It has long been recognised – at least as far back as 1988, during planning for the Channel Tunnel – that the market share achieved by a rail service against an airline serving the same route can be modelled simply as a function of the duration of the train journey. What’s less often appreciated is the universality of this model. It is applicable in every scenario – fast trains or slow, long-distance or short, big city or small, even rich world or poor. It’s practically a law of physics – and therefore an important and useful tool in the discussion of improved passenger rail services.
Previous studies of this type have mostly been limited either in the absolute number, or the geographic distribution of their samples, or have focused only on high-speed services. While not taking anything away from their validity, they have therefore have failed to highlight the universal applicability of the relationship. This is what we hope to address with our review, the largest and most comprehensive study of its type ever published. Our sample currently includes 233 datapoints covering 145 unique city-pairs across six continents. The criteria for inclusion is simple – if a rail service has (or had) a competitive air route, and we could find either patronage or market share data for the train service, it was included. We limited the sample to trains taking 15 hours or less – about the limit for a practical one-day (or night) train.
The Chart
The data is presented below [via the link] as an interactive html chart. Although it is viewable on mobile devices, it renders best on desktop displays (if you must use a mobile device, best to use landscape orientation).
- Hovering the cursor over a data point will display a tooltip showing the city pair, year, travel time and market share.
- Clicking on a region in the legend will show only the data from that region; clicking again will reset the chart.
- The chart will dynamically resize if you change the width of your browser window.
Continue reading Rail’s market share against air: A global review