Flexibility and quality of HST railway stations and surrounding areas

摘要

The construction of the high-speed train network includes the redevelopment of a large number of inner city railway stations and their surrounding areas. These redevelopments must change an often-neglected place in the city into a high quality urban area. The speed in which these station area redevelopments take place differs per country. Great Britain and France are well under way, but The Netherlands tend to stay behind. The railway infrastructure will however soon be finished. As a consequence, the high-speed train will be transferring passengers to unfinished and unprepared railway stations in the Netherlands that don't have the quality to complete the high-speed train network. This situation offers a unique opportunity to learn from the design solutions of the stations that have already been finished abroad. The paper discusses different railway station redevelopments with multiple and intensive use of space in London and Paris, where real estate has also been constructed over the railway tracks. Although the realisation of such projects mostly depends on financial and technical feasibility, this paper will analyse the way in which the projects are designed to create flexibility for the railway system and the real estate and it will also analyse the quality for its users, for these two elements will largely determine the future value of the projects and their sustainability.