Sometimes I enjoy the experience, but sometimes I just want to not waste more than 40 minutes on travel time. I suppose that's just comfort/ease at the expense of emissions.
...and then politicians such as Ursula von der Leyen hop in their jets. This summer the EU Commission President took a 19 minute(!) flight from Vienna to Bratislava (the two cities are ~60km apart) in a private yet, but still managed to be driven ~60km by road during the transfers from central Vienna out to VIE airport and from BTS airport back to central Bratislava.
https://www.diepresse.com/6055894/kritik-an-19-minuten-flug-...
Why would you want the Executive leader of the EU risking event and meeting timings when she's representing almost the entire continent all in order to "deliver a message"? Should the US president take a taxi when going from DC to New York?
In any case the message is clearly not dependent on this since basically only the AfD and British tabloids are feigning outrage over this.
That's a bit of a red herring. Air travel is often disrupted, probably as much as trains.
>In any case the message is clearly not dependent on this since basically only the AfD and British tabloids are feigning outrage over this.
Well we are discussing it here and this is definitely no the Daily Mail.
Besides, she is not a spokesperson. She is the head of the civil service.
A 60km flight is terrible, no doubt about that. However, had it been 500, you’d have heard the exact same complaints.
Where?
For TGV Inoui (the main brand) you have to be in the train 2 minutes before (written on any ticket, also here: https://www.sncf.com/fr/offres-voyageurs/voyager-en-train/tg...), and that's all. People flow through the gate up to the last minute. It has been like this for at least a decade.
For TGV Ouigo (low-cost brand), it seems to be 30 minutes according to https://www.ouigo.com/faq?question=ai-je-pense-a-tous-avant-...
I never understood this constraint with Ouigo though; it's obviously possible to skip it as shown by Inoui trains... and both are operated by the same company from the same train stations.
In Brussels.
However in practice most people respect the 30 minutes, so that you can arrive 10min before the train and get your ticket checked without waiting in line. This is not guaranteed. But often works. I take a lot of OUIGO and never respect the 30 min, because you often wait 10min in line. Once I arrived 5min before departure, had my ticket checked but had to run in front of the correct car. When train arrives nobody is allowed to pass the checkpoint.
For the InOui you can always come 5min before departure, because tickets are checked on-board so there is no wait line.
For me, the are two international airports ~20 euro by cab away, while the rail stations are like ~30-40 euro away through unpredictable traffic.
Compare it with flight where you spend half of the time not using your laptop or without connectivity.
After COVID, how many people can do remote work? Don't underestimate the percentage of population that can use the time on a train in good ways.
If anything, putting Brussels in the centre of the high speed rail net is a good reason for it to succeed.
Yep, that one with such tight schedules you have to systematically compensate for delays happening 3 out of 5 times by booking a train earlier than your planned connection. It cost me many hours and stress for three years when I was regularly going from East belgium to Paris/Lille.
Getting to Brussels or going from Brussels should be okay but may god help you if you want to make a connection in Brussels.
> If anything, putting Brussels in the centre of the high speed rail net is a good reason for it to succeed.
I doubt it. It's often said of the Brussels railways hub that it is totally saturated: not enough lanes and it's impossible to add more. Among commuters it's said as a fact but I don't know if it could be improved and if it's an urban legend rehashed to ramble on late trains. My personal experience reflects that though.
That said, Europe already has quite an extensive high-speed network - especially in its Western parts. The French TGV, for instance, has comparable speeds to the Japanese high speed services, and there are similar (if less complete) networks in Spain, Germany, and other countries. So a high-speed network between major centres is entirely feasible and, in fact, currently being built.
Trains are a lot more convenient in that regard.
That said, at least when you get on an airplane and it leaves the gate you have a pretty decent chance of making it to your destination when you expect to.
Certainly with British trains it feels like your chance of arriving on time (to 15 minutes or so) are about 50/50.
Very dependent on what route you take, though. And far from Swiss or Japanese levels of punctuality.
[0]: https://www.networkrail.co.uk/who-we-are/how-we-work/perform...
What it may do is not match your experiences (it varies a lot by time of day etc.), or be perfectly defined for the replacing-flights question. Both LNER (east coast) and Avanti (west coast) are fairly ordinary in long-distance terms. If the question was, say, Exeter to Newcastle by Cross Country I'd expect more extensive delays.
Anyway, you can explore the data (including breakdowns by quarter, by long distance vs commuter, and by operating company).[0]
[0]: https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/performance/passeng...
That _may_ explain the difference. The officially reported percentage is per train, not per passenger. Passenger onboarding can cause delays (for example, a rural station may, some days, have a school class enter a train. If you make room for that in the schedule, customers will ask why you stop for 5 minutes. If you don’t, the train will be late at its next stop, if that’s only a few kilometers away), so chances are trains with fewer passengers are more punctual. If so, the per passenger percentage of on time trains will be lower.
It also is measured only at final destinations. That percentage almost certainly is higher than that measured at each stop (a train that’s late half-way through can try to make up for lost time, but it can’t make up for being late at stops it already had)
Finally, there the question how cancelled trains are measured. Possibly, they aren’t counted as late, but do delay passengers.