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SCOTTISH STRATEGIC RAIL STUDY
Summary
Study Approach
1. Steer Davies Gleave has been appointed to help prepare a rail investment strategy for Scotland - the Scottish Strategic Rail Study (SSRS). The area for study stretches south from Inverurie & Aberdeen in the North East to include all of the Central Belt, with a southern boundary stretching from Ayr on the west coast and Dunbar on the east. The study does not include the Highland Main Line to Inverness but it takes account of the implications of services that cross all of the study boundaries including those to England.
2. Our brief was to identify the costs and benefits of potential improvements to passenger rail services in Central and North East Scotland and to outline the strategic priorities for the railways in this part of the Country. The aim is to provide a strategy that prioritises schemes according to their achievement of objectives and their relative costs and benefits.
3. Our approach has therefore been to ask what it is the stakeholders are hoping to achieve and how we would measure achievement, before considering the types of schemes that could help us achieve these objectives. We begin by defining high level "overarching objectives" for the railway system. This can be thought of as a ' vision for rail'.
The Vision for Rail The rail system will fully support the economic, social and environmental aspirations of the study area's citizens. Rail passenger services will be of a scale and quality that rail will increasingly become a more viable, practical, affordable and attractive travel choice for passengers in and between the urban areas of Central and North East Scotland, and will become at least as attractive as the private car for an increasing proportion of travel over the next ten years and beyond. As a consequence, the rail network will carry an increasing proportion of peak and off peak travel within the context of sustained growth in travel demand. Rail freight services will similarly be enhanced to play an increasing role in the primary and secondary distribution of goods. The development of rail will represent value for money for users, operators and the taxpayer. |
4. We then defined the strategic outcomes -the things that must be achieved to attain the vision, from which more tangible planning objectives have been developed. Targets or benchmarks that allow us to assess performance against these objectives were prepared for four geographical areas of SPT, SESTRAN, NESTRANS and Tay and for Inter Regional services which link these areas.
5. Once we had defined our objectives and a framework for measuring their achievement we considered a range of projects and/or policies that could be tested against them. The projects have been combined into a number of scenarios (High, Medium and Low Resource) in order to test their interactions.
6. The High Resource Scenario is based on achieving a step change in rail capacity and includes a number of major capacity enhancing 'facilitating' projects such as the Edinburgh Waverley capacity upgrade and City Tunnel proposals in Glasgow, plus a package of schemes that could be delivered with these major facilitating projects.
7. The Medium Resource Scenario: includes the best performing capacity facilitating project in each area and a package of schemes associated with that major facilitating scheme. The results from the high resource scenario are used to inform the composition of the Medium Resource package.
8. The Low Resource Scenario does not have any capacity upgrades to the rail network. The low resource scenario concentrates primarily on what could be done within the constraints of current track capacity.
Future Demand For Rail
9. Under our central case assumptions, the number of rail journeys within the study area is expected to increase by 35% - from around 48m 1 in 2000 to over 65m by 2020, as a result of background economic, demographic and social change. Simply addressing the current infrastructure constraints and providing the system capacity to cope with this growth will require a significant commitment of resources.
10. However, we have noted that this predict and provide approach is not appropriate if the strategy is to meet the objectives of the Scottish Executive and the stakeholders in the rail industry, and that further investment will be needed if the vision for rail is to be achieved.
11. We have used our three scenarios (high, medium and low) to test what might be achieved with different scales of investment. While the scenarios were developed to enable us to understand the relative performance of various packages of schemes and that they do not, in the round, represent an 'optimal' investment package, they do indicate the scale of impact that might be achieved.
12. The schemes considered within the low resource scenario would add only another 2m trips in 2020 but would improve the travelling conditions for existing peak period travellers significantly. If the schemes in the medium resource scenario were implemented they would add another 20m trips per year by 2020 to those in the low resource scenario, while if the schemes tested in the high resource scenario were implemented as tested, demand would grow by a further 9 million per year. The total number of journeys by rail could therefore reach as high as 96m by 2020, or just over double the current number of rail trips within the study area.
Table s1 annual Passenger Journeys Within The Study Area (m pa)
| 2000 | 2010 | 2020 |
Do Minimum | 47.8 | 54.8 | 65.2 |
Low Resource Scenario | | 56.0 | 66.9 |
Medium Resource Scenario | | 72.3 | 87.6 |
High Resource Scenario | | 79.6 | 96.3 |
Scale of Investment
13. The scale of investment to realise this additional demand varies greatly between the scenarios. The low resource scenario is estimated to cost 43m in present value (PV) terms and delivers just under 2m more passenger journeys in 2020 over the do-minimum. The medium resource scenario would cost 651m and delivers just over 22m additional trips in 2020 and the high resource scenario 1,534m and delivers 31m more trips than the do-minimum.
Key Findings
14. The key issue in the SESTRAN area is the scale of upgrade to provide at Waverley station as this project determines most of what can be achieved elsewhere in the area and also influences many of the decisions on Inter Regional traffic. Our analysis suggests that the option that delivers 11 extra peak hour train paths would generate the highest level of achievement against planning objectives and the best economic case of the packages considered.
15. Linked to this is the decision on whether to provide the Edinburgh airport rail link. The most extensive proposal which would provide a sub-surface station at the airport in conjunction with the full Waverley upgrade would add significant capability to the system, and would do particularly well against planning objectives but is very expensive. Conversely, more modest schemes to provide an Airport shuttle service would take up a significant proportion of the additional capacity provided by an enhanced Waverley and limits the scope for other Inter Regional and new Edinburgh to Glasgow services such as a re-opened Airdrie-Bathgate route. The decisions on the airport rail link are therefore highly germane to the future rail strategy.
16. The key issue in the SPT area is the central area capacity problem and any decision on the two capacity facilitating projects - the underground City Tunnel link and the surface level City Union scheme -that have been considered here. The lower cost City Union appears to offer a stronger value for money case than the City Tunnel project, but the latter makes a much greater contribution to planning objectives, not just in the west of the Central Belt, but for the Inter Regional, Tay and NESTRANS areas as well.
17. These are not competing schemes. Their relative costs, and the scale of their impacts are of different orders of magnitude. Fundamentally, there is relatively little scope to increase peak service frequencies in the SPT area without addressing the Glasgow Central High Level capacity constraint. The City Tunnel project would do that, the City Union project, whilst a worthwhile project in its own right, would not, particularly if the Glasgow airport shuttle service is introduced.
18. The key issue in both the Tay and the NESTRANS area is developing a means of linking the proposals for Crossrail projects in Dundee and Aberdeen into a joint package of faster, limited stop, express and Inter City services.
19. Both Crossrail services perform well against the planning objectives for their respective areas, but less well in value for money terms when assessed as stand alone projects. The best prospect for delivering these two projects is to consider them as 'enabling' projects which, through a service recast into distinct express and local services, allow improvements in Inter Regional express journey times to be achieved. This may prove to be the most cost-effective way of obtaining faster Inter Regional services whilst at the same time meeting the planning objectives for the Tay and NESTRANS areas.
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