HSR K2 Competitiveness-Comparative Evidence

HSR K2 Competitiveness-Comparative Evidence

Here is the actual comparative evidence that says that efficient transportation is more important to competitiveness than any other internal link---prefer our evidence b/c it makes actual comparative analysis.

Most analyses of the consequences of specialisation, trade and economic integration have traditionally focused on trade in goods. This was quite natural during the days of the traditional industrial economy when the mobility of consumers and workers was quite limited. For France, around the year 1900, Gru¨bler (1990) has estimated that the average daily travel distance with public means of transportation was around 1 km per inhabitant. In Sweden at the same time the average daily travel distance was around 0.5 km per inhabitant per day (Andersson and Stro¨mqvist, 1988). Under such conditions an equalisation of living conditions between different regions by necessity must take place via trade in goods. In the service field the normal situation was that there in general existed partial local monopoly situations in the labour market, the housing market and in the markets for private and public services. Given the huge deficiencies in the transport system in the form of high costs and slow means of transportation it was natural that the interest in trade in services and to specialisation in service production was, by necessity, very limited. Today the situation is quite different. Commercial service production is substantial and the employment in service production is large and growing. As a result, the question of efficient infrastructure for the transportation of persons has, relatively speaking, become much more important. Forecasts for Sweden (and Denmark) give evidence that the average individual daily travel distance in the year 2000 might be as high as 50 km (Andersson and Stro¨mqvist, 1988). In the case of France estimates point in the direction of average individual daily travel distance increasing to 60 km (Gru¨bler, 1990). It is expected that travel to high-order private services will become as important as commuting and business travel. Of course, in the future freight transportation will also play an important role for the economic integration in high-speed train corridors. However, in the future it will in general not be the conditions for heavy bulk transportation that will determine the degree of economic integration but instead the conditions for rapid transportation of high value goods. When the effects of new conditions for regional integration are to be valued it is, however, vital to have a perspective about the transportation of people. This is central in the European debate on economic integration where themes such as the deregulation of air traffic and investments in high-speed trains have become very important. Even the conditions for the transportation of people in the larger European cities is a central question in connection with the analysis of the internal integration of these regions with respect to common housing, labour and service markets.

HSR K2Competetiveness-business competition

HSR is key to business competition----the expansion of city bands into large functional regions promotes job recruiting, creates regional economic stability, and creates more labor opportunities with new labor markets.

Blum, Haynes, & Karlsson 97 (U. Blum*, K.E. Haynes*, C.Karlsson***, *Technische Universita¨t Dresden, **Institute of Public Policy, George Mason University, ***Jo¨nko¨ping International Business School, Jo¨nko¨ping University, The regional and urban effects of high-speed trains, Received: December 1996 / Accepted: January 1997, Ann Reg Sci (1997) 31:1–20, LEXUS |SK)

High-speed trains can be used to solve two different accessibility problems. In the first case, where a point to point link is dominant, each train is a potential substitute for an air connection between two cities1, i.e. it connects cities (or rather CBD’s) at long distance with a direct train connection. The high-speed train links between Paris and Lyon, Paris and London and, Tokyo and Osaka could be seen as examples of this first type of train connection. For this type of high-speed connection the train trip together with the trip to the train station at the trip origin and the trip from the train station at the trip destination should be compared with the competing solution which consists of the air trip plus the trip to the airport at the trip origin and the trip from the airport at the trip destination. This kind of highspeed train lines are successful if they can supply a sufficient number of trips in a more efficient, more comfortable and more environmentally friendly way than the competing means of transportation, i.e. mainly air transportation. In such cases the number of regions directly affected by a high-speed train link is normally quite small. In the extreme case only two regions are affected. In the second case, where a high-speed network is dominant, the train system links together many cities and CBD’s and, hence, creates a new type of region with a high intra-regional accessibility. In this case the highspeed train binds together cities in a band, where each pair of cities is at a time distance of between 20 and 40 min, i.e. a time distance that allows daily commuting. In, for example, Germany a number of cities are connected in exactly this manner by a high-speed train. Such a solution gives rise to a band of cities and, hence, creates a large functional region formed like a string of pearls.2 According to established models for regional development the expected competitive advantage is large, in particular, for a band of cities formed by a railway for high-speed trains combined with a highway. Such bands of cities are in the literature described as corridors (Andersson and Matthiessen, 1993; Cheshire, 1995; Haynes, 1997). The authors have in this connection stressed the existence of specific corridor effects, where the economic development in the regions forming the corridor are favoured by the improved internal accessibility and the improved conditions for face-to-face contacts in the corridor. The advantages that in particular the private but also the public sector can gain from improved accessibility do on the one hand come from the possibilities to carry through a larger number of contacts with other firms, i.e. with customers and suppliers, and on the other hand from the improved opportunities to recruit labour with a suitable competence profile. Hence, we may note that improved accessibility also leads to a widening of the regional labour markets. Firms can search for labour in wider circles and people in the labour force can supply their labour within a larger geographical area. Wider labour markets, of course, mean more frequent and longer commuting trips. This is an important starting point for analysing the regional and urban development effects of the establishment of a new corridor economy. The business trips that a larger number of contacts lead to and the increased commuting that the improved accessibility give rise to are in their turn two of the basic roots for direct financial justification of high-speed train traffic. An important hypothesis for the discussion in this introduction chapter is the degree to which cities that are linked together into a band of cities by means of a high-speed train are transformed to an extended functional region. The implications of this hypothesis are far reaching. At a general level we should expect two effects when small functional regions are integrated to form a larger functional region. Firstly, we expect the travel intensity to increase and, secondly, we expect the economic growth in the region to be stimulated when labour and service markets are extended. International studies seem to show that one gets the strongest growth stimuli when there is a corridor that combines highway linkage with a high-speed train access and where all important high-speed train stations have well-developed and well-functioning feeder systems (Cheshire, 1995). At the same time we can observe that people living in a corridor with a high-speed connection make more medium- and long-distance trips per person and year by train than people living in other types of regions. When the supply of train traffic is of high quality with high traffic frequency and multiple attractive destinations (which a band of cities normally provide) one could expect train travel to increase substantially not least due to induced traffic (Blum 1995).

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