Evaluating High-Speed Rail

Interdisciplinary perspectives

Daniel Albalate, Germà Bel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138123595
• eBook ISBN: 9781317301981
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

High-speed Rail (HSR) is a technological transportation advance that has raised the interest of policy makers and researchers worldwide. The study of High-speed Rail is a recent phenomenon but has received increasing attention due to the extension of this mode of transportation around the globe.

Evaluating High-Speed Rail contains some of the most recent and cutting edge studies on HSR from different disciplines. The book is organized around a variety of key topics related to the evaluation of High Speed Rail projects and experiences. These topics include: the economic appraisal and evaluation of High-Speed Rail projects; the evaluation of indirect and direct effects of High-Speed Rail; its territorial, redistributive and environmental impacts; its contribution or limitation to urban growth; and the management of challenges created by the arrival of High-Speed Rail lines to core cities. It also covers the contribution of High-Speed Rail to tourism and its impact on intermodal competition, with especial consideration to air transportation. Chapters analyse the expected effects of introducing on-track competition and designing public-private contracts to develop new lines.

This cutting-edge volume offers rigorous analysis from top researchers in the field with a clear intention to deliver policy implications and provide the latest analysis on the impact of High Speed Rail. This book is suitable for students and academics interested in transportation infrastructure, economic impacts of public investments, mobility, planning and urban affairs, as well as researchers and policy makers in the transportation and infrastructure sector.

1    An evidence-based review of key issues in high-speed rail

Daniel Albalate and Germà Bel

High-speed rail (HSR) is a sound, modern innovation in surface transportation. It has become not only a new transportation mode, but a symbol of modernity, efficiency and technological achievement. For this reason, HSR has been expanding rapidly all over the world in order to improve rail services, promote customer satisfaction and compete with other supposedly more polluting alternatives. Nonetheless, debates about its convenience are too often founded on the grounds of intangible and immeasurable outcomes. In the last few years, literature has emerged which sheds some light on the realities and evidences regarding the contributions of this mode of transportation. There is no doubt that HSR often requires a great deal of input to produce positive net welfare impacts. It requires huge investments because it is usually the most expensive infrastructure project in the history of any country. It also requires high-demand from passengers and its general cost in relation to other modes of transportation is far greater.

This book offers a complete review of the recent analyses and cutting-edge research performed in the field of HSR literature. It covers some of the most challenging topics that today deserve the attention of top researchers in the fields of economics, geography, engineering, the environment and planning. In addition, the issues examined in the next ten chapters are of considerable interest to policy makers worldwide and to anybody interested in having a better understanding of what HSR can offer to their community. This better and evidence-based knowledge contributes to a more deliberative and informed democracy and allows better social choices to be made, especially if we take into account how resource consuming HSR might be.

To satisfy this objective, the book is structured into three blocks or research areas. The first block of chapters discusses the economic assessment of HSR projects from both financial and socioeconomic perspectives. This aspect is critical in HSR infrastructure projects given the huge expenditure associated with them. Only a rigorous assessment and evaluation of these investments, usually borne by taxpayers given the traditional means of finance of the public sector, may avoid large welfare losses and financial burdens for both the current and future generations.

Although it is obvious that transportation infrastructure does not need to be financially profitable, its positive externalities and other welfare-enhancing indirect effects should offset the enormous economic cost of building and maintaining the infrastructure.

This block starts with a general methodological discussion presented by Ginés de Rus in Chapter 2, who offers interesting recommendations with regard to rigorously assessing the economic evaluation of large infrastructure projects. Among such, HSR has become a major infrastructure project requiring specific economic evaluation strategies.

Once the methodological framework has been presented, the block moves to an empirical orientation by presenting the economic evaluation of HSR investments in Spain. In Chapter 3, Ofelia Betancor and Gerard Llobet evaluate the Spanish HSR network from both a financial and a socioeconomic perspective. This empirical chapter serves to confirm how demanding this infrastructure is in terms of investment for it to guarantee a positive welfare contribution. In the specific case of Spain, the country with the longest HSR network in Europe, we can confirm after reading the chapter that this mode of transportation was a tremendous mistake with huge financial and economic losses that will have financial consequences over time, and which has also produced negative social returns.

To end this first block, John Preston covers the indirect and wider economic impacts of HSR in Chapter 4. There is an intense scholar and practitioner debate about why and how indirect and wider effects should be included in large infrastructure economic evaluations. The chapter by John Preston offers his view on this controversial and open debate and provides some figures supported by recent evidence and research on the strength of these effects, with particular interest in HSR1 and HSR2 in the UK. These two cases are good examples of extensive research and evaluation being carried out before large infrastructure projects are undertaken and they help to provide early evidence with regard to some of the wider economic effects that are difficult to introduce in cost-benefit models given their complexity.

The second block of chapters opens a discussion on the economic and land use effects of HSR. These chapters offer some specific views on the impact of HSR on affected industries, such as the tourist industry (Chapter 5), on the land used to build the lines (taking into account its accessibility) (Chapter 6) and on the environment (Chapters 7 and 8).

