Methods and Tools for Assessing the Use of Transport Infrastructure on the Example of Railway Infrastructure Research in Central Europe in 1989-2019

Andrzej Massel, Ph.D. Eng.

In December 2020, the Railway Research Institute (IK) Publishing House issued Andrzej Massel's scientific monograph entitled "Methods and Tools for Assessing the Use of Transport Infrastructure on the Example of Railway Infrastructure Research in Central Europe in 1989-2019".

The monograph is devoted to railway infrastructure in selected countries of Central and Eastern Europe, i.e. Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia (until the end of 1992, constitut­ ing one country - Czechoslovakia), Poland, Romania and Hungary. The selection of these six (until 1992 - five) railway networks as the object of analysis resulted from three premises: from the functioning of the centrally - controlled economy in all these countries until 1989, from the economic transformation in the entire region after 1989 and accession of the countries under analysis to the European Union in 2004, and in the case of Bulgaria and Romania - in 2007.

The monograph features potential methods to be applied in this type of research. For the purposes of research on the use of infrastructure, a new method of analysing the use of maximum speed is presented. For a number of methods known from other scientific disciplines, in particular - economics, socio-economic geography as well as earth and environmental sciences, new areas of application have been indicated. This concerns taxonomic methods used to compare the level of development of railway infrastructure, as well as to the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) method used to research the efficiency of railway infrastructure use. In addition, for the needs of those studies, a set of operational, demand and supply indica ors has been defined.

The empirical part of the monograph covers the research on the similarities and differences in the con dition of the railway infrastructure in this part of the continent as well as the changes that it underwent in 1989-2019. A considerable emphasis is put on the way infrastructure is used in individual countries of Central and Eastern Europe and on its effectiveness.

ISBN:978-83-943246-4-3

Number of pages: 500

Items in bibliography: 490,

Publishing House: lnstytut Kolejnictwa

Year of issue: 2020