A High-Speed Passenger Transport Network to Overcome Peripherality. Case Study Portugal

This study is focusing on the problem of connecting peripheral areas to the European passenger transport network. Remote areas are suffering from insufficient inter-regional transport services and missing links to Europe's economic core regions. Transport infrastructure development has therefore been identified as one of the key issues to bring forward the European integration. The case of Portugal reveals some interesting aspects in transport policy and transport planning that without any doubt are of general relevance for the whole area of European cohesion. The European Commission has contributed a corner stone to the transport planning in Europe with the development of guidelines for a common transport policy and the outlines for a trans-European transport networks. Though in the theoretical framework of the common transport policy interconnection of the European regions with intermodal and interoperable transport networks is a key issue, the first step to realisation, the trans-European networks have been massively criticised for a number of inconsistencies and shortcomings. To sum it up, it can be stated that the trans-European transport networks' design does hardly reflect the necessity ofthe development of intermodality. This TEN scenario is also true for the high-speed train connection planned in Portugal, which out of
many reasons will never be realised. The study proposes an alternative approach through using a less costly technology - the pendular train system- to improve the performance of Portuguese railway services and interconnect this service to aviation with Lisbon Airport as an efficient interface. The performance potential of a pendular train system is demonstrated through a computer simulation a part of the corridor Lisbon-Porto. For this simulation the software programme Railway Simulator (RWSJ' running on an Apple TM Macintosh Iiic, is used which originally was designed to build the time schedules for the national Portuguese train network.