Railway utilities play a vital role as social infrastructure, i.e., as an essential part of ordinary citizens’ lives. In this study, we aimed to evaluate the performance of railway utility activities in Japan from three perspectives: financial management, facility operations, and human resources. Examining the relationship between daily passenger kilometers and passenger kilometers across six JR (Japan Railways) companies, we found that they can be divided into two groups: Group A, located in urban areas with higher passenger demand, and Group B, located in rural areas with lower passenger demand. We further found that the passenger demand of JR companies can be captured by a single nonlinear mathematical model. We used this mathematical model to investigate passenger demand composition in terms of commuters/non-commuters and then proposed strategies to increase passenger demand. We applied a cluster analysis technique to classify the set of JR and major private railway companies into four clusters, characterizing the performance of the railway utilities within each cluster and highlighting similarities and differences among them. Then, we applied principal component analysis and selected three principal components to explain the performance of Japanese railway utility activities. We found that the first component represents an axis corresponding to comprehensive factors that improve the performance of railway utilities from the viewpoints of both revenue and financial balance, while the second component represents an axis related to the profit and cost for railway utilities from the viewpoint of financial balance. Through multivariate regression model analyses, we found factors that increase total revenue from Japanese railway utility activities: higher passenger numbers, longer passenger transport distance, and fewer staff.
Piyasena et al. (Mon,) studied this question.