Quick Note: Anti-Green Identity Politics
In Northern Europe right now, there’s a growing backlash to perceived injury to people’s prosperity inflicted by the green movement. In Germany this is seen in campaigning this year by the opposition and even by FDP not against the senior party in government but against the Greens. In the UK, the (partial) cancellation of High Speed 2 involved not just cost concerns but also rhetoric complaining about a war on cars and shifting of high-speed rail money to building new motorway interchanges.
I bring this up for a few reasons. First, to point out a trend. And second, because the Berlin instantiation of the trend is a nice example of what I talked about a month ago about conspiracism.
The trend is that the Green Party in Germany is viewed as Public Enemy #1 by much of the center-right and the entire extreme right, the latter using the slogan “Hang the Greens” at some hate marches from the summer. This is obvious in state-level political campaigning: where in North-Rhine-Westphalia and Schleswig-Holstein the unpopularity of the Scholz cabinet over its weak response to the Ukraine war led to CDU-Green coalitions last year (the Greens at the time enjoying high popularity over their pro-Ukraine stance), elections this year have produced CDU-SPD coalitions in Berlin and Hesse, in both cases CDU choosing SPD as a governing partner after having explicitly campaigned against the Greens.
This is not really out of any serious critique of the Green Party or its policy. American neoliberals routinely try to steelman this as having something to do with the party’s opposition to nuclear power, but this doesn’t feature into any of the negative media coverage and barely into any CDU rhetoric. It went into full swing with the heat pump law, debated in early summer.
In Berlin the situation has been especially perverse lately. One of the points made by CDU in the election campaign was that the red-red-green coalition failed to expand city infrastructure as promised. It ran on more room for cars rather than pedestrianization, but also U-Bahn construction; when the coalition agreement was announced, Green political operatives and environmental organizations on Twitter were the most aghast at the prospects of a massive U-Bahn expansion proposed by BVG and redevelopment of Tempelhofer Feld.
And then this month the Berlin government, having not made progress on U-Bahn expansion, announced that it would trial a maglev line. There hasn’t been very good coverage of this in formal English-language media, but here and here are writeups. The proposal is, of course, total vaporware, as is the projected cost of 80 million € for a test line of five to seven kilometers.
This has to be understood, I think, in the context of the concept of openness to new technology (“Technologieoffenheit”), which is usually an FDP slogan but seems to describe what’s going on here as well. In the name of openness to new tech, FDP loves raising doubts about proven technology and assert that perhaps something new will solve all problems better. Hydrogen train experiments are part of it (naturally, they failed). Normally this constant FUD is something I associate with people who are out of power or who are perpetually junior partners to power, like FDP, or until recently the Greens. People in power prefer to do things, and CDU thinks it’s the natural party of government.
And yet, there isn’t really any advance in government in Berlin. The U8 extension to Märkisches Viertel is in the coalition agreement but isn’t moving; every few months there’s a story in the media in which politicians say it’s time to do it, but so far there are no advances in the design, to the point that even the end point of the line is uncertain. And now the government, with all of its anti-green fervor – fervor that given Berlin politics includes support for subway construction – is not so much formally canceling it as just neglecting it, looking at shiny new technologies that are not at all appropriate for urban rail just because they’re not regular subways or regular commuter trains, which don’t have that identity politics load here.
Pedestrian Observations 
I know nothing of Berlin’s politics beyond what I’ve read on here and occasional perusings of the international Der Spiegel, but is it not possible–maybe even likely–that the CDU’s support for subways is just for show? It’s one thing to say you support it, but if you never do anything about it–and you don’t do anything else to show support for mass transit–do you really?
I think a large part of the issue with car usage in the West is that, by now, it’s reached its limits. Even self-driving cars, if they were to become ubiquitous, would require the sort of infrastructural investment that could also build subways. Pretending that a government can pour all of its transportation funding into cars/trucks and have it actually meet transportation needs–especially in large urban areas like Berlin (or NYC, LA, Paris…)–is a lie that various people have been telling themselves and everyone else for about a century now.
The reconciliation is that despite all appearances, cars were not the transportation revolution of the last 150 years. Just like the horse-and-carriage they replaced, they can only move a handful of people at a time (albeit faster and more reliably). Trains/buses can move hundreds of people at a time, albeit only along set lines. Couple that with the revolution of bicycles–much faster/further than walking for little material investment–and all reasonable transport needs are met. Throw the inefficiency of cars into the mix, and you’re left with essentially a gadgetbahn that wows people without fundamentally changing the transportation calculus of horse-and-carriage.
I don’t know how we fix this issue, but that it’s become an id-pol thing says it won’t be easy
I don’t think it’s exactly for show. It’s just, building things doesn’t really do much for a movement based entirely on partisan idpol; it’s very obvious when it’s the New Left with its “do we really need to govern effectively?” cope, and it’s exactly the same when it’s a center-right party that lives off of anti-green populism.
I don’t think there’s much evidence of it just being partisan ID pol in Britain.
All of the examples I am aware of the antis have a point.
On ULEZ the public transport – especially the circumferal public transport – is weak in outer London. In Uxbridge in particular there are lots of missed connections on the tube and the Chiltern Line local services are particularly weak only running hourly.
The LTN examples where there has been widespread controversy are usually in outer suburban areas where the public transport is weak.
Yeah, in the UK, there traditionally wasn’t much modal warfare on this. The British PM who I most associate with right-wing idpol, Boris Johnson, famously liked public transport and wasn’t at all a climate denier, and the public transport advocates’ criticisms of him centered his ego and incompetence (e.g. the cost of the Boris Bus) rather than his agenda. Sunak’s switch to German-style mode warfare is pretty unusual, and is not just about LTNs because usually cars-and-trains people who hate New Left urbanism like big train projects and wouldn’t move money from HS2 to motorway interchanges.
