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More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights

back-on-track.eu

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Re: More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights

#161

Post by thu2111 »

vanderZwan wrote: post #135
hackeraccount wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the explanation that makes the most sense to me. I'm not sure what the fix is - having multiple companies sharing the same track seem dubious but maybe that's answer. Either that or let a bunch of companies put down redundant lines.

EU intervention. It worked for getting rid of roaming prices for mobile phone carriers in Europe, and that also requires cooperation between different carriers. Why wouldn't something like that be possible for rail?

EU intervention solves nothing. Forcing roaming prices down just pushed up other tariffs, which didn't matter to the Commission because their ideological goal is to unify Europe into a single country, not get people the best mobile deals. It was only possible at all because the phone industry already built all the infrastructure for roaming on it's own.

The problem is lack of demand. The article posits there is huge untapped demand for night trains but there isn't. Rail companies can and do run services on each others tracks but rail lines are frequently at capacity, timetabling wise, so it's not always easy to just drop in and run extra trains in the same way many airports have free slots for extra planes. And of course airlines are still mostly national too.

Indeed it's best kept away from the EU. It has a habit of suspending transport and trading rights as part of unrelated political disputes with its neighbors in order to pressure them to obey Brussels. If you want train connections to be mysteriously severed because of some dispute with the UK or Switzerland over fishing or trade unions then asking the EU to organise it is the right way to go. If you'd like train timetables to be set taking into account what the railways can do, leave it to the private sector and get governments out of the way.

Re: More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights

#162

Post by LatteLazy »

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #65

I really don't get why trains can be so expensive and what we need to do to fix that. To an extent, flying is just way too cheap. I mean, I was looking at a roundtrip london/barcelona just last week, it was $25. By train I'm looking at at least 10 hours, likely more like 15, and $300. Both the $25 and the $300 just seem wrong. Flying is way too cheap, but I also don't get how $300 per person is competitive against so…

I used to work in rail engineering. Our projects were all reliant on explicit government subsidiary. We as a company basically watched the national transport budget for the next 12 months to predict whether we'd make a profit in the coming year.

There are a few factors to rail that make it unsuitable for long distance.

First, there is 10s of 1000s of miles of track, all of which has to be laid, maintained, controlled and signalled. It has to be inspected and repaired and monitored and upgraded. Plus, you can't go directly anywhere. You can't take a train to Barcelona from London. You have to go via Dover for the tunnel, then lille because its a city and there's not track not via lille.

The air maintains itself and you can fly basically direct to wherever.

Plus a shit tonne of political interference (here in the UK we have stations basically next to each other no one will close and HS2 take a huge diversion to avoid politically sensitive areas, and that's just in one nation, try getting them to agree on train safety standards). For an airport, you basically just need a mile of tarmac and a tin shed. I don't think you even have to have radar anymore, just transponder tracking...

Plus, as you point out, the plan can carry 7 loads of people in the same time that the train can carry 1. So all things being equal (which they're not) you'd pay only 1/7th...

Plus, the costs for the Barcelona London route are basically fixed. The fact no one wants to make that journey in the winter just means the assets are unused. If no one wants to fly London to Barcelona in November, you can just switch the route and take people to their ski holidays instead. So planes are more versitile and has much higher utilisation rates than most trains.

Trains make sense but only over shorter distances. Anything over about 200 miles and planes win.

Re: More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights

#163

Post by thu2111 »

fiblye wrote: post #112
Hamuko wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well firstly, you don't need to do any work on the terrain that the plane operates on. Meanwhile a train will require contiguous tracks. That might not be a huge hurdle if you need to get between two places with flat land between them, but add water, mountains, forests and whatnot, and that makes it much harder to get a train from one place to another. An airplane just needs two airstrips.

But once a track is built, it doesn’t take much maintenance to keep it running for decades or even a century. There are places in this world that can’t even manage to repair streets, but have trains operating daily with little trouble. It seems like costs would come down at some point in first world nations, or it’d be worthwhile to subsidize the creation of railways more significantly. I know governments do try to t…

It takes quite a lot of maintenance unfortunately.

Rails need constant work to keep them in good condition. So does the ballast. Signalling involves miles of cables, lights, radio towers and motors that also degrade. The stations need staff, gates, ticket kiosks, displays.

A frequent need is to add capacity. Adding capacity to the sky is easy because it's empty. It's essentially just about scaling air traffic control systems. Adding capacity in a rail line can involve major earthworks, rebuilding bridges, totally replacing the signalling and so on.

