Railway restructuring and organizational choice: network quality and welfare impacts

Finding a new use for neglected infrastructures, such as disused railways, provides an opportunity for low carbon travel experiences as reconversion policies promote new uses, arrest decay processes and re-establish continuity in the environmental system, using existing linear infrastructures.Nevertheless, the decision of what to do in order to reuse abandoned railways represents a complex decision making problem, involving heterogeneous impacts and stakeholders. Within this context, Multi Criteria Analysis techniques can be used to synthesize stakeholders' preferences by accommodating conflicting and incommensurable impacts. The present study thus uses MultiCriteria Analysis to answer a real demand for transportation systems' planning coming from the Piedmont Region Authority in Italy, where 12 passenger railway lines have recently been abandoned and replaced by bus services.The main objective of the study is to develop a methodological framework able to support collaborative planning and decision-making processes related to the requalification of disused railways in mixed urban and rural contexts.The ultimate objective is to provide a robust recommendation to the Regional Authority with reference to the best requalification option for the abandoned railway line under analysis. The contribution brought by the study is twofold and refers to: (i) improved operability of the proposed tools obtained by combining visualization analytics with consolidated preference elicitation protocols for assessing multiple impacts and (ii) the provision of a replicable working tool for policy makers. The study has thus an innovative value and may increase the use of Decision Analytics to support the evaluation of environmental impacts of different transportation systems.

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“…related to the redevelopment of disused railways (e.g. Asabere and Huffman, 2009;Besanko and Cui, 2016;West and Shores, 2011).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How to support the design and evaluation of redevelopment projects for disused railways? A methodological proposal and key lessons learned

Ferretti

Degioanni

2017

Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment

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“…The trade-off between vertical integration and separation is not clearly determined. Cui (2016, 2017) show for instance that horizontal separation-several vertically integrated networks competing with each other-has a strong tendency to produce a higher network quality, while unbundling has a strong tendency to result in lower transport prices and higher consumer surplus. From an empirical point of view, one should stress the relative heterogeneity of results of different studies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Which access to which assets for an effective liberalization of the railway sector?

Bougette

Gautier

Marty

2021

Competition and Regulation in Network Industries

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In the European rail industry, to enable competition in the market, entrants should be granted access to a large set of complementary services, beyond access to the tracks. For an efficient and effective entry, temporary access to quasi-essential complementary assets like rolling stock, mechanical maintenance workshops, data, schedules, etc. is required. In the liberalized rail sector, several observed anticompetitive practices involve distorted access to these quasiessential facilities. Therefore, competition agencies must deal with litigation between the incumbent and new entrants. Most cases have been settled, resulting in commitments from the incumbent. We argue that such transitory and case-by-case remedies fail to produce favorable conditions for a secure and efficient entry. Thus, we propose to systematize such remedies through asymmetric and enduring ex-ante regulation.

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“…In our paper (Besanko and Cui 2016), our analysis of the regulator's optimization problem under vertical separation (VS) was incorrect. Our model presumes that the regulator under VS chooses a variable access charge to maximize social welfare.…”

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confidence: 99%

Erratum to: Railway restructuring and organizational choice: network quality and welfare impacts

Besanko

Cui

2017

J Regul Econ

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In our paper (Besanko and Cui 2016), our analysis of the regulator's optimization problem under vertical separation (VS) was incorrect. Our model presumes that the regulator under VS chooses a variable access charge to maximize social welfare. The regulator's problem, stated in Eq. (19) of the paper, imposes the constraint c ∈ [η V , c] on the regulator's choice of the variable access charge c. We claimed the constraint was needed to ensure network quality q V was nonnegative and less than its upper bound q. This was incorrect. This is because we do not need to set c ≥ η V to ensure that q V ≥ 0. If the regulator set c < η, then the network firm would still set q V = 0. Similarly, if the regulator set c > c, the network firm would still set quality to q.The proper way to state the regulator's problem is without the upper-and lowerbound constraints on c. We then can solve this problem by taking into account the properties of the social welfare function SW (c) implied by the piecewise nature of q * V (c) as given in Eq. (14). 1 1 We have redone this analysis, and a detailed explanation of the revised solution is available on request from the authors.The online version of the original article can be found under

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Railway restructuring and organizational choice: network quality and welfare impacts

Cited by 13 publications

References 22 publications

How to support the design and evaluation of redevelopment projects for disused railways? A methodological proposal and key lessons learned

How to support the design and evaluation of redevelopment projects for disused railways? A methodological proposal and key lessons learned

Which access to which assets for an effective liberalization of the railway sector?

Erratum to: Railway restructuring and organizational choice: network quality and welfare impacts

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