Is Investment in High Speed Rail Socially Profitable?

By G. D. Rus, G. Nombela. Journal of Transport Economics and Policy, 2007

211 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The development of High Speed Rail (HSR) in Europe has been encouraged, and financially supported, by the European Commission. HSR technology is presented as a solution to congested roads and airports and as an efficient response for incremental demand in the coming years. However, the case for an HSR investment project is highly dependent on the existing volume of demand in the affected corridor. Using real construction, maintenance, and rolling stock costs of the European HSR lines in operation, potential time savings, standard values of time and expected demand growth, we estimate the minimum level of demand required from which investment in HSR could be considered profitable from a social perspective. Other benefits, such as providing long-term capacity where overcrowding is expected, could reduce the minimum demand thresholds reported in this paper.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Strategy and Management, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/de089b1f5c120b2576562971a190af2c130350ff

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Citations in the corpus

What Can Be Learned from Spatial Economics? (2019, unknown): “De Rus and Nombela (2007) use a cost– benefit analysis to determine the level of demand needed to make a high-speed railway (HSR) socially beneficial.”
High-Speed Rail & Air Transport Competition: Game Engineering as Tool for Cost-Benefit Analysis (2008, unknown): “From an economic perspective one might argue that vertical integration would benefit passengers, given that there is only one rail operator (Economides and Salop, 1992) however vertical unbundling is one of the key elements of the European Union railway policy (de Rus and Nombela (2007)).”
Does European high-speed rail affect the current level of air services? An EU-wide analysis (2014, background): “However, several excluded routes correspond to noncompetitive HSR travel time because of very long distances (e.g. 1,124 km for BarcelonaMalaga via the suburb of Madrid) and/or limited rides on HSLs (e.g. 778 km for Paris-Munich, 61% without HSL).”
A Review of Ex-Post Evidence for Mode Substitution and Induced Demand Following the Introduction of High-Speed Rail (2013, unknown): “The levels of mode substitution and induced demand together are crucial to understand in order to assess the need for HSR as well as the justification for the high investments required to build the HSR, the costs and the benefits from investments in HSR (de Rus & Nombela, 2007; de Rus, 2011).”
A review of HSR experiences around the world (2007, background): “General assessments are relatively scarce (Nash 1991; Vickerman 1997; Martin 1997; SDG 2004; de Rus and Nombela 2007; and de Rus y Nash, 2007); and many other papers have been devoted to assess the regional and other indirect effects of HSR (Bonnafous 1987; Vickerman 1995; Blum, Haynes and Karlsson…”
Life-cycle assessment of high-speed rail: the case of California (2010, background): “Other studies have quantified the total costs of HSR against automobile or air travel investments by including emission externalities (de Rus and Nombela 2007, de Rus and Inglada 1997, Levinson et al 1997).”