Passenger rail tariffs in Europe: An approach for modeling direct user costs under consideration of market segment and country-specific peculiarities

Abstract

This paper will present a new method for modeling passenger rail tariffs in twenty-five European countries. A fine segmentation of the supply and demand side of the market allows the formulation of regression functions that model tariffs as a function of the distance of a trip. The data used for the estimation of the regression functions are based on a comprehensive investigation of rail tariffs for sample relations. Country tariff data for the estimation of country- and segment-specific regression functions are collected for each demand/ supply cross segment. The geographical scope of the analysis is the 27 EU member states as well as Switzerland and Norway. A representative route for each origin-destination relation is chosen in a rail network model as the shortest-time path, using a real timetable. The rail network model provides the distances of the rail journeys, differentiated by country and type of train (line number). Finally, the regression functions use train type, country, and distance to estimate the monetary user costs at the level of origin/ destination relations.