HSR Station Location Choice and its Local Land Use Impacts on Small Cities: A Case Study of Aveiro, Portugal

According to the Trans-European HSR network planning, in Portugal, Aveiro HSR station will be an important rail hub, of which the current planned location is distant from the city center without any existing public transport service to the urban area. Based on the current urban transport network and HSR planning, this paper examines two proposed HSR station location alternatives in and away from Aveiro city, with various travel times to the station by different travel modes. In this study, by consulting the evidences of land use impacts on Ciudad Real in Madrid-Seville HSR line of Spain as a benchmark model, we develop a land cover agent-based model to simulate the potential urban land use impacts on Aveiro city with various station location scenarios, according to the improvement of regional accessibility and population growth in each square land cell as individual decision-maker. The obtained results from this work reveals the positive impacts on land use development intensities of Aveiro city if the HSR station is located in the same place as the current rail station. Nonetheless, this paper also yields that the city of Aveiro hardly receive any benefits if the station is located away from the city center. A deceleration of land use development is also a possible consequence depending on the attractiveness of the new HSR station.