Page 89 - 360.revista de Alta Velocidad - Nº 6

The rail traveller, pedestrian or customer?
Passenger flow and retail: critical boundary objects in HS Station development

sector, railway travel retail. The balance between crowd (universe of the street) and flow
(vocabulary of networks) entails a series of symbolical and managerial changes.
The crowd evokes both social risk (riots) and the mob, and therefore congestion. Flow
relates to technologies, conveying an image of order and discipline. A crowd is made up of an
approximate number of individuals, whereas flow is measurable (Fruin JJ. 1971). Each product
of a disaggregation of the flow, that is to say the pedestrian can receive a message and become
manageable. Shaping a flow signifies therefore the conversion of a mass of travellers into atomic
units possessing each particular temporal and spatial attributes. Station flow management,
hence, is a field of engineering is anchored in traffic management techniques drawn from road
engineering. Today, station flow management, as a combination of scientific knowledge and
empirical know-how is being integrated into a new field based on two metrics.

In geography, a metric is more than a measurement of distance, it is a way of determining relations
of magnitude and of ordering space and time. The station organization during the peak hours and
the evaluation of time passed into the station (the “allowance time” i.e. the time passengers
allow before the scheduled departure time of their train, Gasnier A, 2007) are key informations to
calculate the station’s optimum volume and planification. It results of a mathematical equation,
including the number of users present at a given moment (the rush-hour), the duration of their
presence in the station and the walking speed of each pedestrian. Then, once each of these
pedestrians has the capacity to react to informational stimuli, the station operator is in a position
to manage the station around flows, by means of audible or digital messages relating to both
planned and unplanned events (ticket sales, train departures, etc.).

2.3 Flow management, condition and result of railway station commercial
intensification

The French station operator explains the professional shift towards flow-based management
by the very sharp growth in station use, presenting this both as a proven fact, an unavoidable
process that demands heavy investment in expansion, and at the same time as a strategic
objective in the construction of the previously mentioned virtuous circle. True, the rise in
the number of rail travellers is an observable reality, even if a certain ambiguity remains in
the projections for station occupancy. The rail company produces traffic projections and the
station operator produces wish figures for growth in station “users” (travellers + friends and
family of travellers + 20% local community). Every presentation of a station upgrade project
starts with a reminder of this very high growth level, in the same time generating a sense of
anxiety (the danger of the crowd envisioned as mob, factor of congestion), and legitimating the
implementation of the streaming model justifying retail growth.

Article R 145-6 of France's Commercial Law defines the commerciality of a station as “the
extent to which it enables tradespeople who do business there to make profit as a result of the
qualities of the place alone, regardless of the abilities of the store operators”. The potential
commerciality of a store depends mainly on its location and relative position to pedestrian
traffic (Dang Vu H., Jeanneau H., 2008). An improvement in these criteria can justify an increase
in the value of the lease, and therefore an increase in rents and fees. With the setting up of the
subsidiary Retail&Co in 2016, the French station operator approached railway station retail with
the intention of maximising the rental value by combining growth in the numbers of station
spaces with growth in overall station commerciality. For the 400 French stations containing
at least one retail outlet (out of the 4000 across the country), the operator has announced
growth targets of 50% in retail area (300,000 square metres by 2025) and of 100% in fees from
the deregulated sector in less than 10 years (Ropert P, 2015). The intensification plan is very
evident. The station operator’s objective is to take advantage of a travel retail sector in which
it is still a minority player (around 30% of market share, compared with the airport sector
players, which have carved out 50% of the potential market). What is at stake here is nothing

International Congress on High-speed Rail: Technologies and Long Term Impacts - Ciudad Real (Spain) - 25th anniversary Madrid-Sevilla corridor 87