The Importance of Tangibles
I’m writing this post on a train to Copenhagen. So many things about this trip are just wrong: the air conditioning in the car where we reserved seats is broken so we had to find somewhere else to sit, the train is delayed, there was a 10-minute stop at the border for Danish cops to check the IDs of some riders (with racial profiling). Even the booking was a bit jank: the Deutsche Bahn website easily sells one-ways and roundtrips, but this is a multi-city trip and we had to book it as two nested roundtrips. Those are the sort of intangibles that people who ride intercity trains a lot more than I do constantly complain about, usually when they travel to France and find that the TGV system does really poorly on all the metrics that the economic analysis papers looking at speed do not look at. And yet, those intangibles at the end of the day really are either just a matter of speed (like the 10-minute delay at the border) or not that important. But to get why it’s easy for rail users to overlook them, it’s important to understand the distinction between voice and exit.
Voice and exit strategies
The disgruntled customer, employee, or resident can respond in one of two ways. The traditional way as understood within economics is exit: switch to a competing product (or stop buying), quit, or emigrate. Voice means communicating one’s unhappiness to authority, which may include exercising political power if one has any; organizing a union is a voice strategy.
These two strategies are not at all mutually exclusive. Exit threat can enhance voice: Wikipedia in the link above gives the example of East Germany, where the constant emigration threat of the common citizenry amplified the protests of the late 1980s, but two more examples include union organizing and the history of Sweden. With unions, the use of voice (through organizing and engaging in industrial action) is stronger when there is an exit threat (through better employment opportunities elsewhere); it’s well-known that unions have an easier time negotiating better wages, benefits, and work conditions during times of low unemployment than during times of high unemployment. And with Sweden, the turn-of-the-century union movement used the threat of emigration to the United States to extract concessions from employers, to the point of holding English classes for workers.
Conversely, voice can amplify exit. To keep going with the example of unions, unions sometimes engage in coordinated boycotts to show strength – and they request that allies engage in boycotts when, and only when, the union publicly calls for them; wildcat boycotts, in which consumers stop using a product when there is a labor dispute without any union coordination, do not enhance the union’s negotiating position, and may even make management panic thinking the company is having an unrelated slump and propose layoffs.
The upshot is that constantly complaining about poor service is a voice strategy. It’s precise, and clearly communicates what the problem is. However, the sort of people who engage in such public complaints are usually still going to ride the trains. I’m not going to drive if the train is bad; I’d have to learn how to drive, for one. In my case, poor rail service means I’m going to take fewer trips – I probably would have done multiple weekend trips to each of Munich and Cologne this summer if the trains took 2.5 hours each way and not 4-4.5. In the case of more frequent travelers than me, especially railfans, it may not even mean that.
The trip not taken
On this very trip, we were trying to meet up in Hamburg with a friend who lives in Bonn, and who, like us, wants to see Hamburg. And then the friend tried booking the trip and realized that it was 4.5 hours Hbf-to-Hbf, and more than five hours door-to-door; we had both guessed it would be three hours; a high-speed rail network would do the trip in 2:15. The friend is not a railfan or much of a user of social media; to Deutsche Bahn, the revenue loss is noticeable, but not the voice.
And that’s where actually measuring passenger usage becomes so important. People who complain are not a representative cross-section of society: they use the system intensively, to the point that they’re unlikely to be the marginal users the railroad needs to attract away from driving or to induce to make the trip; they are familiar with navigating the red tape, to the point of being used to jank that turns away less experienced users; they tend to be more politically powerful (whereas my friend is an immigrant with about A2 German) and therefore already have a disproportionate impact on what the railroad does. Complaints can be a useful pilot, but they’re never a substitute for counting trips and revenue.
The issue is that the main threat to Deutsche Bahn, as to any other public railroad, is loss of passengers and the consequent loss of revenue. If the loss of revenue comes from a deliberate decision to subsidize service, then that’s a testament to its political power, as is the case for various regional and local public transport subsidy scheme like the Deutschlandticket and many more like it at the regional level in other countries. But if it comes from loss of passenger revenue, or even stagnation while other modes such as flying surge, then it means the opposite.
This is, if anything, more true of a public-sector rail operator than a private-sector one. A private-sector firm can shrink but maintain a healthy margin and survive as a small player, like so many Class II and III freight rail operators in the United States. But a national railway is, in a capitalist democracy, under constant threat of privatization. The threat is always larger when ridership is poor and when the mode is in decline; thus, British Rail was privatized near its nadir, and Japan National Railways was privatized while, Shinkansen or no Shinkansen, it was losing large amounts of money, in a country where the expectation was that rail should be profitable. Germany threatened to do the same to Deutsche Bahn in the 1990s and 2000s, leading to deferred maintenance, but the process was so slow that by the time it could happen, during the 12 years of CSU control of the Ministry of Transport, ridership was healthy enough there were no longer any demands for such privatization. The stagnant SNCF of the 2010s has had to accept outside reforms (“Société Anonyme”), stopping short of privatization and yet making it easier to do so in the future should a more right-wing government than that of Macron choose to proceed.
The path forward
Rail activists should recognize that the most important determinant of ridership is not the intangibles that irk people who plan complex multi-legged regional rail trips, but the basics: speed, reliability, fares, some degree of frequency (but the odd three-hour wait on a peripheral intercity connection, while bad, is not the end of the world).
On the train I’m on, the most important investment is already under construction: the Fehmarn Belt tunnel is already under construction, and is supposed to open in six years. The construction cost, 10 billion € for 18 km, is rather high, setting records in both countries. The project is said to stand to shorten the Hamburg-Copenhagen trip time, currently 4:40 on paper with an average delay of 21 minutes and a 0% on-time performance in the last month, to 2.5 hours. If Germany bothers to build high-speed approaches, and Denmark bothers to complete its own high-speed approaches and rate them at 300 km/h and not 200-250, the trip could be done in 1.5 hours.
Domestically, and across borders that involve regular overland high-speed rail rather than undersea tunnels, construction of fast trains proceeds at a sluggish pace. German rail advocates, unfortunately, want to see less high-speed rail rather than more, due to a combination of NIMBYism, the good-enough phenomenon, and constant sneering at France and Southern Europe.
But it’s important to keep focusing on a network of fast rail links between major cities. That’s the source of intercity rail ridership at scale. People love complaining about the lack of good rail for niche town pairs involving regional connections at both ends, but those town pairs are never going to get rail service that can beat the car for the great majority of potential riders who own a car and aren’t environmental martyrs. In contrast, the 2.5- and three-hour connection at long intercity distances reliably gets the sort of riders who are more marginal to the system and respond to seeing a five-hour trip with exit rather than voice.
Pedestrian Observations 
So what’s the balance between the incompetence of German rail policy makers/advocates/DB and austerion madness in damaging the German rail network since the 1990’s?
In the UK I’d say that certainly since the 1990’s rail revival, industry-wide incompetence has been more important than lack of funding, given the subsidies to should-be-profitable-southern-English-operators, Crossrail, Great Western electrification and above all HS2 have shown the British state actually has treated railways relatively generously compared to almost everything else.
(In Japan its incompetence outside Tokyo/Kanagawa and those two are have just been cheap, although not idle).
So, advocates, DB, and policymakers are three distinct groups, with distinct plans and interests. DB is not at all hostile to the idea of running high-speed rail, but the advocates are, and so the policymakers, seeing that the most pro-rail people don’t really care, don’t push it. The policymakers are motorheads, after 12 years of CSU mismanagement followed by an FDP ministry run by people who are smart and yet captive to “startup tech will save us” dreams (they really like hydrogen cars and hydrogen trains).
Is there a reason why advocates are like that if DB is more practical (that dynamic does exist in the UK to a degree but the rail industry produces so few ideas other “more money you bastards”).
Data from ~2019, but I thinl it was shown that China High Speed Rail Hong Kong segment have 40% less ridership northbound than southbound, with I think intangibles being a big cause. It was like 50k pax/day southbound but 30k pax/day northbound frpm my memory.
The system require passengers going north to Mainland China from Hong Kong to enter the gate at least 45 minutes before departure to complete custom, quarantine, immigration procedure of both China Mainland and Hong Kong, and baggage security check and identity verification and ticket inspection procedure, multiple times. While most of the trains from the station stop only at Shenzhen and Guangzhou, at 15 and 50 minutes away.
