Motivations and background

I. Introduction

1.1 Motivations and background

Ukraine is an emerging country of Eastern Europe, former USSR. According to CIA World Factbook, it is the second largest country of Europe (and the first one, if Overseas France is not considered); its square is 603.6 thousand km², east-west distance – 1300 km, and north-south distance – 900 km. The population of Ukraine is around 46 million of people. As this research will often consider socio-economic geography of Ukraine, it is important to provide here more information about the country, as shown in Figure 1.

Background map source: http://worldmap.org.ua/

Figure 1 Approximate socio-economic pattern of Ukraine.

Socio-economic pattern of Ukraine varies a lot from East to West and from North to South. It is caused by heavy industries that are concentrated in the south-east of Ukraine. Those industries where formed during 1930-s and stimulated population increase in the existing cities and created new ones. So, along with high industrialization, east of Ukraine can be characterized as highly-urbanized. There are also smaller places with industry in the center and west of Ukraine (vehicle

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production, chemical industries), that explains high urbanization level in Lviv region, for example, but most of chemical industries are now closed. The north-east and center are mainly agricultural areas and the north-west is covered with forests, so the population density is low there.

Table 1 Top-10 cities, by population (1 Jan. 2012)

Kyiv (capital) 2 814 258

Kharkiv 1 441 362

Odesa 1 008 162

Dnipropetrovs'k 999 577

Donets'k 955 041

Zaporizhzhya 772 627

Lviv 729 842

Kryvy Rig 660 203

Mykolaiv 497 032

Mariupol 464 457

Although major cities are mainly situated in the east and center of Ukraine, there are still quite large and economically important cities in the west. This leads to the problem of intercity transportation in Ukraine: large cities are situated far away from each other. For instance, Lviv and Donetsk (western and eastern regional centers respectively) are 1.200 km away from each other.

At the moment, the main way of intercity transportation in Ukraine is an obsolete railway network, originally built for freight transportation. This causes the following weaknesses of transportation system:

1. Average speed is quite low, the fastest daytime train has average speed of 116 km/h, the fastest overnight trains – around 60-65 km/h. This leads to very long travel times (for case of Lviv-Donetsk travel, it will be 18-20 hours).

2. Railroad routes are not direct and/or deviate from large cities.

Because of low speeds and long distances, overnight travelling is widespread in Ukraine.

Still, though this model is relatively comfortable for 8-10 hours trip, it is almost unacceptable for 20 hours trip. These weaknesses break social and economic relations inside the country and strongly limit business activities.

In order to improve railway services, the government developed a program of InterCity+ (IC+) traffic on existing tracks, but there was no public discussion; therefore, no information if the government considered HSR alternative for Ukraine is available.

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During preparation to Euro-2012 championship, the major directions of Ukrainian railroad system were improved to allow continuous maximum speed of 160 km/h and new rolling stock from Hyundai Rotem was purchased (10 trains). At the moment these trains are commuting on routes Kyiv-Kharkiv (3 per day), Lviv-Kyiv, and Kyiv-Donetsk (2 per day).

Nevertheless, these changes haven’t improved the situation much: only services of Kyiv-Kharkiv are relatively successful and, for other two routes, the following shortcomings exist.

1. Number of stops

Existence of intermediate stops is often very important: it helps to generate demand for transportation. Roughly, if you have route A to B with a stop C, there will be two types of traffic of each section (AC: A -> C, A -> B, CB: C -> B; A -> B). Currently Lviv route doesn’t have intermediate stops because there are no large cities along the used track.

2. Travel times

Travel time is one of the measures that drastically influences travel demand. If the train doesn’t show significant difference from conventional rail, it will not be popular. For example, there is an alternative way from Kyiv to Lviv that has 3 more large cities, but it will increase travel time from 5 hours to 6.5 hours. In the same time, the main trouble of Donetsk route is also travel time: it takes 6.5 hours to get to Donetsk.

3. Convenience

IC+ trains travel during daytime and it is not convenient for numerous people. For example, when business trip is necessary, employer will want his employee to return from a trip as soon as possible. If business requires a 2-day 9 a.m. - 18 p.m. presence in the other city, it means that the entire trip will take 4 days and 2 more nights in hotel. On the other hand, overnight train is much more convenient in term of time usage: the trip can start right in the end of working day and next morning that person is doing his job in another city.

4. Price

Ticket price for IC+ train is almost 90% higher than in premium-class overnight trains as shown in Tab. 2. In pair with relative inconvenience of IC+, this price scares away the passengers.

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Table 2 Price comparison: IC+, Overnight premium and Overnight ordinary Source: http://booking.uz.gov.ua

IC+ Overnight premium Overnight ordinary

Route Travel

So, the introduction of Hyundai Rotem trains as IC+ did not fix the weaknesses of Ukrainian railroad system; therefore, this research remains needed for its improvement.

Of course, today’s Ukraine needs a HSR network to connect Kyiv with the furthest regional centers and to connect them to each other, but every HSR project is very complicated in development and very expensive in building. So this study develops only one line. Considering current directions of IC+ trains, we can see that route Kyiv-Donetsk is very time-consuming, but very promising from the point of view of population covered.

This study offers construction of HSR line between two large Ukrainian cities: Kyiv (capital city) and Donetsk (business and industrial center of Eastern Ukraine). As Ukrainian cities are scattered throughout territory, there are different alternative routes possible. We will evaluate the best feasible alternatives, estimate their influence on regional development, and compare them with status-quo.