Spain's efficient high-speed trains have transformed people's lives | Hacker News Reader

Spain's efficient high-speed trains have transformed people's lives

theguardian.com

66 pointssaguntum33 comments

A personal note from anecdotes i had this year on Spanish trains.

I used the company Iryo, which its mother company is Trenitalia. After living in Germany, i was positively baffled by the quality of the trains, the cleanliness, the speed and most even more relevant and what made me jealous: The price.

A ticket Valencia - Madrid costed 14eur. Which immediately made me wonder about how do they even manage to make money?

In Germany, the high speed trains have the same quality, but by no means the price. Impossible to see that price for a Deutsche Bahn ticket.

For visiting other cities in Spain, it’s always cheaper to just pay a flight to Madrid and get a high speed train to somewhere. But this is also benefiting from the geographical position of Madrid into the country.

Kudos to Spain for this and i wish they can keep low prices with high quality of travel for its citizens.

They seem to use a similar model to low cost airlines. Depending on when you travel and when you buy the ticket, the price varies dramatically.

I recently travelled midweek from Lleida to Madrid return for €40, but I've also paid more than €100 for the same when traveling around the weekend.

Not everything has to make money, especially public infrastructure.

Also, a good railway increases profits elsewhere, in addition to fares, as people can cheaply and relatively comfortable travel across the country.

Trenitalia has to make money since it's partly a private company.

If it's critical infrastructure, it'll get nationalized anyway when struggling.

Correct, but Iryo is a private company, although the railway in Spain is publicly maintained i guess by Renfe. So i believe Iryo should make money, specially (as mentioned in another comment below) it's part of Trenitalia. But i'm definitely not an economist.

The public railway infrastructure is maintained by Adif [1], which is owned by the Spanish state.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrador_de_Infraestructu...

Iryo and Ouigo only arrived in Spain recently. They are selling tickets at cost or even below cost to gain some market share. Ouigo has already stopped some routes because the losses were insurmountable even in a promotional period.

If you want to look at actual prices, look at RENFE (AVE) prices. Even RENFE's own AVLO loses money, it's there only to counter Iryo and Ouigo until they will rise prices or go bankrupt.

+1, Iryo and Ouigo are recent and they are losing money. Renfe has always been tremendously expensive - more expensive than a car or plane.

These train travel success stories are anti-personal transportation propaganda. They want to push you to using trains and then they will raise the prices - they want you not travelling anywhere if you are poor.

This is also my concern, that it does not look realistic and hence my initiative to start commenting in the topic. What is the reality and intention of only privately held companies with such small fares?

What i've heard is that, before, Renfe had a monopoly and since these new players came into picture, the prices have dropped dramatically in Renfe ticket fares. So definitely is good to see the benefits, but is it now also Renfe losing money and would the quality decrease? This would be a bad scenario for everyone then.

Unfortunately, no, prices haven't dropped for Renfe fares.

Coupled with: https://twitter.com/el_pais/status/1716776148049285585

There clearly is a reason for all of this: they don't want you travelling if you are poor.

Having lived in both Sevilla and Barcelona, the high speed lines (until very recently only operated by RENFE as the AVE service) are really amazing and a great value. Also, RENFE has a media-distancia service that isn't quite high speed rail but still pretty fast and efficient, that serves routes like Barcelona-Valencia in ~3.5 hours.

I only wish the international high-speed routes in Europe were easier to book and the prices were lower. It's still at least 2-3x the price to take a train from Barcelona-Amsterdam for instance (which I recently did) then to fly. I have no problem with the much longer duration of the train journey but they need to do something to get trains more competitive price-wise with air, perhaps by increasing taxes significantly for short-ish (<2-3 hours?) plane trips when a viable rail alternative exists, and using that to subsidize the train tickets? I don't know what can be done but it's going to be impossible to convince the public to go on a train for longer trips when both driving and flying are way cheaper.

The whole "Eurorail" "pissing match" between jurisdictions/countries, where you have to confirm/book everything, sometimes manually, ostensibly because of "interoperability" issues ... ... is sad.-

It would be a gamechanger for Europe, were it to function in a frictionless, integrated, simple way.-

To be honest, Spain is almost ideal for high-speed trains. Big conurbations with millions or at least hundreds of thousands people, separated by mostly empty land where few people ever see or hear the trains rushing to and fro.

This article is from the Guardian and it would be fair to mention that densely packed English countryside is on just another level when it comes to NIMBY obstacles. Any high speed track out of London must either be wholly underground, or cut through hundreds, if not thousands of private gardens, and their owners will be hard to placate. Population density of Southeast England is pretty extreme even for Western Europe.

Yep, with HS2 the engineering came in under budget. Tory councils bringing legal objections pushed the price up.

Spanish politics is based on coalition; when a government is voted out, it generally retains a significant presence in the next government.

