Methodological Foundations for Classification of Suburban Passenger Companies in Russia

To solve the economic tasks of the suburban passenger railway transport, it is necessary to form new and improve the existing methodological foundations of its functioning. At the modern stage of development of passenger transportation in the Russian Federation, as a rule, it is classified per mode of transport and types of transportation. Railway passenger transportation is split per type of transportation services in broad terms into long-distance and suburban transportation services.

The structural reform of railway transport, which had been carried out from 2003 to 2015, resulted in formation of a market of suburban passenger railway transportation. This market is represented by 25 suburban passenger companies, subsidiaries and dependent companies of JSC Russian Railways, by several independent carriers and structural divisions of JSC Russian Railways, performing transportation under special conditions. Suburban passenger railway carriers are subjects of natural monopolies and in most cases are created with participation of regional authorities, and their activities are socially significant for ensuring transport mobility of the population in the regions of the Russian Federation. Thus, the suburban passenger transportation market is a complex system with a special order of interaction of its main actors.

In modern academic literature and in the textbooks, there is a certain gap in classification of structural elements of the passenger transport market. The authors propose to use the ABC–XYZ analysis toolkit to form the so-called «core» of suburban passenger companies and to study regional disproportions in the passenger transport system.

The article proposes a methodological basis for classifying suburban passenger companies depending on the subsidies amount received as per performed passenger turnover. A classification of suburban passenger companies (SPC) was developed based on the study of the ratio of subsidies provided to the suburban passenger entities due to state regulation of tariffs and the performed passenger turnover. The ABC–XYZ analysis of the SPC performance indicators for a considered period allowed to develop their classification and to draw recommendations for assessing the risks of unprofitability and possible ways to reduce them. The identified structure of the suburban passenger transport market can serve as a basis for smoothing out disproportions in the level of public transport services.

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