CONSOLIDATION OF RAIL PASSENGER TRANSPORT CORRESPONDING EXAMPLES OF GOOD PRACTICE AT THE LEVEL OF EUROPEAN STANDARD UNTIL 2030 IN THE SR

Abstract

Rail passenger transport is the optimal transport system for handling significant concentrated transport flows. Despite the many advantages of this system, its long-term decline meant a gradual resignation to the role of the railways as the main transport system and its transformation into a support system during peak hours for increasingly busy bus services. The aim of this paper is to identify meaningfully (perspective) rail passenger lines on the basis of objective criteria and to determine how many trains are in the public interest, from where, to when and when they should run on them, and what the interchanges at nodes should be. This plan will be developed at the national level and should serve as a pilot basis for ordering services in the public interest in rail transport in the Slovak Republic. The starting point for the optimal state (until 2030) is the subsequent consolidation of rail passenger transport on all promising lines into a form corresponding to the example of good practice at the level of the European standard. The necessary precondition for the realization of this optimal state is the investment development of these railway lines. The article is part of the project solution VEGA n. 1/0837/21 “Spatial and Temporal Aspects of EU Cohesion Policy: Lessons Learned and Future Perspectives”.