The Economics of Speed – Assessing the performance of High Speed Rail in Intermodal Transportation

This study is an attempt to explore the benefit and cost of ‘speed’ on the performance of High Speed Rail. The discussion is put in the context of multimodal transportation system. Physical intuition leads us to suspect that operating cost increases nonlinearly with speed. However, the scenario is way more complicated in engineering operation. The revealed result suggests that the nonlinear increase in cost is most significant when operating maximum speed exceeds the 200 kph threshold. It also suggests that the efficiency gain from increased speed has the potential to compensate the increased cost requirement.