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Europe is investing heavily in trains

nytimes.com

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Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#201

Post by dragonwriter »

erosenbe0 wrote: post #194
phendrenad2 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, trains are seen as ancient cowboy technology. Trying to build more train infrastructure is surely an uphill battle.

Trains kill lots of people and the noise is excruciating. They also impede other traffic when at grade, and require massively expensive carbon guzzling infrastructure when not at grade. The stations are often designed or located more optimally for getting freight to and from, rather than people. The bathrooms are less claustrophobic though.

> Trains kill lots of people

Vastly fewer, per passenger mile, then passenger cars, comparable to busses, less than scheduled airline flights.

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#202

Post by ascar »

Etheryte wrote: post #181
DominikPeters wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems wrong. New high speed lines are being built and have recently opened (e.g. Berlin-Munich, soon Stuttgart-Ulm). The number of passengers using high speed trains (ICEs) is steadily increasing: from 75 million trips in 2009 to 99 million trips in 2019. To increase the number of trips like that, lots of investment in rolling stock / signalling / lines is needed. https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1…

The numbers seem large when they're in absolutes, but per capita it's moved from ~0.91 trips per person per year to ~1.19 trips per person per year. Not to say there is no progress, but rather that the number of trips is low to begin with. If you contrast the money spent with the end result of roughly one trip per person per year, things are not that rosy.

> The numbers seem large when they're in absolutes, but per capita...

Which is still an absolute number. Just in another context.

It's a relative improvement of 32% which is approximately 3% per year. Not ground breaking, but a nice steady improvement.

ICE usage is also much higher (~6x ) than in-country plane usage to give another point of context. [1](percentage of domestic flights) [2](total air passengers)

I think trips per capita is misleading as a high percentage of the population isn't doing much in-country long distance travel to begin with.

[1] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2021/06...

[2] https://knoema-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/knoema.com/atlas/G...

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#203

Post by einpoklum »

cheschire wrote: post #134
novembermike wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

European trains don't really do that much freight though. They tend to be optimized to carry people. America is actually way ahead of Europe in terms of rail freight, something like 10x depending on the measurement.

Having commuted with both american and german rail systems before, my educated guess it's likely due to who owns the rails. American rail freight companies have far more control over prioritization than european freight companies. DB Netz owns the vast majority of german rail and therefore prioritizes what makes them the most money. Historically that's been carrying people due to all the government and company subsid…

But why couldn't DB Netz do both people and freight, if both are profitable (after subsidies for passenger traffic)? i.e. why does it have to be a choice?

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#204

Post by erosenbe0 »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #191
phendrenad2 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, trains are seen as ancient cowboy technology. Trying to build more train infrastructure is surely an uphill battle.

It's hard to say. Trains have been chronically underfunded in the US for so long that I don't think the US even knows what decent train infrastructure is like. Amtrak hasn't had a guaranteed budget until the recent infrastructure bill passed and was originally designed to just be a publicly-funded holding company to sell off its rolling stock and lines.

We don't really want the trains (because of the way the US developed its cities). Let me give an example. In order to add a few more daily routes from Chicago to Milwaukee on Amtrak, a freight train would have to hold on a holding line for several hours in residential areas to let the Amtrak through. The increase in ridership, not just riders shifting their schedules, would have been at most a few hundred.

So in order to get a few hundred cars off the road, Amtrak would have to build a holding track (carbon cost), add more rolling stock to the route, burn more diesel, and a residential neighborhood full of children would have had diesel trains idling for hours a day.

The total economic and environmental value of the program was negative by most measures.

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#205

Post by Lamad123 »

lqet wrote: post #26

Here in Germany, for as long as I can remember, the government praises itself every year for investing as much in rail as never before. I have not noticed the service quality to change for the better over the last 15 years. The ever-rising investments seem to be only enough to keep the status quo of the crumbling infrastructure.

At least you have that option!! Sounds better than unmaintained "crumbling infrastructure."

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#206

Post by BurningFrog »

Leherenn wrote: post #21
Fargren wrote: post #2

Living in Spain, I love trains and take them over airplane when it's an option. However, trains are often around twice as expensive as flying for may routes. I know nothing about trains, but intuitively I would expect the opposite, and I really wish it was more affordable, specially high speed rail.

Rail infrastructure is very expensive compared to planes. An airport is expensive, but once you've built it you're pretty much immediately connected to half the world. With a train station, you need a track to each surrounding stations, maintain them, and so on. Also, train doesn't scale down as well, it quickly becomes inefficient for the less dense routes. People are talking about subsidies (by not taxing fuel for…

Yeah, rail infrastructure costs O(distance) while plane infrastructure costs O(trips).

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#207

Post by jhgb »

ls15 wrote: post #190
jhgb wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the train will often just stop at some station and the passengers are told "the train ends here". They then have to figure out their journey using alternative trains. In the Czech Republic, what would happen in that case would be that the railway company would shuttle the passengers to their destination using buses. This doesn't happen in Germany?

The typical scenario is that passengers can just take another train. Depending on the ticket, the railway is responsible for refunding cost for alternative transportation (EU law), but there can be frustrating edge cases where people are left stranded, because there is no alternative, but a lot of bureaucracy. The railway may be responsible for refunding accommodation then, but I think this would not necessarily be t…

What I meant was that the buses are provided if there's no other option, like another train.

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#208

Post by [deleted] »

jhgb wrote: post #154
lqet wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A short answer for Germany would be: the system is operating at its absolute limits. The results are employee burnout and bad reliability. An example: a few years ago, they introduced a new way to reduce delays caused by trains arriving so late at their destination that they cannot make their scheduled return trip. This is the so-called "Pofalla-Turn", named after the manager who supported it: if a train has a delay…

> the train will often just stop at some station and the passengers are told "the train ends here". They then have to figure out their journey using alternative trains. In the Czech Republic, what would happen in that case would be that the railway company would shuttle the passengers to their destination using buses. This doesn't happen in Germany?

[deleted]

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#209

Post by luciusdomitius »

Goronmon wrote: post #187
Etheryte wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The numbers seem large when they're in absolutes, but per capita it's moved from ~0.91 trips per person per year to ~1.19 trips per person per year. Not to say there is no progress, but rather that the number of trips is low to begin with. If you contrast the money spent with the end result of roughly one trip per person per year, things are not that rosy.

The numbers seem large when they're in absolutes, but per capita it's moved from ~0.91 trips per person per year to ~1.19 trips per person per year. I mean, if the goal is to make the smallest number, why stop at "per person per year"? If you instead reflected the number as "per person per second" then you would see that the improvement is barely measurable.

Well it could be per capita in decade for a ten-fold increase, but given that a human career lasts around 4 such periods, this metric would not be too useful.

Re: Europe is investing heavily in trains

#210

Post by mickotron »

lqet wrote: post #26

Here in Germany, for as long as I can remember, the government praises itself every year for investing as much in rail as never before. I have not noticed the service quality to change for the better over the last 15 years. The ever-rising investments seem to be only enough to keep the status quo of the crumbling infrastructure.

At least your trains run on time, or at all. I guess your criticism is based on the level of service you have become accustomed to in your country, which is incredibly good by world standards.
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