Do I really like to shift to rail? Influence of rail modernisation on passenger preferences
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| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| Citation | |
| Description | As time goes on, the emphasis on environmentally friendly solutions or environmental behaviours is steadily increasing, and they are also gaining a stronger position in the transport sector. The topic of this article is the discussion of the long-term European initiative shift to rail. This initiative is confronted with historical facts, using the rail link between Prague and Pilsen. Numerous modernisation activities have been carried out on this line and have led to a qualitative change in transport, albeit on a conventional railway line and not on the HSR. The paper aims to evaluate whether, in the long run, a significant rail infrastructure upgrade leads to a change in transport and residential behaviour. In this paper, the change in ridership, frequency and travel time are considered as key indicators of the fundamental change in the quality of service caused by the modernisation of the line. These changes are then contrasted with a self-conducted survey among passengers on the line, which identifies individual preferences and motives for transport behaviour and its changes through in-depth semi-structured interviews. The results show that a relatively expensive upgrade of a conventional rail line (comparable in cost to the construction of the HSR in Spain) achieved significant savings in travel time of 17% and motivated operators to increase frequency by almost 50%. All this increased ridership to more than double. Nevertheless, passengers’ view on this crucial change of rail service supply corresponds with the importance of speed and other factors such as services, comfort, or on the other side, difficult parking situation in Prague. The results confirmed the crucial long-term benefit in the possibility of not relocating to metropolitan centres given new attractive travel time conditions for regular commuting. |
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