A methodology for calculating the passenger comfort benefits of railway travel

A comfortable environment in railway passenger coaches can be regarded as a resource for social consumption during the transport process. Railway passenger comfort benefits （RPCBs） can be regarded as a special generalized cost. In this paper, we select a series of objective and subjective indexes to formulate a quantitative method of calculating the RPCB with considering ticket fares. This method includes three steps： make the initial data dimensionless, calculate the weight of each index, and finally calculate the RPCBs. The proposed method was validated with the data collected from two types of trains： G13 from Beijing South to Shanghai Hongqiao and T109 from Beijing to Shanghai. Also, questionnaire survey was conducted in both trains. After data processing, the results show that there is a linear relationship between the RPCB and ticket fare with a correlation coefficient of 0.9616.

Public Finance Sources and Road Network Development in a Transition Country--Hungary （1990-2018）

This article reviews the history of the Hungarian public road network in the thirty years that has passed since the change of the political and economic regime up to the present from the aspect of financing. In the context of the neighboring countries that today are also members of the European Union, this writing outlines the growth-public finance course that this country, formerly belonging to the Soviet type planned economy mechanism, followed during the past nearly three decades after breaking away from that system. It provides insight into the specific public finance positions determined by the macroeconomic course since 1990 and the opportunities offered by this course for infrastructural developments. In connection with the above, the article outlines the main characteristic features of the social expectations, the financing solutions that could be linked to the various governmental concepts regarding road matters, focusing primarily on motorway development. It shall touch upon the respective starting points and life cycles of those concepts and the role of the EU supports in the developing of the domestic public road system. In light of expenditures, it is illustrating the development by some servicing indicators.

Economical Aspects of the Vehicle Scheduling Optimization

The paper deals with the vehicle scheduling problem related to regional public transport. Linear programming methods are used to solve the problem. A mathematical model is created including the constraints and the objective function minimizing costs and the number of vehicles. A minimum costs and a number of vehicles are forced at the same time by special economical input data analysis and an allocation of costs. Determining of the costs coefficients is done by three methods, which differs primarily by how much of the total costs they take into account. The decomposition of the set of lines into disjoint subsets can be used instead of the ＂direct＂ optimization. The decomposition has proven to be a suitable alternative in solving large optimization problems. The problem was applied to optimize vehicle scheduling in the region, which is situated in the north-east of the Czech Republic. There is used Xpress-IVE software, which solve the problem by simplex algorithm and branch and bound method. Research results show that there are large reserves in the organization of public transport. The implementation of the new vehicle scheduling would bring significant costs reductions in amount of at least 10% for the optimal solution and in amount of about 10% for the decomposition solution. The number of drivers could be decreased and the total time of the vehicles being outside the garage could be also reduced by at least 10%.