Eindhoven is the central city of an agglomeration with about 400,000 inhabitants. It seeks to become a large international knowledge and technologycentre. To facilitate this development high quality international passenger transport connections are important. Currently international rail services to Eindhoven are poor. There is no direct train service to the neighbouring countries Belgium and Germany, transfer times are long and on some connections the vehicle speeds are low. At the request of the municipality of Eindhoven, an investigation has been done to find cost-effective ways to raise the service level substantially. The analysis starts with mapping the current level of service in number of transfers, transfer times, average speeds and travel time ratios (travel time by rail transport relative to the car) on the main international relations to Eindhoven. The service level is compared to the levels reached on the international rail connection to two other Dutch cities: Rotterdam and Arnhem. Next, a number of variants for improving international train services are proposed based on the bottlenecks in the current level of service and a brainstorm with representatives of administrative and tourist sectors in Eindhoven and rail transport operators. The service levels of the variants are mapped in a similar way as those of the current situation. Compared to the reference situation,all variants show significant reductions in number of transfers as well as in travel times. In the German variants travel times decrease with about30% to 50%. In the Belgium variants, travel time reductions range from about 15% to 25%. The higher the investments in rail infrastructure, the higher are the travel time reductions. Increases in passenger volumes of 150%to 450% are expected for travellers from Eindhoven to Germany and vice versa. On the relations from Eindhoven to Belgium the estimated increases vary from 60% to 90%. Because most other regions in the south of the Netherlands also benefit from the improvements, they will attract more international train travellers as well. The estimated growth in total demand for international train services to or from the south of the Netherlands is 100-350% via the German border and 20-80% via the Belgian border. The financialevaluation clarifies that in the low investments variants the marginal costs have about the same size as the marginal revenues. So, a substantial improvement of services is possible without increasing deficits. However, the high investments variants are not cost-effective. For the covering abstract see ITRD E135582.
Abstract