Sustainability in the evaluation of urban rail transit considering both firms and passengers perspectives: A dynamic network data envelopment analysis approach

Abstract

This paper divides the operation of urban rail transit into sustainable production stage and sustainable consumption stage from the perspective of firms and passengers, and includes service input, service output, service consumption in a unified model. A dynamic network epsilon based measure model is proposed to measure the production efficiency, service effectiveness and operational effectiveness of urban rail transit respectively, which is used to evaluate the operational sustainability of urban rail transit. Taking 23 urban rail transit systems in China from 2015 to 2021 as an example, the research results show that urban rail transit production efficiency is superior to service effectiveness, but most urban rail transit operational effectiveness is not high, and a large amount of input redundancy in the current urban rail transit sustainable consumption stage comes from vehicle speed. At the same time, the perennial shortage of passengers and passenger miles is the main reason leading to the low service effectiveness. In addition, there is heterogeneity in urban rail transit service effectiveness among different city sizes, and there is a significant positive correlation between operational effectiveness and service effectiveness. Therefore, improving service effectiveness is the key to ensure sustainable urban rail transit operation.