Marie Delaplace and Sylvie Bazin-Benoit analyze one of the more commonly attributed impacts of HSR – on tourism – which is obviously linked to transportation infrastructure supply. The tourist industry is usually lobbying for new and more efficient transportation modes and in this regard, HSR is seen as a potential channel through which more people may arrive at tourist hotspots. There is no doubt that transportation and tourism are closely related economic activities. However, recent research has shown some mixed or even disappointing results. Bazin-Benoit and Delaplace confirm that in areas served by HSR, the actors expect a dynamic economy, in general, and of tourism in particular. Nevertheless, the disappointing ex post analyses make it necessary to study what factors are relevant for transforming the arrival of HSR into a development tool. Among them, Bazin-Benoit and Delaplace elaborate on new forms of cooperation between local stakeholders to take advantage of the tourist potential created by HSR. Indeed, tourism is an activity that generally needs cooperation policies between various public and private stakeholders, and this is particularly important during the planning for HSR. By focusing on different French cities, their chapter analyzes the different kinds of cooperation used in the tourism field with regard to HSR.

Constructing railway infrastructure on land near cities has never been easy. It has been a source of social, economic and environmental tension and has required careful handling. For this reason, Jordi Martí-Henneberg and Eduard J. Alvarez-Palau present a critical debate on how good initial planning, appropriate design and carefully selected methods of construction are required to ensure that cities and their railway stations are able to get the most from the arrival of new HSR services. These authors study the impact of HSR stations on the geography of Europe in order to analyze, measure and make an international comparison of their accessibility. On the one hand, demand potential and its expected growth seems to be called into question as the standard criterion for assigning investments in HSR. On other hand, different approaches regarding the type of networks designed have inevitably produced consequences for the location of HSR stations, their accessibility and, therefore, their contribution. The chapter shows how transport policies have allowed different cities to integrate their HSR stations into their daily dynamics in different fashions. Indeed, new transport services have been studied taking into consideration the different modes of transport already available in order to allow acceptable levels of accessibility to HSR stations, whether linked to public or private transport. Unfortunately, the authors show their disappointment at the lack of connectivity between HSR stations and airports in some countries, especially because this limits their intermodal potential for journeys over medium and long distances. The major contribution of HSR appears to be in medium distances, where it can be more efficient than road and air transportation. For this reason, designing a multimodal network appears to be essential to offer the best accessibility and service for the whole set of origin–destination distances.

The environmental contribution of HSR in that it has advantages over air transportation in this respect has been one of the most frequently cited advantages by unconditional supporters of HSR. No doubt in standard situations HSR does appear to be more environmentally efficient in operation than air transportation, but this so-called advantage is far from being that clear when we consider other aspects of the life cycle of this infrastructure and its capabilities for attracting users from the more polluting modes of transportation. In Chapter 7, Torben Holvad, Amandine Craps and Javier Campos contribute to this book elaborating on the environmental performance of HSR and its implications. Overall, during the past couple of decades rail has been promoted in European transport policy in order that a move towards a more sustainable transport system can be effected. This draws notably on the environmental performance of rail compared to other modes of transport. The chapter provides an up-to-date and comprehensive assessment of the environmental performance of HSR. The environmental implications of HSR are also considered in comparison to other modes of transportation, including conventional rail. The life cycle perspective is of special interest, a consideration going beyond an extensive literature that neglects the different phases of the project. This part of the analysis provides indications of the micro-based environmental implications of HSR. Subsequent analyses look at an aggregated perspective on HSR environmental implications both in isolation and as part of the overall transport system. The authors also provide a challenging discussion on a future perspective of HSR which involves consideration of expected transport scenarios covering both network development and HSR usage in order to determine the likely environmental impacts of HSR over the time period 2030–2050.

David Hoyos, Gorka Bueno and Iñigo Capellán-Pérez also devote Chapter 8 to assessing the environmental contribution of HSR. They focus on the greenhouse gas (GHG) emission and energy consumption balance and, ultimately, they evaluate the conditions under which HSR investments can be considered the right move for sustainable mobility. For this purpose, these authors apply the transport hierarchy approach as a general framework for the assessment of HSR from a sustainable perspective. This framework establishes a priority order for the design and management of transport systems, differentiating between four levels of priority: (1) demand minimization; (2) modal shift and intermodality; (3) efficiency optimization; and (4) capacity increase. New HSR projects, therefore, fall directly into the last option. Taking into account the magnitude of the environmental problem as well as the commitments already signed by the EU, the most important contribution of HSR to sustainable mobility lies in its potential for environmental impact reductions, especially with regard to GHG emission and energy consumption. In an illustrative example, the project Basque Y in Spain, it is shown that net GHG emission and energy consumption reductions are likely to be virtually nil during the useful lifetime of the infrastructure. This example demonstrates the need to assess the environmental performance of HSR on a case-by-case basis.

