Station avenue: high-speed rail’s missing link. Assessing pedestrian city-station routes for edge stations in Spanish small cities

High-speed rail edge stations, which are located within the urban fabric limits of a city, have generally a good access through motorised transportation modes while the pedestrian/bicycle access becomes, in many cases, very difficult. This paper assesses the quality of pedestrian routes linking high-speed rail edge stations to the city centre, considering physical aspects such as footpaths width, characteristics of the built environment or detours at street crossings. The assessment demonstrates that a pedestrian route could be redesigned to minimise discontinuities and to improve walkability, extending the walkable distance threshold through an adequate design. The proposed methods could provide a useful tool for cities to identify the most appropriate footpath to create convenient and legible pedestrian routes with walkable promenades for edge stations, because, in general, there are no specific strategies or policies to favour these walkable connections. In many cases, these edge stations are hidden city gates and the station-city pedestrian connection is the missing link in this intermodal transport chain.