The potential benefits are basically time savings, higher reliability, comfort, safety and the release of capacity in the conventional rail network, roads and airport infrastructure.
The costs are high, and sunk in a significant proportion; therefore, the social profitability of the project requires that HSR users’ and other beneficiaries’ willingness to pay is high enough to compensate the sunk and variable costs of maintaining and operating the line plus any other external cost during construction and project life.
In Sweden there are now plans to build a high speed rail between the country´s two largest cities, Stockholm and Gothenburg.
The distance between the cities is around 500 km. This is a standard medium-length line where the HSR develops its full potential.
In this paper we conduct a cost-benefit analysis of the HSR lines for Madrid-Barcelona, Madrid-Seville and Stockholm-Gothenburg.
The first one has been running for a couple of years and the second one since 1992, so we can evaluate their performance and increase our understanding of the potential social profitability of similar lines, like the Stockholm-Gothenburg where the investment decision has not been taken so far