More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights
back-on-track.eu
back-on-track.eu
To an extent, flying is just way too cheap. I mean, I was looking at a roundtrip london/barcelona just last week, it was $25. By train I'm looking at at least 10 hours, likely more like 15, and $300.
Both the $25 and the $300 just seem wrong. Flying is way too cheap, but I also don't get how $300 per person is competitive against something like a bus or shared car. The economics of trains should be able to be better than just about anything.
They’re more expensive because they’re better.
There are places in this world that can’t even manage to repair streets, but have trains operating daily with little trouble. It seems like costs would come down at some point in first world nations, or it’d be worthwhile to subsidize the creation of railways more significantly. I know governments do try to to some extent, but riding trains is expensive almost everywhere. It doesn’t make sense to be cheaper than even roads, which need constant maintenance, intense infrastructure, and cleanup.
Rails need constant work to keep them in good condition. So does the ballast. Signalling involves miles of cables, lights, radio towers and motors that also degrade. The stations need staff, gates, ticket kiosks, displays.
A frequent need is to add capacity. Adding capacity to the sky is easy because it's empty. It's essentially just about scaling air traffic control systems. Adding capacity in a rail line can involve major earthworks, rebuilding bridges, totally replacing the signalling and so on.
Roads are easier to maintain and pay for themselves without subsidies just via fuel tax. There's no station infrastructure. No stations means no expensive employees. People drive cars themselves and cars can be driven safely even on quite degraded roads. Signalling is entirely local and so doesn't require much cabling, on high speed routes (motorways) there's usually little or no signalling required. Laying tarmac is much cheaper than laying rails. Finally of the few people needed to maintain and run the roads, many are private sector and un-unionized e.g. gas station employees. The government employees only do repairs and so don't have much strike power. Contrast to the railways which in Europe are frequently shut down for weeks at a time by strikes of drivers or crew.
The capital investment in trains is worth it for only one reason - it's the highest capacity form of transport in seats per hour. It's got nothing to do with greenness which is at any rate a very ambiguous case to make when you consider all the factors. Trains can be less green than planes in many ordinary situations.
Adding capacity to airports, however, is much harder. Heathrow is at 98% capacity, for example, and it's difficult to add a new airport, or even new runway, for London. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_Heathrow_Airport , which discusses the major earthworks, etc. involved.
> Roads are easier to maintain and pay for themselves without subsidies just via fuel tax.
In the US fuel taxes only cover about 25% of "State/Local Road Spending", says https://taxfoundation.org/statelocal-road-spending-covered-u... .
> Finally of the few people needed to maintain and run the roads, many are private sector and un-unionized e.g. gas station employees
That's in the US, right? Fuel-tanker drivers in Portugal went on strike last year - https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-portugal-strike-fuel/portu... .
Fuel-tanker drivers in France went on strike 3 years ago - https://www.thelocal.fr/20170531/french-petrol-stations-begi... .
> It's got nothing to do with greenness which is at any rate a very ambiguous case to make when you consider all the factors. Trains can be less green than planes in many ordinary situations.
Care to elaborate?
For many ordinary situations, train CO2 production is 1/2 or even less than planes, on a per-passenger basis. Quoting https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49349566 "Train virtually always comes out better than plane, often by a lot. A journey from London to Madrid would emit 43kg (95lb) of CO2 per passenger by train, but 118kg by plane (or 265kg if the non-CO2 emissions are included), according to EcoPassenger."
Of course, London-Madrid by train is about 24 hours, or 2.5 hours by flight.
And of course, London-NYC isn't a train trip away, and there are unusual situations like Bergen, Norway—Aberdeen, United Kingdom where there are direct flights while Google Maps just laughs at me for asking for a train routing.
But I'm curious about the ordinary cases where flights are more green than train - that is, where both are reasonable options to consider.
Is that somehow different for train stations?
But I am confused about your comment. There are two distinct statements. X = "Adding capacity to the sky is easy because it's empty. It's essentially just about scaling air traffic control systems." and Y = "Rails need constant work to keep them in good condition".
I don't believe X is correct, and I gave a counter-example about adding capacity to London.
But that doesn't mean I think Y must necessarily also be invalid. While it seems you interpret my comment to mean that Y is correct? And I don't understand how one can draw that inference. So I don't understand the point of your comment.
If you want to move more buses, you need more bus terminals. If you want to move more planes, you need more airports. If you need to move more trains, you need more train stations.
The point about scaling air traffic and scaling trains is that you need far less infrastructure to get a plane from place to place. You don't actually even need a huge, expensive airport to do so, since there are much smaller ones and even just tiny airstrips. And unlike trains, once they leave, they have pretty much unlimited room. How many tracks would a train station need in order to accomodate the same number of passengers leaving from Heathrow?
Again, thu2111's statement was:
> "Adding capacity to the sky is easy because it's empty. It's essentially just about scaling air traffic control systems."
ATC systems are not the only relevant part of infrastructure - airports are also important.
You write "you need far less infrastructure". Sure. But airports are also needed for scaling, even if small/tiny airstrips are included, and my point was that airports were omitted from the infrastructure cost.
You write "since there are much smaller ones ... tiny airstrips". That doesn't solve London's capacity problem, which is why a capacity question must include the cost of airports.
