Rail-air transport competition : A discrete choice analysis along with an international empirical investigation

Sammanfattning: There is an increasing interest among many nations to decrease CO2 emissions.Promoting more sustainable modes of transportation is one particular area that has roomfor improvement. For instance, short and medium distance flights can bepotentially substituted by high-speed rail (HSR). The gains of such a transition can bemeasured as a 95% reduction of CO2 emission for each passenger kilometre made bytrain instead of air, according to the European Environment Agency (EEA) [1]. This research was conducted during 2022 at KTH, Royal Institute of Technology inStockholm, Sweden to further explore rail-air transport competition. It consists of two parts:1) a Discrete Choice analysis and 2) an empirical study of HSR lines with a particular focuson those that has been introduced in recent years. For the first part, a discrete choice experiment (DCE) is designed following a semi-randomdesign method to study rail-air competition in the Stockholm-Malmö corridor. Travel time,travel cost, access time to railway station/airport, waiting time, and check-in time at theairport are the studied travel attributes in this DCE. An online survey was distributedamong the frequent rail and air travellers in Stockholm central railway station as well asArlanda and Bromma airport. The results reveal that passengers were much more sensitive towards increase of traveltimes by air in favour of rail and that the majority of travellers would choose rail when itstravel time is 3h or shorter. Furthermore, access time to the station/airport and check-intime at the airport play a significant role in this competition. Moreover, on average, moreadult passengers are slightly in favour of air compared to rail mode. On average, femalepassengers prefer rail mode compared to air transport. As expected, passengers withhigher income values are more willing to choose air transport compared to rail. Lastly, thehigher educated people are more likely to choose the train compared to the air transport. For the second part, a number of existing HSR routes in different countries were studied.Those HSR that became operational after 2011 were targeted by extra attention in thisreport in order to investigate whether the correlation of travel time by rail and market shareof rail follows the same pattern as it was discovered in similar studies from 2011 [2], [3]. It was found that the general pattern was mostly similar to ones from previous studies.However a few oddities were discovered. One could notice that in some cases the marketshare of rail increased while the travel times became longer compared to previous years.This could be partially explained by the fact that the increases in travel times weremarginal, no more than 10 minutes. At the same time new factors that could be deemedfavourable for rail arose, such as wider HSR-network and increased environmentalawareness.