Railway Station and Urban Dynamics

Railway stations and urban dynamicsIn most countries the development of the railway system has played an important role in the growth of cities and the evolution of urban systems.In his classical article Colin Clark (1958) sketches some of the major developments.Up to the 19th century the costs of transport of agricultural products were so high that they put a limit on the size of main urban centres such as London and Paris.With the rise of the railways this situation came to an end.It then became feasible to exploit economies of scale in manufacturing production by concentrating production in particular cities and this led to a period of sustained urban growth.Indeed, statistical analysis of the development of population size of cities during that period shows the clear impact of the development of railway networks on the connected cities (Rietveld and Bruinsma, 1998).Cities that were not connected experienced lower growth rates.However, this growth of cities led to new problems since railways had been constructed mainly for long-distance freight transport which meant that passenger transport of the increasing number of workers to their workplaces became a bottleneck.Thus, cities remained compact and limited in size.The emergence of tramways in the second half of the 19th century finally induced a process of spatial expansion of cities (Hall, 1994), and this was further reinforced by the introduction of the electric tram at the beginning of the 20th century.In most countries this marked the end of rail as the main transport-related driving force shaping urban development.The introduction of buses and cars led to a further growth of urban agglomerations, but now this was mainly an increase in surface area, not in population size.Gradients of density and rents started to level off.An extreme example was Los Angeles where the centre-supporting role of rail broke down and a large area with practically homogeneous densities of workplaces and residences emerged.At the time of writing his paper (1958) Clark expected a similar development for the large European cities: not only suburbanisation of residences, but also of work.However, this expectation did not materialise.Examples of cities where there are still strong concentrations of work in the centres and where public transport plays a dominant role in commuting are London, Paris, and New York.Although a certain trend can indeed be observed of deconcentration of workplaces towards the city fringes, this tendency remained limited in many cases.In addition, it appears that, although in those cases jobs moved towards the fringes of the cities, this often led again to concentrations of employment.For this phenomenon, Garreau (1991) introduced the concept of edge cities.In some countries, the emergence of edge cities was supportedöand to some extent also stimulatedöby railway developments, an issue addressed by Willigers et al in this theme issue.In terms of intermodal competition, rail was facing large problems for many decades.For short trips, the car became increasingly popular and affordable for large groups of people, whereas for long trips, aviation became a serious competitor.Hence, from the middle of the 20th century one could observe a period of stagnation and decline of railway services in many countries.These countries devoted a good part of their resources to the development of national highway systems.These led to an enormous increase in capacity, but most countries did not manage to create sufficient capacity to prevent bottlenecks.Hence, gradually the public sector started to develop plans for a major upgrade of the rail system.This led to a new turn in