Research on Operational Efficiency of Urban Rail Transit in China by Super-SBM Model

An urban rail transit (URT) operational efficiency evaluation index system with undesired output was constructed in this study. The Super-SBM model is used to analyze the URT operational efficiency of 22 cities in China from 2015 to 2019 horizontally and vertically. The results in this study indicated that the overall operational efficiency of China's URT is improving year by year. However, each year only a few cities can achieve DEA efficiency, and the efficiency of URT systems varies greatly. The operational efficiency of Guangzhou, Beijing, Nanjing, and Shanghai has reached DEA effectiveness every year. The URT operational efficiency of 13 cities, including Qingdao, Changchun, Dalian, Suzhou, is less than 1 per year, and DEA is ineffective all the year-round. These cities which the operational efficiency of URT has been DEA effectiveness during these five years. Sort out the pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency calculated by the super-SBM model and construct the “pure technical efficiency-scale efficiency” matrix. It found that scale efficiency is the main reason for lowering the operational efficiency of URT, and most cities are in Group II and Group III. The URT of these cities is either unable to keep up with technological progress or a waste of resources and diseconomies of scale.