That’s… an odd statistic. What was balancing the net movement flow? Were people just taking cars/buses/flights one-way? Or was there a population accumulation in HK?
Yes alternative choice of leaving are car/bus/metro rail/flight, and people who desire can also choose ferry or helicopter instead. There’re about 800k people crossing the border each day so the difference easily get distributed across different modes
Also, another thing, how much do fare expensiveness affect the rodership compared to all pther time related factors?
There are times I feel like time is actually a much more important factor than fare level that are underplayed by many people who pay attention to transit, for example how Tokaido Shinkansen dominated the market despite much cheaper buses and somewhat cheaper plane rides are available, yet there are also cases of like Niigata City to area around Naoetsu station, or case like Aomori to Hakodate, where it have been believed that fare level of trains now being priced at requiring surcharge (As limited express or shinkansen) is a big cause behind losing passengers compared to the past
I don’t think Naoetsu’s problem is the Shirasagi service being pricier than it should so much as its rural Niigata and why would you go there? (Okay I would have gone there in 2020 but work got in the way and I’m a sucker for such places). The demographic/economic situation is such that competing transport services cannibalise each other and rail’s advantages in scale are less of an advantage if they exist at all. Especially since the roads are massively overbuilt and have straighter alignments (damn you Tanaka).
Whether a conventional West coast service connecting Niigata to Hokuriku is actually viable would be something I’d like to see investigated better. Certainly the Hokuhoku line and the Echigo west of urban Niigata probably need to be closed with consolidation along the Shin-etsu mainline (which has freight so its mostly safe for the moment). Heck the parallel Chitetsu/Hokuriku mailine section could probably use it too (Yes I know about the electrification difference and its not insuperable).
Problem is not there are no demand, but they mostly drive. According to survey when people from Joetsu area visit Niigata City area and Nagaoka area, 95.1% drive and only 2.7% would take the train. But I guess speed and frequency are probably still much bigger cause behind this compared to fare.
And I think Tanaka, being back in the era, actually envisioned rails being much more extensive than roads. However time changes and so as people’s demand, so the way people see plans and priorities get shifted and lead to where we’re now at
The question isn’t how many would take the train today, but how many will tomorrow if you build it. People who don’t have with a reasonable train option cannot see how they would change their life if it was a reasonable option. When the train doesn’t exist; or it does but it is slow, expensive, dangerous, and infrequent: the train is not a reasonable option. People don’t think if only the train was better I wouldn’t need to drive, instead they think about how to make driving better – wide roads and plenty of free parking everywhere.
This is why ALL surveys should be taken with a lot of salt. They are useful for somethings, but they often are outright wrong. If there was great train service for 30 years would we still see 95% of the people driving and only 3% taking the train? Or would we see people discover the train is great and so drive less and turn encourage more train oriented development (less roads and parking so that places people want to go are near the train station).
Do note the 30 year timeframe above. if you provided great train service for only one day 1% would use it (less than the 2.7% claimed!).
It’s also super cheap in general to improve service for peripheral regions. You are probably currently running 2-3 trains per hour on the mainlines so you have masses of capacity for additional service.
The survey was done in the context of exploring how to improve ridership of train between the two area, with options undergoing associated exploration includes increasing speed of the conventional train or converting the section of line into Mini Shinkansen.
I assume the survey is in Japanese so I won’t try to find it. However I think my point stands, using a survey to get this data is completely invalid. Sure you can get numbers, but they are complete garbage.
It was pure patronage and machine politics, but given that Tanaka was rumored to have hand drawn the Joetsu Shinkansen route on a map and then told JNR “Do this!”, I’m not sure a claim that he was a road-over-rail-ideologue really sticks. It’s possible that without him Niigata wouldn’t even have Shinkansen service, with the line to the west being only the Hokuriku line.
I’d suspect that it was the Highway Public Corporation’s strength and ties that led to the road share being so high, rather than any ideology on Tanaka’s part. More important was probably the unspoken fact that road’s lesser efficiency than rail means more construction for the same transportation capacity=more jobs for Niigata.
I think it is just inherent advantage of cars in lower density area that cannot support frequent transit, rather than any Japan specific politics. Like how people along the line fiercely opposed construction of Narita Shinkansen yet let the motorway pass without a noise.
* Shirasagi is the train from Hokuriku to Nagoya/Maibara. The train to Niigata City is Shirayuki
The few German city pairs for which I have data overperform the Shinkansen by about 20% relative to city size. The TGV, which has the speed and also lower fares, overperforms by 50%+.
But no indication as to what drives the underperformance. If not higher fares, it could well be the market characteristics of the chosen city-pair, stronger non-rail competition, national culture, or any number of confounders, or any combination thereof.
If that’s the case then wouldn’t that potentially indocate benefit of France’s airlinesized HSR operation?
In my experience the people who complain most are the rich and well connected (and there is a large crossover between those two groups).
And the rich certainly can and will go by train if it is good and go by car if it is not.
But even Chiltern (owned by Deutsche Bahn) are going along with the attempted ticket office closure here even though its basically impossible to imagine it won’t cost more revenue than the ~£100-150m it will save in costs by closing them. And even though as the least subsidised railway their position to argue back is the strongest.
The ticket office closure brouhaha is classic British railways. We should close a lot of them and move to European proof of payments system. But nobody in DfT or Network Rail or the Nostalgia-poisoned advocate community seems to know what POP is and how our European counterparts have cheaper operating costs.
Honestly coming back to the UK via the North, I was amazed at labour intensive railways were compared to Japan which doesn’t even use POP. But hey its about keeping the Victorian legacy not actually moving people. And money is how you show that you’re committed to Great British something something.
If you do that you have to make the flexible tickets cost the same as a medium-cheap advance ticket.
And that will cost you vastly more revenue than the cost of keeping the ticket offices open.
I apologize if this is a stupid question, but why couldn’t you keep the different ticket types and their different price tags just because they are now printed by a machine at a fixed location, or on the train, or is a QR code pointing to a row in a central database, or (…), rather than being “hand-printed” by a staffed ticket office?
Because if you have cheap inflexible advance tickets and medium priced flexible off peak tickets and expensive very flexible anytime tickets you need a person to explain it and can’t just do it with contactless ticket purchase. This is especially true for non frequent travellers.
Fundamentally its a revenue question. I would estimate 20% of revenue goes through ticket offices – and it may very well be even higher. If 1/3rd of those people no longer travel by rail that would cost you £575m in revenue whereas you might save as much as £150m by cutting staffing.
And theres all the equalities issues that are super important too. Ticket offices are easier for the disabled and the elderly.
These are all solvable and have been solved, but they would require massive simplification of the ticketing system. But the government doesn’t know that’s possible and wouldn’t be willing to have the political fight with favoured constituencies/admit that it actually runs the trains it has pretended to privatise (the main purpose of British privatisation has been to allow the government to avoid political responsibility for trains).
Sorry but Japan and Switzerland employ fewer manned ticket offices than us and are waaay more accessible for those groups while having no operating subsidies/high farebox recovery ratios. This is mostly about keeping the current dysfunctional system and not admitting British railway industry is a pile of incompetence ODing on nostalgia.
Proof of Payments enforce ticket revenue with a cadre of roving officers to check people have paid. Its a more efficient use of labour time than having somebody read the newspaper while waiting for somebody to have a problem.
The Japanese pricing structure basically concedes all journeys where the airlines are a plausible alternative to the train, so in a British context they’d basically concede the entire Scotland-London market.
And given without proper high speed rail and with weak reliability we are what #4 in the world for long distance passengers per capita? I mean that isn’t shit and means we are getting at least some stuff right.
And to be fair as per https://reporting.sbb.ch/en/finance?=&years=1,4,5,6,7&scroll=1281&highlighted=eea06b102f185079e564539118e17a0a and https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/2162/rail-industry-finance-uk-statistical-release-202122.pdf it looks like the Swiss and British covered about 1/3rd of their costs in 2021 and 2021/22 respectively with freight and passenger fares.
“Because if you have cheap inflexible advance tickets and medium priced flexible off peak tickets and expensive very flexible anytime tickets you need a person to explain it and can’t just do it with contactless ticket purchase.”
