Study of Urban Rail Transit Operation Costs

In order to analyze variation of urban rail transit (URT) operation cost against the distance from the city center, the URT of Shenzhen was taken as an example to study in the three cases. The costs of URT operation were addressed through the real data of URT, and the skeleton planning method was used to estimate the costs of Shanghai and Hangzhou metro. The results show that the cost of URT operation is nearly 15 million Yuan/(Km·year) when the URT is just opened; the cost of URT operation is nearly 35 million Yuan/(Km·year) before the network operation and nearly 12 million Yuan/(Km·year) after the network operation. The cost of Hangzhou metro operation is about 60 million Yuan/year. The cost of Shanghai metro operation is about 5.7 billion Yuan/year. More specifically, the findings of this paper have insightful implications to planning, design, operation, and assessment of urban rail transit.