Study of Railway Passenger Transport in the European Union

This paper examine the development of railway passenger transport in the European Union countries by using criteria related to the transportation process and the level of economic development of the countries. The study proposes a methodology based on the combination of multicriteria methods. In the first step we determine the indicators to be used in evaluating railway passenger development. As main criteria of the assessment we have chosen social and economic factors, infrastructure factors, factors associated with travel and technological factors. In the second step, using the Fuzzy AHP method, the weights of the criteria and sub-criteria have been calculated. In the third step, we have rated the studied countries by means of the PROMETHEE method. The results show that the factors associated with travel and technological factors have great importance in the ranking of the countries and that, when all factors are taken into account, the countries with the most highly developed railway passenger transport are Germany, Britain and France. The results of the method in the fourth step were compared by applying Cluster analysis. The railway passenger transport in European Union countries have been classified into 5 groups.