Planning a High Speed Rail Route in an Emerging Country: A Case Study of Ukraine

101

Ukraine is one of the largest countries of Europe and its major cities are situated far away from each other. The current railway network is obsolete and provides either overnight or time-consuming daytime service, so it takes 8-12 hours to get from the capital city of Kyiv to the regional centers in the West, East and South. This limits mobility inside the country and creates obstacles for regional development. Although Ukrainian railroads were improved before the UEFA Euro 2012 Championship, introduction of IC+ trains did not solve challenges of Ukrainian railroad. As high speed rail (HSR) introduction is a mainstream in transportation improvement policies in developed countries, this research makes an attempt on developing a route planning approach for Ukrainian HSR. This study aims at two objectives: to start a scientific discussion of HSR in Ukraine, and to propose a method, that can be used in further HSR planning in Ukraine. The HSR line offered will connect Kyiv with Donetsk, the most eastern business center of Ukraine. This study develops the planning approach in two main phases: alternative generation and alternative evaluation. The first phase generates route alternatives. The most important components of this phase are identifying possible routes and defining rules to cut off infeasible alternatives. The possible routes are identified via a computer simulation that generates the full list of the routes available. Using analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), the alternative routes are selected for further evaluations. The second phase uses transportation demand analysis (TDA) and geographic information system (GIS) to analyze the characteristics of each route and finally determine the optimal route. This study results in two contributions: it introduces a method of HSR route planning and recommends the optimal HSR route considering the chosen criteria. The route connects Kyiv, Cherkasy, Kirovohrad, Kryvy Rih, Dniprodzerzhyns’k, Dnipropetrovs’k, Zaporizhzhya and Donetsk. The proposed methods and results of this study can be used for the further studies in this field. Future researchers can either improve the ideas and results of this study or develop neighboring issues such as possible financing scenarios according to the results of this study.