You ask "How many tracks would a train station need in order to accomodate the same number of passengers leaving from Heathrow?"
Heathrow has about 80 million passengers per year says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathrow_Airport .
London Waterloo has about 94 million passengers per year says https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/1668/estimates-of-statio... , with 24 platforms says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Waterloo_station . Looking at the aerial photo confirms there are 24 platforms, and it appears from Google Maps' satellite view that they are served by 7 rail lines, splitting into 24 platforms.
So, 7 tracks are enough to accommodate the same number of passengers leaving from Heathrow.
However, that answer doesn't make a whit of difference to my point, which is that if ATC is important cost facto to bring up when discussion air transit capacity, then airports are also an important cost factor.
All of the biggest airports have had extensive and expensive work done to increase capacity. SFO is about 90% of capacity, if I read https://www.faa.gov/airports/planning_capacity/profiles/medi... right. And it's worse if the weather is bad.
That's why I argue that you cannot ignore airport capacity in your estimates.
We can look at the inter-war period to see how capacity calculations had to consider more than just the sky. Pan-Am famously ran flying boats in their transoceanic lines. "Their advantage lay in using water instead of expensive land-based runways, making them the basis for international airlines in the interwar period." (Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_boat ).
Indeed, floatplanes are still important in bush flying for the same reason.
I don't know what "pretty journal" means. None of the dictionary definitions seem to make sense. I know the rail lines serving my city are not anywhere near capacity. The train between Santa Fe (my former home city) and ABQ is also nowhere near capacity (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Mexico_Rail_Runner_Express ). A couple of years ago I took the train from San Diego to ABQ. It was also not at capacity.
The problem with rail is the capacity issues affect the entire line. If one station has busy platforms and the rest are all quiet, you can't put additional trains on that line (unless it's a terminal station and there's a turning circle before that station and you are willing to run trains that don't go there). Also if one line shares fast and slow trains, that kills capacity.
One airport can share fast and slow planes, and capacity problems at one airport don't affect other airports.
I guess I'm writing mostly from the British perspective. My comment about fuel taxes paying for the roads is (or was) true for the UK.
Since privatisation at the start of the 1990s decades of decline in ridership turned around and now more people use the railways than ever. In the UK there are lines everywhere that are not only at capacity but drastically over-capacity, e.g. there's a train departing from Euston on a Friday night that carries more than 2x the number of people it was designed for. Despite that Crossrail - one of the biggest civil engineering projects in Europe - isn't even open yet, the country just committed to an even more eyewateringly expensive new rail line that won't be open for over a decade. Primarily justified on capacity grounds.
Heathrow expansion is also very expensive of course. But there's really only one airport in the entire country that has such severe capacity issues, and the expansion is difficult primarily because it's surrounded on all sides by urban development like motorways and villages that have to be demolished and relocated. In the case of the motorway, it's also carrying such large capacity that it can't actually be closed for extended periods, so it has to be moved whilst "live".
I think the USA has a different set of issues because the railways are used mostly for cargo rather than passengers. The large distances involved means air travel is the only feasible mode of transport for many routes, and Americans take internal flights all the time whereas for most Brits I know, internal travel is almost always car or train. Business people take internal flights, and even then only quite rarely. I've traveled Acela and indeed it also wasn't heavily used.
Regarding "kills capacity", aren't passing loops meant to help that exact scenario? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_loop has many details. At the very least, it's not as dire as you describe.
I know little about the UK rail system -- or any country's rail system, for that matter. I do know your rail enthusiasts despise the Beeching Cuts, and that just saying that term is a hot button for some.
As for Beeching, it's not quite that simple. The roughly 25-35% of the country that's pretty left wing hate the Beeching cuts for the same reasons they hate all government cuts.
Despite my negative view on trains above, I'm actually a train enthusiast. I love taking the train. I love reading about how they work. There was a story on HN some days ago where a rail engineer talked in detail about how the high-speed rail record was set, I absolutely loved reading about it. My girlfriend had to tear me away from the screen. And I've often wondered about how to really scale up the railways in a big way.
In a way, railways are kind of the ultimate nerd dream. An ideal railway is a huge, smoothly operating and very safe high performance machine, entirely coordinated by engineers and planners. I think perhaps that's why it's such a political hot-button issue: a nationalised railway represents a very tangible instance of massive state planning and control. Decentralising it is difficult for various logistical and technical reasons, not only the politics of it.
Despite that the Beeching cuts have never been rolled back, even under the 3 terms of Labour government. Many of those lines made no sense, especially in the context of continually declining ridership and the ever rising traffic on the roads. It'd have been a very irrational government that continued ploughing money into rail instead of building motorways given the expressed preferences of the population at the time.
For unknown reasons that are still debated today (but which align perfectly with privatisation), the decades-long decline in train usage reversed and so now new lines are needed again. But they're different routes to the ones closed by Beeching. Those were mostly small rural lines.
While trains are touted as very efficient modes of transportation, and generally beloved by nerds, I'm skeptical, largely because train tracks are so under-utilized.