(By the way: in Berlin, the pedestrianization project that CDU criticized the most, and reversed this year, was of Friedrichstrasse in Mitte, rather than in an outer neighborhood.)
So is the issue that the median voter in a swing seat in Britain uses public transport at least occasionally but that the median voter in Germany only drives?
Germany doesn’t meaningfully have median voters. There are swing voters in many directions: SPD-CDU, Green-SPD, Green-CDU, FDP-CDU, CDU-AfD, any party-not voting, etc. FDP swings between trying to go after FDP-CDU marginal voters and trying to go after FDP-Green or FDP-SPD marginal voters; CDU swings between trying to go after CDU-AfD marginal voters (which Merz is openly doing) and trying to go after CDU-SPD/Green ones; etc.
Not what the voter does, but what they see themselves as doing. If you drive but fondly remember college years when you took transit you might see yourself as a transit rider even though you are not. If you always take transit but aspire to some day drive you might see yourself as a car owner and vote against transit.
The best transit is invisible. However that means voters don’t think about it and end up inadvertently voting against it.
Certainly British regional trains are better than the French ones, how they compare to the German trains I am not sure.
Perhaps the arrangements when there is a delay are better in Britain – the train company will put you in a taxi with no cost if the last train is cancelled. Plus compensation is available pretty easily if there is a delay of only 15 minutes with a full refund on a single if you arrive at your destination is 60 minutes late and a full refund on a return if you arrive 120 minutes late – see https://www.avantiwestcoast.co.uk/help-and-support/delay-repay as an example.
Johnson is not actually an especially Right ID-pol Conservative politician. That’s mostly because he is far too incoherent, lazy, selfish, afraid of being disliked etc to have any real ideals. He has prejudices, but he is much more interested catering to his audience’s. Remember this the guy who in 2009 did a TV program which ending arguing for Turkish membership of the EU so as to unify the Roman Empire.
Sunak is much more right wing and doesn’t have Johnson’s breadth of experience handling ordinary people. Johnson knows the limitations of the hard right press and that elections are won by selling an image on TV. Sunak thinks its won on Telegraph articles….which is really really stupid. (His best friend is a Spectator editors which is about as useful as a Republican hiring a National Review editor to do their mass media). Sunak is 1/4 Coastal Southern English petty bougie reactionary 1/4 American Libertarian Tech bro 1/4 SW Indian Tech Brahmin 1/4 Oxbridge Bougie. He was writing anti-EU screeds as teenager at Winchester.
Traditionally the Conservatives have been anti-bus and pro-trains because of their suburban southern English vote. Sunak is almost as ignorant of that England as is of his Yorkshire constituency. Where the conservatives will go on this depends on where their vote goes from now. Whoever controls southern England will be pushed to solve train problems. A Tory party based in the Midlands/North against London will be much less interested in trains policy*.
*North of England has crap trains because nobody wins elections on improving Northern trains. See history of the West Yorkshire metro.
For me, that’s kind of the showing-of-the-hand. Explicitly or implicitly relying on individuals to meet their own transport needs–whether through loudly extolling car ownership or quietly failing to promote an alternative–is an easy way to let your government get away with doing nothing but band-aid roadworks (at whatever costs, and whatever time frame), and hoping/assuming/imagining it’ll all work itself out, even if in a city of Berlin’s size, that’s just delusional. As we see in North America, partisan idpol can be inclusive of the idea that government can’t/shouldn’t try to build things, though again, I, myself, don’t know if that applies to Berlin/Germany, too.
As ever, it’s that Penalosa quote. Good governments will force themselves to meet the public’s needs; rich publics can pretend that they don’t need the government to meet their needs, and so even do-nothing governments can just slide on by.
“The reconciliation is that despite all appearances, cars were not the transportation revolution of the last 150 years.”
Given that cars didn’t exist in 1873, yes they were not the transportation revolution of the last 150 years. However, they most certainly were the revolution of the last 100 years (with airliners being the revolution of the last 50 years). To suggest cars have the same transportation calculus of horses and carriages just because they both carry the same number of people is as foolish as comparing a modern short DMU to a late 19th century sailing clipper because both have a similar passenger capacity.
Cars are the dominant mode of transportation around the world. Even in countries with world class public transit (Switzerland, France, etc.) cars are the overwhelmingly dominant mode of transport, with 75-85% mode share. In Seoul bus and train carries 50% of passengers, but in South Korea as a whole it is only 28%. In general, car use is almost entirely tied to wealth, in Europe the countries with less than 70% car use are poorer countries like Serbia/Hungary/Turkey – and even then cars are still the majority mode with 60% share. In Japan car mode share went from 0.6% to 57.3% between 1950 and 2000, as train/bus fell from 99% to 36%. If Japan did not purposely tax cars and toll roads to reduce auto use, the mode share would undoubtedly be higher.
To describe a mode of transport that moves billions of people daily as a “gadgetbahn” is not a serious argument.
Transit advocates have a huge problem when they ignore reality like this. The fact is that for many (most?) trips the zero-headway, infinite-span, express service provided by cars is the best form of transport, and it is “set line” service that is inefficient. It is also a fact that in many/most urban areas subways are the best form of transport. It is also a fact that for many/most medium distance journeys to/from a urban area (intercity journeys or regional service) high speed rail is the best form of transport, faster than cars but better access than planes. It is also a fact that even in areas where cars are best it is possible to make public transport efficient enough for reasonable journey times, both as an amenity (for people going somewhere they want to drink alcohol and not drive) and a social benefit (for people who cannot afford a car). Transit advocates need to focus on the latter cases and promote them, not dream for a world where cars don’t exist – because that will not happen.
