# Towards Sustainable Regional Planning: Potential of Commuter Rail in the Madrid Urban Region
###### Abstract
First, there is a predominance of urban plans marked by developmental approaches and dominated by a narrow municipal perspective about the treatment of problems and the identification of opportunities. This situation has been the cause of serious sociospatial and environmental imbalances [22; 23]. The second feature is a lack of coordination among public transport modes [24], between transport planning and urban planning at the municipal and regional levels [19], and immobility before the implementation of a land management policy at the metropolitan \begin{table}
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**Authors (Year)** & **Transport Mode** & **Study Location** & **Indicators and Factors** \\ \hline [PERSON] and [PERSON] (2016) [17] & High-speed rail & Zaragoza and Valladolid & Strategic metropolitan and urban plans: proposals for urban management (land use) \\ \hline  & & & Ad hoc study of mobility, customer service staff, existence of taxi stops, number of (inter)urban bus destinations, bicycle parking capacity, daily (inter)urban bus frequency, vehicle parking \\ [PERSON] & & & (inter)urban bus frequency, vehicle parking capacity, rail accessibility, destinations reachable by the TRAM, daily frequency of TRAM use, number of workers by economic sector, resident population, and degree of functional mix; less than 1000 m radius \\ \hline  & & & Land occupation, gross area, net area, number of dwellings, density, and percentage of officially protected dwellings, area of uses, type of promotion and financing of the analyzed pieces, morphology, and pedestrian network; 600 and 800 m radii \\ \hline [PERSON] et al. (2018) [20] & Subway & Madrid & Street network, synthetic indicator of accessibility (incorporates the number of people and jobs); 400 and 800 m radii \\ \hline [PERSON] et al. (2019) [21] & High-speed rail & Albacete, Ciudad Real and Toledo & Street network (network readability, detours, orientation, section, presence of vegetation, street crossings, etc.) \\ \hline \end{tabular}
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Table 1: _Cont._scale [22]. Since its creation in the mid-1980s, the Madrid Cercanias unit, a commuter railway that connects the city of Madrid with its regional area, has been managed by Renfe Cercanias and has lacked full integration with the Madrid Regional Transport Consortium. In addition, the Community of Madrid has not approved any mobility laws or a regional mobility plan [25]. The creation of new urban growth together with existing public transport, such as growth developed in parallel to the construction of new public transport stations, lacks coordinated planning [19]. The third characteristic is the lack of an environmental and social strategy related to infrastructure investment in the Madrid region [26; 27]. Although public transportation is more sustainable than private mobility [28], the average yearly investment in roads from 2005 to 2018 is around 200 million euros, while investment in the commuter railway is barely one tenth. Other authors have also highlighted that the tracks are underused, moving fewer trains according to their capacity, with wide margins of improvement in commercial speed, frequency, service reliability and the accessibility and interconnectivity of the stations with other modes of transport [24; 27]. In turn, the lack of a strategy guided by sustainability criteria has meant that investments in high speed prevail over those in commuter rails when the latter moves a greater number of people than does the former. According to the Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility, Autoridad Independiente de Responsabilidad Fiscal, between 1990 and 2018, 55.9 billion euros were invested in AVE, compared to 3.7 billion euros invested in commuter railways [29], a figure that contrasts the number of annual travellers; in 2019, there were 34.5 million travellers in AVE, compared to 475.9 million travellers in commuter and regular railways--253.4 million in the Madrid commuter rail network [30].