Welfare assessment of departure time shifts in interregional rail timetables

Abstract

In order to improve current rail timetabling process, the suitability of train departure times for passengers could be included in timetable optimisation. To achieve this, one possibility is to calculate the consumer and producer surplus (i.e. the welfare) coming from departure time shifts in a rail timetable. However, the existing methods for welfare calculation are not directly applicable to any interregional rail timetable. To fill this gap, we propose a new method in the current paper. This method enables the comparison of any interregional rail timetable within the cost-benefit analysis framework while considering an elastic demand. Our method takes advantage of schedule-based models that allow considering the impact of departure time shifts on each individual route at a specific time of the day. We illustrate this method on a case study on a Swedish interregional line. The case study shows the usefulness of the method to determine the efficiency of rail capacity allocation. Unfortunately, the great amount of data and work required to implement our method might restrict its usage. Future research should be directed towards solving this limitation.