Europe wants a high-speed rail network to replace airplanes | Hacker News Reader

Europe wants a high-speed rail network to replace airplanes

cnn.com

21 pointskrn24 comments

We need to first get past: 1) differing rail gauges 2) inability to buy international tickets from many (most?) national rail providers

Here in Portugal, the formerly national rail line "Comboio Portugal" was privatized and sold off to 1 (one) company. This was the stupidest possible thing we could have done. They promptly shutdown many interior (lower profit) lines and left many areas as transport-deserts, shifting even MORE traffic to our limited roads infrastructure (the entire eastern side of Coimbra just shut down afterwards as a result. It's still low-value real-estate for precisely the lack of transport. The famous Lousã line etc.) Nevermind that this monopolistic idiocy was repeated across telecom and other industries, focusing purely on railways, we have basically coastal coverage with some select lines through the interior (The once-a-day Alfa Pendular Lisboa-> Madrid line, for example)

Our railway decadence roughly mirrors the US rail decline, as cars clearly dominate the Iberian peninsula...

If a line is not profitable, it's not that bad to get rid of. If the stations want to stay open, they should pay the train operator to stop there. Then people can locally decide if they want the station or not. Another alternative would have been to have it as a demand when it was sold. When you buy the company, you are obligated to keep these lines open.

This is the difference between a business and a service. The unprofitable lines could have continued as a government-backed service to promote economic development, for example.

That's what I said, if the locals think it's important for them then they can pay for it.

> if the locals think it's important for them then they can pay for it

That's what I thought you were saying, but that's not what I'm saying. There might never be enough local money to support it. But the regional or higher levels of government might think it's strategically important, or even profitable over a much wider area beyond local municipalities. For example, the USPS services rural areas where they lose money because it's considered important enough.

Municipalities can certainly work together on a regional level, my explanation does not exclude that option. Just that the funding has to come from the local level, this serves as a verification that there is a local need for the line and that the need outweighs the alternatives.

We know the line in question was not profitable, that's why it was shut down. I don't know if this was beyond municipality level but I would assume so.

Whoever keeps downvoting my posts should perhaps try and participate in the debate ;)

I don't have a down button, but I can see why someone used theirs.

1. Why would you verify local need, if the need is national?

2. Why would you verify inability to pay with ability to pay?

Spain's demographic problems are exacerbated by lack of rail access to certain areas. Portugal faces similar issues. If they want a strategic rail line, why would they apply the unrelated criteria you propose?

I know it's not you, but even if you had downvote rights you wouldn't be able to revenge downvote a direct comment.

If it's not profitable nationally then I argue the need isn't very big, so they should spend their tax money more wisely on things where the need is clear. Local municipalities are well aware of their needs hence why it is better to have it local.

I don't get your two questions, maybe you can rephrase them?

By that logic, a country can't make long-term investments, and can't provide unprofitable services that have other benefits. My two questions challenged your circular reasoning.

The more you do that, the less people think about the train as an option and the less they use the other lines as well. Plus it gives an opportunity for other, more polluting modes of transportation to develop, since no one is suggesting we do the same thing with roads.

The roads in Europe are paid for several times over by the taxes on fuel.

Don't forget toll roads. They rake in billions in profits every year and keep making excuses not to decrease the toll fees. Worse, they have roadworks with decreased speed limits on really busy roads at the worst possible time, which in some cases makes your average speed lower on the toll road than on a toll-free road.

The key is to think about it, not in terms of just the money brought in, but the wider benefits to society: keeping traffic off the roads is a big one. That is what makes running national infrastructure difficult; it's never entirely obvious how to balance the different factors.

What US rail decline? Rail has a higher freight modal share in the US than any major European countries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usag...

Maybe they meant passenger rail where we are last (by capita/transport share)

Our country is too big and sparsely populated to make passenger rail viablr. It's why our airline industry is top notch.

This is surprising because train tickets have gone nothing but up, at least in France. You used to be able to do Paris-Marseille (660km, 410 US miles) in 3:30 hours, for 30€. Recently it's operated by private companies, who limit you to one piece of luggage and make you check in in advance, and charge you 150€. Like they are trying to be an airplane company but slower and more expensive. I thought we had given up to be honest.

I have trouble following your post. Paris-Marseille is still strictly operated by SNCF. Some of them might be under their low cost branding but that’s still SNCF and a one-way trip is 37€ provided you book it one month in advance.

Local services will be partially operated by a private company from 2025 onwards but to be fair it will be hard to do worth than SNCF in the south. They are on strike so often they could stop working I’m not sure anyone would notice.

> Some of them might be under their low cost branding but that’s still SNCF and a one-way trip is 37€ provided you book it one month in advance.

This is exactly their problem: over-the-counter tickets are prohibitively expensive, making them effectively operate like airlines if not worse, and taking all its drawbacks from the customer point of view but none of the advantages.

Domestic railways has recently been open to competition, but prices still haven't gone down much enough to match with the low-cost carriers they're competing with.

I'm running into an error using https://www.sncf-connect.com/app/home/search, no matter what I enter in. The last 3 times I took the trip (pre-COVID mind you, and maybe not booked a whole month in advance), that was the price.

edit: works in Chrome, here are the trips exactly 1 month from now (August 6): 65€ 6am, 65€ 7:13am, 116€ 7:39am, 116€ 9:36am, 116€ 10:39am. A month and a half or two months advance seem to be required now, how bad we think it is is up to debate but it's definitely worse than when I commuted regularly, 2009-2011.

Not going to deny it’s less easy that it used to be but SNCF desesperately needs to extract some values from their business customers. Apart from a couple of lines of which Paris-Marseille isn’t they are always losing money on trip.

Also if you struggle with SNCF Connect which is terrible my advise is to use Trainline instead. It’s not as good as it used to be when the French part was still CaptainTrain but it’s miles better than the SNCF app.

> use Trainline instead

Yeah this was already the wisdom in the days of voyage-sncf.com. Some things never change.

Low speed rail is much more efficient and Europe is having a major energy crunch. It might make more sense to construct an enhanced high speed capable rail network and then run mostly low speed trains on it until ongoing transitions in energy markets are more advanced.

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