Impact Assessment of Internet Users on Chinese Railway Transportation

With a total length of 35,000 kilometers, China has the world’s largest high‐speed rail network. Due to the deepening of China’s “Internet +” strategy, new opportunities and challenges have emerged for China’s railway system. While railway transportation industry efficiency has been widely discussed, most previous studies have focused on railway transportation industry operations and have generally ignored the important influence of internet technology on the industry. Therefore, to go some way to filling this gap, this study took the number of Chinese internet users as an investment indicator and integrated big data and the Internet of Things (IoT) concepts into a dynamic directional distance function‐data envelopment analysis (DDF‐DEA) model to comprehensively measure the impact of internet technology on railway transportation industry efficiency in 31 Chinese provinces from 2011 to 2016. It was found that (1) when the internet influence was considered, the overall railway transportation industry efficiency in most regions significantly improved, with Heilongjiang Province having the largest increase; (2) the labor input, passenger traffic, freight volume, railway turnover, and freight turnover input efficiencies in most provinces were significantly higher when the internet influence was considered; and (3) the internet has had a positive impact on railway transportation.