….I debated whether or not to respond, because you seem to have a habit of unproductive nitpicking (Really? is it worth is to point out cars came around the 1890’s and not the 1870’s? The point was to encapsulate the time frame of when new forms of transportation started becoming more widespread during the industrial revolution) and bad analogies (cars/walking/cycling/trains=land transport; ships/planes are not), but why not?
1. “Everybody’s doing it” is rarely a sound argument for something’s merit. I’ll never claim cars have no particularly meaningful benefits, only that the bulk of those benefits are available at much lower individual and societal costs through efficient urban design and public transit.
2. Per Wikipedia: “Gadgetbahn is a neologism that refers to a public transport concept or implementation that is touted by its developers and supporters as futuristic or innovative, but in practice is less feasible, reliable, and more expensive than traditional modes such as buses, trams and trains.” I ask you this: in those countries wealthy enough to have mass car ownership do we, in effect, use cars as public transit, i.e., rely upon cars and car-based infrastructure to transport large numbers of people, often in areas where (even if their urban forms have been dictated by mass car ownership) there are enough people going to close-together places that mass transit would work more reliably and cheaply than mass car ownership?
I call cars a gadgetbahn because that is often how we use them, not because of what they are. I don’t expect them to go away, either completely or–insofar as they ever will–any time soon. But telling ourselves that our current usage levels of car ownership are somehow a natural product of their virtues–instead of a project of vested interests to insert car usage into scenarios where they are absolute overkill for what they’re doing–is a tremendous distraction from the fact that we can get most of their benefits–for nearly everyone, at much lower costs–from building for actual mass transit systems, and cities around them, instead of cars.
Add, basically, the money-equivalent cost of coordination complexity. With transit, a more-or-less single, central plan simultaneously addressing all vertices of the Holy Tetrahedron (infrastructure, rolling stock, schedule, land use) needs to be made. (Yes, there are historical oddities like the multi-company origins of the London Underground and the Japanese networks. They are oddities for a reason.) Whereas with cars, there is much less need for that. As a transportation system, cars are not Fordist. (Huh.) People/households decide to buy a car and set their “schedule”, such as it is, but they take infrastructure as an external given (and for the most part, they also take land use as a given). Governments building roads (or chartering turnpike companies) generally speaking treat the properties of traffic — its composition (vehicle type and occupancy), direction, timing, etc. — more or less as a given, or at best, as something to change in bulk (HOV lanes, ramp metering, etc.) rather than subject to bespoke negotiation, as they would with a rolling stock manufacturer/lessor. Oddly enough, they also seem to often treat land use as an external given.
If a — putting it very roughly — society is incompetent, or is deliberately hobbling its ability to coordinate, that puts a higher exchange rate between complexity and monetary cost. Roughly put, there is a fixed number of megaprojects per quarter-century that the society in question can accomplish. Does this transit network rank high enough to fit into this (unknown but real) limit? If you have a national-prestige project such as putting astronauts on the Moon, that presumably takes precedence. With cars, for the most part you don’t have megaprojects at all, so you can build/extend the car network with far less spending from the Competence Budget.
The “everyone is doing it” argument means cigarettes have been the most significant fashion trend in the last 200 years (possibly way more). More people smoked cigarettes than they wore any clothing, or perfume or anything.
What I care about is safety. I’ve been to enough funerals for 3 year olds who lost to a car (despite being in the right by all legal and safety practices). So I’m looking at how do we move the needle and attract people who can afford multiple cars and mostly go where traffic is not a problem.
Which is why I’m asking for 5 minute or less service all day for the suburbs, and transfers to other/express routes at no more than 15 minutes (7 average) from. That is the only level of service that can attract people who have no issues with driving into transit anyway.
It might not be realistic to get, but it is something that should be obtainable if enough other people realize it and thus become willing to invest. And best of all long term for the 80% who give up one car (not all cars!) for this system it is cheaper than the car.
Second cars are expensive so I don’t think you need a service every 5 minutes to be attractive to replace a second car.
Most people live in a family situation. That second car is for “him”, while the first car is for “her”, if there are driving age kids then the third car is for them. If transit isn’t frequent all of those people will much prefer to take the car (suburbs: parking is free and traffic is light) which goes when they want. If transit is frequent then the entire family only needs one car – when “he” takes the boat fishing (an activity that cannot be done on transit) “she” just can’t visit “her” “grandpa” on the farm (any other activity that can’t be done on transit) – but odds are such things where they are not together and both want to do something transit can’t do don’t happen on the same day.
I do know families (“him and her”) with three cars where one car is a backup. If transit is not frequent they can still get rid of that third car – typically infrequent transit is useful for work trips only (because you can make work schedules fit around transit, and such trips tend to be less impulsive): if your car is broke over a weekend you can work around it while you are expected to get to work on time (one reason to have a third car). Though often this third car is a collectors car and so will never be gotten rid if but is impractical for regular use even though that is the excuse.
Everything in quotes above I just invoked a populate stereotype, you should substitute whatever fits your personal situation.
As much as I’d like to believe it, no doubt it is merely political posturing. Probably a few Berlin politicians have done a study tour of Chengdu where Transport System Bögl has an operational 3.5km test track. It’s already racked up >100k kilometres of runs. The original rationale for this system is that unlike existing low-speed urban maglevs this is capable of 150kph, and the idea is to link distant suburbs/subsidiary cities with the centre of Chengdu better than standard trains. I’ve never seen any cost estimates but Bögl claims “very low costs of around 30 to 50 million euros per kilometre of double-track line with elevated track”. In the Anglosphere that €80m would barely pay for a report on the project from KPMG or the usual suspects.
