Impacts of Liberalisation on HSR Affordability

High-speed rail (HSR) contributes to countries’ economic growth, productivity, and competitiveness. Nevertheless, the implementation of HSR services has some negative effects in terms of social equity, as the opening of HSR lines is often associated with the reduction or removal of conventional rail services, and HSR services generally have significantly higher ticket prices, meaning that certain social groups are ‘pushed out’ of the rail mode due to an income effect.

Liberalisation in the passenger rail sector represents a major opportunity to improve the social equity effects of HSR services. Opening up to competition in any economic sector usually leads to a reduction in tickets prices and an increase in the supply and quality of services, including the modernisation of replacement rolling stock fleet.

The objective of Liber-Afford is to find recommendations to improve the effects of HSR on social equity, which can be extrapolated to any HSR network. This study does not tackle the issue of the cost of liberalisation itself, the unbundling of infrastructure from operation, the creation of new entities, or the necessary regulation. It also does not question railway liberalisation itself but instead aims to explore how to take advantage of it.

Finally, this final report from the Liber-Afford project summarises all the tasks conducted (state of the art and practice, data collection and treatment, and demand modelling). Importantly, this document presents and discusses the main results of the project and, based on these results, includes a set of recommendations on how to take advantage of rail liberalisation. The main objective is to achieve a more equitable growth of HSR services and help operators and policymakers better identify actions to improve the equity of HSR services without impacting operator profits.