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The length of a rail line that will minimize total transportation (user and operator) costs, and the threshold demand necessary to ensure that the resulting length of the rail line is nonzero are investigated for an urban transportation corridor. A density of demand for travel to the central business district (CBD) represented by a general function P(x) passengers per unit length of the corridor where x is the distance from the CBD is considered. The line-cost as a function of x, the costs of the rail fleet, rail and bus operating costs and passenger time costs are also considered in the formulation. The fleet size is formulated considering the peaking of demand relative to time. When the line cost is nonuniform there could be several line lengths at which the total transportation cost is minimized or even maximized locally. When the line cost per unit length is uniform, a minimum transport cost rail line of nonzero length exists only if the net gain in travel time and operating cost of transporting the total ridership a unit distance by rail, when compared to bus, exceeds the marginal line and fleet costs per unit length. In either case, the minimum transport cost rail line length can be determined easily. The effects on the line length of shifts in demand are investigated. Closed-form solutions for the line length are obtained for the cases of sectorial and rectangular corridor-sheds with uniformly distributed demand per unit area.

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Issues related to the evaluation of the performance (quality of service) of passenger terminal buildings and the passenger perceptions of performance are discussed. According to the results of a personal interview survey of departing passengers, the variables that have a significant influence on the performance of a particular element of the terminal is quite different to those influencing performance of another element. For example, for the circulation elements, 53% of the respondents perceived Information is the most significant variable, while for the waiting areas, 44% of the respondents perceived performance to be a function of the Availability of Seats. It is only for the processing elements that Waiting Time was perceived by passengers to be a significant performance variable. Moreover, in all elements, less than 10% considered Availability of Space or the degree of freedom available for maneuvering as a variable influencing performance. On the basis of chi-square tests of proportions, a set of significant variables is established for each element of the passenger terminal building. Six variables are found to be commonly associated with each of the elements, and on the basis of four of these variables indices are suggested for evaluation of performance.

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The design of public transportation networks is made difficult by a multitude of conflicting objectives. For example, networks designed to minimize travel time cannot be expected to maximize coverage and accessibility. Two simple methods for designing and improving public transportation routes with the aid of TransCAD, a geographic information system, are presented. The first method involves a direct demand model that uses readily available socioeconomic and demographic variables to compute a generalized impedance function, which subsequently is used to determine the best alignment for transit routes. The second uses rider origin and destination data (addresses) and TransCAD's address-matching capabilities to improve transit coverage to specific heavy-traffic locations such as universities and hospitals. The first method is illustrated using data from Logan, Utah—a newly urbanized community with a population of approximately 33,000 people and home to Utah State University, which, beginning in 1994, has had an annual enrollment of more than 16,000 students. Two alignments were determined for the same origin-destination pair. The first alignment represents the route established with the sole criterion of minimizing travel distance, and the second represents the route established with the criterion of minimizing the generalized impedance function. When the alignments are compared, the second is found to increase route coverage significantly, but at the expense of a slight increase in travel time.

This paper uses grey relational analysis method to study the scale of foreign investment, fiscal revenue, stock trading volume and Kazakhstan domestic bank credit risk assessment of transportation and communication industry with the grey correlation degree of the financing growth rate of the industry. The study found that Kazakhstan transportation and communications infrastructure construction financing in the scale of foreign investment and stock trading volume is the major factor of four index. Therefore, on the one hand China could continue to maintain direct investment in Kazakhstan; on the other hand, China enterprises should further broaden to Kazakhstan investment, give full play to the role of capital market, reduce their investment risk and accelerate the west "going out" pace.