Economic efficiency analysis of railway and highway transport systems

Highway and railway are two main transportation systems which are both complement and substitude to each other. The main goal of this research is to analyze those transportation systems in terms of economic efficiency. For this purpose, calculation and comparison of the costs, analyzing the efficiency of infrastructure, and analyzing the competition which is significant in achieving efficiency in the transportation sector are targeted. In addition, it is aimed to determine how number of employees, the total line length, the total number of wagons and the total capacity of wagons effect railway transportation through panel data analysis.Transportation costs are analyzed for both the actual cost and estimated cost with optimum capacity. Furthermore, efficiency of each system is analyzed by comparing the ratio of actual cost to estimated optimum capacity cost.According to the optimum capacity evaluation; the cheapest means of transportation for passengers is found out to be high-speed trains. Highways, state roads, and conventional railways have relatively close costs to each other. For the freight transportation, on the other hand, highway transportation costs three times higher than railway transportation.According to actual cost evaluation, for both passenger and freight transportation, the cheapest means of transportation is highways whereas the most expensive means of transportation is conventional trains.When analized in terms of efficiency, passenger and freight transportations via conventional trains and freight transportations via state road are inefficient whereas passenger transportations via highways are relatively more efficient.According to allocative efficiency evaluation, transportation sector is found out to be inefficient, especially in conventional railways, efficiency is found out to be quite low. Two-part tariffs in railways, the average cost pricing in inter-city highways, and the marginal cost pricing in intra-city highways hwere traffic congestion is high are some suggestions of pricing methods to eliminate inefficiency mentioned above.If the TCDD is evaluated in terms of modern business making, ıt can be concluded that sources are not utilized eficiently. Moving away from the view that the TCDD provides public service and exposing the company to the competition may increase the efficiency of services.In panel data analyze these results are found: Positive and significant relationship between line length and rail transportation, positive but insignificant relationship between number of employees and rail transportation, negative relationship between total passenger wagon and passenger transportation, and finally positive relationship between total freight wagon capacity and freight transportation are exist.