Economic efficiency losses arising from subsidized intercity rail passenger movements in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While all four of the main modes of intercity passenger transportation in Canada (air, automobile, bus, and rail) are currently subsidized, rail recovers from its users a considerably lesser portion of the total cost of service than any of the other three modes. This thesis estimates the effect this imbalance has on the passenger network in two ways: i) in physical terms -- the change in modal volumes given full-economic-cost pricing and the implications this has on network configuration; and ii) in financial terms -- the dollar cost of the economic efficiency losses suffered due to non-full-economic-cost pricing. The first element is estimated by calculating modal fares based on full cost recovery for 52 intercity routes between Winnipeg and Quebec City. The changes represent from the actual fares charged is translated into volume changes based on a set of demand elasticities developed for this thesis. The second element is estimated for these same 52 routes using the standard deadweight loss triangle methodology which measures the loss in aggregate social welfare that exists when non-optimal prices are being charged. This result is then extrapolated to a national level. The calculations show that given full-economic-cost pricing, air volumes would increase by 4.76%, automobile volumes by 0.32%, and bus volumes by 3.47%. Rail volumes would decline by 56.67%. While the changes are marginal for the non-rail modes and would not likely result in any changes to the network, rail would cease to be a viable mode on many routes. The economic efficiency distortion caused by the failure to charge fares based on full economic costs amounted to about $130 million in 1986. This cost, along with the subsidy itself, is what the social and political benefits of continued VIA Rail subsidization must be compared to, not simply the amount of the subsidy, as is currently done. This estimate of deadweight loss ignores positive tourism, energy, safety, and environmental externalities of rail, and thus overestimates somewhat the detrimental effect of VIA rail subsidies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".