This is how airline fares work and basically everyone buys their airline ticket online or through an app. I’m sure it’s possible to buy a ticket at a counter at the airport, but no one does. If it works for planes it can work for trains.
“I would estimate 20% of revenue goes through ticket offices“
Anything to support this or are you making things up? I had to buy a ticket short notice in England and the agent on the platform told me to just jump on and buy my ticket using my phone on board. Even if that many people were buying tickets at the station, and you’re worried about access for people without smartphones, you could just have a kiosk (again, like airports, and like the ATMs everyone of your passengers have been using for decades anyway).
Well according to the government who want to close the ticket offices it is still 12% of tickets. As half of all rail journeys are within London and almost no one would go to a ticket office for those it’s probably more like 20% of tickets that aren’t entirely within London.
Plus obviously people will be more likely to go to the ticket office to buy a more complex (and expensive) ticket rather than a simpler one. Without data from the government 20% seems like a pretty reasonable conservative revenue estimate to be fair.
With airlines, they don’t really offer flexible tickets without reserved seats so there is really only one class of ticket that you buy. Plus the elderly in particular probably go to a travel agent to buy their holidays as they always have.
“according to the government … it is still 12%”
So it’s 12% not 20%, and there is still no reason they can’t use a kiosk at the station.
“almost no one would go to a ticket office for those”
If half of the population is *never* buying a ticket at a station, that is not an argument why the other half need to, in fact it’s the opposite.
“With airlines, they don’t really offer flexible tickets”
Is this a joke? Have you bought an airline ticket recently? First class/business class/premium economy/plus economy/economy, refundable vs no refund, fare saver tickets (can’t choose seat or check bags), per seat upgrade fees for exit rows or aisle seats, and all of this before demand management pricing that can see a economy seat more or less expensive than a premium class depending on if the ticket is sold a month, a week, a day, or an hour before the flight.
Plus, Alon has written several times how fare complexity depresses ridership. Airlines get away with it because there are no other real options for long distance travel, but if your train fares are so complex people need it explained to them *each time* they buy a ticket that is the perfect opportunity to simplify your fare structure. First Class vs Standard, and reserved time/seat vs flexible time and seating-if-available (so 4 total choices) should do.
If the elderly are buying airline tickets through a travel agent I’m sure they can buy train tickets there too.
@Matthew
“Because if you have cheap inflexible advance tickets and medium priced flexible off peak tickets and expensive very flexible anytime tickets you need a person to explain it and can’t just do it with [automation].”
“Presenting/explaining your product menu to customers” is a technology that capitalism has figured out remarkably well. Look for companies hiring for “UX designer” job description, go to those companies, ask to borrow a few of their people. I apologise for the comparison, but claiming the railway needs staff for explaining their product offering is like claiming that the railway needs an army of clerks to coordinate wagonload traffic. (It used to be the case, but then people invented computers. Also wagonload traffic died and lorries replaced it, but that is beside the point.)
Even I can come up with a 3×3 for {advance, flex, anytime} x {
thirdeconomy,secondbusiness,firstfirst}, and I’m not even a UX designer. Make the 3+3 categories’ names buttons that show pop-up explainers.Do you want
friesextras with that — return, bike, dog, etc.?Uncommon products like passes go behind a button in the sidebar, below the language change button.
Basil you are so right. Honestly the structure for this should write itself.
Screen 1: “Where are you starting?”
“Where do you want to go?”
Screen 2: “I want to leave whenever I feel like.”
“I want some flexibility when I leave.”
“I want to leave at a specific time for less cost.”
And so forth.
Of course, the way Apple designed the iPod’s interface was a revelation two decades ago in its simplicity, so maybe it isn’t quite so easy or obvious.
Does anyone offer 2nd class rail service anymore? With train’s having so much space economy seats can be sized much more comfortably than aircraft, so I don’t see the need.
They computerized reservation systems 60 years ago. You call one of the vendors and say “do my trains”. They will.
@Basil, creating a UI that works with the complex tickets available and works for the elderly and disabled is actually very very hard.
If it wasn’t very, very hard this problem would have been solved long ago and usage of ticket offices would be much lower. And capitalists have been involved in the whole thing and haven’t solved it. The railway passenger companies selling the tickets are privatised and there are also capitalist third parties like thetrainline.com involved.
@Onux
I called it a technology on purpose. It had to be invented. It is only after it had been invented, tinkered with, explanations for it provided (and most of them falsified), that retrospectively it appears obvious and its typical applications easy.
The exact number of travel classes is mostly an example, and the current offering is probably not the last word on the topic. The most obvious is that single- or double-person compartments (inspired by airline first- and increasingly business class) may turn out to be in demand. Some railways are already experimenting with dedicated family spaces and other such interior layouts. I’ve also seen the idea from an advocacy group that if seats are reserved, then only 4 independently booking strangers should be put into compartments seating 6-8; the nominal capacity should only be used if a group books together.
@Matthew
Indeed, the interface for complex tickets won’t be easy. However, the worst case is rare, it is not the median use case. Most people buy simple tickets, you can design a correspondingly simple interface for that, and potentially have an effectively separate interface design for complex products. Furthermore, you can make some observations that perhaps have some political cost:
– Some ticket types are virtually unused and discontinuing them should be an option on the table if that looks to have some benefit.
– Do not let perfection be the enemy of improvement. Allocate effort in proportion to benefits. The interface dealing with simple tickets should be meticulously accessible (the huge numbers of fully abled users also benefit from this!); however, “elderly/disabled person wants to buy a particularly complicated ticket, or set of tickets” is rare enough (even latently) and has straightforward/cheap enough alternatives that — if it should turn out to be necessary in order to make the rest of the system work — the option of making it less than fully accessible should be considered an unfortunate but acceptable sacrifice.
– Sometimes, the current doctrine is known to be grossly suboptimal, it is “merely” the enormous institutional inertia that prevents improvement. If, to take the example of my own country, the basis of the fare calculation is the actual route mileage, moving to a different principle is obviously beneficial (seamless fare integration between buses and trains is somewhat impossible if getting from the same A to the same B costs different on the two modes since they take different routes between A and B; of course, in actuality there is no fare integration at all). If they managed to tie stopping pattern and amenity level together in their domestic IC brand, a reform in scheduling (the introduction of takt timetables) may produce the absurdity of a train with the following classes: IC 1st, IC 2nd, gyorsvonat 2nd, and sometimes also gyorsvonat 1st. As of 2023, they haven’t disentangled this yet. If the train operating companies sell their own tickets, it would be better to move to the Verkehrsverbund system, whereby the VVB sells and checks tickets, and pays the contracted TOCs a “flat” fee that only depends on how the trains were run, not on how many people rode them.
@Basil, you might save £150m a year by closing the ticket offices. Complex tickets certainly aren’t a majority, but they bring in a lot more revenue than that.
Plus they are particularly helpful for people who are disabled, elderly and new to the railway. There is significant value political and otherwise in supporting those groups. Both because it is the right thing to do, and because the elderly in particular are very powerful because they vote.
The same with first class, yes in raw passenger numbers they reduce capacity, but they are better for business travel and they generally bring in additional revenue you otherwise wouldn’t get.
They computerized reservation systems 60 years ago. You call one of the vendors and say “do my trains”. They will.
“creating a UI that works with the complex tickets available and works for the elderly and disabled is actually very very hard.”
1) If your tickets are that complex, simplify your fare structure. You are losing revenue to people who choose another mode rather than deal with the complexities.
2) Its not very very hard because airlines do it, and I have already demonstrated how airline tickets can be complex than train tickets (or certainly than train tickets need to be). Do any of these people ever buy a plane ticket, attend a football match or concert, order something on Amazon or Alibaba, or use an ATM? Since the answer is ALL of them (or at least 99+%) then they can buy train tickets the same way.
3) Disabled access (color-blind compatible palates, captioning for the deaf, text speaking for the blind) is a known quantity, even legally required in places like the US. Any UI/UX engineer can do this automatically.
4) You can sell tickets at the station, just use a kiosk, where your control of UI is greater than a website so it can be even simpler. Hundreds of thousands of tourists a day who don’t speak the local language do this at subway ticket machines in cities across the globe, despite options like fare zones, single ride vs passes, different services, etc.