Train tracks take up as much space as many multi-lane highways. On highways, dozens of cars go by every minute. But a train car only passes through at best a few times an hour. I suspect that if you took one mile of train track and one mile of a highway with the same overall footprint, far more people/goods will move through the highway-mile every hour than the train-mile.
Don't have data to back this up, just a hunch. But if it's true, then even though trains are far more energy efficient than cars, they're likely far less real-estate efficient.
(Also, I do suspect that this is not always true. A heavily trafficked tunnel in/out of Manhattan's Penn Station is probably more efficient real-estate wise than an equivalent tunnel. But that's a very extreme case with super high densities).
One point of "unease" (to quote the Wikipedia entry) is that Marples was pro-road; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts#cite_note-50
> A more critical interpretation is that after Macmillan named Marples as Minister of Transport, Britain’s transport policy swerved to the right, and became motivated by the kind of conflict of interest that Thompson notes can be loosely regarded as a form of corruption (9). Actually, in this case it may well have been a rather tight form of corruption. At the time that he was named minister, Marples owned 64,000 of the 80,000 shares of Marples Ridgeway, a civil engineering firm that specialised in building roads"
I as an ill-informed outsider cannot disambiguate how much of the shift to roads was from "expressed preferences" and how much was from "a form of corruption".
You wrote "nationalised railway represents a very tangible instance of massive state planning and control".
But .. so is a national road system. Your country spends billions on roads, which is pretty massive.
In the 1970s, protests against the increasing number of children deaths caused by cars resulted in the more pro-cycling infrastructure they have now, rather than prioritizing cars first, second, and third like they did in my country (the US) and, I believe, the UK.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic... for background.
I can't help but also note that post-war UK manufactured cars, while the Netherlands did not.
The BBC can't really be trusted to get complex topics right. They're just quoting some activist organisation there. Note that the figure is "per passenger" but that turns to assume fully loaded vehicles. The airline industry is much better at keeping seats full than train operators are. A nearly empty train will be much worse for the environment than a full plane.
As for trucker strikes, yes, but that happened mostly because they were allowed to blockade refineries. In the UK at least laws have changed since and there are mitigations in place. If you look at the rule changes around unions coming up there, they're motivated by rail strikes because those are a common occurrence whereas strikes taking it out roads are not.
(you can also take the bus for €15 or some such, but last time I did that I got rather carsick, so I figured I'd take the train, not knowing how expensive it was!)
I lived in the UK for a while, and things are really complex there with a patchwork of private companies. Either way, I stopped complaining about the Dutch trains very shortly after moving there :-)
Long distance trains usually have several intermediate stages they can sell tickets on, often with no public transport competition, and there's really no incentive for them to price-cut on a London-Barcelona route involving several other companies and very little customer interest.
The problem is lack of demand. The article posits there is huge untapped demand for night trains but there isn't. Rail companies can and do run services on each others tracks but rail lines are frequently at capacity, timetabling wise, so it's not always easy to just drop in and run extra trains in the same way many airports have free slots for extra planes. And of course airlines are still mostly national too.
Indeed it's best kept away from the EU. It has a habit of suspending transport and trading rights as part of unrelated political disputes with its neighbors in order to pressure them to obey Brussels. If you want train connections to be mysteriously severed because of some dispute with the UK or Switzerland over fishing or trade unions then asking the EU to organise it is the right way to go. If you'd like train timetables to be set taking into account what the railways can do, leave it to the private sector and get governments out of the way.
I pay less than twenty euros a month for 10 GiB of data throughout all of Europe. What are you talking about?
Then show those studies, because as I'm pointing out, my "tarifs" have not increased in the slightest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_roaming_regulat...
In Norway, prices increased by 66% when RLAH was introduced.[20] The same argument was being used by Danish operators. In Denmark several operators increased monthly subscription prices by 10–20 DKK.[21]
Swedish operator Comviq removed roaming services on its plan “Fastpris mini” 15 June 2017.[22] The operator Hallon is doing the same to its smallest plan “LITEN” starting 1 October 2017.[23] In Denmark, operator Telmore introduced "TELMORE Home" without roaming services, even when travelling to countries outside the EEA.[24] Vodafone UK introduced "UK-only plans" that disallow roaming altogether.[25] This is possible because, while the Regulation disallows operators from charging extra for roaming when available, it does not force them to make roaming available in the first place.
Of course, price rises are very unpopular. History gives us lots of experience of price controls to draw on. The effects of price controls are often subtle and hard to anticipate. For instance, unavailability of new services for which the investment can no longer be justified, cutting R&D budgets, elimination of services to some customer segments entirely and so on.
If you look at KPN in the Netherlands, the cost of the price controls is estimated at being 100M euros or more.
https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/nl/Documents/...
Their yearly net profit in 2018 was about 292M euro. So price controls aren't enough to cripple these businesses, they can absorb the hit. But obviously forcing people to spend money on something isn't free, even if the effects are obfuscated.
It's a lose lose situation... Bad for environment, bad for people, bad for economic efficiency. The whole point of a rail network in a nation's economy is to be an economic force multiplier, not to be a profiteering entity
So fast trains (at least in France that you should have cross to go to Barcelona) must have very specific time tables and get along with local trains, when airplanes don’t and can go straight.
It adds constraint.
