Page 377 - 360.revista de Alta Velocidad - Nº 5

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

the passenger traffic in 2008 before the implementation of the general discounts policy. This
strategy has also lead to further positive effects, such as a notable decrease in the financial
losses experienced by the public company RENFE.
4. The methodology

As pointed out above, this research is aimed at analysing whether HSR systems can increase
social exclusion for long-distance trips, taking into account that other transport alternatives
are available to users. This contribution is based on the framework of factors that may limit
the mobility of socially excluded people, proposed by Church, et al. (2000). In this paper, the
following categories of exclusion connected to transport, applied for urban trips, are mentioned:

1. Physical exclusion: physical barriers, i.e. lack of disabled facilities or timetable information,
limiting accessibility to transport services.
2. Geographical exclusion prevents people from accessing transport services, especially those
living in rural or peripheral urban areas.
3. Exclusion from facilities, concerning the low accessibility connected with facilities, like
shops, schools, health care or leisure services.
4. Economic exclusion represents the high monetary costs of travel preventing or inhibiting
access to facilities or employment and thus having an impact on incomes.

5. Time-based exclusion refers to other demands on time, like combined work, household and
child-care duties, reducing the time available for travel.

6. Fear-based exclusion concerns to the fears for personal safety precluding the use of public
spaces and/or transport services.

7. Space exclusion is the security or space management preventing given groups having access
to public spaces, like first class waiting rooms at stations.

These categories have been adapted to medium-long distance trips to properly address the
aim of the paper. Based on this assumption, a Revealed Preference (RP) survey was carried out
in Spain between October and December 2015. The questionnaire was created on the Google
platform and 414 useful responses were collected. Users were interviewed regarding the last
interurban trip they made within Spain, and reported different trip characteristics such as the
transport mode chosen, including HSR.

Due to the survey method used, based on the web platform, the sample needed to be weighted.
The percentages of gender and age classes, based on the 2011 Spanish Census (INE, 2015), have
been considered to adjust the sample. Then, those observations with a trip length lower than
80 km have been removed from the sample since they typically correspond to regional trips,
not operated by the AVE services. In this case the authors tried to avoid any bias present in the
data set used to make inferences.
Table 2 includes the socioeconomic characteristics of the whole sample, reporting figures for
both HSR users and non-HSR users. It is interesting to notice that both groups mainly correspond
to full time/part time workers. Particularly, the highest percentage (70%) is observed for HSR
users, probably because they can afford this service, while for non-HSR users the percentage
is around 55%. Concerning the monthly income, it can be noticed that 70% of the sample has
an income between 1,000-3,000 Euro. Among HSR users, less than 70% of them has an income
higher than 2,000 Euro, while non-HSR users are less than 53%, this result seems to highlight the
influence of income on mode choice.

International Congress on High-speed Rail: Technologies and Long Term Impacts - Ciudad Real (Spain) - 25th anniversary Madrid-Sevilla corridor 375