5) Absolute worst case you can have some service representatives available via text or video chat for the difficult cases on the extreme margins. These could even be people working at the station as platform agents instead of sitting behind a desk waiting for someone to buy a ticket.
“If it wasn’t very, very hard this problem would have been solved long ago and usage of ticket offices would be much lower.”
See above on airlines, the problem IS solved. If people are still using ticket offices its due to inertia because you still offer them. Also see above on kiosks to buy tickets at the station (although signs with a QR code saying “Buy Tickets Here” probably works just as well for people buying last minute tickets, which is and should be a thing for rail).
@Ounx, the elderly really hate all this tech shit and find it really difficult to use.
The problems may be solved for young nerds but they aren’t solved in general.
@Onux, in a customer service context an “AI” chatbot has never solved any of my problems – and you always have to go through to a human agent anyway, and a lot of the parking and other transport apps etc are unbelievably terrible. I took 30 minutes to pay for the last one, I believe it’s because I had an account and forgot the password, or got the 3 digits on the back of the card wrong and the software wasn’t robust enough to cope.
Fundamentally that’s a huge issue with technology. The tech nerds are obsessed with new features and changing the design of stuff rather than the boring but much more important part of making the basic parts work well.
Maybe if the tech nerds stop focusing on AI and having real humans to help people and stop focusing on new features then tech will be good enough in a decades time that ordinary older people will be happy to use it.
Trainline has sold tickets for Britain online since 1999. It has been possible to buy tickets from the operators directly for a long time too.
Even given that large numbers of people still want to buy them in person. Its probably still £2bn a year in revenue if not more.
It escapes me why anyone would want to close the ticket offices when they are clearly bringing in more revenue than they cost – especially when its clearly more revenue than would be lost by people travelling by other means or stopping travelling altogether.
The rich and well-connected who complain about rail service tend to be the users making the fewest marginal trips. Here it’s the Green voters and railfans, who take a lot of trips and don’t mind how slow the trains are, since the journey is its own destination. In the US it’s suburban white flighters, who’d love to detach themselves from the city completely but need to go there for work and have no other options, and who also never ride off-peak and thus make no marginal trips. The Home Counties NIMBYs are the same type as the Long Island white flighters, no?
It’s not 1949 anymore. The people living on Long Island are quite diverse these days. It’s not flight of any kind if it was your grandparents that moved there from the city.
Yes, at this point the white flighters are also apoplectic about school integration with Roosevelt and not just with the city.
It’s just awful the way they let black people, from the city, move to the suburbs too.
Yeah gotta agree with adiron on the demographics of the home counties. A generation ago it was lily white. Not now.
Unfortunately we just don’t know. The history of urban policy outside the inner cities and immigration/racial tensions hasn’t been done with the detail and sophistication of American white flight studies.
The structural problems 1947 system of Thames valley housing and trains pre-dates the Windrush migration , let alone the emergence of immigration/race politics in the late 1960’s. Which is confusing to people whose models of racial urbanism are based on American or South African experiences* and don’t want to believe the sacred Attlee government created this mess (let’s allow rich suburbanite Tories to decide where poor people live what a brilliant idea dipshits). Inner city population decline predated WW2, centralisation of taxation removed the property tax doom loop and the 1947 system’s enforced shortages also create weird integration spots at least in London. Bradford and Leicester have much more explicit white flight cultures but that’s possible because overall house prices are much lower.
That said I can’t help but think Greenbelts and in the incoherence of Home County governance aren’t to some extent about racial control and prejudice. The prominence of the word “community” in NIMBY discourse is telling. Its also complicated by an influential species of NIMBY visible minority politicians (Abbot, Khan, Kwarteng, Lutfur Rahman, Rupa Huq).
There is also a species of Far Right YIMBYs which is even more confusing (including GB news, Unherd lot, even Cummings). These are people so anti-Europe and mass-immigration they are willing to sell housing reform to buy off professionals and make sure they have lots of aryan babies or something**.
*British planners talk more about South Africa than they do most of Europe. Its deeply terrible.
** Of course Northern Indians/Pakistanis are Aryans too
Do I need to blog sometime about why urbanists of all political leanings need to shut the fuck up about birthrates and stop making every single issue in the world about urbanism? At the very least, read one (1) sociologist who’s studied this; I’m biased in favor of Paulin Tay Straughan but there are others.
…or I can even vlog it in three hours if people really want me to.
? I wasn’t endorsing it. In fact I’m low key scared that Labour will fuck up somehow and we’ll end up with Erdogan like YIMBYism for true Great British race.
I wouldn’t call these guys urbanists, its more just retvrn-to-the-19th century in general which means abandoning semi-detached car suburbs for townhouses and row houses. Also they are desperate, they have lost, mass immigration is being normalised, Brexit has turned Britain into an EU client state etc etc.
Why can’t I try and make everything about urban planning? I happen to have a arguement about how the littoral East Asian democracies bad planning decisions have made them much more vulnerable to PLA long-range fires spam strategies than they need to be.
Please do give your counter-blast against housing-theory-of-everything people.
…how has bad planning made democratic East Asia more vulnterable to PLA artillery?
My counterblast against the housing theory of everything is that, to start with, well actually Japan and Korea have very low birthrates even with loose housing markets (Tokyo and Seoul have both overtaken Paris in residential space per capita, etc.). More fundamentally, sociologists who study East Asian birthrates don’t think the housing issue is too relevant. They instead mention other things. Alice Evans talks about gender relations, in which women are liberated enough to make reproductive decisions but face career consequences if they marry and have children, and in which men still haven’t gotten the memo and take women for granted so a lot of women just forgo having partners. Straughan talks about the very high costs of raising children because of the culture of hyper-competitive education with early testing and streaming (Singapore ranks first in the world in private tutoring spending as a percentage of income), and about the brutally long working hours reducing the available time to find partners.
I expect a blog on the topic would be received the same way those on the cultural theory of risk and on cultural cringe were received. I’m strongly in favor.
(Straughan, please. Both of the items mentioned are strongly self-perpetuating phenomena. Furthermore, the competitive display of long working hours can explain both of Evans’ items, which are also weaker to begin with. A widespread expectation of “career vs. childcare” or “career vs. even childless marriage” choice/tradeoff can be weakly self-perpetuating in its own right (and empirically, all Western countries mostly broke out of it, in the context of limited work hours). However, if the long hours also apply to women, that implies this trade-off and thus obviates the need for it as an independent explanation. Furthermore, “men haven”t gotten the memo” is not (or even negatively) self-perpetuating, thus obviously not a satisfactory explanation. Moreover, the competitively long working hours situation by itself implies that men would attempt to offload household labor onto someone — not necessarily their spouse — because doing so actively improves their career prospects, whereas taking on childcare responsibilities would affect their prospects negatively. If wages (um, the expected net present value of future earnings) grows superlinearly as a function of working hours, it is economically rational for the members of the household to specialize, just as in absolutely every other field. An interesting direction to go from here is to assume that, after redistributing all household labor to one of the two partners, the designated stay-at-home partner actually has a positive number of notional wage-work-hours left over (but less than a Western full-time job), thus the 1:1 arrangement is using their labor potential inefficiently. If this were true, that would imply that e.g. multigenerational households with both adults working
fullall-time, and the/one retired/SAH elder(s) providing the household labor (childcare, etc.) would work better. Do we observe anything like that?)@Basil Marte you missed some factors: burn out and fatigue. On paper anyone could get a lot more done if I worked 24 hours per day, but it is well known if someone doesn’t get 8 hours of sleep per night they won’t last long before they get tired and make mistakes. This is well studied. It is known that productivity goes down as hours go up and so the sweet spot of productivity is somewhere around 6-12 hours of work per day (I can’t be bothered to look for studies, but I know they exist). Some studies even find negative productivity as hours go beyond the sweet spot.
