Page 212 - 360.revista de Alta Velocidad - Nº 6

Coronado, José María. Ureña, José María.

Ciudad Real has a high proportion of HSR passengers per year in relation to its population (13.3
HSR passengers per inhabitant) and also important although smaller Puertollano (10.0 HSR
passengers per inhabitant). This amount of HSR passengers diminished around 20% during the
crisis years and has recovered during the recent economic recovery years.

In general, studies on the implications of new transportation investments are undertaken prior
and shortly after the investment. The opportunity of reassessing the implications several years
later diminishes, since other factors mix up with the new transportation investment; for this
reason, ex-post long-term studies are scarce. Nevertheless, since Ciudad Real and Puertollano
are still relatively isolated, 200 km to the nearest city above 100.000 inhabitants, the short/
longterm comparison may sound more useful, since fewer factors mix with the HSR.
2. State of the art

This section reviews the scientific literature on the subject of comparing the short and long-
term implications of new transportation infrastructures.
In several countries, Environmental Assessment, as an internationally accepted methodology,
has to evaluate immediate and long-term effects of construction and operation of major
proposed transport infrastructure projects on the environment (Goodenough and Page, 1994)
and major spatial plans (Ureña and Español, 2006). In other countries, Territorial Assessments
are also compulsory with similar immediate and long-term evaluation requisites. Their interest
is their requirement to evaluate not only immediate but also long-term envisaged effects, and,
as a consequence, to find mitigation measures.
There are many ex-ante evaluations of expected immediate and long-term effects, there are
fewer short-term ex-post measurements of produced effects after the operation of new transport
infrastructures and even fewer long-term ex-post measurements of produced effects. Long-
term effects studies are frequently theoretical, without empirical basis (Bonatti & Campiglio,
2013).

Ojha, Vrat and Sharma (2016) proposed a System Dynamics approach to explore long-term
implications (25 years) of quality of Highways on manufacturing growth, by exploring 8
highway maintenance/repair/construction scenarios and considering that improved highways
will produce growing manufacturing and additional movement of goods, and thus, increased
deterioration of highways, several refeeding loops (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Relations between Highway quality and length and Manufacturing output

Source: Ojha, Vrat and Sharma (2016)

210 360.revista de alta velocidad