A Review of Ex-Post Evidence for Mode Substitution and Induced Demand Following the Introduction of High-Speed Rail

ABSTRACT

To date, relatively little is known about the nature of the demand for high-speed rail (HSR) soon after inauguration of the services, despite close to 50-year experience of HSR operation and 17 166 km of HSR network around the world. This is a real lacuna given the scale of HSR construction around the world, the amount of resources committed to it, the desired accessibility, economic and environmental effects associated with HSR development and the relatively poor track record of forecasting demand for HSR services. Focusing on mode substitution and induced demand effects, this review aims to fill the gap in knowledge about the ex-post demand for HSR services in order to facilitate a learning process for the planning of the future HSR network. Although there is not much evidence on the demand for HSR services and existing evidence is largely influenced by route-specific characteristics, a methodological limitation that must be acknowledged, the evidence presented allows a better characterisation of HSR as a mode of transport. The review shows that the demand for HSR a few years after inauguration is about 10–20% induced demand and the rest is attributed to mode substitution. In terms of mode substitution, in most cases the majority of HSR passengers have used the conventional rail before. Substitution from aircraft, car and coach is generally more modest.

Keywords:

• high-speed rail
• mode substitution
• induced demand
• intermodal competition
• ex-post evaluation

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank three anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions, Myoungshin Kim for her help with the Korean report and Pierre Zembri for advice on the French experience. This research is part of the DATE project, financed by the European Commission under a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship for Career Development. It only reflects the authors' view and the European Union is not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.

Notes

1. Includes lines or sections of lines on which trains can go faster than 250 kph at some point during the journey (EC, 2011a).

2. Mode substitution is used since it is the term commonly used in the literature to refer to passengers changing from using one mode to another. Since in most cases, the new (HSR) and previous (aircraft, car, etc.) modes continue to operate there is no actual substitution of modes, but transfer between modes. Furthermore, in changing from conventional train to HSR, there is certainly no change of mode, but change of service, yet for simplicity also in this case we refer to mode substitution.

3. London and Continental Railways is the private company that won in 1996 the contract to finance build and operate the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL — nowadays called High Speed 1).

4. Excluding international traffic since HSR lines in the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands were opened later than expected.

5. Such changes in most cases cannot be fully separated from changes in accessibility following improvement in the transport network, making the matter more complicated.

6. Considering, for example, the Paris–Amsterdam route in 2004 (Table 2), a HSL was then only available between (north of) Paris and (south of) Brussels (52% of the distance).

7. Reduction in demand for car travel has been recorded in some cases, but not in the periods and/or countries examined here (but see Goodwin and Van Dender (2013) for a special issue on ‘Peak Car').

8. The extent to which the development of HSR is positively or negatively affecting the conventional rail network is difficult to determine and requires further analysis, which is outside the scope of this paper. This issue is revisited in the conclusion section.