Of course as you say long hours is often about cultural display. So people may be in the office, but if you look close they are playing a game or something not work related. I don’t know how to change culture, but it does seem like Japan and Korea would benefit from a culture change so that people just go home to play. (probably other countries, but the people I know in India do value their time at home – but this might just be my company)
PLA strategy is based on using massive barrages cruise and ballistic missiles to take out US and allied airbases, enablers and aircraft carriers so that superior on-paper allied airpower can’t deploy. The cheapest way to counter that strategy is to builder more defensible airbases, trade concrete for PGMs. No just hardening but you want to have a surplus more runways and bunkers so you spare capacity and can play-hide-and-seek with PLA kill-chains. Pretty much all the bases in Japan/Taiwan/Korea are ex-Japanese military bases. Taiwan and Korea have hardened theirs, but those fortifications date to the Cold war when the PLA and technology were in a very different place. Japan has basically no hardened airbases at all, and they are concentrated in urban areas including Tokyo (Atsugi, Sayama, Tachikawa). This means expansion is both unpopular and expensive as the struggles in Okinawa have shown.
All three democracies have problems with eminent domain and small lots and airbases are difficult to use the traditional land-readjustment strategy because there is no “profit” at the end. Japan is the worst by far here, because the state has the weakest land-assembly powers. But Korea and Taiwan also have much more restrictive sprawl-control and agricultural land protections. Which is partly why they have higher housing costs than Japan. Military bases need to be seen like large industrial sites with risks of “pollution”, you need to put them on urban extremities where land is cheap enough to go big, but close enough bases and their personnel plus families can access urban amenities and services. Sticking with Japan, they need to do a land flip to move the Tokyo bases into a mix of outer Kanto sites and Kyushu, link to giving Tokyo more green spaces and peripheries more economic activity.
As for the relationship between housing and birth rates. Japan is now the most fecund of the industrialised NE Asian states, its just 20 years ahead of everybody else in going below 2.1 TFR. Given that Japan has had little progress on other gender-issues and still has quite weak welfare for parents and kids (you still pay for High school). Housing is the the main difference I can see*. In particular Taiwan does “badly”** despite being the most progressive state in the region. But more dramatic is the Korea-Japan where the family-work balance is very similar. Yet Japan now has nearly double the TFR. Japanese life has eased up on people since the 1990’s and people outside the urban salaryman core are treated better than in Korea so the hyper-competition is less intense. Not good, but better. Not having conscription helps too since its a male only activity where it exists. Which is a big problem since conscription is a male burden and experience its a real source of both resentment and an incel-ideology propagation event. Taiwanese and Korea gender activists utterly dropped the ball there.
That said family/work patterns are the no.1 factor of where a rich country is on fertility, dysfunctional and self-destructive “traditional family” arrangements are why NE Asia and Southern Europe have lower fertility than the Anglo-saxons or the Scandinavians. If you asked me to guesstimate I’d say having affordable housing is worth 0.1-0.3 in TFR* which is a lot.
*Its important not to exaggerate Japan’s success in housing-affordability here, the higher than normal depreciation of the Japanese housing stock also increases costs and there are composition effects from fertile aged adults disproportionately living in more expensive areas.
** I understand the gender assumptions on competitive natalism, people can get a bit apocalyptic, but pretty much all industrialised societies have quite a lot less children than they say they want.
1. Okinawa has special problems coming from how the American soldiers there treat it as occupied territory. It didn’t help that Okinawa was covid zero until the GIs brought in the virus.
2. Korea is as YIMBY as Japan.
3. A big chunk of PRC strategy re Taiwan is to boost the KMT as useful idiots; the ROC Armed Forces have eve-of-WW2-France levels of loyalty to the democratic regime.
4. Re TFR, Israel exists, it’s just ignored in Western natalist discourse because the people who are most into that discourse are trad Christians who know less than nothing about Jews and get shushed by pro-Israel members of the coalition every time they speak up (cf. the otherwise very knowledgable Lyman Stone thinking the blood libel was about abortion).
1. Okinawa is an atypical case. People love talking about the Neo-colonial narrative, none of talk about the issue that Okinawa is among the top 10 most expensive land prefectures while being dead last on income. Okinawans are actually quite Nimby and didn’t extort a full railway system because they kept thinking they could get rid of the Americans. (This doesn’t apply to the smaller islands who are pro-new base and LDP because see the Chinese everyday and have no other economy.).
2. In raw construction yes, but it isn’t showing up anywhere on affordability. Homeownership rate is just above 55% (i.e. Germany). I honestly don’t understand what going on there other than there is a bubble.
3. PRC has a bunch of plays they are trying. KMT return to power is just one of them. And you keep making excuses for the DPP dropping the ball most of the last 8 years on defense (see conscription reform). FFS the Ukrainians had most of their navy defect in 2014.
4. You can make similar stuff about Ireland, Georgia, Czechia and Romania.
Ukraine is being invaded by a country with 3.5 times its population; Taiwan is threatened by a country with 60 times its population. It leads to a very different attitude toward the importance of raw military strength.
“different attitude” doesn’t include improved civil defense measures like stocking 6 months worth of food in bunkers, and having completed an energy transition away from very easy to destroy-and-blockade gas. Or building emergency port facilities on the East Coast. Conscripting women and adding a civil defense corps etc.
None of Taiwan’s critics are asking it to spend 30% of GDP to fight a conventional war alone. They want it to spend 8-10% to become a defensible island fortress that withstand bombardment and blockade long enough to destroy enough so the PLAN and PLAAF attrited enough that convoys can get through.
Which is reasonable if Taiwan expects the US and co to fight WW3 over it.
8% of Taiwan’s GDP is still a fraction of current PLA spending. By the same token, Iran spends sub-2% of its GDP on the military, because there isn’t any amount of money it can spend that will beat an American invasion.
Part of Korea’s housing costs are likely the age and quality of the housing being replaced by new construction. It’s a much richer country than it was when a lot of the housing being demolished was built; expectations are high and there’s huge pressure to get into newer housing units. Additionally, single-person and smaller families are much more common than back then, so even though population is beginning to decline, more units are needed. There’s also relatively more financial activity around housing than other financial assets. The economy is much weaker outside of Sudogwon, as well, so there is very high demand for housing either within Seoul or Gyeonggi or, in Chungnam/buk, near transit stations.
At least some of this stuff applies to Taiwan as well, so I’m curious how housing prices are, there, although neither Taiwan or Japan are as centered on their capitals as Korea is on Seoul.
because there isn’t any amount of money it can spend that will beat an American invasion.
…..Afghanistan and Iraq went so well.
I’ve been trying to find stuff on Taiwanese housing problems. But all of it is “evil speculators” even among academics. There is clearly some level of “we’ve exhausted catch-up growth but can’t abandon the catch-up model” bubble in there Taiwan. Taiwan has very stringent urban containment combined with very little land and very high weighted density. Plus relatively underbuilt mass transit. Taiwanese cities have designed street layouts and more middle rise than Gyeonggi New Townia. Taiwan also has more problems than Japan in tearing down and rebuilding apparently (and Taiwanese cities do look like that).
I’d like to say they are where Japan was say 1990, but the interesting thing about Bubble era Japan is that outside the luxury condo market in Tokyo and Osaka residential property didn’t really have a bubble and peak unaffordability was in the 1960’s. The bubble was commercial property (offices and hotels) and stocks. Korea and Taiwan seem much more residential in the current bubbles.
Alon Iran is not a good example. The US is not a genocidal superpower that isn’t willing to engage in the levels of violence necessary to destroy an insurgency of the scale that a US invasion would probably entail. Taiwan doesn’t have that luxury, the PRC is already doing that level of violence elsewhere. Also the Iranian regime doesn’t trust the military.
And you didn’t engage with my points. Having 6 months till mass starvation rather than 6 weeks is major strategic difference etc etc. And Taiwan isn’t facing the entire PRC military budget either much of which goes on a still oversized ground component.
And its also political insurance to boot, if the Taiwanese aren’t willing to undertake hard reforms let alone sacrifice blood and treasure for their independence, why should anyone else?
In defense of Taiwanese leadership, they’re in a bit of a bind as any increase in defense spending, acquisition of new systems, etc–most especially when done by the DPP–is met with ratcheting-up of tensions from the PRC. So they have to thread the needle of preparing to fight a war with a superpower while also preparing slowly enough, and with enough plausible deniability, not to provoke the war. All while a good 40% of the country is stupid enough or scared enough to think they should just roll over when the war comes.