(Ok, I know planes have routes too, but it’s much easyier to do timetables)
I recently watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwjwePe-HmA which covered much of the cost breakdowns - especially for American passenger rail. TL;DR:
* Labor is expensive. That 10 hour train ride is 10 hours you're paying every employee on the train. The faster speed of an equivalent plane ride means you're not paying pilots for as long, or allows them to make more trips.
* Rail is expensive. You have to buy the land between point A and point B. You have to build the rails, bridges, crossing guards, with lots of labor to build and maintain it all, with plenty of regulatory burdens to work through (ecological, safety, eminent domain, ...). The sky between airports, on the other hand, is free.
I've seen some suggestions that the sweet spot for trains is in medium length routes ("too far to drive, too near to fly"), with short haul routes being dominated by road vehicles (cars, taxis, buses) and long haul routes being dominated by airplanes (fast, don't need to buy/lease/maintain rails across thousands of miles)
A driver, a ticket inspector, and someone to run the café? Three people? Shared amongst a few hundred passengers? Is that really a significant cost?
Of course, there are also 44 hour routes. Or less popular routes without 300 passengers that are run for political reasons, or because they feed passengers into the more popular routes. Or the popular routes when run off-peak, so passengers can still use the route even if they may occasionally need some flexibility in when they travel. The video suggests amtrack employs 1 person per 4 riders, not per 100! For a route half the distance (DC to New York - 3.5-5 hours) they attribute $25/ticket to labor costs.
You've got stories like this where Japan is keeping open a train station for a single passenger - do you think that route has 300 people on it there? And this is in a country where trains are popular and some routes are packed to the brim in the middle of rush hour: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2016/01/japan-keeps-t...
You could tax the airline industry into the ground but it will not fix the reality that trains simply are not flexible, similar to how light rail in cities is not ideal for the majority of cities that employ it; for many city transportation systems light rail eats away a disproportionate amount of the budget impacting bus availability as well - it is a money pit
A previous financial times article [0] explains some of the political problems but far too many still do not understand the logistical side of rail lines.
[0]https://www.ft.com/content/e77dc48e-7894-11e8-8e67-1e1a0846c...
A decade ago we build HS1, a 67 mile track between London and the Channel Tunnel, for a total of $7.6 billion ($112m / mile).
HS2 is longer but its 330 miles of tracks will cost $400m / mile.
The project costs make absolutely no sense: London is a special weird place in the UK where everything you build is twice as expensive as in the rest of the country. Considering most of HS1 was in London and most of HS2 is outside of London, this budget makes absolutely no sense.
What makes the whole thing even more insane is that the endpoints are not connected to the rest of the infrastructure. You have a 30 minute trip between HS1 and HS2. So if you're travelling from Birmingham to Paris you'll have to switch trains in London. For the money they're spending on this it's crazy that you're not getting it.
See: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-51415590
The only other thing I'd add is that Euston is easily within walking distance of St Pancras. But given all this already extraordinary cost it seems like you might as well connect St Pancras and Euston HS lines and have the odd Eurostar service run from Birmingham.
For travellers who don't know London, who have to lug around baggage and small children it's a massive pain.
It's well worth the effort to connect it. It would already be way better even if you had to switch train in one station.
Also inflation had to be taken into account when comparing projects that are decades apart.
So without knowing much about the details, it might well be that the costs are plausible to what was proposed.
The comparison of HS2 with 18 paths per hour in each direction, on an overground rail system stretching over 320 miles, running at high speed (theoretical uppper speed limit of 250mph), with the London Underground, is laughable. I could not find any references to your claim in the official documents.
The project was never about speed, but rather about increasing capacity. It was packaged and sold to the voters as shaving off some time to get from A to B, largely due to politrickery. The aim is to free up commuter, regional and freight capacity on existing lines ─ which will also have an overall impact on roads and motorway nework used by freight carriers.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
The point I was trying to make was that a comparison to HS1 without accounting for the train frequency is probably not fair.
Ah, of course, it's the 'free market' that's the solution. I mean it's complete shit in the UK, where I live, but am sure that's just an outlier. The U.S. healthcare industry is a strong proof that the private model for essential services works flawlessly and now there's Reds again running in the election campaigning for 'Medicare for All'. Outrageous.
I don't expect my point to be landing with free market Regonomists, but seriously? I mean even trains in my native country, which is generally fairly undeveloped are a lot more dependable. Trains in the UK are regularly late, cancelled, broken due to the slightest change in weather that's fairly typical of the UK, overcrowded, slow etc. etc.
Maybe it was even worse before, but if this is what 'a lot better' looks like, then the private industry has a long way to go.
I think there's plenty of room for private industry, but am not sure essential public transportation is one of them.
German trains are a lot better run, (have family there presently, so can speak to that) and while they're technically owned by a private company, the state is the single shareholder there.
Perhaps the problem was that in the UK, like in the US, there's a strong desire to underfund and underpower public programs to be able to then point to them and say how they 'don't work' - the same has been the case for the NHS as well, which btw now has huge contracts with private companies like Virgin Health, who sue and waste public funds if they don't get a contract rather than conclude that their offering simply wasn't good enough in the 'free market'.
