High speed railways, development period and competitiveness with other transportation modes

High speed railways can be considered as a new railway class which is provided by enhancing the criterias like level of service parameters, infrastructure and capacity of konventional railways for more than forty years. High speed railway line that has been started to use firstly in Japan more than forty yeras ago which has been resulted as Shinkansen corridor that still constituted the most improved high spee railway system all over the world. After Japan, high speed railway systems have been started to improve in Germany and France too. After the priority of these three countries in this sector for years, on the parallel of European Union (EU) transportation decisions that is mainly based on White Paper and the reflections of economical developments of China to transportation, high speed railways have started to spread worldwide more. On this context, China and Spain have become leaders of the sector on a short period like 10-15 years. Nowadays, Japan, France, Spain and China can be considered the leaders of the sector. A rapid entrance to high speed railway sector has been emerged in Turkey that important investments have been done and is done. Firslty, Ankara-Eskişehir High Speed Railway Line has been completed, then Ankara-Konya High Speed Railway Line was started to operate, after that Eskişehir-Konya High Speed Railway line connection has been opened. Lastly, Eskişehir-İstanbul section has been completed and Ankara-Eskişehir-İstanbul High Speed Railway High Speed Railway Line operation has been provided. While İstanbul-Edirne High Speed Railway Line construction is going to start in 2017 and be compeleted in a short time, construction of Ankara-Yozgat-Sivas-Erzincan-Erzurum-Kars High Speed Railway Line continues rapidly. Another important line that is continued to construct is Ankara-Afyon-İzmir High Speed Railway Line. Beside these, there are lots of lines which is constructed or planned. There are many important improvements in airway sector that lot of airports are constructed in many cities too in last years. At this point, specifying of integration and competition elements between high speed railways and airways is very important especially for Turkey. Objectives of the thesis are expressing the development period of the sector, evaluation of high speed railway definitons, researching on the perspectives of level of service parameters and capacity and making compares with other modes. Keywords: Speed, Capacity, Intermodal Integration, Passenger Transportation, High Speed Railways