High-Speed Rail

From Paris to Madrid: Lessons for Better High-Speed Rail

What lessons can we learn from Spain and France's High-Speed Rail systems? This report from a study tour identified 8 lessons.

Key Takeaways

• HSR works best for medium-distance trips, journeys of about 100–500 miles, offering reliable, low-stress travel from city centre to city centre that rivals flying and driving.
• Good stations allow easy transfers between local, regional, national and international services.
• Successful stations give priority to pedestrians, cyclists and public transport over private vehicles.
• Make stations destinations in their own right, combining shops, services, public space and cultural amenities.
• Use stations also to drive neighbourhood renewal and transit-oriented development.
• The authors stress planning around the least flexible elements, such as location and tracks. Even when future passenger numbers and surrounding development are uncertain, these should be decided as well as possible from the start.
• Strong national institutions, centralised station management, and consistent wayfinding and amenities make travel seamless even when several operators share a station.
• The European examples show the value of purpose-built delivery bodies with strong in-house capability and institutional memory.
• Simpler approval processes let European rail megaprojects finish faster and far more cheaply than similar US projects.
• Outreach that focuses on what a project delivers builds public trust while staying faithful to its strategic principles.

Comment

Last year, I wrote a blog about key strategic decisions for High Speed Rail. It covers a lot of the lessons from this report.

The two recent high-speed rail tragedies in Spain appear to be, at least partly, related to asset management and maintenance. Similarly, the TGV in France is also struggling with asset management and maintenance.

This suggests that France and Spain have significant improvements to make to be able to maintain world-class high-speed rail as their systems age.

What Next?

Have your high-speed rail projects incorporated these lessons into your plans?

Strategy

​Urban Living Labs: Good Intentions, Limited Transformation

Finding successful ways of transforming our transport systems to deliver significantly better outcomes is a key challenge. This article looked at Urban Living Labs (ULLs), real-life experimental platforms where government, business, researchers, and citizens collaborate to co-create, test, and validate sustainable urban solutions in everyday neighbourhood settings.

Key Takeaways

• Living Labs talk a lot about working together, but they’re often limited by the agendas, funding rules and power structures of the organisations running them.
• Researchers usually decide a project’s goals and methods before involving local people, so those people have little chance to shape the project.
• People may take part throughout a project, but the big decisions, like which problems matter and whose knowledge counts, have usually already been made.
• Even when a Living Lab sets out to be inclusive, other priorities, such as institutional goals or new technology, can slowly push inclusion aside.
• Getting a fair mix of voices doesn’t happen automatically. It has to be a deliberate goal.
• Being inclusive means thinking carefully about who you invite and how you keep them involved throughout.
• People often liked the proposed changes, but their ongoing worries about parking, enforcement and the convenience of driving show how deeply car habits are built into everyday life.
• Real change needs more than redesigning streets. It also means changing what people value and expect, and making sustainable travel seem normal and acceptable.
• Living Labs need better ways to measure their impact if they’re going to do more than run one-off experiments.

Comment

ULLs sound like a nice idea, but this article suggests they are very hard to get right, and even if you do, it is not clear they lead to significant transport transformations.

What Next?

If you are considering a ULL-type approach, how will you structure it to maximise the chances of delivering substantial outcomes?

Resilience

Inside the UK’s New Transport Resilience Strategy

Resilience has been moving up the transport agenda in recent years. The UK has now released its transport resilience strategy.

Key Takeaways

• The strategy uses the government’s eight-stage resilience cycle: anticipate, assess, prevent, prepare, validate, respond, recover and learn.

Three objectives:

• Objective 1 - Continuously assess how resilient the UK transport sector is, to target interventions and resources effectively.
  • Identifying, assessing, and anticipating risk
  • Evaluating resilience capabilities (including establishing an expert transport resilience red teaming panel)
  • Understanding interdependencies
  • Validating through exercises
  • Learning lessons
  • Measuring resilience (action: developing, establishing, and monitoring transport resilience standards for the sector).
• Objective 2 - Enable the whole of the transport system, including transport users, to take action to increase their resilience
  • Ensuring preparedness
  • Critical National Infrastructure (mapping and formalising engagement with operators)
  • System resilience (tools and technologies)
  • Building networks
  • Working together locally (including a Transport Resilience Academy pilot).
  • Cooperating with transport users
• Objective 3 - Strengthen government’s transport resilience capabilities
  • Lead Government Department model
  • Embedding resilience principles in government
  • Transport crisis response
  • Effective sharing, learning, and collaboration
• Focus on what can be done to ensure that:
  • Strong formal and informal networks are in place
  • Knowledge is shared effectively
  • Duplication of resilience activities between operators is streamlined
  • Across the whole sector, everyone has the skills, capabilities, and capacity they need to improve transport resilience together
• As rail and road electrify, transport’s resilience increasingly depends on the energy system.
• Next steps: The Department for Transport will work with partners to translate these commitments into a clear delivery plan.

Comment

A resilience strategy is obviously a good thing, and the report includes some interesting innovations.

Effectiveness will depend on the delivery plan they develop. Currently, we lack specific objectives, targets, and timescales, including when they'll produce the delivery plan.

What Next?

Do you have a robust resilience strategy, including a delivery plan?

Quick Adventures in Transport Wonderland

Here is what else I came across this week:

• ​Investigating the influencing factors of users' intention toward driverless buses in a real-world setting: An empirical study from China - research into the use of driverless buses. I am still sceptical that if/when they become unstaffed, they will provide an adequate level of personal safety, especially for girls and women.
• ​Tradable credit schemes to decarbonise commuting trips: Insights from a field trial in a university setting - these types of schemes have been suggested as a viable path towards mode shift. The results are relatively disappointing.
• ​Citizen-Led Change - a Freewheeling podcast on how Milan has been undertaking citizen-led transport change.

Tool

Cycling Safety

You can find the index here.

Special Offer

Support Transport Leader and get the full Policy Reform Toolkit

If you’ve found this newsletter useful, there’s now a simple way to back it.

I’ve bundled annual support for Transport Leader with Premium access to the Policy Reform Toolkit.

If you haven’t used it, the Toolkit is a checklist for every stage of a public policy reform, from defining the problem through to implementation and review.

​Become a supporter​

Thank you to everyone who reads, shares and replies. It genuinely keeps this going.

Jobs

Jobs for Transport Leaders

​Here is a link with jobs around the world, specifically designed for transport leader readers. Use the filter to find jobs that match what you are looking for.