The Total Social Costs of Constructing and Operating a High-Speed Rail Line Using a Case Study of the Riyadh-Dammam Corridor, Saudi Arabia Hamad Almujibah1,2, John Preston1 1Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences, University of Southampton, United Kingdom 2College of Engineering, Taif University, Saudi Arabia *Correspondence:Hamad Almujibah
[email protected] This paper builds on an earlier paper by the authors on the potential for “The total social costs of constructing and operating a maglev line using a case study of the Riyadh-Dammam corridor, Saudi Arabia” (Almujibah and Preston, 2018) by examining High-Speed Rail. Keywords: High-Speed Rail, Total Social Costs, Operator Cost, User Cost, External Cost, Saudi Arabia ABSTRACT Constructing High-Speed Rail technology between the Saudi Arabian cities starts raising many challenging issues of a different nature ranging from technical to operational, which require huge investments in infrastructure, operations and maintenance. However, this paper develops a new methodology to calculate the total social costs of building a new HSR worldwide and applies this using the case study of the Riyadh-Dammam corridor in Saudi Arabia. This is done through a Spreadsheet Cost Model mainly based on Microsoft Excel that includes operator cost, user cost, and external cost. In order to determine the total social costs of a Riyadh – Dammam HSR line, the annual travel demand is forecasted of 13,205,212 passengers in the first year of operation. In this case, the gravity demand model is used to forecast the demand, as a function of independent variables for the cities alongside with the proposed line such as the population, GDP per capita, the generalized journey time, unemployment rate, years since opening the corridor, and the dummy variable.