You could probably sell increased food stocks as a general disaster-preparedness measure, and an energy transition as a climate change thing (but what are you going to do that the PRC can’t bomb–build even more nuke plants?) but the rest… as much as I’d like to see it happening, I can appreciate that the situation is complex and I don’t envy the leadership at all.
That was a legit excuse in Tsai’s first term to military budget expansion, we are in the 2nd term. I won’t defend the US’s role in the mid-2010’s on procurement either. But the attempt to move away from conscription to a “professional” volunteer force was madness. It showed a lack of thinking in the Green camp towards defense policy (it wasn’t all their fault it was joint effort with KMT).
And DPP energy policy has been not quite German (wind power is rapidly expanding finally), they basically wasted the first 5 years after having decided stupidly to abandon nuclear before Gas.
Tsai is master at managing the diplomacy, its her area of expertise but the problem is its not 2003 anymore and the military balance is the trump card in international relations. I’d add housing and immigration reform as other areas of her years dawdling hard problems.
The non London trips by rail are definitely marginal for the wealthy.
And if you are running more trains to the Thames Valley for example to non London destinations you don’t need to use up slots for train passengers into London itself so you almost certainly have spare extra capacity – or you can create more capacity relatively cheaply.
Is there any evidence that the EU’s Open Access policy is improving this or making it worse?
Was the Snälltåget night train between Berlin and Stockholm an option? I understand it goes via Copenhagen and of course the Øresund bridge.
The EU is more or less completely irrelevant to this, as evinced by the fact that they stopped the train at the border for 10 minutes for passport control. In theory, the EU’s facilitating the Fehmarn Belt tunnel, but in practice, it’s proceeding even slower than German domestic construction, and at costs that don’t really exist here.
Improving very much. For example entrance of competition on Barcelona Madrid decreased ticket prices and increased passanger volumes. In Czechia quality of state CD improved much, when competition from Regiojet entered. The same Italy, or other countries. Just the threat of competition alone forces state monopolies to improve price and quality, eg. SNCF making ouigo to defend market against low cost entrants.
Missing thing is how to easily transfer from one company to another – ticketing, route finding, substitute transport in case of accident…
This could be improved, there should be debate about network ticket including private companies.
Some state regulation would help here.
OuiGo is invisible in TGV ridership trends; one of the motivating factors for the Spinetta Report that I link to my post about was that OuiGo led to reduction in revenue through decreases in real ticket fares without leading to any increase in ridership. All ridership growth between the pre-Financial Crisis and pre-corona peaks can be attributed to the opening of the LGV to Bordeaux.
Yes, that confirms my theory about the EU’s magic competition policy leading to nothing more than parasitising the most lucrative TGV routes without growing the ridership.
Yet again, I believe one way to help with this problem is to provide later services than SNCF for which most TGV services’ last train is about 6pm. The new night train services is another, and of course that will mostly be international routes like your Berlin-Copenhagen (but I suppose a bit too short? probably dumps you at 3am en route to Stockholm?).
Well strictly Ouigo led to more people travelling due to lower prices but that was entirely cancelled out with the loss of ridership because they ran less frequent InOui trains.
The problem with opening lines up to competition is that the private entities cherrypick the lucrative high-volume routes and ignore the more lightly used lines. So corridors like Madrid-Barcelona might become cheaper, but then the state operator has less revenue to cover losses on other lines, leading to degradation of service or even closure.
And then oops, those lightly used branch lines were actually useful in bringing passengers to the high-volume corridors (due to the network effect), and now the network as a whole is entering a death spiral, with multiple operators competing over the rotting carcass.
Rail is a natural monopoly and should be treated as such. Private competition is an ideologically driven short cut to improving service. The superior alternative is the SBB. Switzerland does have private operators but they’re confined to their own lines, the main network is a public monopoly. (incidentally the fact that track and operations are bundled means there isn’t the kind of buck-passing in other countries where these have been deliberately carved off from one another).
But it works because there is a relatively high degree of democratic oversight over transport policy (due to Switzerland’s plebiscitary system) and the public service actually cares about the service it is offering.
df1982:
Absolutely, but that is mandated by EU law. I suppose this is something Switzerland avoids by not being a full member of EU?
1. Most countries do not have Switzerland quality railway. Most countries had inefective, non-inovative state monopolies. Threat of competition forced them to improve. Maybie France is not the best example, so some other examples:
Praha-Ostrava when Regiojet came to route, state CD decreased price, increased quality and overall frequency improved. Now there are 4 competitors CD, ZSSK, Leoexpres and Regiojet. You can get ticket from 13 euros for 350km ride in good quality train.
Madrid – Barcelona before competition, prices were high and frequencies low. Now there are 3 companies, lower prices and better frequencies.
France and Germany literally both have better intercity rail under state monopoly than the competitive systems of Italy and Spain, relative to trip times. This isn’t just some small country that won’t even join the Union – it’s the two largest members.
“France and Germany literally both have better intercity rail under state monopoly than the competitive systems of Italy and Spain”
Yes, but would they have even better rail service with competition (for example would SNCF ditch some of the airline-style ticketing you criticize if a competitor introduced simple flat fares?)
No one is arguing monopoly vs competition is the sole determinant of quality, if it was Amtrak would offer the same level of service as SBB, while SNCF and DB would have identical ticketing policies. Instead people are arguing that competition provides a better price/quality balance than monopolies which have no incentive to change.
The Swiss railways were not born in a perfectly formed shape. They’ve undergone a long process to get where they are now, and ceteris paribus there is no reason why other countries can’t replicate what they’ve done. Liberalising operations actually makes this goal harder, because it becomes a lot more difficult to coordinate services and optimise infrastructure for them.
Another issue is what happens when your infrastructure is full? (A state that compared to air travel or even more so buses is surprisingly easy to reach for railways, especially on mixed-traffic lines.)
Once that is the case, instead of directly competing for passengers, train operators need to start competing for train paths instead, which a) already means that you start getting some disalignment of incentives between operators and passengers and b) means that more competition can’t happen without immediately worsening somebody else’s service offering.
Like e.g. in Germany basically everywhere Flixtrain has decided to operate so far, it has left a minor bloodbath of broken clockface schedules and connections behind – only mitigated by the fact that it only operates a few trains per day on a few selected routes. (To be fair, though, DB Fernverkehr hasn’t been absolutely perfectly innocent in that regard either, but considering their scale of operations they’re still more well-behaved in that regard.)
Connections also don’t really work all that well with uncoordinated competition, plus of course it’s impossible anyway to offer good connections between a connecting service that might run only half-hourly or so and a multitude of competing long distance operators because there’ll usually only be one or at best two train paths available in the Goldilocks zone (not too tight a connection, but no unnecessary long waiting times, either).
Scheduling, timed connection and track capacity, in this I agree, that state monoply is better.
Advantage of competition is that it can create new connections, improve frequency and quality of service and can have more efficient operations.
Other advantage of competition is that private companoes are creating new routes and connections which would not exist in state monopoly. Like in Czechia, there are new vacation trains to Croatia, Baltic coast (Gdaňsk) or to Legoland which would not exist without open access.
Simply, if country has good rail operations it does not need competition, but most countries are not Switzerland.
Railway track is natural monopoly. Train operations are not.
I will give you example – train procurment. It is not unusual, that state monopoly buyed bad or expensive trains because of corruption or to support local production. Private companies are much more effective in buying trains cheaply.
Do the private operators buy cheaper equipment than DB or RENFE or FS? Even SNCF is fine outside Ile-de-France, which has atypical center-of-the-world problems.
Track and train operations should be thought of in unison. That’s also something that can be learned from the Swiss: first figure out what kind of timetable you want, then decide on the optimal infrastructure improvements needed to realise it. Rather than build a line and let a bunch of competing entities haggle over its use.
And competition reduces effective frequency, it doesn’t improve it. Let’s say you have enough demand on a corridor to support 4 trains per hour. In a public monopoly model, you can run trains every 15min. If you have two competing operators, you get two rival services running every 30min. Most likely you would end up with uneven headways, and if you didn’t, it still makes life worse for those who need to make connections, have return tickets, season passes, etc.
The British solve this by having standard regulated tickets that are valid on all operators.
I believe there is a process to share revenue between the different companies based on actual passenger numbers on each train.