That's besides the point that there's no such thing as a 'free market' for most people, because most of us aren't of means enough to simply pack up and leave if there's no good train/ISP... choices in our area for example, nor do most of us have the ability to start our own.
If you look at ridership graphs for the UK they were in decline for decades. There was no investment because governments thought the railways had no future. Once privatised, ridership turned around and started growing again. Now there's lots of investment again. Usage figures show the story. UK rail is btw no worse than Germany. Look at data, not anecdotes. Or if you must use anecdotes:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2018/...
Railways have trouble with reliability in most countries that aren't Switzerland (which has 2x large subsidies).
You seem to believe only ideological people could possibly believe rail is better privatised. It's the other way around. Look at the quote from the leader of one of the rail unions in the UK. He praised privatisation. It's ideology to deny the turnaround so clear in the data.
That's because you are comparing standard railway companies with low-cost airlines. I believe that it would also cost around $300 to fly from London to Barcelona and back with British Airways or Iberia.
The era of low-cost railway companies in Europe is just beginning: FlixTrain[1] (Germany), OUIGO[2] (France), RegioJet[3], and LeoExpress[4] (both Central Europe) are now all offering long-distance train tickets from 10€.
[1] https://www.flixtrain.com/
[2] https://en.oui.sncf/en/ouigo/fares
[3] https://www.regiojet.com/services/services-on-board-of-train...
European trains are way more expensive AND I have to sit my way through long hours with not even pushback. Ouch my back hurts even thinking about it. Sleeper berths are extremely rare and even more expensive.
I just don't get how my fellow european humans consider this mode of travel plausible.
There are a few factors to rail that make it unsuitable for long distance.
First, there is 10s of 1000s of miles of track, all of which has to be laid, maintained, controlled and signalled. It has to be inspected and repaired and monitored and upgraded. Plus, you can't go directly anywhere. You can't take a train to Barcelona from London. You have to go via Dover for the tunnel, then lille because its a city and there's not track not via lille.
The air maintains itself and you can fly basically direct to wherever.
Plus a shit tonne of political interference (here in the UK we have stations basically next to each other no one will close and HS2 take a huge diversion to avoid politically sensitive areas, and that's just in one nation, try getting them to agree on train safety standards). For an airport, you basically just need a mile of tarmac and a tin shed. I don't think you even have to have radar anymore, just transponder tracking...
Plus, as you point out, the plan can carry 7 loads of people in the same time that the train can carry 1. So all things being equal (which they're not) you'd pay only 1/7th...
Plus, the costs for the Barcelona London route are basically fixed. The fact no one wants to make that journey in the winter just means the assets are unused. If no one wants to fly London to Barcelona in November, you can just switch the route and take people to their ski holidays instead. So planes are more versitile and has much higher utilisation rates than most trains.
Trains make sense but only over shorter distances. Anything over about 200 miles and planes win.
If you take into account the time overhead for airplanes, the break-even point is about 4 hours. For modern high-speed rail (speeds of over 200 mph), that's about 800 miles (NYC to Chicago, or Paris to Vienna). Most European high-speed rail lines outside France and Spain don't operate at that speed yet, but it's not uncommon for newly-built high-speed lines (which is why it's common in China).
The maximum speed that trains operate at in regular commercial service is 350 km/h (217 mph), so average speeds of nearly 200 mph are possible nowadays.
This means you just can't compete on the level that budget airlines can. Spirit, RyanAir, etc: they helped bring down prices across the industry. Flying used to be $300, but after relentless competition, even the more expensive airlines are now far cheaper than they used to be.
The inching down of leg room, saving pennies on drinks and food, paying for extra luggage; that kind of brutal cost saving just doesn't happen without merciless competition. And it's comparatively impossible to start a RyanRail: you can't just dump your trains in between the other ones. It's an inherently hard field to compete in. Even in the UK and NL, where different private companies compete, they do so by winning bids for sections of tracks, and exclusive access to those tracks. That's not the same as airlines. If only one airline could fly LDN->BCN, it wouldn't be $25. (case in point: KLM & SLM had a monopoly on flights Netherlands <-> Suriname for a while. The day they lost it, prices dropped >50%).
Most of the other things (salary expenses, track upkeep, etc) would follow if they could compete harder. We could have said the same about flying two decades ago; nobody would have predicted a $25 LDN->BCN, yet here we are.
(this is just my theory, and it's hard to conclusively disprove, therefore quite a weak one..)
But subsidies also play a role. France subsidizes rail as much as air travel is subsidized, and there rail is much more affordable.
The UKs new HS2 line is looking at costing £750m per mile while airspace is free.
I can hop on google flights and book a multi-city trip, I get a single price, and it's basically going to steer me towards roughly the cheapest option, within a set of parameters (e.g. trip time) that I can set.
With trains? Just nearly impossible. You get directed to different websites for price/departure/arrival/amenities information. It becomes a logistical nightmare to plan anything. When booking flights you sometimes get directed as well to multiple sites, but only for final booking, not the search stage.
And then indeed, the websites are not in English.
Or they have pricing which requires a national discount card which you don't have and can't get online, and makes the trip otherwise extremely expensive.
