Keywords: HSR, Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe.

This paper examines Western European experience of the circumstances in which HSR is economically justified, and explores the degree to which such circumstances are found in Central and Eastern Europe. Specifically it examines the ex post evaluations of HSR projects in France and Spain and of HS1 in Britain and the ex ante appraisals of HS2 in Britain. It then applies the lessons from these studies to consider the prospects for economic justification of high speed rail proposals in Central and Eastern Europe. The case for HSR depends heavily on demand, with typically 9m trips per annum end to end being needed. A second key factor is construction cost. Lower construction costs may be achieved by routeing which avoids tunnelling, only building wholly new track on bottleneck sections and upgrading existing tracks elsewhere, using spare capacity on existing right of way and stations. But of course to the extent that these solutions reduce quality of service they will also reduce benefits. The case is better the greater the value of time savings. This is likely to be greater when existing rail infrastructure is of poor quality. The value of those time savings depends on the mix of trips by journey purpose and on incomes. The extent of wider economic benefits remains controversial. A further consideration is the extent to which the proposal relieves congestion on existing transport infrastructure. There are various characteristics of Central and Eastern Europe that may affect the case for HSR. With the exception of Poland, CEE countries are smaller and lower in population than main countries of the West. Thus a bigger proportion of potential traffic is international. The poor quality of much rail infrastructure in CEE countries means that there are potentially very large time savings to rail users. On the other hand, much traffic on the main international routes uses air travel, compared to which the benefits may be much lower. Also, values of time savings are generally correlated to incomes, and the lower incomes in CEE countries will tend to reduce the value placed on benefits. Other important factors are the level of construction costs and the benefits of increased capacity. If the forecasts of low construction costs, moderate demand and high time savings are accurate then it appears that there may be a case for HSR in CEE countries. But further studies are needed to verify this.

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