The UK has some degree of ticket coordination, in the sense that you can buy a single ticket from any origin to any destination. But plenty of tickets are tied to a particular type of service offered by a particular company. If I have a ticket for a Thameslink train from Brighton to London, it’s not necessarily going to be accepted on a Southern train, for example. In general, ticketing in the UK is so labyrinthine I wouldn’t recommend it as a model for anyone.
> But it works because there is a relatively high degree of democratic oversight over transport policy (due to Switzerland’s plebiscitary system) and the public service actually cares about the service it is offering.
Private operators on their own lines with bundled tracks and operations also works in Japan. It actually works even better in Japan.
Japan is not a plebiscitary democracy. The oversight is mostly done by unelected bureaucrats. While they are accountable to politicians who are elected in what are technically fair and free elections, in practice they are accountable to the single party that has managed to win almost every election for decades.
Competent oversight may be necessary. Democratic oversight is absolutely not necessary.
Caring about the service it is offering is just the natural state of things for a private company. It’s nothing special.
Even most of the exceptions, like airlines aren’t really exceptions. In the case of airlines, the companies have noticed the only thing almost all of their customers care about is unfortunately price. And even the legacy airlines actually care about providing the hub and spoke style service that some travelers care about, instead of going all in on low prices with more LCC-like models.
There’s no uniquely Swiss reason why Swiss railways work well. The overlap between uniquely Swiss and uniquely Japanese cultural and institutional factors is basically zero.
As for whether you actually want to cut off and privatize parts of a national railway network, probably not. It did work extremely well for Japan, but the JNR break up probably had many uniquely Japanese factors working in its favor.
The “unique” Japanese factor is the legacy privates who have never received operational subsidies and some even run de-facto intercity networks (Kintetsu, Tobe etc). JNR master-narratives tend to ignore them even though its really obvious JNR privatisation worked because it slotted into the same regulatory framework and business model framework.
I think there is a kind of overlap is that SBB doesn’t just have conventional representative democratic oversight but has a hard budget constraint and a direct relationship with its riders-voters to the point it can appeal directly to them for bond issues etc.
I think formal private-public axis is actually quite unhelpful. I’d argue SBB is more like a private company than British rail franchises are, given the latter’s massive operations subsidies, state ownership of the assets and the state micromanaging of the timetables. Timetable autonomy is never going to 100% apolitical, but there are definite degrees. Britain has the worst of both worlds, a state that imposes stupid operations on its network and pretends it’s not in charge of those decisions. The opacity is such that the UK has very weak public discussion of timetable other than “more more more services and money”.
Railways are not natural monopolies to the extent that water or electricity are. The existence of alternative forms of transport at every level of transport makes it so. Its in that vague space between oligopoly, monopoly and monopolistic competition. However, railways have massive positive externalities that make pricing difficult, and have so much advantages in certain corridors (major-intercity connections, big city urban services) that give them dangerous levels of market power. Worse the massive mismash of subsidies that other transportation methods (cars above all, to a lesser extant planes) means state subsidy for capital expenditure is inescapable and only fair.
I have a simple rule of thumb on rail privatisation. Have you privatised parking*? If the answer is no, then don’t privatise railways.
But it’s important to keep focusing on a network of fast rail links between major cities. That’s the source of intercity rail ridership at scale. People love complaining about the lack of good rail for niche town pairs involving regional connections at both ends, but those town pairs are never going to get rail service that can beat the car for the great majority of potential riders who own a car and aren’t environmental martyrs.
Define regional. Almost no one makes a long trip to see the sights in the railroad station. Or airport or bus station. Almost no one lives at one either. Both ends are going to involve some other transport for most people. Everybody wants express service on their doorstep. They aren’t going to get it and going someplace not-local is going to involve some sort of travel.
You also have to keep in mind that people realize that saying “Are you nuts? I’m not going to get on public transport where I might have to interact with those people” and tell you it’s more convenient to drive.
I have looked at rail passenger numbers for a fair number of places now. The rich places often have very high ridership given their size.
Define regional. Almost no one makes a long trip to see the sights in the railroad station. Or airport or bus station. Almost no one lives at one either. Both ends are going to involve some other transport for most people. Everybody wants express service on their doorstep. They aren’t going to get it and going someplace not-local is going to involve some sort of travel.
Aye. According to this article Alon counts Karlsruhe as one of Germany’s “13 metropolitan areas of at least 1 million” inhabitants that should/could be connected via a high-speed network.
While that population figure isn’t wildly implausible if you add up the immediately neighbouring counties, I would like to note that of the million and a bit people, only 300,000 actually live within Karlsruhe proper where you can sort of plausibly assume that public transport will be good enough that you don’t have to worry about how to get to the Hauptbahnhof for your high-speed train. (In reality even that is only true for the tram network, which, while quite comprehensive, still doesn’t cover quite 100 % of the city, though on the other hand a few immediately neighbouring villages and towns get a high-frequency service, too, so on a rough scale those two things might cancel each other out. And of course this is only applicable Mon – Sat daytime…)
That means all those 700,000+ other people need to somehow make their way to the station before they can zip off to the rest of the country – via train and bus connections that currently often only run hourly or half-hourly (sometimes every twenty minutes) at best. (A lucky few of the largest neighbouring cities might get a few more trains per hour to and from Karlsruhe, but due to scheduling constraints these trains won’t be evenly spread out and still leave some twenty or even thirty minute gaps.)
While the exact split between the true core urban population (with public transport good enough that you don’t have to worry about connections) and the wider metropolitan area probably varies from case to case, I’d wager that basic issue applies to almost any of those 13 areas given, so either you do need to worry about regional connectivity after all, or else you need to stop claiming that connecting just those 13 cities literally covers more than half of Germany’s population.
There are a bunch of people, especially older people, for whom driving a short distance to the train station is a reasonable thing to do, but for whom driving for several hours is going to be a problem.
And as long as you aren’t going too far taxis are often a good option.
It’s kind of funny that you picked Karlsruhe to make your point when in fact its highly successful regional tram-train system serves as a model for numerous other mid-sized cities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlsruhe_model
The main goal of the tram-train was making getting into and out of the city centre easier, but quite a few routes still only run hourly or half-hourly, so if you’re connecting to the wider rail network, you’re still dependant on good connections (and your personal schedule matching up with the railway’s schedule) if you want to get anywhere near those headline journey time figures. Plus unless you’re coming in from the south, the local geography means that you need to make a trade-off whether you want to prioritise a quick journey into the city centre, or a quick journey to the main station, and the implementation of the tram-train has meant choosing the former over the latter.
Great for local journeys (and the success of the system did prove that it was the right trade-off, since local journeys to/from Karlsruhe itself happen more frequently than long-distance journeys looking to catch a train from the main station), but it doesn’t help within the context of claiming that all the million-plus people are now truly well-connected to the high-speed network and won’t be disappointed when they start comparing those headline journey times with their actual journey.
(Some overhead in getting to and from the station is of course expected, but if you really want to claim a million or a million-and-a-half people for Karlsruhe instead of merely half-a-million or so [i.e. only the city itself and the really immediate neighbourhood], that overhead of getting to and from the main station will increase significantly. Now I don’t want to be too pessimistic: Speed-ups on the long-distance network would still be speed-ups – provided they actually apply end-to-end instead of merely having to wait longer for your last mile(s) connection – but in terms of absolute journey times and e.g. that stated sub-2,5 to 3 hours goal, those “really wide metropolitan area” population figures still feel somewhat inflated to me.)
People have a multitude of possible journeys. Far suburb to distant city center is amenable to trains and far suburb to far suburb isn’t. But since it’s far suburb to far suburb, there aren’t a lot of them. It’s okay if people have more than one choice.
Yevgeny shoulda taken the HSR train St Petersburg-Moscow.
If he did, we would just be reading about a massive train derailment right now…
Nah. Exceedingly low odds of assassinating one particular person by targeting a train.
Unconfirmed reports that the jet was brought down by 1 or 2 SAMs. Unless there is some phone-video that someone downloads on the usual sites, we will probably never know details. The real question is whether there will be any blowback to Putin.
Yeah, the guy who started a war that has killed tens of thousands and radioactively poisons dissidents is totally going to be squeamish about how he assassinates the person who launched a coup against him….
They use nerve-agents too.
PSA: don’t lean on the door. It can suffer a mechanical malfunction and unexpectedly open.
