Resumen de Efficiency of high-speed rail same-day trips for different purposes: characterising the supply of services in the spanish high-speed rail system
Amparo Moyano Enriquez de Salamanca
The development of high-speed rail systems in recent decades, transitioning from single lines to a complex mode of transportation that encompasses many lines and cities and involves many kinds of services, requires a global assessment to understand the real utility of HSR for each city.
Since the beginning, the literature and stakeholders have focused on the infrastructure itself. HSR systems were conceived to connect large metropolitan areas over distances of around 400-600 km. However, as this infrastructure generates impacts on the regions in between, it challenges how smaller cities en-route are still going to be serviced by rail. In many cases, local/regional authorities have actually applied pressure to secure specific HSR infrastructures that were originally designed primarily to serve bigger cities. Subject to the balance of power, technical feasibility, costs and financial contributions of local/regional authorities, HSR acquired a social and political compromise through which it served smaller cities on the lines. The local authorities of these smaller intermediate cities believe an HSR station in their locality is an iconic element needed for surviving the national competition between cities and an opportunity for urban and regional development. Being included in the HSR map generates important expectations for urban projects, based mainly (and sometimes excessively) on the ‘image effect’ of HSR in terms of modernity, accessibility and connectivity. Indeed, local and regional authorities often do their best to secure specific rail infrastructures to accommodate HSR services. Nevertheless, in their euphoria they usually forget to consider HSR operations. Yet it is the services supplied (routes, frequencies and timetables) that ultimately determine the utility of HSR for cities, and the real possibility of being connected to other cities.
This focus on infrastructure has also been reflected in the scientific literature on the subject, in which scholars have mainly examined the socioeconomic impacts generated by the systems and improvements in accessibility provided by HSR. Such impacts are generally centred on the reduction of travel times generated and the benefits this improvement provides in terms of accessibility, mobility and socioeconomic development. However, at a time when medium- and long-distance accessibility is considered a key element of the attractiveness of cities and regions, it is necessary to think beyond infrastructures to also consider services. Improving long-distance/high-speed accessibility is not enough to induce economic development if adequate HSR services are not also implemented.
In addition, in the context of HSR expansion, the quality of the operating services is just as important as securing an HSR infrastructure. The new panorama of HSR development, with its many possibilities for connections and services provided for the cities involved, highlights the need for a whole reassessment of HSR systems from a service-related perspective.
Importantly, this dissertation focuses on the services and opportunities they provide for Spanish HSR cities in terms of accessibility and mobility choices. The aim of the dissertation is to characterise the supply of services of the different HSR connections found in HSR systems and to analyse their efficiency and utility for different same-day trip purposes. This will help us understand and identify the differences between cities in terms of possibilities for travelling in the current HSR map. This dissertation presents three main contributions and helps to answer key questions about the utility of HSR services for cities.
1) First, this dissertation highlights that the ‘HSR brand’ should not be considered the same for all the cities included in HSR networks. The evolution of HSR networks and services is opening up a new panorama in which the quality of the services determines different types of connections, highlighting the fact that an HSR system could play different roles in terms of connectivity and mobility choices. Among all the types identified, it is possible to recognise not only the ‘early stage’ HSR connections, which are those links between large cities located approximately 350–600 km apart, with high frequencies and speeds oriented to compete with air transport, but also other types, to which little consideration was given during the conception of the initial HSR system. The latter connections generally appear due to the development of the network (new lines and intermediate stops) and the bypasses connecting different lines. They offer a new perspective on the HSR service and establish a multirole network that can cover a wider range of possibilities from which travellers may benefit.
2) Second, this new scenario highlights the need to assess HSR systems from a different perspective based on the need to incorporate the characteristics of the supplied services into the accessibility analyses of the means of transport that are limited to fixed timetables, such as HSR systems. The main contribution of this dissertation is an efficiency analysis of the HSR system for same-day trips in the Spanish HSR network. Traditional accessibility analysis, usually location-based approaches that consider travel time as the main friction in network analyses, reveal the potential of network configurations but generally overestimate the outcomes, as they assume that all nodes in a network are equally well served in terms of frequencies and costs. However, in this dissertation, the efficiency measure proposed – the available time at a destination that can be gained with a given monetary investment – is a new approach to assessing the accessibility of transport networks. Therefore, this dissertation focuses on an analysis of the efficiency of HSR networks as a whole for different trip purposes, such as tourism, business and commuting, identifying and analysing the influence of the ‘network effects’ (different services, bypasses, transfers, etc.) in mobility choices.
3) Finally, this efficiency approach should not be understood without including the stations’ integration in urban transport systems. HSR trips must be considered, including the influence of all the links in the whole transport chain, because the influence of access and egress times to/from HSR stations and their spatiotemporal variations are determinant in door-to-door HSR trips.
