Research On Rail Transportation And Its Externality

Urban Rail is one of the essential transit infrastructures, which to maintain the cities'vitality and the economical development. It's highly active, energy-saving. As urban rail transit can suit the cities'development, it's becoming the key to solving the problems which are brought by the urbanization. The rail transit has been highly paid attention to.The second part of this thesis summarizes the current situation of externalities and of research on rail transit. By 1852, the railroad cars had existed in the Europe, since then, it has always been the essential as the method of municipal public traffic. The first underground railway is built in Landon in 1863, as well as urban lines which were spread from the municipal lines. Before the World War I, at least 13 cities such as London, New York, Berlin, Hamburg, Buenos Aires etc. had built railways. Compared with its development abroad, the rail transit in home has started later. Since the initial starting of the rail transit planning in Beijing in the middle of 20th century, and the starting of building the railway in 1965. But the purposes of these railways are based on the principle of anti-aircraft defenses. The construction of No.1 Railway in Shanghai was the real beginning of solving problems of transit. the construction of rail transit which was aimed at transit had indeed began by the Shanghai Metro Line 1,the Guangzhou Metro Line 2 and the Beijing Metro Line Fu-Ba. Soon after that, our country has enacted a moratorium on approving high-speed rail transit because of the costs, the safety, etc. until 1998, the government has re-started the rapid rail transit, and it reached a crescendo at 2005.The rail transit can better solve the problems brought by the urbanization and spur the economy to a certain extent. But it also has negative conditionality. All these properties are reflected by the externalities. Along with the steps of rail transit development becoming faster and faster, its externalities are becoming more obvious, and its influences are increasingly prominent, too.The third part of this thesis separates and discussed the externalities into two parts—the positive externalities and the negative externalities. The positive externalities of rail transit are apparent. Not only it play its proper transport function, but also can spur the distribution of resources among the cities and the process of the urbanization. Its"Corridor Economic"benefit can bring business opportunities and form new business districts. The positive externalities can spur the development of the local economics and improve the distribution of economic regions. On another hand, although the rail transit has strong advantages compared with the conditional transit in terms of the environment, it also brings certain negative externalities. There has been many scholars do the researches about externalities of rail transit at home and abroad, and they have made some achievements about the classification of rail transit externalities,the performances of rail transit externalities and the composition of rail transit externalities. But by reading plentiful research documents, we can conclude that most of these documents are resting on the level of qualitative analysis.Meanwhile, due to the particular characteristics of the rail transit industry, the government plays an important role in its industry development. Based on the effect that the externalities has to the rail transit industry, the process of the rail development and its wide prospect of marketing, in order to let the rail transit industry develop healthily, it's particularly important to do the relative research about its externalities.The fourth part of this thesis, based on the qualitative analysis of rail transit externalities and the characteristics of the infrastructures, through the analysis and summaries, relatively analyzes the differences and common grounds between the rail transit and other transportation industries. It uses the model of external cost accounting of transportation industry. Due to the severity of the accident of rail transit, this part uses integer optimization to build the accident external cost accounting mathematics model to rail transportation that might bring traffic accident. According to the density of resources in different regions, it discusses and analyzes the negative externalities caused by the short of resources in two ways—in rich of resources and in lack of resources.Infrastructures are the base of the economic development; they provide a forum for other industries development in society. Due to the long period of construction, and the prior period investment is hard to get benefits, the small direct benefits compared with the indirect benefits, the infrastructures constructions have apparent externalities characteristics. According to the informed research, the infrastructures have large contribution to the development of GDP. Such as: the GDP increases 0.804% in Sichuan province when the Grade highway mileage increases 1%; 24.61% of the annual increase in GDP is spurred by infrastructures in Shenyang province during the "Ninth Five-year Plan"period; when the investments in infrastructures increase 1%, the whole outputs will increase 0.13%; due to different countries are in different economical level, the effect by infrastructures capital is different.In order to explain that the investment in infrastructures has significant effects to economic development, by using the method of comparison, the fifth part of this thesis chooses FAI (The fixed asset investment) as the contrastive object of CII ( infrastructural investment). Because the FAI has poor mobility and the investment scale is easy to calculate, as well as the outputs of FAI is stable and has a large proportion in social investment, FAI is similar to CII. Both of them have apparent externalities, and their outputs are both difficult to calculate but to use some methods to get. By using the error correction model which belongs to dynamic econometrics, it describes discrepancy between the CII's contribution rate to the GDP and the FAI's contribution rate to the GDP, then to compare the externalities to the GDP. By calculating marginal contribution ratio, this thesis reckons that CII has higher marginal contribution ratio than FAI, this applies well to the conclusion that the infrastructures have apparent externalities. Because the rail transit is continuingly the backbone of infrastructures and it's the core power of the infrastructures which will be a stimulus to the economic development, the rail transit industry also helps drive gains in economic development, which means, its externalities are apparent.Because of the infrastructural attributes the rail transit has and the influencing factor of the whole industry operation, it has an extremely close relationship to policies. The regulation means and their results directly effect the operation and the development of the whole industry. In comparison with the characteristics of the telecom industry, the sixth part of this thesis analyzes the development of rail transit in our country, and according to the situation and the results of the telecom industry regulated by the government, analyzes the results and the effects if our country brings competitions into the rail transit industry. Finally, this thesis puts forward some advices about setting out rules and regulations on rail transit in our country.According to this thesis, we can get the following conclusions:1. Compared with other traditional methods of transportation, the rail transit will has tremendous negative externalities caused by accidents. So it's essential to build cost functions which have ability to determine the passenger and freight carrier that might bring traffic accident. The rail transit supports the industrial production and main artery of the national economy. It's so important to relate to the national economy and the people's livelihood. The rail transit use the centralized transportation method and it's transporting such as people, coal, foodstuffs, wood, petroleum and chemical products, some of them are poisonous and flammable. The transport volume is large, in addition, the speed of rail transit is rapid, so the accidents of rail transit are almost serious, they can not be compared with general accidents. Due to the importance of rail transit, its transports have strict requests about planning, coordination, conduction and control. The cost of rail accident does not only include in the scene of accident, but also the delay of the trains and the change of the planning.2. The CII can fuel economic growth better than the FAI, which explains that the CII has apparent externalities. By calculating marginal contribution ratio, this thesis reckons that CII has higher marginal contribution ratio than FAI, this applies well to the conclusion that the infrastructures have apparent externalities. Because the rail transit is continuingly the backbone of infrastructures and it's the core power of the infrastructures which will be a stimulus to the economic development, the rail transit industry also helps drive gains in economic development, which means, its externalities are apparent.3. By analogy analysis, it can be seen that the rail transit industry and the telecom industry have many analogous characteristics, so they have industry degree of association to a very great extent. As a reformed industry, the telecom industry must be go-ahead. Its experiences of some changes and some means using in innovation can also be used in the rail transit industry to some extent.The questions this thesis remains:1. When we reckon the return of investment of the CII and of the FAI, the calculation is based on simulation model parameter estimation. Because the model can hardly include all the explanatory variables, the conclusions are just estimated values and have some errors with the true values. Therefore, the next points of this research is to compare the conclusion with the contribution rate of social productive investment to the GDP, to analyze the reasons why the investment contribution rate is decreasing, and to investigate the how the diminishing marginal utility and the unbalance of the investment proportion effect the investment contribution rate.2. To compare the negative externalities of the rail transit with the traditional transportation, its relative data is difficult to collect. It still needs deeply research on estimating and reckoning the relative parameters of the total cost of the rail transit.