The UK looks like it's about to send the tories to the shadow realm, so they have zero incentive to do any long-term thinking.

My belief is that Sunak has cancelled this project out of sheer spite, to salt the earth for when the next government restarts it, so that in five years' time they can do their customary blame-it-on-labour bollocks. And they aren't expecting any votes from the north anyway.

My heart goes out to those who had their homes compulsorily purchased, but if they now buy them back, they will only be purchased again. The obvious winners are developers who sweep in to buy in the expectation that they'll be CPOd at a higher price in a year.

The Tory party is broke and in need of donations to fight the next election. If any of their donors then buy land back from HS2, I shall be cross.

While I hope that Spanish politics continue to be based in coalitions, this is a very recent phenomenon, with a two-party political system historically dominating the country's politics, a tradition that predates the democratic system itself. [1]

For what it's worth, I believe the plan is to keep most of the land that was purchased for HS2, as to make it possible for the project to be restarted at a later date.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turno

It’s interesting to see that low population density is an advantage here - it’s usually described as a financially obstacle for most infrastructure projects ( telco, etc )

it's high density urban centers with empty countryside in between. the problem with low density is that many areas don't have enough people close enough to any station to be able to get there without a car

In Spain, there's usually no "density gradient" between the core of a city and its suburbs.

The core of the city is dense, the suburbs are equally dense, and the conurbation's edge is a street which has a five-story building on one side and farmland on the other. Outside the conurbation, it's primarily farmlands and forests, with even small towns following a similar pattern.

That is, the density of a given area is either somewhere in the thousands of people per square kilometer, or in single digits.

(Some cities do break this pattern to some extent, but it's mostly isolated phenomena, such as the suburbs of Madrid around the A-6, or the continuum of housing along the Costa del Sol)

While Renfe trains are great travel alternative, they only transformed people's lives, for those people that live close enough to the train stations where they stop.

And if one needs to take their car to one of those stations due to lack of transport alternatives, they end up doing the whole travel by car anyway.

> they end up doing the whole travel by car anyway.

I'm not sure this is true, but I haven't seen any official numbers to support this or what you're saying.

Anecdotally, consider the Maresme line ending in Barcelona. Plenty of people take their car to Mataro or the smaller stations before/after, and take the train in to Barcelona leaving their car at the stations, as entering Barcelona in the morning is a big hassle with a car.

As someone with roots in Iberian penisula, across both countries, where I lived half of my life and routinely come back to, approaching 50y, anecdotallyis what I see when people are forced to drive from small towns.

Entering big cities is big hassle with the car, yet plenty of people put up with it, due to the convinence that public transport isn't available everywhere, connections get dropped, delayed, or carriages are taking more passengers than they should.

> public transport isn't available everywhere, connections get dropped, delayed

This is 100% not the case in Barcelona.

> or carriages are taking more passengers than they should

Perhaps at the absolute peak of rush hour, but the roads are just as bad at that time as well.

Barcelona is one city, one of the richests in the Penisula, and the capital of the Catalonia region.

Think outside of the box, of the rest of the other people outside Barcelona, specially the regions that aren't that full of money on their ayuntamiento.

This is true.

Also, high-speed trains are a lot (2x, 3x or more) more expensive than the traditional trains were, for a very small time savings (15-20%) in many cases, which means a lot of people cannot afford to travel by train anymore. So yes, high-speed trains transformed people's lives but not always in a positive manner.

Are the older train routes no longer running trains?

I'd expect them to have cheaper tickets between the same cities, if you don't care about the speed.

They are; in France they are referred to as Intercités and Ouigo Classique.

In Spain, especially after the closures in the 80s [1], the traditional rail network, which was already chronically under-maintained, also became, with some exceptions, hopelessly disjointed. Many of the remaining operating routes can't meaningfully connect the territories they pass through with each other, only to Madrid.

As more and more of the main cities are brought into the high speed network, the traditional network is given less funding and less service, to the detriment of the smaller towns served by it. However, it is important to note that this trend was already underway before the high speed network was in place.

The remaining regional train between Barcelona and Madrid, for example, takes eight hours by the schedule (nine or ten in real life) while the high speed trains take three hours or less.

Occasionally, some services survive that use the high speed network for most of the trip, then switch to the traditional network for the last leg of the trip.

[1]: https://nitter.net/pablomarinas_/status/1361406780757200898

Most of the non-high speed routes are gone indeed. There's 1 non-high speed per day, while there are 8-10 high-speed (which are a lot more expensive).

Necessary rebuttal: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2013/12/high-speed-trains-...

Good article as a rebuttal. One caveat: the comparison between high-speed and conventional rail is overshadowing the privatization/market forces of the operators themselves. HSR will be invariably more expensive to run because the energy costs are much higher, but a lot of that price tag is — I assume — the profit margin of the private company. Public rail can run at cost, but private can’t.

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