Or you can book your train ticket, but you have to pick up the tickets at the station, which gives anxiety because googling half of these options gets you to forums which say the ticket service is closed until 10AM, while your train arrives at the station with the service at 8AM, and the next train (for which you need to pick up the ticket) leaves at 9AM. And the only reason you know this, is because of some underground travel forum with 3 posts in the past 5 years about this train station.
Or you can only look up train tables online, but you can't even reserve tickets online, you have to buy at the station, but they can get sold out, and you're looking to buy tickets for a summer trip in 4 months, so there's literally just no way to plan any other trips or hotel reservations because you have no clue if you can be on that train, until in 4 months.
And then you have to go to a travel company which literally sends employees to buy a hundred tickets in bulk, then resells them online to you at a huge markup. But these are just 3-man companies that come and go, lots of scams, lots of markup, and they may sell only some tickets, but not others, meaning to plan a long vacation by train, you're depending on lots of these little companies.
At that point I just think, screw that, I'm just going to browse on google flights and be done with planning in 1 hour, it's cheaper, no anxiety, no stress, no dependencies, no scams, lots of insurance and assurance, all in English, mostly through reputable companies with normal UI/UX design.
If you need timetables then Bahn.de also covers almost all of central Europe and the app is usable. You can even do eg London to Beijing.
There's also the European Timetable book https://www.seat61.com/Thomas-Cook-European-Timetable.htm
I skimmed a couple Wikipedia articles and tolerated the International Civil Aviation Organization's website[0], but couldn't find a group that decided the traveler-facing standards.
Not only because it's better for the environment but I really like trains. They are confy, fast and cheap. There's no need to pay extra for your baggage, you just hop in with your stuff, take a seat, read, watch a movie, listen to a podcast or sleep for a while and you're already at your destination.
Also they are much more expensive. Which makes sense as tech itself is legacy. The cost of maintaining, lack of competition (especially with buses) is killing them.
Honestly I don't see how we can't replace trains with electric buses...
https://www.express.co.uk/travel/articles/816431/Ryanair-fli...
Also, personally, I prefer trains even just for the fact I have not to lose 2 extra uncomfortable hours between checkin and security checks.
I used to travel Southampton to London a lot (that's like 150km or so). IIRC renting a car used to be cheaper.
Either way the train is far faster.
I've once missed my train in UK. Next one was something like 120 pounds vs 8 pounds for bus. I think it's the last time I've ever took bus.
IMHO difference in price should start to increase as electric bus TCO is already lower than diesel. The difference in XP should increase as less noise and pollution is added. Plus adding premium seats, air suspension would make a massive difference.
Oh geez. Even with our pretty crappy trains in Australia, I'd still take a train every time. Trains are faster, offer much smoother rides and are much more efficient than busses.
I suspect you've never taken a train, or a bus.
But only inside the Netherlands, I only know a few commuters in my circles who go by train; the rest drive a car, noting inconvenience (train then tram instead of door to door) and, more so, high prices as reason.
Sure, there might be room for improvement in some areas, but Dutch trains are the third most punctual in the world, after Japan and Switzerland: https://www.railtech.com/policy/2019/01/03/dutch-passenger-t...
Are you suggesting that Germans and French don't enjoy a good complaint?
Nowadays, the backlog in maintenance seems to be sorted out and things run generally well again. Although I still plan a half hour safety margin when traveling to schiphol airport by train.
Dutch rail infra was designed as a commuter network, and it shows.
A large part of the comfort factor is that a direct train takes me from city center to city center, while a "direct" flight requires me to first get to the airport, then navigate the airport, then get from the destination airport to the city. That not only easily adds at least 2 hours to the trip (30 min x 2 spent getting to/from the airport, 30 minutes to get through the airport/security in the best case, 30 minutes to be there at the boarding time), you also spend at least half of the time actively having to do something.
A 4 hour train vs. a 1 hour flight? The flight shaves off one hour of wall-clock time at best, at the cost of being a lot more hassle. But you don't think about this when booking, nor about the luggage surcharge etc. You see "4:00" vs. "1:07" and "$99" vs. "$29".
I wouldn't call that slow. Not as fast as a plane but it's not slow at all.
I tried to find something equivalent in Europe to compare, maybe Frankfurt to Berlin? Google Maps is showing that as 4h16 by ICE over 549 km, for an average speed of 128 km/h.
Maybe the inefficiencies can be eliminated and the European trains can get closer to 200 km/h average speed?
Ah, I took the ICE from Frankfurt to Berlin last year on a last minute ticket. A bunch of things come to mind. In no particular order:
- Tokyo - Kyoto is pretty much the premier Shinkansen line. Is Frankfurt - Berlin considered the same?
- I was pretty underwhelmed with the overall comfort on the ICE trip (slightly less than Amtrak's Acela). The Shinkansen (well, at least Tokyo - Kansai Region) is really on a whole other level.
- A last minute ICE ticket Frankfurt - Berlin was fairly expensive (> $100 if memory serves), I didn't price advance tickets. Berlin - Amsterdam tho got dramatically cheaper the further out you booked your ticket.
- Spain's Barcelona - Madrid train has regularly raised its peak speed (now at 310 kph) and if my calculations from the Wikipedia page are correct RENFE completes the 621 km trip in 2.5 hours (about 250 kph average).
