RESEARCH ARTICLE


Economic Assessment of Railway Policies: High Speed or High- Performance. A Case of Study



Pablo Coto-Millán*, 1, Pedro Casares1, Vicente Inglada2
1 Department of Economics, University of Cantabria, Spain
2 Department of Economics, University of Complutense, Madrid, Spain


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Creative Commons License
© 2012 Coto-Millán;

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Department of Economics, University of Cantabria, Spain; Tel: +34 942201653; Fax: +34 942 201603; E-mail: cotop@unican.es


Abstract

The objective of the present paper is to assess the railway investment project in Spain for the Santander-Madrid route, using the Cost-Benefit Analysis method. The paper aims at answering the following question - what is more viable: a High Speed Train for passengers between Santander and Madrid, or rather a High Performance Train for passengers and cargo between Santander and Madrid? Being able to answer this question is clearly key information for investment decision making in the field of government's or country's transport policy. In this study, a Cost-Benefit Analysis with two options for the railway project has been calculated: only passengers and combined passengers-cargo. In this case, results favour the passengers-cargo option rather than its alternative.

Keywords: High speed train, high performance train, cost-benefit analysis, demand.