Investigation into the efficiency of assessment of the railway line significance for respective countries

Abstract

The article investigates a possibility of using the traditional multi-criterion assessment methods to evaluate how significance of a railway line is distributed for the countries it crosses. The article analyses two examples of railway lines: the railway line Rail Baltica (Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia) and the container train Viking route (Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine). The distribution of significance of the Rail Baltica line was calculated by the geometric mean method, whereas the distribution of significance of the train Viking route was not only calculated by the geometric mean method, but also the results of this calculation were compared with the distribution of an actual freight flow. A hypothesis is raised that to strengthen the correlation, not the method itself, but the representativeness of criteria themselves is important.