- Amsterdam Centraal is perhaps one of the most obnoxious stations I've had to navigate. Every Dutch resident I've talked with has complained about the punctuality followed by complaining about how unnecessarily unintuitive the fares are.
Germany still has a fair amount of diesel service and a ton of legacy infrastructure. Spain is basically converting all of their non-standard gauge rail to a more common gauge and rolling out a ton of high speed service. I've only done relatively short trips (Madrid - Toledo) versus a variety of longer distance trips in Germany.
Stop counts are always a difficult balance for longer routes: They slow the trains down, increasing end-to-end travel time, but provide connections to more people and regions.
2 adults from Valencia to Madrid and with return for 70€ at a max speed of 300km/h.
We should also take in consideration that planes are cheap because they have become the main mean of transport for long distances for the last decades.
I can't see why we couldn't do this with trains. Invest in infrastructure and use it as much as we can.
There already is form of transport that's much cheaper than train or flying which is called BUS. We can make them fully electric and even have different classes. They can share existing infrastructure that doesn't require thousands of specialised people to maintain or operate...
Spending on highways and roads was $175 billion in the US in 2016 [0]. They absolutely do require massive numbers of people to maintain them - for example, Caltrans, the California agency that manages the state highway system, has over 18,000 permanent staff.
[0] https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...
Zurich to Paris just takes too long by train, and doing night trains isn't always an option.
Many cities it’s a nightmare to get to the airport, whereas the train station is usually central.
German trains pack as much people as possible and occasionally you can consider yourself lucky if you manage to reach your seat, if the wagon is still available to start with.
None of my train trips in Europe (Scandinavia, Germany, Switzerland) had the issues you mentioned.
In particular, the designers of the German ICEs seem to have realized over the past ~decade that people don't want to lift heavy bags overhead (especially if the compartment is too small), and that when the only other space to store them is the corridor, the corridor will be full of bags. They added dedicated luggage racks with enough space to actually fit your luggage.
In any case, that was just an example, I am not doing Germany - Portugal by train, unless forced to do so. It is more than 24h.
That's the point, we need to expand the rail network to make longer distance trips shorter, more comfortable, and affordable. Flying can't continue to be the default option.
For short and medium distances it rarely is, given that
A) for flights, you ought to be at the airport 1 to 2 hours before departure.
B) the train typically takes you from city centre to city centre, while the airport is frequently 1/2 to 1 hours out.
C) on the train, you can work non-stop, while on a short flight a good proportion of the time you spend in security, boarding, take-off and approach, where you can’t be on your laptop.
D) on many routes, trains depart every hour or even more frequently, so you can basically go whenever you want.
It's a nudge over 4 hours by TGV from Zurich center to Paris center. That is almost certainly comparable to getting from city center to airport, checking in, waiting before flight, flying, waiting for bags, and getting to city center at the other end. Of course, if your source and destination are closer to the airport and you have no bags/minimize waiting time that might tip the flight in your balance but I doubt it'd be very far off in many cases. Personally I'd much rather take the train here -- I find it more comfortable and convenient than flying and for me the overall time taken is comparable.
It can also be cheap. I've had several €29 fares on that route.
100€ both ways can be considered a good price, unless one also owns a Bahncard.
My tips would be:
* Book at least a week in advance.
* Buy a Bahn Card 25.
* Get up early.
If you do this Berlin -> Munich is €44.90 next Saturday on the 4 hour fast train. Also don't forget, it costs around €11 to go from Munich airport to the city.
One thing I despise about trains in Germany and France is that the experience still feels way too old school. What happens when something is delayed or when a connection has an issue makes you feel back in the eighties. The Deutsche Bahn applications are a great way to see that, it's confused and overly complicated. I wish the UX of apps/websites like https://www.trainline.eu/ would be the standard by now.
Why does buying an affordable train ticket always involve a treasure hunt of weird ticketing combinations and cards like this?
In the end the cheapest option was not to use a BahnCard 25 or 50 but to buy two one-way tickets for each leg from the regional transportation provider via a smartphone app, because smartphone tickets are sold at a discount. It's wasn't just a bit cheaper but about 30%.
I'm considering if it's a good idea to tax air travel inside the EU to help the trains move forward. I believe air travel is not taxed at all. The resulting money could be spent on climate change reducing policies.
Most tickets I get are usually £10 fare then like £50 taxes? I think those are passenger duty Vs the actual flight itself though if that is what you mean?
This is different from tax, as without it you would not fly.
The big advantage of air travel is exactly this, you don't need to spend much time in the actual plane. And the passengers are by definition under full-time supervision by other passengers, so stealing or attacks are not so easy to get away with.
Having said that, I would still prefer to take the train when it's possible. Central railway stations are usually pretty much in the best locations of most European cities, where the connections are really good.
But there is one more thing that even the article mentions: > In general, there is strong demand for reliable and frequent services between large cities
I second that: even in Germany the I.C.E is notorious for the delays and the poor passenger experience. So there is a lot to improve for the rail operators.
>The big advantage of air travel is exactly this, you don't need to spend much time in the actual plane. And the passengers are by definition under full-time supervision by other passengers, so stealing or attacks are not so easy to get away with.
