Florent Laroche (p), Ayana Lamatkhanova , Leny Grassot

Laurent Guihéry

This paper explores the effect of competition on prices and frequencies for the Interurban rail market in Europe. The market is defined by long distance train services mixing classical speed and high speed. The intramodal competition is usually in “open access” for long distance services in Europe and can be formalized through the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) commonly used to assess the level of concentration between different firms on a market. The intermodal competition takes into account the air transportation, as usually in the literature, but includes new type of services as coach services and carpooling services. The analysis is original by an extended perimeter including seven European countries and a total of 90 routes. The method is based on an econometric analysis which has never been applied yet to the rail market and its specificities in terms of competition. Results show that intra-modal competition have a significant impact on frequencies for long distance train services but no significant effect on prices in economic class. Otherwise, the effects of intermodal competition are limited mainly because of the strong differences between the market structures in terms of travel time, comfort or user’s preferences. It is the case of coach and carpool services, available when prices for train are high, but not of air transport which can drive train operators to decrease their prices in case of direct competition for long distance.

Laurent Guihery (p), Michal Taracha (p)

Florent Laroche

Poland has a long and complex history in the East-Central part of Europe. Between 1795 and 1918, it was split between three countries, Austria-Hungary, Prussia and Russia. In their policies, the occupying empires aimed at the integration of the newly gained Polish lands with their main territories. One of the manifestations of such policies in the economic dimension was that they invested in new roads and railway lines. In 1918, Poland regained its independence. However, the Great Depression, world wars by which Poland was most severely affected in Europe, and central planning of the communist regime after WW2 slowed down the development and integration of the road and railway networks. Since joining the European Union in 2004, Poland has been a beneficiary of the European Structural and Investment Funds which aim through co-financing on national, regional or local basis at the improvement of the infrastructure, in terms of both quantity and quality.
The analysis of the existing infrastructure was carried out to show what remains from the previously existing discrepancies in the three former regions of partitioned Poland until now? Can we still see any differences between them? Is the convergence in terms of the transport infrastructure to be seen as rather weak or strong? Does it accelerate or not after the accession to the European Union?
Our research revolves around the road and railway network. In the analysis, we will consider the accessibility of main urban centers (travelling time), density of railway lines and highways measured as a length of the railway lines related to a unit of area and per inhabitant. We will also consider the data concerning the European funds to assess whether the European Regional Policy has reduced the level of infrastructure discrepancies in Poland during the last 15 years?
We will look at the interconnection between the three former regions: does the gap in the transport infrastructure still exist? Then the amount of regional funds dedicated to Polish infrastructure programs for both road and railway networks will be analyzed, with a regional mapping of the financial flows towards each voivodeship (administrative subdivision of Poland) in order to observe the reduction of the disparities inherited from the time of the partitions of Poland. Finally, the practice of closing the minor railway lines will be considered as a part of the policy towards the increase of efficiency of the rail network.
The main reason for writing this paper seems obvious: can we verify that the reduction of the discrepancies that we observe now is linked with the closing of tracks, or it is due to the flows from the European Structural Funds or both. What are the relations and proportion between the benefits to the road and railway infrastructure: is the convergence trend characteristic of both networks? To what extent the development of the road network (and closing of some railway tracks) has reduced the disparities inherited from the old partitions of Poland?

Mattia Borsati (p), Daniel Albalate

Florent Laroche

The development of high-speed rail (HSR) has been one of the central features of recent European Union transport infrastructure policy, as highlighted by the latest Commission White Paper 2011 “Roadmap to a Single European Transport Area”. Nowadays, HSR services have notably changed the modal market shares in the routes where they have been implemented by both generating new demand and replacing the demand for other modes of transport.
To date, the attention has been mainly devoted to the intra- and inter-modal competition between HSR and air services, while few studies examined the impact of HSR links on shorter distances, where car is the competitive means of transport. Therefore, since road traffic reduction is one of the key drivers to offset HSR investments, the aim of this paper is to fill this gap by analysing whether the HSR expansion led to a modal shift from motorway to HSR services in Italy in a quasi-experimental setting. At this purpose, we empirically test i) whether HSR openings next to some motorway sectors has reduced the total km traveled by light vehicles on those sectors during the period 2001-2017; and ii) whether this reduction is persistent or even stronger after the opening of on-track competition (since 2012) on HS and some conventional lines between the incumbent Trenitalia and the new operator Nuovo Trasporto Viaggiatori, that provided more HS capacity and forced Trenitalia to reduce the average fares. The novelty lies in carrying out a generalized difference-in-differences estimation by using a unique 17-year panel dataset that exploits the heterogeneous traffic data within all tolled motorway sectors
Results show that HSR expansion did not lead to a modal shift from motorway to HSR services, as the two transport modes are not competing. This arise the debate whether the mobility needs of wide metropolitan areas, where middle-sized towns are at relatively short distances between each other, should rely more on a fully mixed high-speed model rather than on the typical "need for speed" of long-haul routes.