Greens parties are usually punching bags by both left and right. Labor and Socialist parties consider the Greens are nothing but thieves of “their” voters. At the Federal level in Australia the Greens have significant influence in the lower house narrowly held by Labor and have balance-of-power in the Senate, so Labor are furious with them, especially given that the Greens have made significant public impact with their housing, climate and fairer tax policies. But Anne Hidalgo (Socialist) seems to have managed a coalition with the Greens to run Paris effectively. So, with similar problems one wonders WTF Berliners are voting for CDU? Is it a reflection of the wider problem, or at least perception, of Germany not pulling its weight, in Ukraine, Israel-Hamas and the EU? Has their wealth made them too timid and complacent?
I think the optimistic way to view TSB and other urban maglevs is as a potential alternative to conventional automated light metro systems for cities currently without higher order transit. For example, a city like Brescia or even Seattle might in the future build its first metro line with TSB as opposed to rail. In cities with established rail-based rapid transit it’s hard to imagine a use case and in Berlin it’s very likely not a a serious proposal.
That’s of course assuming that infrastructure and operating costs can actually be controlled to be not higher than for conventional rail.
As to why Berliners are voting for CDU, Berlin includes a lot of lower density somewhat auto-oriented suburban and even rural communities. It covers a fairly large area and the core city just makes up a somewhat small part. Paris famously does not even include all of the urban core of the Parisian metro so voter demographics are rather different. It’s the same story in Hamburg by the way… the dense urban environment is within the 2nd ring road (Ring 2) – in Berlin this is the Ringbahn – and outside of it the average density drops of fast.
That wasn’t the case with Chengdu which is a megacity with an exisiting mega-metro system. I see it as an experiment to see if it can improve urban mass transit under such conditions (mega …). For the same reasons I thought Paris (a megacity) should have considered it for the M15 orbital; and given that it gets built elevated it might even turn out not much different in cost!
The actual maglev mechanism is expensive but the physical infrastructure is a lot cheaper (the trains are a fraction of the weight of wheeled trains and they can traverse bends at much higher speeds meaning more flexible route–which is already flexible because it is elevated). Operating costs are almost zero. Seriously a visiting academic engineer to the Shanghai maglev estimated it had the equivalent of about two weeks “maintenance” in its first decade. On that basis alone–and the resulting highly reliable operation–justifies a much higher capital cost.
Of course the real problem is human perceptions of cost. Politicians don’t much care what future politicians or transit users may have to pay in operations costs. Just like people are unconvinced that with EV one can easily justify paying more than an ICE vehicle because you will be saving hugely on fuel.
Aren’t most of the curve radius things about passenger comfort not physical limits?
In terms of physical limits I believe you can go round a 340m radius curve at up to 75mph as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_accidents_at_Morpeth, but that is below the minimum curve radius on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_railway_curve_radius
Also I believe the maintenance on slab track like the channel tunnel is pretty minimal.
The different parties definitely differ on a county-by-county basis – sometimes quite significantly.
So the Greens in France and the Greens in Germany are undoubtably quite different.
In Germany, nobody mentions non-European examples as worthy to learn from. (See also the corona writeup from late 2020, mentioning the different European responses but not once the far more successful ones in Asia-Pacific.)
In Berlin, the CDU issue is that SPD and the Greens in the city were both atypically weak. SPD’s head is Franziska Giffey, who plagiarized her thesis and had to resign from the federal ministry when this was revealed, and yet refused to step down as Berlin SPD mayoral candidate; she’s also way too right-wing for SPD. The Greens in Berlin have been running as Die Linke without the Putinism; the mailer I got from the Greens accusing SPD of not truly supporting rent control mentioned Die Linke positively and in efffect said there need to be strong Green and Linke parties against SPD. So what happened in the election is that CDU came first but the red-red-green coalition maintained its majority, albeit reduced; Jusos wanted to keep the coalition, but the Greens and Die Linke were inflexible with their demands, and Giffey wanted to throw the Greens out and crawl into a CDU-led coalition out of spite, and she ended up getting her way.
Ukraine was definitely relevant last year, but at this point, Germany is not perceived within Germany as atypically bad on Ukraine, and also CDU isn’t especially different from SPD on this issue. Israel/Hamas has been mildly relevant, in that it’s a foreign policy issue in which the enemy is Muslim and this boosts the right, but it’s only led to a few points of increase in polling support for CDU and none for AfD (nobody trusts AfD on shit). The Hesse and Bavaria state elections were held the second day of the war, but the polls from just before the war started nailed both results, so it’s not really about the war. Rather, it’s general anti-green vibes; for most of 2023, right-wing populism in Germany focused on environmentalism as the biggest enemy rather than immigrants, queers, etc., and this hasn’t changed too much during the war, with one grifter even speaking to Axel-Springer media saying that everyone who supports Greta Thunberg supports terrorism.
The German Greens are quite NIMBY though… I mean, they were founded explicitly as being anti-nuclear and were sceptical of modern technology (to some extent they still are, see anti-GMOs or being against AC)…
Isn’t this just polarization in action? Anti-car movement causing the rise of anti-anti-car movement?
Yeah I agree. IMO the Green left in Germany overplayed their hand by assuming that everyone would agree with them because their positions were obviously the right ones (see the article on “The Smug Liberal Style” on Vox for a similar attitude amongst too many “progressives” in the US)…
The dynamic may be different in Germany. But in the US, Green government initiatives have devolved into mostly grift. It’s become another opportunity to shovel money to special interests, and few projects have any of the promised impact on emissions reductions.
