Economics of Transportation最新文献

This paper examines how the opening of a subway affects urban passenger transport modes. The DID method is applied to a dataset of 43 Chinese cities where subway development plans were approved between 1994 and 2015. This paper finds strong evidence that subways affect people's choice of travel modes. Specifically, every new subway line put into operation annually diverts about 4.1 percent of bus passengers, which is equivalent to saving at least 10 bus lines. Furthermore, subways supplement the existing bus systems, but do not have a crowding-out effect on the number of buses or the length of bus lines. The opening of subways reduces the number of taxis and cars on the road.

Following the decision of the European Court of Justice in 2002, which overruled its member countries’ Bilateral Air Services Agreements (BASAs), the EU has been negotiating Air Services Agreements as a block with third countries within the framework of its External Aviation policy. This paper explores whether routes governed by this policy have lower fares and higher service quality and load factors compared to those governed by BASAs, as would be expected in a liberalized air transport market. By analyzing traffic flows over 14 years between 28 EU countries and 27 external partners on 4 continents with which the EU has varying degrees of liberalization, we find that the external policy leads to 6% - 23% reduction in fares. Lower fares in turn spurred a 27% increase in demand and led to higher levels of capacity utilization.

We study entry deterrence in air transport markets with a full-service (FS) carrier (the incumbent) and a low-cost (LC) carrier (the potential entrant). We consider a vertically differentiated product model where airlines have different operating cost and different generalized prices so they compete in ticket prices and frequencies. Thus, more frequency allows airlines to increase ticket prices without losing demand. In this context, we show that the incumbent may increase the frequency offered in order to deter the LC carrier entry. We show that if the airport capacity is low enough the LC carrier entry can be easily blocked or deterred. However, if the airport capacity is sufficiently high, the LC carrier entry must be accommodated. Regulators should take these results into account in order to promote competition among airlines.

In this paper we study how the spatial arrangement of transit lines (lines structure) influences scale economies in public transport. First we show that the degree of scale economies (DSE) increases discretely whenever passenger volume induces a change in lines structure. The technical elements behind this are explained by using a new three-dimensional concept called directness, encompassing number of transfers, number of stops and passenger route lengths. This is first exemplified in a simple ad-hoc network, and then applied to examine the structural changes that occur in the design of transit lines in a fairly general representation of a city. We show that directness increases whenever lines structure changes as a response to larger demand volumes - increasing DSE at the particular value of flow where this change occurs - because systems with more direct lines for each OD pair diminish in-vehicle times while increasing waiting times mildly, such that users are benefited by lower travel times and operators are benefited by lower idle capacity. After the change, however, DSE decreases within the demand range where the new line structure is maintained, just as in the one line model. The possibility of deciding the line structure introduces directness as a new source of economies of scale which are finally exhausted after full directness is achieved.

This paper analyzes the flight-frequency choices of a monopoly airline serving a hub-and-spoke network with asymmetric demands. In the 3-city hub-and-spoke network, demand is allowed to differ across markets. Analysis is done separately for two distinct passenger types: those who assign zero cost to layovers, and those who assign a very high cost. Both cases result in a higher flight frequency on the higher-demand spoke. Using a simulation, the flight-frequency choices for the two models are compared, and results show that the difference between the flight-frequency choices on the high and low demand spokes is smaller in the high-cost-layover case than in the zero-cost case.

We analyze the differences between corner solution and survival models in estimating the marginal cost of track renewals. Both approaches describe the renewal process in intuitively similar ways but have several methodological distinctions. Using Swedish data for the 1999–2016 period, results suggest the median marginal costs per gross ton-km from corner solution and survival models are SEK 0.0066 and SEK 0.0031, respectively. Since several European countries use information about marginal costs as a basis for track user charges, the choice of estimation method is obviously important. Our conclusion is that the corner solution model is more appropriate in this case, as this method considers the impact traffic has both on the probability of renewal and on the size of the renewal cost. The survival approach does not consider the latter as part of the estimations, which is problematic when we have systematic cost variations due to traffic and infrastructure characteristics.

Transportation economists apply different labor supply models when examining transport pricing: (i) endogenous working hours; (ii) endogenous workdays; (iii) labor supply as a residual. We study whether the optimal level of transport taxes that changes the relative cost of labor supply margins is robust against the model applied. We find surprisingly strong differences in the level of optimal fuel and miles taxes and even variation in the sign of the Ramsey terms. For instance, the US and UK optimal fuel taxes vary up to 19% and 15% and the Ramsey terms up to 73% and 130%. Finally, we develop a recommendation for research on all issues that include decisions on commuting trips: Researchers should apply both a model of endogenous working hours and a model of endogenous workdays because the first provides the upper limit and the second the lower limit for optimal tax levels and Pigouvian and Ramsey terms.

Proponents of the Mobility as a Service concept claim that subscriptions to alternative modes can effectively reduce car ownership and the adverse effects of underpriced car use. We test this hypothesis in a microeconomic model with endogenous mode choice as well as car and subscription ownership. The model contains congestible urban rail and car sharing options as substitutes of underpriced private car use. We find that aggregate car ownership is not a reliable proxy for road congestion: subscriptions may reduce car ownership while increasing the vehicle miles travelled by remaining car owners. Subscriptions induce welfare losses for two reasons. First, pass holders overconsume the alternative modes, as the marginal fare they face drops to zero. Second, non-pass holders tend to shift to car use due to the crowding induced by pass holders, causing additional distortions. We illustrate numerically that differentiated pricing is more efficient in achieving the goals of MaaS.

This paper analyzes the effects of changes in aeronautical charges as brought by several airport management regimes on the air transport industry. Airlines compete on both price and non-prices variables, where connecting passengers have asymmetric valuations of flight frequencies in different legs. Changes in landing fees trigger airlines reactions on flight frequencies and airfares, whose sign depends on the weight attached to flight frequencies. Thus, an increase in the spoke landing fee leads to more international flights under low valuations of frequencies at spoke airports. Simulation exercises show that profit-maximizing aeronautical charges only at the spoke airport are preferable to those either only at the hub airport or at both airports. Welfare losses are lower when airports are granted to a unique infrastructure manager rather than to independent ones. When frequencies in the hub are highly valued, profit-maximizing charges only at the spoke airport will likely induce a welfare increase.

Studies of airline mergers have largely focused on measuring the impact of mergers on average airfares. As a result, they may not sufficiently reveal the full range of price effects given the complexity of this industry. To address such industry intricacy, I investigate prices of merging firms and their rivals in response to the United-Continental merger on three types of routes: those include one or both endpoint airports as merging firms’ hubs (hub routes), those primarily consisting of price-sensitive leisure travelers (leisure routes), and those more likely to have both price-insensitive business passengers and leisure consumers (big-city routes). Results show that on hub routes, the merger creates hub premiums for merging firms and benefit legacy rivals rather than low-cost carrier rivals to raise fares. On big-city routes, the merging firms increase fares for business travelers but not for leisure passengers, and reduce prices for leisure travelers on leisure routes. Their legacy rivals increase fares on leisure routes but not on big-city routes. This finding suggests that a critical reason for inconsistent conclusions in previous research may be the failure to consider details of the airline industry.