France’s new high-speed trains • Hacker News Board

Re: France’s new high-speed trains

#201

Post by isostatic » Thu, Feb 28, 2019, 1:51 PM UTC

jdietrich wrote: post #38

supernova87a wrote: post #31

SNCF is fiddling with the wrong things. It doesn't need to separate train operations from rail track network maintenance. It doesn't need to open up the network to competition. What it needs to do is cut the number of excessive public sector workers, reduce costs, and stop running the business like a political arm of the government. I can bet that the reason they think they need to do all these things is that cost pr…

>UK tried this sort of thing and it left everyone with a shittier experience, though they could claim that they successfully privatized the industry -- everyone knows that's a total lie. Passenger volumes have more than doubled since privatisation, after a long period of stagnation under nationalisation. While walk-on fares have increased above the rate of inflation, advance fares are substantially cheaper. The suppo…

> While walk-on fares have increased above the rate of inflation

Barry Doe covered this in a recent Rail issue.

Inflation in this context is RPI, because that's what rail salaries are based on. Walk on fares are regulated and thus kept relatively cheap (Vrigin off peak returns are 6% higher than they were in 1995, after RPI for example. Service is now nearly twice the speed and twice the frequency). RDG want to get rid of this protection though.

But you're right that advance fares are both cheaper and easier to get.

The biggest winners are season ticket holders - many have risen by less than inflation (Chiltern, c2c, EMT, Great Northern, Sourther, Thameslink, South Western and Virgin)

Re: France’s new high-speed trains

#202

Post by isostatic » Thu, Feb 28, 2019, 2:03 PM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #165

adrianN wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the alternative to rail is cars. Cars don't scale to the level needed in cities. They also pollute a lot and kill a lot of people in accidents. Everybody benefits from fewer cars on the road.

>Because the alternative to rail is cars. // Going by air is an alternative to rail for some journeys [eg within UK] too. Edinburgh-London for example.

There are about 2600 seats on 29 planes from Edinburgh to London's 3 airports on Monday -- average of say 100 seats a plane.

There's about 12,600 train seats

How do you propose to fit in another 145 flights a day between the two cities?

Re: France’s new high-speed trains

#203

Post by isostatic » Thu, Feb 28, 2019, 2:06 PM UTC

distances wrote: post #87

acchow wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hong Kong's is profitable mostly because it is run as a real estate company. They acquire land before adding a metro station and then lease/sell the valuable land after adding the station. Why don't other cities do this?

I think all land within city limits should be publicly acquired with eminent domain before zoning and building of utilities. No reason to let the land value increase fall to private landowners when it's all due to build-up of public services. Better use the profits for maintaining the services.

A land value tax would sort this out. Build a new train station (crossrail was a massive subsidy to land owners[0]), land price increases, more is raised in tax, which pays for the infrastructure.

On the other hand, build a new bypass, land prices drop, and nearby land owners get compensation for their inconvenience.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/mar/18/house-prices...

Re: France’s new high-speed trains

#204

Post by isostatic » Thu, Feb 28, 2019, 2:12 PM UTC

titanix2 wrote: post #116

acchow wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hong Kong's is profitable mostly because it is run as a real estate company. They acquire land before adding a metro station and then lease/sell the valuable land after adding the station. Why don't other cities do this?

Because it's not East-Asia. It works in HK, Japan, Taiwan or others countries because a train station increase value of the surroundings but in France a train station is a place you want to avoid , especially at night. In any city of a respectable size this is where you have you have a lot of beggars, thieves etc. trying to extorts you cigarettes and money. It is even worse for women that get everything of that plus…

I was shocked by how bad the metro stations were in Paris at night, I changed somewhere in the central zone and it was a right dive. I've never seen a London tube station, or Manchester metrolink, anywhere near as bad as Paris metro ones.

No harassment, just homeless people pissing on the platforms etc.

Paris is a dive though, give me Berlin, Munich, Rome, Prague, etc any day.

Re: France’s new high-speed trains

#205

Post by isostatic » Thu, Feb 28, 2019, 2:13 PM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #162

makomk wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think SNCF have any choice about separating train operations from rail track network maintenance and opening the network up to competition. It's an EU requirement, part of the fourth railway package. That's part of the reason there was talk of the UK not being able to renationalise their railways if we didn't leave the EU - it's increasingly requiring all states to structure their railways more like the UK sy…

>That's part of the reason there was talk of the UK not being able to renationalise their railways // I thought we did effectively renationalise a portion of the network on the East Coast, and it was better [for users] and profitable in some sense [for the exchequer]? https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/oct/26/east-coast-m... We have a lose-lose system in the UK AFAICT, we have a private system, and we subsidise…

> profitable in some sense

East coast made £100m a year for the exchequer Stagecoach promised £400m for the exchequer

Clearly the latter is better for the exchequer, it means more subsidy can be spent on other areas of the network.

The problem is that Grayling let stagecoach off their promises, undermining the whole point of privatization.