Yeah, I’m making a specifically Northern European argument, with green parties that are generally perceived as responsible governing parties (if obnoxious on some matters, like nuclear power or Norwegian oil drilling, the mainline left in Norway assenting to restraining Norwegian oil consumption but not exports), have long track records as junior partners to social democrats, and on occasion even aim to be senior partner in the coalition. This to some extent also cascades to places where there’s green-socdem fusion – to a large extent Sweden is in that position, with the Social Democrats having embraced the New Left to a greater extent than for example in Germany, and the actual Green Party consequently being very weak; I think France is in that situation as well, with unified primaries on the left for a joint PS-EELV presidential candidate, and in Britain this is a factional dispute within Labour, cutting across the Corbynite vs. Starmerite fighting. The US is very different – local government there is pretty openly a grift.
“Norwegian oil consumption but not exports”
Ya I’m with Matthew Yglesias on this. Makes more sense for western democracies to do it then totalitarian anti Enviromental countries.
I think it’s helpful to do both, but in Norway the case is admittedly weaker than in a place with serious environmental justice problems with oil drilling like Canada.
“Normally this constant FUD is something I associate with people who are out of power or who are perpetually junior partners to power, like FDP, or until recently the Greens. People in power prefer to do things.”
I would expect this attitude (technically, doctrine) to change now that the Greens have power, albeit with massive institutional inertia.
Don’t be so sure – Kretschmann has been in power for a while and all he offers is NIMBYism.
The German Greens are the biggest NIMBYs in German politics though (at least when it comes to modern technology). They are the main party opposing e.g. high-rises or new transport in Germany…
It’s a bit like debating whether a zebra is black with white stripes or the other way around, but ideological unwillingness to do specific things is evidently compatible with a general attitude of doing things. Take, for instance, nearby Hungary’s Fidesz government, definitely used to power (starting in 2010 and still in power, and their messaging is very heavy on “obviously we are the only possible legitimate government”). They are rabidly anti-GMO and slightly anti-residential-high-rise, but they do things:
– build an excessive number of football stadiums;
– over multiple orders, buy 123 four-section FLIRTs and 40 six-section KISSes (for MÁV-Start, and a further 20 FLIRTs for GySEV/ROeEE which is jointly owned with ÖBB);
– build a Budapest-Belgrade high-speed freight line;
– build a new nuclear plant at Paks next to the old one, make the prime contractor be Rosatom, have plan fall apart after ground was broken on an ancillary subproject;
– manufacture new high-floor locomotive-hauled buffer-and-screw-link coupler “IC+” passenger cars, not including any control cars (I’m uncertain whether they even have the wiring for any system) at the state railway’s maintenance facility, which was already not up to the task of maintaining&refurbishing the existing fleet;
– reform Budapest’s transit agency structure and greatly improve how it works, particularly the Buda side of the tram network, then because the reforms are immensely popular semi-fire the guy associated with them (make him head a closed museum);
– do complete rebuilds of mainlines (with multiple months long closures of both tracks) that only restore their previous non-degraded condition, without any actual improvements whatsoever, then naturally fail to do ordinary maintenance such that slow orders have to be posted barely a decade after the full rebuild;
– reopen with great fanfare a multitude of epsilon-traffic rural branch lines closed during the 2008-2010 recession, overwhelmingly with two trains per day per direction (same as before closure). But, hey, it’s open, it technically exists, who cares if traffic is zero.
– Renovate the M3 metro in Budapest, including both track and trains. Because a priori refurbishment is cheaper than new manufacturing, exclude offers submitted by manufacturers, contract with the original manufacturer Metrovagonmash for refurbishment (hence with short warranties) at a higher price than the new-mfg offers, Metrovagonmash lifts up the nameplates and builds new vehicles under them, now M3 is stuck with trains that lack e.g. gangways, whereas M2 had received new fully-pass-through Alstom trains under the 2002-2010 government (albeit probably at unreasonable prices, given how everything about the M4 (using near-identical trains) was incandescently expensive — it’s 39th in the entire Transitcosts list at 601 M$/km).
As you may imagine, all of the concrete-pouring is deeply corrupt. (Same applies to the pre-2010 Socialist government, who in addition to M4, also massively expanded the motorway network. Put this together with the branch line brouhaha, and it’s almost an unexpected reversal that Fidesz is the one to occasionally make American-style generally anti-urban and specifically normative-car-and-detached-house noises, not the opposition.)
Idk enough about Hungary… but in the end even “ideological” political parties have to be pragmatic so as to not lose elections in most jurisdictions (the obvious counterexample are many of the US “red states”, where the GOP seemingly can be as successful as long as they only focus on national politics and style themselves as a permanent opposition to the “liberal coastal elites”, something similar applies to Alberta and their conservatives too)…
Far-Right autocrats in the present day have a deep connection to construction patronage states, Orban, Erdogan, Sisi and above all Xi Jinping (the main product of PRC industrial policy is steel-reinforced concrete).
Hungary is actually quite NIMBY compared to the rest of ex-Warsaw pact countries with surprising little urban expansion either out or up.
https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/#5/51.083/16.743
Hungary is sui generis to some extent because its territorial disputes gives the nationalist right a lot of grievances to monger (Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation is based on population exchange that pointedly didn’t happen with Hungarians). It has also been the worst governed of the ex-Warsaw pact countries within the EU. It also has toxic regional politics with such a hyper dominant capital region compared to the rest of its weight class. Its not just cultural politics of mobilising anti-Budapest sentiment, its actually the urban containment of Budapest that creates such a divide (England has this good grief).
I would not include Albertan conservatives in the same sentence with Republicans. The old Progressive Conservatives built North America’s best new transit systems and continue to add onto them, while building more housing than anywhere else in Canada. And they invested in industries of the future and the universities while welcoming immigration. Yes the oil patch made everything easy at cost to the environment. And when the UC overthrew the PC immediately the NDP has risen to be the strongest left-wing party in Albertan history. You can see a future where Alberta is to the left of Quebec.
