High-speed trains in Turkey carried 50M passengers in 10 years

High-speed trains have carried 50 million passengers since they were put into service in Turkey. Fast and comfortable train travel was introduced to Turkey when the Ankara-Eskişehir high-speed train line opened on March 13, 2009, reducing the travel time between the two cities to an hour and 25 minutes.

High-speed trains, running on four lines across Turkey, have carried 50 million passengers so far, with 14,537,000 of them using the Ankara-Konya line which runs an average of 14 times a day.

The Ankara-Eskişehir line carried 17,284,000 passengers, while the Ankara-Istanbul and the Konya-Eskişehir-Istanbul line carried 13,321,000 and 4,627,000 passengers, respectively.

As far as daily average of passengers go, a total of 5,900 passengers traveled on the Ankara-Konya line, 3,850 on the Ankara-Eskişehir line, 9,000 on the Ankara-Istanbul line and 3,200 on the Konya-Eskişehir-Istanbul line.

According to a survey conducted by the Turkish State Railways (TCDD) Transportation Inc. for at least two times throughout the year, looking at the travel purposes of passengers who travel by high-speed trains in Turkey, it is seen that 27.8% preferred high-speed trains for "relative visits," 18.9% for "business visits," 18.9 for "holiday and tourism," 13% for "other purposes," 11% for "going to school," 7.4% for "transportation between home and work," and 2.6% for "going to the hospital."

The survey results also revealed that 46.1% of passengers had bachelor's degrees, 15.3% were high school graduates, 4.3% primary school graduates, 10.5% upper secondary graduates, 17% master's degrees, 0.8% were literate and 5.6% had doctoral education. Of these passengers, 29.3% were career professionals, 20.7% students, 11.7% civil servants, 7.9% retired, 6.8% workers, 4.9% businessmen, 4.7% artisans and 3.3% housewives.

Looking at the age profile, 32.8% of passengers were under the age of 26 and 60% were between the ages of 26 and 37.

According to survey results, overall satisfaction of passengers with high-speed train service was 98.9%. This was 97.4% in last year's surveys.

The increase in the rate at which passengers took advantage of food and beverage services during high-speed train travel did not go unnoticed. The rate of passengers who benefited from food and beverage service increased to 63.1% from 55.9% over the period when high-speed trains were put into service.