Re: France’s new high-speed trains

#206

Post by Silhouette » Thu, Feb 28, 2019, 2:39 PM UTC

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #190

rswail wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Public rail is a money-losing venture" So are public schools, public hospitals and national defence. But they are enablers of everything else that we do and the actual purpose of government and taxes. Public transport needs to be as efficient as it can be while providing the services needed . There are additional benefits like providing a training environment for trades, ensuring that a heavy engineering skillbase i…

The government should not be engaging in money losing ventures to provide services that private companies will provide at no cost (other than point of service cost) to taxpayers. If they want to run a jobs program then fine, run a jobs program. Don't pretend your jobs program is an infrastructure program though. I have no problem with the government spending tax money on things, that's kind of its job, but resources…

I have no problem with the government spending tax money on things but resources are not infinite (eventually you run out of other people's money) and in lieu of that they should not be spending taxpayer money on services private entities are willing to provide.

What if private entities are willing to provide an essential service, but due to effects like lack of effective competition or economies of scale, most/all people wind up paying more direct to the profit-making private entity than they would via tax to a publicly funded service?

Re: France’s new high-speed trains

#207

Post by throw2016 » Thu, Feb 28, 2019, 2:44 PM UTC

The US does not have a rail and wider public transportation culture that is prevalent in 99% of the world. Predictably the discussion here will be preoccupied with the kind of 'metrics' that other countries that take for granted they exist and are run for the benefit of citizens do not need to have. That is a wide ideological divide.

The US seems to want to run a business for 'consumers', not a country for citizens. Part of this culture has leaked to some countries via the classic neoliberalism playbook of demonizing government services and public infrastructure, defund, create chaos and sing the praise of privatization to transfer resources and business to the private sector. All these experiments have failed miserably to deliver better services, promised efficiency or costs savings. Notice the absence of economic studies and wider dissemination of these failures compared to the ever flowing 'economic studies' demonizing public services and government. No one to fund it.

On the other hand public spends that benefit business like subsidies, bailouts, a wildly excessive military industrial complex do not generate the same ideological fervour. Think tanks, economists and the business press do not talk about inefficiency and size of the public workforce when it comes to the agricultural subsidies regime, bank bailouts, corporate freebies, the massive security state and endless wars and its attendant inefficiencies in the pentagon, NSA, TSA, in this case its 'grin and bear it'. Why does the NSA need to spy on everyone, how much is it spending, how many workers does it employ? How much does the TSA cost? Lament but make no changes. This is not how a democracy works.

Re: France’s new high-speed trains

#208

Post by Silhouette » Thu, Feb 28, 2019, 2:47 PM UTC

adev_ wrote: post #189

kmlx wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TOKYO -- East and West Japan Railway have both forecast record profits for the fiscal year ending March 2018, anticipating more bullet train passengers and higher income from real estate and other noncore operations. > West Japan Railway said Friday it expects a group net profit of 109 billion yen ($978 million) for the fiscal year through March 2018, up 19% on the year. Full article: https://asia.nikkei.com/Editor…

JR rails makes an important part of its benefits from the huge commercial centers (Atrée & others) they run in their stations. That's a model that works in Japan, but cannot run everywhere. Not every country is a tiny island with such a dense urbanisation.

I read an interesting article about this a while back.

Something distinctive about the Japanese rail culture is that they build lots of communal facilities right next to their stations. For example, people routinely stop and do their shopping on the way home from work, even though they're getting home by train (though this idea isn't just about shops).

Compare that to typical Western railway stations, where a huge amount of the prime real estate right next to the trains is used for giant car parks, and you can see that the success of their model is no accident. Of course, we couldn't trivially adopt the same strategy in the West. Unlike the Japanese, we haven't been designing our towns and cities around this principle for a long time, and as the parent comment notes, we also don't have the same density. That means we do need ways for people to get to the station from the surrounding area.

Often good alternatives to the car are still lacking in the West, which then creates an unfortunate chicken and egg scenario. But that doesn't mean the Japanese model isn't potentially better than ours, if only we could find a viable path from one to the other.

Re: France’s new high-speed trains

#209

Post by mcv » Thu, Feb 28, 2019, 3:05 PM UTC

C1sc0cat wrote: post #197

falsedan wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK, usually you negotiate for the occupier to refresh the lease before concluding the sale. After 50 years, you'll probably be dead so you don't have to worry about lease renewal (in the UK the standard leasehold is 99 years, so you'll definitely be dead by then). If you were due for a renewal, and you didn't have the funds to pay the fee, you'd remortgage. If you were very wise, you'd take out an insurance po…

It effects the value of your estate and you wont get a mortgage on a short lease very easily.

It's also not necessary for a short lease. If you're going to pay every month or every year, a mortgage is pointless. If you want to pay it off for 50 years, that's when you're probably going to need a mortgage.

Re: France’s new high-speed trains

#210

Post by ssmiler » Thu, Feb 28, 2019, 3:16 PM UTC

cowl wrote: post #176

isostatic wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think this is mandated by the EU. Not really, the EU is democratic, and generally there's skeptisism in the EU about a liberal rail market. The Fourth Railway Package explicity allows tracks and trains to be owned by a single holding company. The main point of the package was things like harmonising safety standards across europe (so if you wanted to run a train from london to warsaw you wouldn't need to get safe…

>That's because you're not travelling with a valid ticket. Try driving off from the petrol station without paying, or boarding a plane without showing a boarding pass. that's not even remotely close. I don't know exactly how it is in France but in Italy (and I suspect it's similar) I may have a monthly ticket clearly stating the validity FROM-TO, having my name on it and yet still if i don't time stamp it at the star…

I suppose that government subventions are split as a function of the number of passengers...