Pricing Commuter, Intercity, and Freight Trains in a Terminal Railway Context: An Approach

Abstract

The cost-of-service (or fully allocated cost) pricing model has been criticized in the economics literature. The criticisms generally focus on the issues of cross-subsidization problems from using average costs and economically inefficient pricing. A fully allocated cost model, applied to a terminal railroad setting, is presented that can substantively overcome these criticisms by using a resource consumption approach for key cost drivers. A successful implementation of a new cost recovery system in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, is used that applies these resource consumption concepts. A necessary precondition to this approach is the charting of the classes of traffic (commuter, intercity, and freight) into operated-track segmented paths, each of which consists of a set of one or more track links. Each traffic class path is characterized as either consisting of sole-use links, joint-use links, or a combination thereof. Operating and capital costs directly attributable to the track links are calculated. A reverse engineering work-effort-per-activity approach is used for assigning the total routine maintenance of way and maintenance of signals budget dollars to the terminal track links. The resource consumption approach provides a logical framework and analytical platform for analyzing link infrastructure complexity; system, path, and link capacity; path and link cost performance; and path and link renewal and replacement capital planning and capital sharing responsibility.