Roads are easier to maintain and pay for themselves without subsidies just via fuel tax. There's no station infrastructure. No stations means no expensive employees. People drive cars themselves and cars can be driven safely even on quite degraded roads. Signalling is entirely local and so doesn't require much cabling, on high speed routes (motorways) there's usually little or no signalling required. Laying tarmac is much cheaper than laying rails. Finally of the few people needed to maintain and run the roads, many are private sector and un-unionized e.g. gas station employees. The government employees only do repairs and so don't have much strike power. Contrast to the railways which in Europe are frequently shut down for weeks at a time by strikes of drivers or crew.

The capital investment in trains is worth it for only one reason - it's the highest capacity form of transport in seats per hour. It's got nothing to do with greenness which is at any rate a very ambiguous case to make when you consider all the factors. Trains can be less green than planes in many ordinary situations.

Re: More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights

#164

Post by AsyncAwait »

thu2111 wrote: post #157
AsyncAwait wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because politics. Trains are very national in the EU Ah, of course, it's the 'free market' that's the solution. I mean it's complete shit in the UK, where I live, but am sure that's just an outlier. The U.S. healthcare industry is a strong proof that the private model for essential services works flawlessly and now there's Reds again running in the election campaigning for 'Medicare for All'. Outrageous.

Trains in the UK got a lot better after privatisation, and of course we're discussing how they're not competitive against the airline industry which is significantly more free market again. So your point isn't landing. Yes. Globalised and freer markets are a solution to this. In fact it's what the article advocates, more or less.

> Trains in the UK got a lot better after privatisation,

I don't expect my point to be landing with free market Regonomists, but seriously? I mean even trains in my native country, which is generally fairly undeveloped are a lot more dependable. Trains in the UK are regularly late, cancelled, broken due to the slightest change in weather that's fairly typical of the UK, overcrowded, slow etc. etc.

Maybe it was even worse before, but if this is what 'a lot better' looks like, then the private industry has a long way to go.

I think there's plenty of room for private industry, but am not sure essential public transportation is one of them.

German trains are a lot better run, (have family there presently, so can speak to that) and while they're technically owned by a private company, the state is the single shareholder there.

Perhaps the problem was that in the UK, like in the US, there's a strong desire to underfund and underpower public programs to be able to then point to them and say how they 'don't work' - the same has been the case for the NHS as well, which btw now has huge contracts with private companies like Virgin Health, who sue and waste public funds if they don't get a contract rather than conclude that their offering simply wasn't good enough in the 'free market'.

That's besides the point that there's no such thing as a 'free market' for most people, because most of us aren't of means enough to simply pack up and leave if there's no good train/ISP... choices in our area for example, nor do most of us have the ability to start our own.

Re: More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights

#165

Post by mister_hn »

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #65

I really don't get why trains can be so expensive and what we need to do to fix that. To an extent, flying is just way too cheap. I mean, I was looking at a roundtrip london/barcelona just last week, it was $25. By train I'm looking at at least 10 hours, likely more like 15, and $300. Both the $25 and the $300 just seem wrong. Flying is way too cheap, but I also don't get how $300 per person is competitive against so…

And what about the price of time? Going from e.g. Denmark to Spain or Italy isn't cheap in terms of time..

Re: More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights

#166

Post by nothrabannosir »

IkmoIkmo wrote: post #65

I really don't get why trains can be so expensive and what we need to do to fix that. To an extent, flying is just way too cheap. I mean, I was looking at a roundtrip london/barcelona just last week, it was $25. By train I'm looking at at least 10 hours, likely more like 15, and $300. Both the $25 and the $300 just seem wrong. Flying is way too cheap, but I also don't get how $300 per person is competitive against so…

I see a lot of good explanations for the status quo, but I'm surprised nobody mentioned the more fundamental problem that you simply can't overtake a train. Airplanes can fly relatively independently of each other, compared to trains who have to share tracks and more limited train stations.

This means you just can't compete on the level that budget airlines can. Spirit, RyanAir, etc: they helped bring down prices across the industry. Flying used to be $300, but after relentless competition, even the more expensive airlines are now far cheaper than they used to be.

