Bottlenecks in Railway Infrastructure - Do They Really Exist? The Corridor Rotterdam-Genoa

Abstract

Even if freight transport is still growing rapidly in Europe, building new rail infrastructure to further support modal shift becomes more and more difficult, due to public budget restrictions, or opposition of the civil society about environmental issues. Especially financial restrictions oblige public administrations to guide the planning process of infrastructure policy more by economic rules than by political influence and business interest of the incumbent. Frequently transport associations or other economic stakeholders use the bottleneck argument to ask for new tracks. Parting from a local or national point of view, investments are first asked to extend infrastructure where bottlenecks are located. Presently representatives of Deutsche Bahn negate the existence of bottlenecks along the German part of the corridor Rotterdam-Genoa. They mentioned that infrastructure manager DB Netz is able to satisfy all demands for new freight or passenger paths on rail. This different view of reality is probably due to a different concept of bottleneck. This paper is an outcome of discussion and analysis within the EU-INTERREG project Corridor Development Rotterdam-Genoa (Code24). It starts by asking from an economic point of view what a bottleneck in railway infrastructure is. Furthermore it presents different economic approaches to analyse efficiency in the railway market and presents an overview of the current situation on the corridor 24. On the other hand it shows a spatial planning approach investigating inner reserves and limits of the actual infrastructure in their broader context of spatial and environmental embedding. The definition of bottlenecks cannot only be based on the analysis of infrastructure, technical definitions, operational systems and demand forecasts. The paper proposes a more accurate definition of bottleneck in rail infrastructure that beyond capacity discussion also includes the economical, spatial and social context. Based on economic theory a definition of a bottleneck in rail infrastructure is developed which is different to those of a bottleneck in road infrastructure. This is the missing theoretical link for decision-making in financing new railway infrastructure. The paper first focuses on most important insights from microeconomic theory and network economics to freight transport on rail. It includes the analysis of market form, pricing and marginal costs. It shows the premises of excess demand in railway infrastructure and their consequences. Compared to road infrastructure, where bottlenecks or capacity shortage becomes evident to the eye of the observer as traffic congestion, this obvious kind of congestion phenomena cannot be observed by non-expert public in railway infrastructure.

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