Frémont, Antoine <br/><br/>
High-speed trains, competition and territories 

 -  2020.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 83 
<br/><br/> The paper by Federico Antoniazzi and al. (2019) highlights the benefit of competition to increase the performance of rail operators engaged in the high-speed rail market. But what are the consequences of this competition on cities and the whole country? Our aim is to analyse the motivations and interests of four different stakeholders as regards to high-speed rail: passengers, railway companies, the railway infrastructure manager and public authorities, particularly the French State and local governments. Our main hypothesis is that competition boots networks’ dynamics which push for hubs, traffic and massification. Competition thus intensifies spatial disparities. Local governments, which are themselves in competition with each other to attract high-speed line investments, lessen the patchwork effect created by high-speed railway at the margins, with, as a result, the tremendous reduction of travel time between Paris and other major French cities. With the quick impacts of competition on one hand, and the longer temporality of social cohesion on the other, the forms of regulation between the different stakeholders have yet to be invented.