New High-Speed Rail stations are often expected to act as catalysts for regional and local urban and economic development. Accessibility improvements are assumed to increase locational attractiveness for households and companies, motivating municipal decision-makers to allocate land for urban development projects, particularly in the immediate vicinity of new stations. However, most empirical studies call such automatic effects into question, pointing to the importance of additional local factors, such as station location within the urban context. We construct a dataset of 232 stations in 11 countries in Europe to analyse evolving station placement strategies as well as land use changes in the surroundings of High-Speed Rail stations before and after construction. We find that stations close to the existing urban fabric and well connected by complementary regional and local public transport are on average associated with more land use change, while peripheral stations outside of metropolitan regions hardly attract any development.

As a protective measure during the Covid-19 pandemic, in Spring 2020, a high number of employees began relocating their workplace to their homes, many for the first time. Recent surveys suggest that the share of those working from home (WFH) will remain higher than before the pandemic in the long term too—with correspondingly fewer commuting journeys. Workplaces are still often concentrated in inner cities, into which workers commute from more outlying areas. However, classical geographical economic theory suggests that a reduced need for commuting might lead to a reorientation of residential preferences amongst employees towards even fewer urban areas, as households trade off the disamenity of commuting against lower housing costs and more living space. This article investigates how such consequences could unfold in space. The Munich Metropolitan Region is characterised by a high share of knowledge-based jobs suitable for WFH and thus serves as our case study. We collect data at the municipality level for relevant aspects of residential location choices and develop an index for the potential of additional residential demand through increased WFH for each municipality in the Munich Metropolitan Region. Crucially, a municipality’s potential depends on the number of commuting days per week. Keeping the weekly commuting time budget constant, an increase in WFH, or a reduction in commuting days allows a longer commuting time per trip. We visualise our results and sensitivities with maps. We observe a gradual yet discontinuous decay of potentials from the region’s core to the fringes with an increase in WFH days.

Transport accessibility is one of the most significant locational factors for both households and firms, and thus a potentially self-reinforcing driver of urban development. The spatial structure and dynamics of accessibility hence have the potential to alter the locational choices of households and firms significantly, leading to concentration and de-concentration processes. In spite of recent innovations in automotive technologies, public transport systems remain crucial for the functioning of metropolises. In this paper, we use the case of public transport in the Munich Metropolitan Region (MMR) in Germany to (1) discuss whether public transport in the past has contributed to regional urbanisation, the blurring of urban and suburban spaces; (2) model future accessibility changes due to the ongoing mega-infrastructure project “second trunk line” (“Zweite Stammstrecke”) for suburban trains and their likely effects on processes of regional development; (3) compare the balance of accessibility and functional density at stations in the MMR and (4) recommend a planning strategy based on an integrated urban and transport planning philosophy. We argue that particularly the monocentric design of the project means that it will intensify and extend the scope of suburbanisation and metropolisation, while planning should aim for a greater regionalisation of economic activity.

Transport accessibility is an important location factor for households and firms. In the last few decades, technological and social developments have contributed to a reinvigorated role of passenger transport. However, rail accessibility is unevenly distributed in space. The introduction of high-speed rail has furthermore promoted a polarisation of accessibility between metropolises and peripheral areas in some European countries. In this article we analyse the development of rail accessibility at the regional level in Germany between 1990 and 2020 for 266 functional city-regions. Our results show two different facets: The number of regions that are directly connected to one another has decreased, but at the same time the spatial disparities of accessibility have decreased, albeit to a small extent. This development was strongest in East Germany after German reunification and thus largely a consequence of the renovation of the conventional rail infrastructure, not high-speed rail. Nevertheless, it can be concluded that the introduction of high-speed traffic in Germany did not lead to an increase in accessibility disparities. Instead, the accessibility effects of high-speed rail in Germany seem to break the traditional dichotomy between core and periphery.