Research on Intercity Railway Subsidy Mechanism Optimization from the Perspective of a Government–Company Game Model: A Case Study of Henan Intercity Railway

Intercity railway is an important part of public transportation, and the priority development of public transportation cannot be achieved without the support of government policies. This paper aims to find a more reasonable subsidy model for the governments and intercity railway companies. The paper analyzes the mechanism of intercity railway subsidy and uses the evolutionary game method to balance interests among governments, railway companies and social capitals. The main conclusions are as follows: (1) The introduction of performance subsidy into the traditional loss subsidy strategy can alleviate the conflict of interests between government and companies, and achieve a win-win conclusion: an annual revenue of 50 million RMB for the railway and 4 million RMB for the social capitals could be generated by the new subsidy model. (2) According to different intercity railways, reference performance standards are different, and operating mileage, pairs of trains and passenger flow are some of the factors that can be considered. The innovation of this paper is the introduction of a new dynamic subsidy model that combines performance and loss subsidies to intercity railways. For sustainable transportation development, it is significant for the government to develop a new reasonable intercity railway subsidy strategy.