Except this only helped the folks living close to big train station hubs, across the country there are plenty of places where the car is the only viable option.
My gripe with the ticket is that traveling with bikes in regional train became a gamble, you never know if you can get in as there is so many people inside already (and even more when the previous train got cancelled, which happens a lot...)
Intercity travel has lots of punctuality problems but many of the local train operations and S-Bahn are often much superior. At least in places where I have been, like Karlsruhe, Berlin, Hamburg the local transport has been very good.
Not everything in live is about long distance communing.
> 3h down to the 1h
That completely depends on the details of your route and ignores lots of possible aspects. As a universal statement its just outright false.
I've had similar experiences commuting into Cologne where it's 40 minutes by car or 2 hours by train, and that's without delays. In the rush hours it's 60 minutes by car. A missed train connection adds another half hour.
What exactly do you mean by that? "never far" as in "always within walking distance"? That would be very wrong.
The other factor is that frequency of service is low outside of major cities. At the need to change and a small-distance trip can take a couple of hours.
Yes there are places where cars are better in some aspects, but that is the case no matter how the ticket is structured. You can't magically extend the train network by reducing ticket price.
And if cars are the only viable option is questionable, as there are many people even in those places who don't own a car. They just have to live with subpar bus system or other local transport.
I don't understand how anybody can paint this as a bad thing. Are you also against universal health care by any chance?
Every city has public transport.
There is a large density of public transport throughout the country: trains, local trains, underground trains, busses, ferries, ...
The ticket is valid there, too.
if you are in the rushhour and a traffic jam (not an unusual problem), then the train will be faster. Plus one can work in the train or relax.
My regional train here 20km going into the city center is impossible to beat by car.
77.77% of the people live in cities. 55% live in cities with >20k people. Generally Germany is a decentralized country with a lot of regions with local center cities. There are 15 cities with >500k people. France has only four.
That car traffic has generally less problems than the train system is a myth. Check the ADAC traffic event overview on a random workday.
And that's before we get into questions like "How many of your hours of paid work are required to make car payments, insurance payments, tag, title and maintenance?"
Just yesterday I hit jackpot, as my train got delayed 10 minutes delaying my connection to the following 30 minutes later train, as it turns out, the previous connecting train was delayed for 1h blocked at the station, so I got to jump into the 1h delayed train, instead of the one that would be coming in 30m later, which got to depart 5 minutes after I jumped into it.
The poor souls on that 1h delayed train weren't so happy as me.
As a counter example I live in Rome where city trains are the best public transport available and house prices are heavily linked to closeness to subway or train station, yet we still are the city with most cars per capita in Europe and probably in the whole west.
If only those living close to train stations used trains it would massively reduce the need for cars and consequently the heavy traffic we usually experience.
I live 15 minutes walking from the closest station and it's so much better to go to work by train than by car, the trip is shorter, I don't have to drive, find a parking spot, a legal one, where I can't be fined and don't have to pay for it, while on the train I can read and air conditioning actually works and train cars are usually not crazy full like subway ones.
TL:DR that's how trains work they are not supposed to solve every commuting problem but the solvable ones
Plus: your point, caller? Investing in roads only helps folks with cars. There are plenty of people for whom public transport is the only option.
I mean, in the US I've been to a lot of small towns where there is no train service, but the old station is still there, with the rails all torn out and replaced with houses, or roads, or bike paths.
And in the UK, the infamous Beeching cuts in the 1960s removed lines based on a profitability model which wasn't applied to roads, causing many communities to lose rail service and essentially require everyone there to shift to cars (replacing trains with bus service failed.)
How much of Germany is like that, where the people in the country insisted on good roads for their cars, causing the rail system to be decommissioned, and now they are stuck with that decades-old decision to prioritize the more environment destroying option?
Menawhile the far larger village I live in has never had a station.
Some lines would be useful nowadays and could possibly be worthwhile, but there was no realistic way to know which should have been kept in the 60s. Far better would be to stop all the nonsense and just start digging new lines. But we proved we can’t do that - look at the billions of pounds spent attempting to appease the millionaires in Buckinghamshire with tunnels. Billions the m40 never had to spend.
Some political groups will never be happy, I wonder if better strategy is confrontating them then appeasing them. At least would have kept the budget down
Okay, now the village has no train service, so they are required to use cars or buses to get around.
