Most studies in the transport literature have focused on analyzing the efficiency or productivity changes of metro transits. However, in practice, besides the productivity or efficiency measurements of the MRT (mass rapid transit) system, the operator also pursues the performance in sustainable financial effectiveness, safety, service quality, or marketability. As indicated in the literature, many studies often overlook the goals mentioned above when measuring the performance of metro transits. Thus, the performance evaluation from the one-dimensional perspective does not provide operators insight or useful information for making improvements in resource allocation. This study, therefore, proposes a triangular pyramid performance evaluation concept based on the multi-dimensional perspectives, and also presents a sequential network performance assessment model to evaluate overall effectiveness. The overall effectiveness is also decomposed into efficiency and effectiveness for production, service, and marketability stages for urban metro transits.
This study conducts a case study consisting of the Taipei and Kaohsiung MRT transits with the input-output data from 2009 to 2018. The Supper Slack-based Measure (Supper-SBM) is applied to evaluate financial efficiency from the one-dimension perspective. The network SBM (NSBM) model which was proposed by Tone and Tsutsui (2009) is also applied to measure the overall effectiveness and decomposes overall effectiveness into production efficiency, service effectiveness, and marketability effectiveness simultaneously.
Result of the Rank-Sum-Test (Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney) shows a significant difference in ranking distribution of financial efficiency between the traditional SBM and Supper-SBM model. In addition, the Kruskal-Wallis Test also displays the difference in ranking distribution of marketability effectiveness (MSE) among two-stage network, three-stage network, and four-stage network SBM models. The results of the case study demonstrate that the overall effectiveness (OE) of the four-stage network DEA model can be decomposed into managerial efficiency (ME), production efficiency (PE), service effectiveness (SE), and marketability effectiveness (MSE) of the metro transit system simultaneously. The empirical analysis displays that the triangular pyramid framework and sequence network model can provide managers with insight management implications from the multi-dimensional perspectives.