Assessment of Economic Efficiency of High-Speed Passenger Transportation

Increasingly, people tend to spend as little time as possible on the road anywhere. This desire was the beginning of the era of high speeds, which also affected railway transport. The construction of a HSR always requires large investments and time spent on calculating the future payback. Such large infrastructure projects, however, should be considered not only from the commercial side – they have a great impact on other sectors of the state's economy, on the social sphere of life, and on the environment. In 2013-2014, the Moscow-Kazan VSM – 2 project was developed in Russia. Then the project was frozen due to government doubts about its profitability, as well as passenger traffic forecasts. Many researchers believe that the socio-economic efficiency of such infrastructure projects is more important than the commercial component. Thus, the purpose of this final qualification work is to evaluate the social effectiveness of the HSM – 2 project. The relevance of the work is that the final decision on the fate of the project for seven years has not been made, and calculations of both commercial and socio-economic efficiency need to be updated. The paper describes the methodology for evaluating the effectiveness of commercial and socio-economic projects and the features of railway infrastructure projects. Analysis of the world experience of HSR operation has shown that the nature of HSR influence on the development of adjacent territories depends on the degree of economic development of these territories before the construction of the highway. The VSM-2 project also has its own external effects. According to the calculations given in the final qualifying work, the public effect may amount to about 14.8 billion rubles. However, not all possible effects were calculated, so the possibility of evaluating other effects, including environmental ones, can be noted as a direction for further research.