The expansion of high-speed rail lines can support the growth of electric vehicle sales and lead to significant increases in electric vehicle market share, a new study by the University of Pennsylvania’s Hanming Fang and collaborators suggests.
The research has implications for the growth of metropolitan areas and the expansion of electric vehicle charging stations, says lead author Fang, Joseph M. Cohen Term Professor of Economics at Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences.
The working paper from the Penn Institute for Economic Research examines China’s “electric vehicle adoption miracle,” which saw electric vehicle sales rise to 45% of the market there in 2024, compared to 25% in Europe and 11% in the United States.
The researchers looked at the parallel growth of China’s high-speed rail system, now covering nearly 28,000 miles of track, and how rail can serve as a complement—rather than a challenge—to electric vehicles.
They concluded that high-speed rail expansion significantly boosted electric vehicle sales volume, with an average increase of 91%, and could have contributed an estimated one-third of the electric vehicle market share.
The central issue, Fang says, is driver concern over “range anxiety,” or worry that their electric vehicles will run out of battery charge on longer-distance trips and end up stranding them. Such drivers primarily use their electric vehicles for shorter travel or commuting to work, yet still need transportation for longer trips.
With a readily available and reliable alternative, drivers don’t face the same challenge, Fang says. “If there are other ways to travel long distance—say you take one hour to go by high-speed rail—then you don’t worry about using your electric vehicle for that kind of travel,” he says.
The solution, the researchers say, turned out to be high-speed rail, which zips passengers along between 155 and 217 miles per hour.
To answer the question of whether high-speed rail connections would accelerate electric vehicle purchasing, the researchers looked at monthly data on vehicle sales spanning 328 cities. They examined both cities before and after they were connected to the rail systems, as well as cities that had never been connected. And they examined additional factors, including the presence of electric vehicle charging stations, the volume of road investments, and the effects of government industrial policies, to determine whether those affected electric vehicle sales.
Their research found that cities that were connected to the rail network earlier were also those that saw the earliest growth in the electric vehicle market. The best strategy for accelerating electric vehicle purchases, they concluded, was the combination of “complementary infrastructure,” or high-speed rail, and incentives for consumer purchasing.
The connection between the growth of train connections and cars sales was likely not an intentional one by transportation policymakers, but rather a serendipitous occurrence, Fang says.
China’s high-speed rail system developed during the global financial crisis, which began in 2008, as part of the country’s economic stimulus plan. At that time, China was predominantly testing electric vehicles in its school bus fleet rather than individually-owned cars, and they weren’t a major part of the automotive market.
“It was a happy coincidence,” Fang says. “At that time, electric vehicle adoption was still expensive, the batteries were not very reliable.”
China’s rail system has unique features, including its national connectivity—high-speed trains serve 96% of cities with populations over 500,000. The country’s network makes up more than 70% of the high-speed mileage around the world.
In the United States, wealthier families might own an electric vehicle for short trips and a gas-powered one for longer trips, Fang says. “That combination is not available for less wealthy households, and isn’t very clean because the longer trips are still completed by gas-powered vehicles,” he says. High-speed rail, by contrast, is both cleaner for the environment and more equitable, he suggests.
One challenge for countries such as the United States is the cost of land and infrastructure construction, Fang says. In China, where the central government owns the land and can mobilize large-scale projects faster, such ventures are relatively simpler.
In the future, Fang plans to look at the effects of high-speed rail on other economic aspects. “You can live 200 kilometers away and still come to work in a city—the same commuting time, but it covers a much longer distance. That has implications for housing prices and the distribution of economic activity,” Fang says.
Hanming Fang is the Joseph M. Cohen Term Professor of Economics at the School of Arts & Sciences and holds a secondary appointment at the Department of Health Care Management and the Department of Business Economics and Public Policy at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Other authors include Ming Li and Yang Yang of the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Long Wang of Fudan University.
This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants 72403216 and 72192804); the Guangdong Province Natural Science Foundation (Grant 2022B151512006); the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant 72303035); the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (Grant 14504022) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant 72203192).
