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Calculated using air ticket pricesCalculated using rail ticket prices
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Increase in rail ticket revenue (€) / year
SimplifiedIncrease in rail ticket revenue (€) / yearSimplified
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High Speed Rail (Domestic)841,433,478€841 million520,381,123€520 million
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High Speed Rail (Cross-Border)334,649,328€334 million571,385,422€570 million
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High Speed Rail (All)1,176,082,806€1 billion1,091,766,545€1 billion
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"If we apply this 50% modal shift to all routes which are also covered by HSR, the estimated annual increase in revenue from ticket sales is €‎1 Billion and CO2e emissions would reduce by over 2.4 million tonnes."

So, how did we calculate the above?

"50% modal shift"
This is calculated by taking an average of the modal shift change for 3 flagship European HSR routes where liberalisation has been introduced and extrapolating it across all 28 existing HSR routes.

UK (London to Edinburgh): Rail's share of rail:air shifted from 35% to 63% upon introducing liberalisation. This is an 80% increase.
Spain (Madrid to Barcelona): Rail's share of rail:air shifted from 48% to 73% upon introducing liberalisation. This is a 52% increase.
Italy (Milan to Rome): Rail's share of rail:air shifted from 58% to 80% upon introducing liberalisation. This is a 38% increase.

(i.e. (80+52+38)/3=~58)

"Estimated annual increase in revenue from ticket sales is €‎1 Billion"
When we applied this 50% modal shift to flight routes that could be serviced by 28 existing HSR routes in Europe (where the door-to-door journey time is close to parity for both train and plane), the increase in rail ticket sales was an estimated €1 Billion. To sense check our calculation, we also compared this to the loss in aviation revenue due to a projected drop in air passengers — giving the same figure of €1 billion. This calculation involved using Google Flights to find the number of flights per day/week for a given route, the capacity of each flight, and the distance between the origin-destination pair to estimate the number of air-passenger-kilometres per route, per year. We then applied these figures to the average ticket price (per passenger-kilometre) for each route on both air and rail to calculate the estimated increase in rail ticket revenue.

"CO2e emissions would reduce by over 2.4 million tonnes"
By applying the same logic described for the €1 billion calculation, we were also able to calculate the estimated net decrease in CO2e emissions by comparing the increase in rail-passenger-kilometres with the decrease in air-passenger-kilometres against the associated CO2e emissions per passenger-kilometre for both trains and planes. The net difference gave us the estimated tonnage of CO2e savings.

Explore these calculations in more detail on the 'High Speed Rail (All)' tab of this document.

Date of analysis: Monday 24th April 2023.

GBP to EUR currency conversion was calculated using a 1.16 multiplier on Thursday 22nd June 2023.
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