Abstract:
Rail services across Europe are facing problems due to declining market
share, lack of
responsiveness to market changes and customers’ needs. Policy initiatives
are put forward to
change this situation and provide viable solutions, e.g. as presented
in the EC White Paper
from 1996 on Revitalising the Community’s Railways. Many rail services
are loss-making
and will continue to be so such that these services can only be provided
through financial
support from the State. Given that resources are scarce it is important
that this support is
allocated according to the social value from these services.
This paper will present the EC funded SONERAIL project, which has concerned
an
examination of socially necessary rail services. In particular, it
has developed an evaluation
methodology which allows for the assessment of the costs and benefits
associated with
providing a given rail service.
The paper is planned as follows. Section 1 will give an overview of
the SONERAIL project
in terms of background, objectives and project structure. In section
2 the SONERAIL
definition of a socially necessary rail service will be described.
The evaluation methodology
developed during the project will be examined in section 3. Subsequently,
section 4 will
discuss the potential for applying the methodology in practice. Section
5 considers possible
future scenarios while best-practice recommendations regarding the
provision and evaluation
of socially necessary rail services are given in section 6.
Forfatter(e):
Prof. Stuart Cole (Director - Transport Research and Consultancy, University
of North
London), Dr. Torben Holvad (Senior Research Fellow - Transport Research
and
Consultancy), & Michael Gommers (Project Coordinator - Netherlands
Economic Institute)
Keywords - dansk:
Evaluering, jernbaner, cost-benefit analyse, multikriterie analyse,
Europa
Keywords - engelsk:
Evaluation, railways, cost-benefit analysis, multicriteria analysis,
Europe
Session:
Jernbaner
År:
1999