The inching down of leg room, saving pennies on drinks and food, paying for extra luggage; that kind of brutal cost saving just doesn't happen without merciless competition. And it's comparatively impossible to start a RyanRail: you can't just dump your trains in between the other ones. It's an inherently hard field to compete in. Even in the UK and NL, where different private companies compete, they do so by winning bids for sections of tracks, and exclusive access to those tracks. That's not the same as airlines. If only one airline could fly LDN->BCN, it wouldn't be $25. (case in point: KLM & SLM had a monopoly on flights Netherlands Suriname for a while. The day they lost it, prices dropped >50%).

Most of the other things (salary expenses, track upkeep, etc) would follow if they could compete harder. We could have said the same about flying two decades ago; nobody would have predicted a $25 LDN->BCN, yet here we are.

(this is just my theory, and it's hard to conclusively disprove, therefore quite a weak one..)

Re: More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights

#167

Post by Sharlin »

captainbland wrote: post #158
Sharlin wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source for that? You need ten buses to replace a single medium-length train. To my understanding trains trade higher up-front costs (infrastructure!) to lower per-passenger-km operating costs.

I mean just based on UK ticket costs I'd say they're not too far off the mark. If you catch a coach rather than the train it's often half the price, but the trade-off is you get stuck in traffic, they're infrequent, if they're oversubscribed there's no standing room (although coach operators rarely face this issue) and they're usually just not as fast as trains. I commuted to work by intercity coach for a couple of w…

Consumer ticket prices seem like a poor proxy for operating expenses per passenger km. For one, as you said, the quality of service is better.

Re: More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights

#168

Post by 45ure »

prennert wrote: post #144
radicalbyte wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privatized trains are worse, in the UK they've just given the go ahead for a $140 billion high speed rail project, HS2. A decade ago we build HS1, a 67 mile track between London and the Channel Tunnel, for a total of $7.6 billion ($112m / mile). HS2 is longer but its 330 miles of tracks will cost $400m / mile. The project costs make absolutely no sense: London is a special weird place in the UK where everything you b…

From what I understand HS2 was planned to become very similar to the tube with 18 trains per hour. This is more that one every 4 minutes. The trains would also run very fast. This allows for caring lots of passengers, but it also is very complex to achieve and accounts for a lot of the costs (as well as buying property). Also inflation had to be taken into account when comparing projects that are decades apart. So wi…

>From what I understand HS2 was planned to become very similar to the tube with 18 trains per hour.

The comparison of HS2 with 18 paths per hour in each direction, on an overground rail system stretching over 320 miles, running at high speed (theoretical uppper speed limit of 250mph), with the London Underground, is laughable. I could not find any references to your claim in the official documents.

The project was never about speed, but rather about increasing capacity. It was packaged and sold to the voters as shaving off some time to get from A to B, largely due to politrickery. The aim is to free up commuter, regional and freight capacity on existing lines ─ which will also have an overall impact on roads and motorway nework used by freight carriers.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Re: More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights

#169

Post by presto8 »

Darmody wrote: post #72
Hamuko wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trains are really slow actually.

200 or 300 km/h I wouldn't call that slow. Not as fast as a plane but it's not slow at all.

The most well-executed high-speed train system I can think of is in Japan, e.g. shinkansen from Kyoto to Tokyo, which Google Maps is reporting as 2h11m. Distance by road for that city pair is showing as 464 km, for an average speed of 212 km/h. So I think around 200 km/h can be considered the highest possible currently practical average speed of a high speed train network over a reasonable distance.

I tried to find something equivalent in Europe to compare, maybe Frankfurt to Berlin? Google Maps is showing that as 4h16 by ICE over 549 km, for an average speed of 128 km/h.

Maybe the inefficiencies can be eliminated and the European trains can get closer to 200 km/h average speed?

Re: More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights

#170

Post by ac29 »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #16
sudoaza wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is crazy!! We need action on this immediately. I suspect aviation subsides are to blame.

Aviation is highly taxed (about half of your ticket). Subsidies (or more accurately tax discounts) are only on fuel which is something like 10% of your flight costs. Rest goes on staff and capex. There already is form of transport that's much cheaper than train or flying which is called BUS. We can make them fully electric and even have different classes. They can share existing infrastructure that doesn't require th…

>They can share existing infrastructure that doesn't require thousands of specialised people to maintain or operate...

Spending on highways and roads was $175 billion in the US in 2016 [0]. They absolutely do require massive numbers of people to maintain them - for example, Caltrans, the California agency that manages the state highway system, has over 18,000 permanent staff.

[0] https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...

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