By Evgenia Ivanova
As the US President Barack Obama has once said: “A major new
high-speed rail line will generate many thousands of construction jobs over
several years, as well as permanent jobs for rail employees and increased
economic activity in the destinations these trains serve.” The quote is indeed
true and it made me think how we rarely have the chance to stop for a moment
and consider the positive economic benefits of transport projects. Their
tremendous impact on the way we live not only shortens the distance and brings
us close together but they also alter our environment through agglomeration formation.
The high-speed rail (HSR) serving the road between Cologne and Frankfurt in
Germany is an excellent example to illustrate my point.
Opened for the first time in 2002 as an Inter-City Express
(ICE) high-speed passenger dedicated line, it serves the 177 kilometers
distance between Cologne and Frankfurt. With trains running at a speed of 320
km/h, this ICE has reduced the rail time from 2h 15 min to just a bit over an
hour for the non-stop services. Less than ten years after the first train started
operating, there are plenty of evidence for the positive effects that the ICE
line brought for the regional development and the labor markets of the smaller
towns interconnected by the service.
Evidence of Agglomeration Formation and Development Impacts
With the construction of the line we observe an increased
intra-regional accessibility, where the cities form a band and each city pair
is no more than 40 minutes away from each other, thus giving the opportunity of
daily commuting. A number of recent studies have analysed the economic effects
of better transport accessibility as a result of high speed rails and concluded
that there is a tendency of 0.25% growth in GDP for any 1% increase in market
access. The existence of the HSR has indeed confirmed the results of these
studies and transformed the region by boosting its economic growth and allowing
for agglomeration formation (Figure 1).
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| Figure 1 |
The most remarkable was the regional economic transformation
of the two intermediate stations Montabaur and Limburg on the route. The two
cities are located exactly between two major agglomerations - the Rhine-Main
area and the Rhine-Ruhr conurbations – and each of them has become more
reachable to the traditional employment center-cities Cologne, Frankfurt as
well as Wiesbaden. Despite the proximity of the regions around Montabaur and
Limburg to large metropolitan areas, until the opening of HSR in 2002, they
have preserved their rural character, with high quality of life and affordable
land and rent prices. Several months after the beginning of the train services
the regions started growing in migration attractiveness due to the lower prices
of living there and the lower costs of commuting to the megalopolis cities.
Since Frankfurt is the main employment market in the region
and an important hub on the road, which has a better connection and more frequent
services especially during rush hours, it attracts the majority of commuters
from Montabaur, Limburg and the surroundings. I should mention here that 80% of
daily commuters from Limburg and about 60% of commuters from Montabaur travel
to Frankfurt using the ICE line. Also a significant number of people chose to
reallocate to the smaller towns from the neighboring large agglomerations,
which strengthens the recent trend of people moving from the core metropolitan
areas to the periphery, seeking higher quality and lower land prices and at the
same time having the advantages of shorter and cheaper commuting to their work
places.
The impact of the HSR on Montabaur, Limberg and the
surrounding regions has been indeed positive. The population gains through the
migration of new residents are tremendously important and beneficial, having in
mind the demographic problems which Germany, similar to the rest of Europe, is
facing nowadays.
Since the line is relatively new, functioning for less than
10 years, there is still no economic boom observed in the regions connected by
it. However, the significance of the urbanization tendencies, the residential
migration and the increase in the real estate prices as a result of it, give
positive prospects and make us optimistic about the future development of the
cities.
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