Impacts of Short-Term Land Use by High-Speed Rail on Large Metropolises

An accessibility-based approach was used to find the short-term impacts of high-speed rail (HSR) on metropolitan areas. The impacts of Spanish HSR on Madrid from 2006 to 2009 were studied by the integration of geographic information system technology and spatial discrete choice models. Besides the socioeconomic variables, both local and regional transport network development and accessibility growth were considered to isolate the impacts on the changes of land use types brought about by different sources of accessibility. The results from the model reveal that in large metropolitan cities such as Madrid, the impacts of HSR were shadowed by other external factors. With a focus on the land typologies that shifted the land use types during the years studied, the growth of regional accessibility by inauguration of new HSR lines was found to be an important incentive. This growth of regional accessibility may lead to the upgrade of land occupation. However, this finding does not imply that such an increase can be a sufficient factor to drive the change in land use patterns because in a comparison with the whole metropolitan region, the proportion of land cells that changed each year was relatively small.