Regional impacts of high-speed rail: a review of methods and models

The development of high-speed rail (HSR) has been constantly encouraged and supported due to its arising importance and potential contributions to regional growth and development. Concerning the link between HSR and regional development, the existing research mostly focuses on the general qualitative insights and restricted quantitative analysis on specific aspects of interest. Rather few researchers have focused on exploring the impacts induced by HSR quantitatively and analyzed the relationship between HSR and regional development holistically. This paper reviews the existing research ranging from the impacts of general transport infrastructures to HSR, in particular, with focus specifically on the applicability of the methods and models. It then proposes a conceptual model, which is able to combine the different aspects of regional development and jointly evaluate the overall impacts of HSR at the regional level. At last, to explore preliminarily the applicability of the conceptual model, a case study has been added to the paper, which analyses the impact of Portuguese freeway construction to the municipal development in the 1990s using structural equation modeling (SEM) approach.