You don’t need conspiracism or steel-manning. Conservative backlash led by media organisations is the cost of doing business. Intellectual contradictions and facallcies mean little in the face of genuine emotional backlash to the end of society based on the ICE on top of various other combustible goings on.
Hydrogen cargo culting is a lot about trying to have the ICE without the C02 (oh my god Toyota). Which is a pity since the technology is better suited to utility scale battery function than vehicles. And if it can’t do that, it can’t do vehicles.
Also with the Germany economy in real trouble, people are gonna find scapegoats. The Greens have never had this much power Germany wide, so its new.
Its unfair, most of the mistakes Germany is feeling the pain of were made under Merkel and those before her. The CDU aligned media orgs held their fire while she avoided doing much. Its not like the Greens have a coherent answer to how to end Germany being deflationary-mercantilist at the expense of everyone except Big business and the dying industries of North Germany.
I’ve seen people assert with a straight face that if Merkel had been in charge, Germany would have responded to Putin more forcefully.
Which is indeed stupid. At best she would a pivoted more coherently than Scholz. But she had done too much to appease the Russians to really walk it back. And had treated the Ukrainians like unstable yokels who kept ruining their nice peaceful great nation peace.
I really think her era will be seen as a era of stagnation and indolence for Germany. Germany is much more like unstable UKania than it realises. That’s not all on her, she was hired was hired to do that job. The body politic is guilty.
I think the issue is that Bosnia really forced the Greens to come to terms with the trade-offs of their ideals and reality in foriegn policy. I don’t just mean that it the usual “move to the centre” concern-trolling sense so much as “pick your evils, prioritise ruthlessly, self-discipline your desire to feel good about yourself”. They haven’t quite done that on domestic policy as the anti-HSR/U-bahn/Nuclear/density politics show. This not a party that hasn’t quite realised what a Carbon zero society is going to cost them.
Arguably, there’s only one item missing. “Solarpunk a.k.a. ye olde time slow life on the farm, just with more tech” is mostly coherent — the only bullet that needs to be bitten is that everyone would be poorer by an order of magnitude. Of course, this means it will never happen, and if it somehow did, it would immediately revert, because people don’t like being poor. (Citation not needed, hopefully. Though some may quibble that people actually care about relative rather than absolute wealth, i.e. what people want is not particular stuff, but “what the Joneses have, and a little more”.)
Europe has explicitly or implicitly made a trade off against America of better wellbeing in exchange for a worse material life.
And something funny is going on in America where the economies “vibes” are much worse than the economic reality.
Europe hasn’t made any choice. The deflationist-mercantilist nations decided keeping their Boomers trad-vibes happy was more important than anything else. France, UK, Italy and Spain agreed to let them do so. Meanwhile the East Europeans are growing rapidly per capita.
A lot of the European ragging on America’s crappy ability to turn its productivity into living standards for the bottom 50% is cope to deal with an unwillingness to confront Boomer political and cultural domination that traps us in an endless 1950’s. That 1950’s was backstopped by American technological imports and military power. Still is.
Perhaps the thing I like most about Biden is unlike so many politicians he thinks the present needs to serve the future not the past.
Europeans are much better travelled, life expectancy is longer, the food is better, jobs are better protected and our government is less dysfunctional.
At a federal level the Republicans in the house have struggled to pass a budget on time even when they controlled both chambers and the presidency.
At a state level the Welsh are doing more on public transport with their valley line improvements than the Californians or New Yorkers even though both the Californians and New Yorkers are much much wealthier. No one could say being in the Welsh government or Scottish parliament is just a “grift” even given the legal issues Sturgeon has found herself in.
Welsh and Scottish governments are both normie Gubernatorial in terms of domestic governance and Far Right Imperialist once you add their relations with their colony of England which includes their racist housing policies (i.e. wrecking the rental markets).
And Europe is wide area. I’d agree France, Nordics etc are better governed overall than the US. But Germany, the Celtic fringe are parasite states that export their social problems by wrecking others. Sans Hungary things are getting better in Eastern Europe.
Europe is dependent on the US as the defender and consumer of last resort, plus tech support. It shouldn’t be that way. And until it isn’t I find a lot European superiority complex silly. We’re losing a artillery ammunition production war with Putin’s Russia FFS. Particularly from the peoples of the British Isles (yes including the Tax-and-extortion state centred on Dublin).
How does German export its social problems by wrecking others?
Its called the European Central Bank (read Michael Pettis’s Trade Wars are Class wars). Germany uses the Euro/Hartz Labour system/Balanced Budget restriction to suppress wage growth and currency appreciation in order to preserve the industries of northwestern Germany plus the very wealthy. This inflicts deflationary demand destruction on the rest of the Eurozone which has no independent monetary/fiscal policy nor capital controls.
This deflationary-mercantilism isn’t exclusive to Germany, the NE Asian economies have different versions of it. It inflicted costs on Germany too, its inhibited the urban-service sector and helped push non-urban East/South Germans to the AfD. Its what made Germany so supine to China and Russia as sources of cheap energy, cheap defense and cheap demand. But a Germany able to generate its own demand would mean the end of Postwar West German social order. A more successful Germany would be investing more in its own society, its infrastructure, its military, its housing and its people. But it would make Germany more like Berlin and less like Hanover (it is no accident the gang behind Hartz are from Lower Saxony). It wouldn’t stop Thuringians etc being mad at the Gays and Turks etc but it would buy enough of them off to keep the Bundesrepublik safe.
Deflationary Liberal states are the walking dead unless they parasitize aggregate demand off others. That was true in 1932 and its true now.
