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Economic, geographical and time-based exclusion as main factors inhibiting Spanish users from choosing High
Speed Rail

European HSR network had over 8,100 km in service but it is planned to reach around 22,000 km
in 2025. This shows not only the actual relevance of HSR services, but especially the central role
that this infrastructure is going to achieve in the European transport policy. HSR is highlighted
as a key future transport mode by the EC white paper “Roadmap to a Single European Transport
Area – Towards a competitive and resource efficient transport system”. Its recent expansion and
its planned extension could induce important geographical effects (Givoni, 2006) at different
territorial scales (European, national and local ones) even though the role of HSR can differ in
European regions due to the fact that networks, services and improvements of accessibility are
diverse depending on each country and served city.
Spending public money in the construction of HSR lines has been defended as a socially desirable
public investment which produces several types of benefits such as passenger time savings,
increase in comfort, generation of new trips, reduction in congestion and delays in roads and
airports, reduction in accidents, reduction in environmental externalities, release of needed
capacity in airports and conventional rail lines, and wider economic benefits including the
development of the less developed regions (De Rus, 2008).
Although these advantages, it is relevant to highlight how expensive is building and operating
the new transport system. Indeed, today most of the HSR lines in Europe are subsidized, with
the consequence that there is a trade-off between economic exclusion and the economic
feasibility of these systems. For instance, for the case of Spain, Betancor, et al.(2015) analysed
the economic feasibility of the HSR network and did not recognised its economic benefit,
therefore other additional social and political factors have motivated the development of the
HSR services in the country.
The objective of this research is to analyse whether HSR systems can increase social exclusion
for long-distance trips, taking into account that other transport alternatives are available
to users. This constitutes a topic of great interest given that future transportation systems
investments seem to be focused on these services, mainly in Europe. Specifically, the case study
of Spain is considered since it has one of the longest HSR network worldwide.
This paper is organised as follows. Section 2 reviews the current literature addressing the link
between HSR and social exclusion. Section 3 briefly introduces the Spanish HSR system. In
section 4 a binary logit mode choice model is introduced in order to identify the explanatory
variables potentially affecting the choice of HSR and the impact of social exclusion. Section
5 presents and discusses the results. Conclusions and further perspectives are presented in
section 6.

2. Social exclusion and HSR systems

Several contributions on the social effects brought by HSR systems have been analyzed in the
literature (Vickerman, 1997; Preston and Wall, 2008; Pagliara, et al., 2015). However only few
contributions have been conducted on the impact of HSR systems on social exclusion. Among the
very few studies present in the literature, the statistical analysis of surveys carried out by Cass,
et al. (2005) reports interesting results. It indicates that HSR has both positive and negative
social impacts. The positive social impact is represented by the increased accessibility and
activities for commuting HSR users. The key concept of accessibility highlights the relationship
between the system of activities located in a given territory and the transport system serving it.
According to Cascetta (2009), the concept of accessibility may refer alternatively to: a) the
need to carry out some activities –shopping, work, education, etc.– by an individual who is
in a certain area (active accessibility), or b) the need to be physically reached by potential
users –customers, employees, suppliers, etc.– for an activity that is located in a certain area
(passive accessibility). The nature of accessibility is influenced by the time-space organization
in households, the nature and performances of the transport system, and the nature of time-

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