DEVELOPING THE RAIL NETWORK THROUGH BETTER ACCESS TO RAILWAY STATIONS – SUMMARY OF FINDINGS FROM THE IBRAM RESEARCH

摘要

A railway journey is almost always part of a journey ‘chain’ that includes a journey to, and later from, the railway station by different modes of transport. It is therefore necessary also to look also outside the ‘rail’ element of a rail journey in order to improve rail service and increase rail use. This is the context for the "Integration Between Rail and Access-to-railway-stations Modes" (IBRAM) research, financed by the EU Marie Curie Actions. The central question the IBRAM research, addresses is: How rail use can be increased through facilitating the access to the railway station and the interchange between different transport modes at railway stations. This paper provides a summary of the analysis and findings of the IBRAM research, in which the Netherlands was taken as a case study. It begins by describing the current modal choice of rail passengers when accessing the station (distinguishing between home end and activity end stations). Then, using the Dutch Railways customer satisfaction survey, the extent to which passengers’ satisfaction with the rail journey is influenced by their satisfaction with the access facilities is examined. It was found that improving the quality of the access facilities at the rail station is likely to increase passengers’ overall satisfaction with the rail journey, and therefore rail use. This provides an important signal to rail operators that they must consider the whole rail journey, doorto- door, as within their responsibility. The next stage in the research directly examined the role of station accessibility in determining the propensity to use rail (measured as the number of daily trips per person at the Dutch municipality level). It was found that this role is important (and statistically significant) and if improving the access to the station is less costly than improving the level of rail service, then improving station accessibility is more cost effective. This holds especially at the periphery of the rail network where the volume of demand is relatively low. Furthermore, it suggests, as the research argues, that improving the rail service (e.g. higher frequency of service) and improving the access to it are substitutes when it comes to increasing rail use (and decreasing car use). The implications are that distance to the station, which found to be an important determinant in the propensity to use rail, should be reduced not in the physical sense, by opening new stations on the network, but in the real and perceived travel time sense, for example by improving public transport service frequency to the station.