There are also drawbacks to air travel that you're not mentioning. I was in a sleeping segment with 5 other people and felt more safe than in an airplane. The important thing though is: we need to cut down on carbon, and travel by train is an important way to do it.
Traveling less is even more effective.
With all the debate about transport modes, it still boils down to distance - the emissions per passenger kilometer of all powered modes of transport are within one order of magnitude.
It’s rarely a good idea to look at a proxy instead of the real kpi you want to optimize. Don’t tax air travel. Tax CO2 emission of the fuel if that is what you want to reduce.
It's so bad that the train companies themselves ask their employees use flights instead of the network railways to save costs. They're all owned by european governments, so they have no incentive to make things cheaper in the UK.
Because the majority of humanity has never flown at all. What fraction of your CO2 emissions came from flying last year?
I took 6 flights (~3,000km each).
I would start with the immediate implementation of a tax (10%?, 20%?) on all new ICE vehicle sales. Revenue from this tax would be used to subsidize the purchase of EVs.
I looked up one of my flights (actually only about 2,400km) using that calculator and only got 230kg (83kg of C02 and 173kg of "contrails, ozone formations, etc."). This flight was on a A321neo.
It's getting ridiculous; everybody is shifting blame to something or someone else because we all think small chunks and, obviously, each one of those chunks, individually, doesn't contribute much in terms of percentages. If you think this way, nobody will ever get anything done.
The second priority should be cost. Train travel should never be more expensive than even low cost airline tickets. Within the EU this would seem fixable by taxing and subsidies to just move money from air travel to train ticket subsidies. Tax funded subsidies is a clumsy instrument but it’s needed.
For many routes, if we did this, aircraft would perhaps not be price-competitive with rail. So be it.
* French rail strikes this winter caused:
a) my Zurich to London TGV to be cut short (it started from a later station), 3 days before departure b) my connecting Eurostar to be cancelled, so I had to no-show the TGV and cancel the Eurostar to fly c) my return Eurostar was not cancelled, but d) my TGV was, 4 days before travelling, so again I had to cancel the Eurostar and the TGV and fly e) I filed claims for the disrupted/cancelled trains. Eurostar refunded me immediately but I waited 7 weeks for a reply from SNCF before calling them a few times to get my refund
Sure, strikes affect other modes of transport but the hassle here was the amount of coordination I had to do to fix my travel.
* I booked a Zurich -> London roundtrip on oui.sncf but later needed to change my return. I called SNCF because the site wouldn't let me change the ticket online. SNCF told me they couldn't change my Eurostar -- I had to call Eurostar for that, then call SNCF again to change the TGV. They didn't know what would happen to the fare. I gave up and bought new single returns. Next time I'll by Eurostar tickets from Eurostar and TGV from SNCF.
* Changing trains in Paris is a nuisance. It's not hard (2 stops on the RER) but it adds significant extra time, particularly on Paris -> London where there is passport control. I've taken bikes from the UK to France a lot and hauling them on the RER sucks.
* It's often pricier, at least for Eurostar. The TGV prices are often cheap (from €29 Zurich->Paris) but Eurostar gets expensive fast unless you book way in advance.
Travel within Switzerland and the surrounding countries is great but in general making long trips with connections between systems is harder and problems have greater consequences. There's no form of alliance or easy rebooking or anything like that -- a lot of problem solving is down to you.
But! When it works travel by train is relaxing, enjoyable (for me), can be more convenient (less bag hassle, train stations generally central), not to mention less bad for the environment.
So it depends, but obviously there are cases where they do offer a better alternative.
b) Plane takes longer than 2 hours when you factor getting to/from the airport and passing through security. Plane is obviously still faster to Munich, but to Paris, Amsterdam, even Bordeaux? I am not so sure.
We would need a European infrastructure project for:
* major new transnational lines
* separation from passenger and cargo lines
* self coupling/decoupling wagons
And when you are on it, build some Thorium reactors to power them.
Relevant:
https://www.thelocal.se/20200116/sweden-reveals-plans-for-ov...
North of the alps and south of the Scandinavian is doable, but a lot of that territory is Belarus, Ukraine and Russia.
You have a natural corridor that can connect france with finland - which maps nicely with the hanseatic league territories. But from Athens to Amsterdam there is no way to build competitive train service compared to flights.
I’m more excited by the prospect of electric/hydrogen powered regional air travel. IMHO that is what will start to make a real difference.
Or I can tell you: You have to take the train to St. Petersburg and change there. Going to someplace like Paris you'd have to change one more time, and of course the trip would be long.
You can find other weird routes if you try, too. Teheran to Bangkok by train is a weird one. You have to go west via Istanbul, then northeast to Moscow, then take the Transsiberian, then south through China, finally westwards to Bangkok. All possible but very convoluted and hardly something you'd do in order to reach the destination.
In one way it reminds me of some friends of mine who went on a trip around the world for two months — on one airline ticket. The ticket was to New Zealand and back, with quite a few longish stopovers. Not the itinerary one would choose just to get to New Zealand.
The thing is, you have to make trains an actually viable solution for people (speed, comfort). High speed all across the Europe would help a lot.
[0] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2007/04/High-speed-trains-...
...but commercial airline planes are public transportation.