Estimating the impact of new rail station openings on through-passenger demand
When a new rail station is built on an existing line, it imposes additional travel time on all existing trips passing which now stop at the new station. These through passengers incur an extra’ cost’ in the form of extra journey time.
Appraisals of new stations can be highly sensitive to small changes in journey times and can have large impacts on the resulting Benefit Cost Ratio (BCR) for the scheme. This often can misalign with the intuition for the new scheme which is perceived as having no real downsides.
This study aimed to determine the impact on demand of a small-time penalty incurred from new stations for existing passengers and see if they really do have the negative impact on demand that is modelled with current assumptions.
RSSB and Network Rail have co-funded work through the research partnership with the Institute for Transport Studies to undertake a study of impacts from real schemes.
This paper has explored the presumed demand reductions caused by new rail stations on existing passenger flows where a few minutes are added to the timetable. The affected flows of two recent station openings on the GB network was conducted to observe what had happened before and after the station was opened.
Rail Industry Dataset for Econometric Analysis (RIDEA) data, provided by the Rail Delivery Group, was used to determine weekly passenger flow-level data for the routes of interest. Flows were analysed separately for different ticket types, and results were than analysed for statistical significance.
The key finding of this study is that demand response was statistically no different to other similar flows in the same line and same region that were unaffected. This held across the two case studies and various model specifications tested.
We also compared the model estimates with the expected predictions of standard rail forecasting methods on the GB network, the Passenger Demand Forecasting Handbook (PDFH).
These observations will be of general interest to the transport community and have important implications for the planning and appraisal of new stations. These results need to be treated carefully, and additional more generalisable work is being recommended from this initial study.