Vision on the railway industry, development of our way of thinking since “Rail 21" This paper investigates how our way of thinking about railways has developed between the "Rail 21" plan from 1988 and the "Benutten & Bouwen" vision which has recently been published. When "Rail 21" was developed competition between car and public transport was the main focus and thus the aim was to offer the most attractive product for the passengers. This was a market-pull approach. The risk of a market-pull approach is that you end up with a product that isn't producible, which actually happened in the case of "Rail 21". On the other hand, the risk of a technology-push approach is that the product isn't interesting for the customers. The first goal of"Benutten & Bouwen" was to increase the number of trains on the existing infrastructure but it was also important to offer an attractive product for the passengers. To achieve both goals iteration between market-pull and technology-push has been necessary. The result is a relatively simple system of independent corridors, which provides more capacity, more reliability and shorter waiting times for the passengers while the number of transfers slightly increases. (Author/publisher)
Abstract