Research on Passengers’ Preference for High-Speed Railways (HSRs) and High-Speed Trains (HSTs)

Abstract

This paper aims to study passengers’ preference for High-Speed Railways (HSRs) and High-Speed Trains (HSTs) through a systematic literature review. The existing relevant literature was examined by using the Scopus application, and the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) method is applied to extract the topics of the selected documents. By comparing the contents of the relevant literature, the general overview of research in this field can be further understood, and the key factors that have been studied so far that affect passengers’ preference can be analyzed. As a green, safe, and sustainable transport mode, HSRs do not only play an essential role in serving passengers but could also be a novel option for freight transport as long as HSRs are able to adjust their technology to the requirements of the rapid growth of the modern logistics industry. The evaluation of passengers’ preference for HSRs/HSTs presents some gaps that need to be addressed in future studies: (1) the speed of the HST line ought to be introduced clearly; (2) more competing alternatives, such as maglev, autonomous vehicles, and other access–egress transport modes to terminals, such as subways and aero taxis, need to be included; (3) the analysis of passengers’ preferences needs to be extended to the new role that HSRs can play in the logistics industry as new cargo services have been developed with the participation of HSRs; and (4) some attributes related to environmental costs and carbon emissions for the transport modes, as well as segmentation variables that are proxies for different passengers’ attitudes towards climate change concerns, need to be included in the design of the choice experiment.