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06 SUSTAINABILITYSUPPLEMENT Ignacio Barrón de Angoiti


Director of the Passenger, High Speed and Stations Department and Coordinator of Latin America Region, UIC, and European Railway ReviewEditorial Board Member


Alexander Veitch


Head of Sustainable Development Unit, UIC


Does high-speed rail contribute to a more sustainable transport system?


The European Transport White Paper proposed in early-2011 that the European High Speed Rail (HSR) network should triple in size by 2030 and be completed by 2050, to help ensure that the majority of medium-distance passenger transport can go by rail. A central justification for the promotion of HSR is its advantages for society, economy and the environment compared to other transport modes.


With this context in mind, the International Union of Railways (UIC) has recently published two new research reports which provide compelling evidence of the ways in which HSR contributes to a more sustainable transport system. The main report, ‘High Speed Rail and Sustainability’ considers the social, economic and environmental aspects of HSR, and makes a compelling case for why rail has major advantages in all three areas. An accompanying background report,


‘Carbon Footprint of High Speed Rail Lines’, takes four case studies of high-speed rail lines (two in Europe and two in Asia) and carries out a transparent, robust assessment of carbon emissions for each route, including the planning, construction (track and rolling stocks) and operation phases.


High-speed rail around the world The earliest HSR, Japan’s Shinkansen, started its operation in 1964. It is 515km-long, and links


European Railway Review Volume 18, Issue 1, 2012


Tokyo with Osaka in 3 hours 10 minutes. France’s TGV began in 1981, linking Paris with Lyon in two and a half hours. Other European countries have followed: Italy’s Direttissima was partly open in 1988, Germany’s ICE in 1991, Spain’s AVE in 1992, and Eurostar through the Channel Tunnel between France and England in 1994. Furthermore, the first HSR train in North America, the Acela Express, started service in December 2000. In 2009, Japan was the country with


the greatest HSR network in operation, followed by France, Spain and Germany. This distribution has changed taking into account HSR lines under construction in 2011. China now ranks first, with a total HSR operating mileage of 4,576km as of March 2011, including Beijing–Tianjin, Wuhan–Guangzhou, Zhengzhou–Xi’an and Shanghai–Nanjing (with the highest operating speed in the world). According to the planning and current construction status, the total operating mileage


of HSR in China will almost triple by 2020 and exceed 13,000km. The world network in 2011 totalled


15,231km of HSR lines in operation, of which Europe represents 43.5%, Asia 54.0% and other countries 2.5%. Over nine thousand kilometres of lines are under construction and nearly 17,594km of HSR lines are planned. By 2025 the HSR lines in the world will reach 41,997km.


Environmental advantages Looking first at environmental issues, the reports conclude that the carbon footprint of high-speed rail can be up to 14 times less carbon intensive than car travel and up to 15 times less than aviation even when measured over the full life-cycle of planning, construction and operation. Emissions on the high-speed Méditerranée


line from Valence to Marseille average 11.0g CO2 per passenger km, compared to 151.6g CO2


per


passenger km for car and 164.0g CO2 per passenger km for air. The carbon ‘pay back’ time for this route – the length of time it takes for the carbon emissions saved by the impact of the new high-speed services to overtake the additional carbon emissions produced through the line’s construction – was just 5.3 years.


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