N/B not that the UK doesn’t have its own parasitic elements (tax evasions, money laundering, destruction of the state, becoming Turkish style EU problematic client state), but the primary victims are the English and the immigrants who live among us.
People overly blame the ECB for the double-dip recession; non-euro users in Europe engaged in the same fiscal and monetary austerity (UK, Sweden, etc.), with similar results, and even the US engaged in a fair amount of austerity, just less so than Europe did.
The Niedersachsen assholes are neither here nor there. The biggest proponents of austerity in Germany aren’t them – to the contrary, Steinmeier was sympathetic to Greece when he was running for chancellor and called for looser spending. Rather, it’s CDU and especially CSU. It’s the regions that don’t have zombie heavy industries but rather are just wealthy from the industries of the early 21st century and think everyone else should stop being poor.
What pushes people in Germany to AfD is racism and sometimes homophobia. In interviews with journalists, they never say any of what people who try to Explain the Grievances of the East say. They don’t complain about Besserwessis, they don’t complain about inequality, they certainly never complain about jobs, not even in the “immigrants took my job” sense; they instead say that Germany needs Hitler back. It’s remarkable how AfD’s campaigning has been pure far right idpol, without even the patina of offering something material that even Nigel Farage did (“if we leave the EU, there will be more money for the NHS”). Far right parties generally don’t really do anything for unemployment – the unemployed tend to vote far left in countries where that polling crosstab is available, like France – but AfD is even more focused on pure hate over any materialism than the norm for Le Pen et al. The growth in AfD’s support in May-June coincided with the mainline right legitimizing their grievances by declaring open season on the Greens rather than with anything material.
Alon, if the Eurozone can’t meaningfully outperform us with Brexit and the incompetence that is the modern Conservative Party then it really isn’t doing very well.
I looked at the data on https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?tab=table&country=OWID_EU27~DEU~GBR~USA~FRA~NLD~BEL~ITA~CHE~DNK~SWE (you have to change it to selection only for it to be interesting)
Between 1990 and 2021 German GDP per capita has increased by 45%, France has by 33%, Italy by 15% and the UK by 43%.
The better performers like the US, Netherlands and Sweden have increased by 57%, 55% and 57% respectively.
I mean frankly out of the big Western European countries, given the German figure includes catch-up growth in East Germany, we are pretty much top – despite Brexit.
Levels matter as much as direction. We still have lower productivity. We are as we have been since the 1950’s behind our comparison countries.
https://data.oecd.org/lprdty/gdp-per-hour-worked.htm
1990-2008 is doing all the work there. The Thatcher reforms which include Single Market membership massively increased competition within UK products markets. Euthanising the zombie industries removed a lot of deadwood. UK had the lowest productivity among the major West European economies in 1980 after Ireland we caught most of the gap to 2008 and have stayed still at best. Plus flexible labour markets played well with the IT tech boom.
Two additional confounding elements are the UK is younger thanks to higher birthrates/immigration over the last 40 years than the European average, which means lower dependency ratios and that we work more hours per capita. Adjusting for French summer holidays is actually quite important!
The Thatcher era reforms are exhausted indeed some of the gains especially 2004-8 proved vapourware. The UK’s main problem is the 1947 Town and Country’s planning acts sabotaging labour mobility and capital accumulation (its not just housing, UK’s deindustrialization is mostly about strangling industry in southern England with land rationing and they feed into lack of infrastructure investment). UK has poorer Eastern European levels of capital per workers. Which is absolutely insane considering we should the most capital mature country on the face of the earth. 1947 is that insanely bad.
N/B UK and European underperformance are actually related, not just because of Boomer toxicity and Austerimania being transnational but also because we have tightly integrated economies. UK is actually big enough to plug a lot deflationary demand gap in Europe. Not to mention London should be Europe’s IT tech hub, but the housing crisis is wrecking that (SF has first mover advantages and doesn’t have to share with other industries in the Bay Area).
It’s true that some of the blame can be put on Merkel’s government, but then people on the German right tend to criticise Merkel for having being too much “green left” and focusing too much on progressive ideas (refugee policies or the shutting down of the nuclear power plants for example)… I’m not saying that they are necessarily correct, but anyone who knows something about German politics should know that the Greens are at their core an anti-modern and romantic party that is just as “conservative” as the CDU, maybe even more so, and really is struggling to understand that a complex industrial economy such as Germany needs relatively inexpensive energy costs…
The Greens are a lot of things. German Greens are probably among the least reactionary and serious about governance of global green parties. Evolution of the party since 1980 is marked above all in foreign policy. Anti-nuclear unfortunately became a cargo cult to keep their radical heritage having compromised on almost everything else.
There is a history here, the SDP’s embrace of Gold Standard economics in the Great Depression is key aspect of the rise of you-know-who. They kept to it not just out of respectability politics but also Keynesianism destroys Marxist economics theoretically as well as practically. The prophet of Hampstead said such solutions were impossible because history (i.e. him) said so.
(Bear in mind, SPD today is not at all an austerian party. Even Steinmeier ran against austerity in the 2013 election. The issue is that in Northern European coalitions that are not all-left, the non-left partners will demand some kind of budgetary austerity, even if those partners are center rather than center-right as in Sweden; usually the tradeoff is that the social democrats get to run the country more or less as they see fit within those budget limits, but FDP is more annoying than that, with strong opinions about Autobahn speed limits and other irrelevances.)
As long as Germany
1. Maintains the stupid balanced budget constitution (which I would add the SPD supports).
2. Gives its excess corporate savings favourable tax treatment.
3. Doesn’t release significant urban land for private development admitting that the postwar system of rent-controlled units funded by low interest loans is no longer as viable given fiscal constraints.
