Transport systems can bring enormous benefits to society by providing access, mobility, and economic growth that are essential for growing and modern societies. The way of harnessing this benefit for an emerging economy as well as modern society has relied mainly on a cutting edge and state of the art transportation systems such as high-speed rail.

The primary purpose of high-speed rail systems is to facilitate fast and efficient transportation and as a result, passengers save time and money. There are many benefits associated with implementation of HSR such as creating dispersed settlement patterns to utilize available land, reduced congestion, reduce accidents, reduce air traffic congestion by creating competitive mode with other small and medium distance transports, less carbon emission, less energy usage and improved environmental effects.

Ethiopia has significant transportation problems and the government has long been planning to invest more in modern railway infrastructures. To assist this ambition of Ethiopian government, this study has applied scientific methods such as a screening method, multicriteria discussion-making methods, analytical hierarchical prioritization (AHP), and techniques for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) to analyze the best alternative new high-speed railway routes.

First, review of relevant literatures was carried out to identify a suitable methodology to solve the defined problem, and a screening method was employed to analyze, shortlist, and rank more than 230 city pairs using seven variables in five categories with pre-designated syntax equation, and formula. The second stage of the study focuses on assessing, and weighing the evaluation criteria such as construction cost, potential users, and per capita GDP starting from Ethiopian expert’s opinion on the relative importance of the decision criteria by utilizing a method called Analytical Hierarchical Prioritization (AHP). Finally, computing performance scores via Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), and ranking the alternatives based on the values of the decision criteria in each alternative as well as the criteria weight obtained from the AHP analysis.

The result shows that the main mega-regions with their respective mega-cities are paired on top of the pre-screening result. The analytical hierarchical prioritization method shows that the construction cost criteria weights 26%, potential users criteria weights 38%, and per capita GDP weights 36%. The ranking of alternative high-speed rail routes using TOPSIS shows that Addis Ababa – Hawassa is ranked 1st, Addis Ababa-Dire Dawa is ranked 2nd, Addis Ababa – Gondar is ranked 3rd and Addis Ababa – Mekele is ranked 4th.