The third block of chapters relates to the role of institutions, particularly with regard to regulation, competition and the introduction of private participation. On the one hand, we have two chapters exploring the potential and realities of competition. Chapter 9 examines on-track competition, while Chapter 10 considers and contributes to the extensive emerging literature on intermodal competition. Paolo Beria and Raffaele Grimaldi examine the very first case, unique in the world so far, of HSR on-track competition in Chapter 9.¹ On-track competition is slowly coming to the fore in the battlefield of the rail market, and is trying to open niche long-distance markets behind the front line of regional franchises. Their chapter aims at revising – under different perspectives (normative, analysis of current and potential markets, competitors’ behaviour) – the current and expected cases of on-track competition, with particular focus on the only one actually belonging to the high-speed segment – that in Italy. While detailed traffic figures are not available, the effects of competition can be analyzed empirically looking at supply and at fare strategies. The text concludes by generalizing the results, in order to shed light on the conditions for the development of the high-speed open access market in Europe.

Intermodal competition is also of essential interest if we take into account the fact that part of the environmental effects and a large share of social benefits depend on the operational attractiveness of HSR with respect to other modes of transportation. Chapter 10 is devoted to intermodal competition. This chapter, offered by Frédéric Dobruszkes, Moshe Givoni and Catherine Dehon, examines competition between HSR and airlines as being a fundamental issue to consider with regard to taking advantage of the supposed environmental efficiency gains of this mode of rail transportation in comparison to air travel. These authors suggest that the supposed environmental benefit is now inevitably at the core of any new HSR project or of many plans that aim to reduce the environmental footprint of medium-distance mobility, and especially as far as air travel is concerned. This critical aspect of HSR is evaluated in the chapter by moving from HSR project rhetoric to the evidence-based outcomes in terms of intermodal impacts of HSR services. The authors highlight some of the most common methodological misunderstandings in this debate and discuss the limitations affecting the power of HSR to reduce air travel.

On the other hand, the last chapter of this book, contributed by Yves Crozet, considers the limited role of privatization in the development of this mode of transportation by drawing on the French experience with public–private-partnerships (PPPs). During the last 20 years, PPPs have been applied in the rail sector, especially for HSR. A review of these PPPs shows that some of them have partly or totally failed. Beyond the evidence that PPP is a good option to optimize the risks in that these are shared between public and private partners, the fact that some unexpected risks do arise has to be emphasized. These can occur especially because of opportunistic behaviours from both sides of the contract. After a description of the attractiveness of PPPs, the chapter proposes a brief inventory of difficulties encountered by HSR PPPs. The main learning outcome from this review is that some huge risks remain for the public authorities. The state is very often the lender of last resort and sometimes the operator of last resort because it is usually highly unacceptable to simply close the service down. Such a result can be explained by the fact that public decision makers behave like “risk lovers”.

To conclude this introductory chapter, all the chapters in the book offer a particular contribution and present different viewpoints with regard to the new, modern and controversial mode of rail transportation – HSR. The book reviews the current state of knowledge in relation to some specific issues that we consider the main topics and challenges underlining a consideration of HSR. This, therefore, implies that, inherently, the book will also help to identify new lines of research, the results of which will ultimately offer more certainty of what HSR has to offer, taking into account the impacts that it will have. The book will also help to identify further challenges regarding the introduction of HSR which will need to be addressed if this impressive project is going to reach its full potential in any country.

Note

1    Spain prepares for the liberalization of part of its network by introducing on-track competition for the Madrid–Valencia link. This liberalization has not been implemented yet at the time of writing this chapter.

2 The economic evaluation of major infrastructure projects

Notes on HSR projects¹

Ginés de Rus

1. Introduction

In the 1970s and first half of the 1980s, the net stock of public capital in the US grew at 1.6 per cent, approximately three times lower than the annual growth rate during the previous 20 years. Aschauer (1989) linked this reduction in infrastructure investment to the productivity slowdown in that period, particularly during the first half of the 1980s. Followin...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Evaluating High-Speed Rail
• Routledge Studies in Transport Analysis
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 An Evidence-Based Review of Key Issues in High-Speed Rail
• 2 The Economic Evaluation of Major Infrastructure Projects: Notes on HSR Projects
• 3 Financial and Social Profitability of HSR in Spain
• 4 Direct and Indirect Effects of High-Speed Rail
• 5 High-Speed Rail Services and Tourism Expansion: The Need for Cooperation
• 6 HSR and the City: Accessibility to Stations and Intermodality
• 7 Environmental Performance and Implications of High-Speed Rail
• 8 Environmental Assessment of High-Speed Rail
• 9 Reality and Opportunities for On-Track Competition in HSR
• 10 Assessing the Competition between High-Speed Rail and Airlines: A Critical Perspective
• 11 High-Speed Rail and PPPs: Between Optimization and Opportunism
• Index