Modelo de determinación de las condiciones de competencia en el transporte ferroviario. Aplicación a las líneas de alta velocidad

Resumen

The success in the introduction of competitiveness in the Spanish Rail Sector will depend on the incentives to be perceived by the potential new railway companies. Said incentives are considered the expected benefits that can be obtained in the evolution of the railway transport operations of both passengers and goods. At the present, the expected benefits seem to be materialised only in the passengers sector while the freight sector still faces some structural problems that impede for the moment the full development of its potentiality. We must remember that in spite of all the above it has been the freight sector the one to be liberalised first (at least in the international side.) The technological changes produced in the railway sector, due to the introduction of the high speed trains, has had effects that go beyond of the rail business itself, since the new technology will allow the railway to compete with the air transport mode in both quality and price in the passengers sector and for distances up to 700 Km.s. (Not to mention the possibilities of the night trains). This situation was unthinkable in the years prior to the nineties, and it is still being updated since the competitiveness has been extended to journeys from 500 to 700 Km.s., due to the new technological developments that allow speeds up to 350 Km.s./hour. The liberalisation of the railway sector undertaken through European Directives is based on the potential interest that the private sector can have in the operation of certain passengers and freight services. Therefore the competitiveness is something feasible, although only very recently has been analysed in detail and, in most of the cases, in a theoretical manner ( the first studies of Marc Ivaldi are dated in 2003). In this scope of structural and deep modifications of the sector it is necessary to understand the characteristics that define and develop the competitiveness in the rail market so as to offer advances on the results that such liberalisation can produce, and on the conditions that could favour them in order to allow us to know the possible behaviour of the companies intervening in the sector. The theoretical elements that allow us an in depth analysis include: the economic theory in its industrial organisation area, the game theory, as far as strategic decision taken is concerned from the companies´s side and the discrete choice theory in the aspects referred to the decision taken by the consumers. Within this framework this investigation work is presented, aiming at the definition of a methodology for the analysis of the competitiveness of the railway operators. The results thus obtained, are referred to the characteristics of competitiveness in prices, the results in terms of market share, the competitive advantage that the new competitors can obtain through the leadership in costs (understood as the capacity of the incoming company in reducing its operative costs with respect to the existing ones). As final point and conclusion of the investigation work, the entrance and establishing conditions of a new High Speed passenger's railway operator are defined. (including the fixed costs analysis to enter into the market, the benefits obtained and its sustainability in the short term). The services frequency is included while considering the infrastructure capacity. The railway operators subject of this competitiveness analysis have been RENFE-Operadora (the existing operating Company) and the potential incoming companies, some of them already holding a licence to operate granted by the Ministry of Development. The application of the model has been done on the Madrid-Barcelona corridor, although this territorial assignment does not affect the validity of the model in its application to any other geographical environment (provided that a transport option of a high speed train is included)