Then the UK introduces a "UK ticket", £50/month for local train service anywhere in the UK.
If those villagers protest against the ticket, because it's funded by their taxes while they can't use it, how should we understand that complaint?
One way is to use their anger to justify shutting down the new ticket scheme. This is typical us-vs-them politics.
A second is to say "suck it you car-addicted freaks", as if they had a choice in the matter and were not stuck with the results of decisions made during their grandparents' time.
A third is to re-connect train services, an option made much more expensive by the decision to not bank the rail lines for possible future expansion; a hidden debt which must now be paid.
But then who will pay those costs?
Simply saying 'only helped the folks living close to big train station hubs, across the country there are plenty of places where the car is the only viable option' is entirely too simplistic to be meaningful.
Subsidising buses like the £2 fare makes far more sense for most people than subsidising trains. Not that we get a bus which goes anywhere useful like a train station there’s 6 a day but you then need to change to another bus to get to the station.
Offering free parking at stations would help with a “living close to station” lot. I went to Birmingham a few weeks ago, choice is drive 30 minutes to station, pay £12 to park, then pay £17 for the train fare. Instead I just drove the extra 40 minutes and paid £10 to park in Birmingham.
From everything I've read, that's a huge subsidy. It takes land away from people willing to live without a car, and who would pay to be in walking distance from the station.
Put subsidized parking around a station and you lose that tax base, and encourage even more car dependency.
Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts#Replacement_buse... and you'll see why you need to bribe people with cheap parking to use the trains:
> The assumption at the time[citation needed] was that car owners would drive to the nearest railhead (which was usually the junction where the closed branch line would otherwise have taken them) and continue their journey onwards by train. In practice, having left home in their cars, people used them for the whole journey. Similarly for freight: without branch lines, the railways' ability to transport goods "door to door" was dramatically reduced. As in the passenger model, it was assumed that lorries would pick up goods and transport them to the nearest railhead, where they would be taken across the country by train, unloaded onto another lorry and taken to their destination. The development of the motorway network, the advent of containerisation, improvements in lorries and the economic costs of having two break-bulk points combined to make long-distance road transport a more viable alternative.
You've built a lot of your country around car transport (and diesel trains instead of electrification). Less than we did in the US, certainly, but the fundamental problem is to reduce the severity of the greenhouse crisis. If rail subsidies reduce CO2 emissions and parking subsidized does not, then why do the latter?
Lines started closing around the 1930s and after WW2 this continued. Beeching was only working on this topic a short time and produced a report that suggested lots of things. Some of those things were done, others weren't. Cuts happened before Beeching and after him. And they happened during various different railroads organization schemes.
That it was strictly about profitability is also false. If anything it was about cost. They believed in future buses (and yes cars) would take car of those communities. At that time bus services were often government run.
And Beeching was actually correct in many cases. The British rail system was simply not rationally build. It was basically built by partly speculation driven rush. While this is not a bad and certainly gave Britain a great rail system, once you have centralized control it does actually make sense to reevaluate. Lots of lines didn't make rational sense to continue.
Now of course I agree that to many lines were closed that shouldn't have been closed. But that is only a small part of the issue with the rail system. Britain still has a pretty high rail density.
The Beeching report of course cut no lines. It was just a report. By "Beeching cut" I mean the systemic policy of the time of prioritizing roads over rail, using the report as synecdoche.
> They believed in future buses (and yes cars) would take car of those communities.
That belief is the core of my comment, not the specific details of which lines were cut.
Once the lines are torn up, and the land not banked for future possible reuse, it's very hard for a car-centric area to switch away from cars.
How much should the sore feelings of those consigned to live in a car-only area affect the decision to promote rail service in order to reduce CO2 emissions?
In my opinion, zero.
> That it was strictly about profitability is also false. If anything it was about cost.
When I wrote 'profitability model' I wasn't saying it was strictly about profitability. The report clearly uses profitability as one of the driving factors, but not the only factor.
My point is that the model which lead to statements like "As soon as the required procedure permits, it is desired to withdraw those passenger train services which are clearly uneconomic" was not applied to roads. Outside of a few toll roads and bridges, the direct earnings of a road is zero, resulting in an expected loss in total gross revenue.
The environment impact to the cuts clearly wasn't included, but neither was the implied increased demand for new roads, nor the higher road maintenance costs, much less concepts of induced demand that Leeming was just then formulating.