From accessibility improvement to land development: a comparative study on the impacts of Madrid-Seville high-speed rail

Abstract

This paper studies the impacts of Madrid-Seville High-Speed Rail (HSR) on land-cover change in the five HSR connected cities – Madrid, Ciudad Real, Puertollano, Cordoba, and Seville. The analysis period ranges from 1991 to 2006. The study finds that, in the Madrid-Seville region, the land development process concentrates mostly toward the two largest cities, Madrid and Seville, while other smaller HSR served cities are also benefited. The process of land development in each city varies largely. HSR contributes more to Ciudad Real and Cordoba than to Puertollano, with booming urban development in the former two cities. To study the accessibility impacts of HSR, binary discrete choice models are adopted. The results suggest that, the land development in smaller cities can be mainly explained by the improvement of regional accessibility and population growth. However, to model the urban development process in Madrid and Seville, the inputs with only accessibility and population are not sufficient.

Keywords:

• Accessibility
• comparative study
• discrete choice methods
• GIS
• high-speed rail
• land-cover change

Acknowledgement

The authors appreciate the supports from International Association for China Planning, Prof. Jason Cao, and Prof. Pengyu Zhu for this work; and would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their very constructive comments. This research was developed in the framework of the EXPRESS Research Project (MIT/SET/0023/2009) sponsored by the Portuguese national research funds through FCT/MCTES (PIDDAC) and co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) under the Operational Agenda for Competitiveness Factors - COMPETE.

Notes

1. The municipality registration data may provide greater figures than the census data. It might lead to some degree of overestimation in the population of 2006.

2. UNESCO: the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.

3. There could be the indirect impacts of passenger-only HSR on roadway freight transport. It means that, the opening of HSR reduces the market share of intercity shuttle bus. As the number of buses on the road declines, the roadway capacity for freight transport increases. However, these evidences are difficult to observe and can hardly be found from the previous literatures.