Railway trip speeds and areal coverage. The emperor’s new clothes of effectivity?

Europe’s railways have experienced a general decline in the second half of the 20th century and a renaissance since the 1980s. Total network length has decreased fundamentally while high-speed rail (HSR) line construction has soared since then. Accordingly HSR has stipulated a lot of research, but only recently HSR’s impacts on settlement structure and transport regimes have been studied in depth. We embrace a passenger’s point of view and utilize a generalized overview model for illustrating the trade-offs between trip speeds of complete trip chains, access/egress legs and mainline trip lengths. In order to estimate input parameters, an overview of railway network and settlement structure of Austria is empirically derived. In four scenarios, we vary these input parameters to study the impact of timetable integration, speed upgrades on mainlines and access/egress modes on trip speed in the Austrian case. Our results show that travel speed advantages of mainline speed increases are quickly countervailed by access/egress improvements or timetable integration improvements. We conclude that finding harmonized optimum speeds, introducing clock-face timetable design and improving access/egress modes are promising strategies in comparison to unscrutinized further maximization of mainline travel speed levels at the expense of feeder/distributor lines quality.