PSA: don’t lean out the window. The structure gauge is narrower than you imagine it to be.
PSA: don’t throw your rubbish out the window. Given the velocity of the train, it can seriously hurt [checks notes] maintenance-of-way workers and other railway staff, or even the passengers of the oncoming train.
The US is an intensely commercial society. Passenger rail will only succeed in the US if it involves for-profit commercial interests in a central way.
Feel free to correct me:
The NYC subways were built by private companies. The city government passed laws freezing subway fares at $0.05 for 44 years, thereby forcing the companies to give up their now-money-losing assets.
Nearly every transit system in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th century was built and run by private companies under a municipal charter like how early rail lines were built in the United Kingdom. Because they were kind of monopolies, the government did things like not permit them to raise fare prices. This ended up really screwing transit because capital improvements were really hard without the revenue.
This is the model of passenger rail that WILL work in the US. https://www.gobrightline.com/. Amtrak will have to become some kind of holding company that leases out trains to actual operators or funnels public money to new track or stations. Without competition and private capital, things just don’t work in the individualistic and commercially-oriented US.
Airports and highways seem to be doing quite well.
True but don’t forget that the annual [2014] $66bn repair & maintenance cost of the IHS is only covered by about $21bn in fed fuel taxes with the rest coming out of general government budget allocations, ie. direct subsidy. It also explains why the US national road network is in such poor repair (probably worst in the developed world), because Americans and big-biz don’t like to spend on maintenance. There is a case for running it like a business, wherein sections are managed by private companies with tolls and long leases (not ownership), with of course strong regulation on maintenance etc. This is the way the French National autoroute network was financed, built and run. They would have had to have a system of zones/states of responsibility determined by the feds (not by the companies who would otherwise just cherrypick) so that lower-user roads would not be ignored.
Re airports, they have come under intense pressure to be privatised but so far the feds have resisted on the non-trivial reason of national security (for the major airports which are all federal). Examples of where they have been privatised, like Heathrow and all the London airports and Sydney, show how the monopoly gets abused with some of the highest landing charges (in Europe and world, respectively) and poorest ‘customer service’. Plus those excess profits go to their private shareholders and not to future airport improvement (like Heathrow’s third runway which will be mostly government funded via various fudges; superb example of public cost with private profit).
Commercial airports are owned by local government with a few exceptions like Reagan/National and Dulles in Virginia. The Federal government heavily regulates them, partly so Senators and their constituents can get flights at choice times. I don’t know how Heathrow works but here in the States the customer service is provided by the airline.
Exactly. Airlines and cars are not owned and operated by government. That’s the model that will work for passenger trains. Just because the rails and stations are owned by a public body doesn’t mean the trains or employees must be.
Cars don’t have timed transfers to consider. Trains have more moving parts than cars as a transportation system; not for nothing, states with limited ability to coordinate different bodies are more auto-oriented than states with more extensive ability (e.g. compare Thailand or Indonesia or the Philippines with all of East Asia).
Tell this to the European Union. https://www.railway-technology.com/features/how-spain-became-the-arena-for-high-speed-rail-competition/.
You mean how on a handful of corridors in Spain, ridership is finally on a par with the state-run TGV?
The EU has the same problem as the US federal government with not really doing anything – they nudge rather than build and run things themselves. The real action is at the member state level, hence the contrast between good domestic TGV (or ICE) service and bad cross-border service.
No I don’t. The aggregate is made of individual choices. I mean the actual experience of passenger rail travel. Amtrak’s stalinist customer service and lack of access to private for-profit capital mean it can’t build market share in competition with cars and planes even where the infrastructure might make that possible. Brightline is the model that will work in the US because it has customer service and access to private capital. Bringing both private and public investment into passenger rail travel is essential.
Rail infrastructure here is done exclusively with public investment. Private companies can come in later, and in the case of Spain could make use of very good infrastructure hobbled by very bad operations, but it’s not something that private companies operating at private-sector scale ever do. (JR Central got the Tokaido Shinkansen from the public sector.)
Rail infrastructure does not HAVE to be done with public investment. That’s my point. All the railroads in the US were built by private for-profit companies originally.
Almost all the original rail infrastructure in the US was built by private for-profit companies. Rail infrastructure can be built by private companies AGAIN.
That was in the 19th century, when there weren’t competing modes of travel and when local governments had fewer tools for surplus extraction.
In the 19th century, the US and state governments gave huge tracts of public land to railroads to encourage their construction.
The government gave them huge tracts of land in the West. They had competition in the East. With canals and with each other.
That land they were given was worthless without the railroads. You couldn’t reasonably get there by any other means (no natural rivers for the most part). Sure roads could have been built (wagon trains did create them), but they were slow and unable to supply a town with anything it couldn’t make, or get anything the town did make back to customers. As such before the rail roads the only people who could live out west were trying to get away from other humans.
As adirondacker12800 said, land with value was not given away. The railroads had to buy it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2023/08/30/amtrak-brightline-high-speed-rail/
Brightline isn’t high speed. Traffic is awful, it’s faster than driving.
Brightline exists and is moving passengers by train who would not travel by train otherwise. It’s something where there was nothing.
https://www.loc.gov/collections/railroad-maps-1828-to-1900/articles-and-essays/history-of-railroads-and-maps/land-grants/#:~:text=Between%201850%20and%201872%20extensive,of%20track%20that%20was%20built.
Brightline exists but it’s not high speed.
1. I have seen/heard Brightline referred to as “higher speed”.
2. One of the famous US Supreme Court cases dealt with railroads and “extraction”. It was with what is now called Caltrain. In Santa Clara County versus Southern Pacific Railroad (1886), the County decided it wanted railroad land and confiscated it. The Court said companies are entitled to the protections of the 5th and 14th Amendments, and that state/local government had to pay just compensation for eminent domain takings. In other words: “Corporations are people”.
The choice for the east coast of florida was not high speed or Brightline. It was Brightline or absolutely nothing at all.
They had and have TriRail. Neither of them are high speed.
1. Florida had a public option ready to go in Florida HSR; Rick Scott killed it out of spite.
2. Eminent domain was, by today’s standards, pretty weaksauce extraction. The tools of extraction have evolved – for example, the arbitrary denial of permits, like that Seattle suburb where the fire department wouldn’t certify a light rail station that met code unless it was built to exceed code requirements.
They can’t make you exceed code. You build to someone else’s code they can make you change it but they can’t make you exceed code.
They can (and did) refuse to certify the train station; the state didn’t fight back.
You have mangled happened somehow.
Exactly. The “public option” doesn’t work well in the US. There has to be private capital and profit involved somehow. You can rail against America’s failure to be other nations, but that is the way it is. You’re helping to prove my point.
Monopoly and privatization are two different things. You have to have competition AND access to private for-profit investment to make passenger trains work in the US.
Once again, feel free to correct me.
In the USA:
The Highway Trust Fund pays for mass transit with money collected mostly from the gas tax. Mass transit doesn’t pay into the HTF. About 20% of the HTF goes to mass transit (to be more precise, the Mass Transit Fund receives about 20% of the HTF). Mode share of mass transit is about 5%.
Amtrak pays $0.04 per gallon tax on diesel it uses. That goes to the FRA, while a trucker pays $0.24 per gallon into the HTF.
The Airport and Airways Trust Fund gets money from taxes on gasoline and jet fuel for aviation uses. The AATF is also where the per-passenger tax on flyers goes.
Your mileage may vary ..
The Highway Trust Fund takes money generated from all roads but only spends it on national roads, and its state equivalents only do on state roads. Local road spending is entirely local, at a level that has unfortunately not been as delegitimized in American discourse as the federal level and therefore is not perceived as tax money being spent on roads.
I think raising and spending money in one’s own community is inherently kinda popular. And the people involved probably also do lots of stuff for the community in general to make it better.
Raising money from outside sources is popular. The federal gas tax hasn’t been increased in a long time because that is money from locals. Property taxes are controversial (Prop-13 in CA for example), and that is the main way most locals get money from locals. Sometimes you can raise property taxes, but they are looked at harder than most taxes in general so it isn’t easy – though since the benefit is local it can be done if the benefit is sold right. If you can get a business to donate money to a local park that is popular as then you don’t pay for it.