Second-best Decision Making of Railway Operators: How to Fix Fares, Frequency and Vehicle Size

Optimal strategies in railway networks call for a differentiated treatment of fares, frequencies, and vehicle sizes in various links. However, for several reasons, railway operators may apply uniform levels for these decision variables. In this paper the authors investigate the welfare losses implied by uniform setting of fares per km, frequencies, or vehicle sizes. This is done within the context of a model with uniform cost structures but where demand levels vary across segments of the network. They demonstrate that the largest welfare loss results when frequencies are made uniform across links. Their results suggest that where differentiated prices are important to address issues such as congestion and directional asymmetries in demand, differentiated supply in terms of vehicle size, and in particular frequencies, are the preferred ways of addressing demand variations on different segments in a network. © 2007 LSE and the University of Bath