4. Appoints morons to the ECB.
I will continue to call it austerian or rather deflationary-mercantilist. N/B Conventional budget austerity is only no.1. There were ways other than conventional Keynesian deficits to add AD to the Eurozone. They weren’t taken.
Germany’s actual fiscal policy in 2020-1 was not at all austerian – it passed a huge stimulus bill, on a par with the bills passed in the United States per capita. Austerity doesn’t get you to 3% unemployment.
I call Germany deflationist-mercantilist not Austerian. And you could add the emergency spending over the shift from Russian energy into the mix too. Germany has always been a hypocrite at best about fiscal probity. Italy has had more primary surplus’s since 1990 than Germany, it hasn’t done them much good because the Euro enforced deflation on them (and the lack of supply side reforms).
And sorry you can be deflationist-mercantilist with low unemployment, Japan’s been doing that for years without having a currency block to screw over. The Deutschmark would be sky high right now. And the supply shock is hiding the deflationary pressure that Germany’s economic model pushes.
As I said, Germany needs to tax its horrifically high corporate savings (and spend them) and permit way more private housing construction.
You don’t get this level of current account surplus with a 1st world economy because you’re awesome. You get it through wage suppression, capital account mismanagement and currency manipulation* etc. This is almost Chinese levels of bad.
https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/current-account-to-gdp
Is there a good reason why a mature industrial economy like Germany has such a low household spending share of the economy? Its not domestic investment, its shifted money from household to the export and corporate sector despite crummy returns.
https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-spending.htm
*Which is basically Germany using the Eurozone to sterilize its extra-Eurozone export earnings.
Germany is not the worst actor, I think the east Asian littoral states are equally self-destructive bad actors here. But the Greens are dicking around with no ideas here while the SPD clings to the past. FDP is terrible but that’s because their ideology is all for this system.
“strong opinions about Autobahn speed limits and other irrelevances”.
Idk if that’s as irrelevant as you might think… In German politics, the lack of a speed limit is kind of similar in terms of symboliito the Second Amendment in the US…
The acute 2012 crisis caused by the uncertainty that the ECB would act as a lender of last resort to the PIGS. That was totally unnecessary damage.
But the real damage has been chronic before and after. Running below 2% inflation to keep Germany happy meant savage unemployment elsewhere and disappointment in the middle countries (France, Benelux). European economic underperformance is overstated, but real. It is destablising and enabling the Far Right across Europe.
Germany didn’t and shouldn’t have given the PIGS a blank check, in fact it should have just spent more of its own money on itself.
NW is Germany is clearly falling behind the South plus Berlin/Hamburg. It not rapid, but it’s real. And its where the SPD is strongest, the North German plain was where the SPD won in 2021 and where Merkel won her victories. Its where outside Hamburg and rural East the Greens are weakest in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_German_states_by_GRP_per_capita
The CDU/CSU plus FDP are the biggest culprits. But the SPD is still responsible given their place as the coalition partner. The Greens haven’t managed a coherent response. They can’t even remember it was deflation not hyperinflation that brought the Weimar Republic down.
And sorry but economic prosperity does matter on margin for killing Far Right movements. The Bundesrepublik did that in the 1950-60’s. They even managed to kill the Far Right parties based on the millions of expellees from Eastern Europe. I’m amazed how they did that. Yes the AFD will be close 10% no matter what you do, because Germany has enough racist homophobes. But elections are won on the margins. And Scholtz was able to eat into the AfD vote in 2021.
Until the 4.5 German democratic parties realise the system will collapse unless they allow the West German social order to die. That’s also related to the ICE angst. NW Germany is the centre of the global ICE tech.
If democratic parties won’t inflate their economies, they’ll get Fascists that will.
If I have a macro-theory of the problems of the OECD countries its “let the 1950’s go”.
I agree to some extent but IMO your economic prescriptions for Germany aren’t constructive…mire housing is needed for sure, but “taxing the evil companies” isn’t gonna make them build more houses… IMO what German fiscal policy should do are lower taxes and other social insurance payments for most income earners. IMO the German pension system isn’t sustainable and Germany should move to an Australian or Canadian pension system… Also, as Alon wrote, there’s a lack of a “Yimby” movement in Germany, and IMO that’s because of anti-modern attitudes among many Germans, especially those on the “ecological left” (I know that Alon disagrees with this but IMO it’s obvious)…
Lowering your own taxes is a perfectly reasonable policy desire. But is politically impossible, the need to climate/energy investment plus rearmament while Germany facing health/pensions expenses from ageing population. It would take savage welfare cuts which would hit the NW rustbelts and East Germany particularly hard.
Yes Aus pension system is great but 1. Aus has almost always had higher fertility and higher migration, Germany has only had the latter sporadically 2. They implemented it decades ago, there are assets 3. You built a social contract on the existing pensions. When Putin and Xi punt on far more unsustainable pension systems because its politically toxic you need to beware.
Its not so much “evil corporations” as “this corporatist model is evil”. As long as Germany pursued deflationary mercantilism greater taxation of corporate savings is a viable option. The post-2000 rise in inequality and fall in household share of gdp has brought little economic or social benefit. Its the easiest pool of revenue available to the state given the poor performance of these savings.
Also export corporations that the chief beneficiaries are not going to build those houses anyway (although the steel industry would likely benefit). A land boom could mobilise them, but it requires hard choices about where those buildings are built i.e. high-rises/sprawl which are unpopular with CDU and FDP not just the Greens. And it probably requires increasing private sector access to Land Readjustment i.e. lower demands for rent-control units in order to encourage investment.
I actually don’t think the Greens are the main problem here. They were out of power 2005-2021 Federally etc. The real question is why the CDU and FDP didn’t reform housing (spoilers ecological anti-modernism is secondary to social conservatism as a motivation of NIMBYS). FFS CSU couldn’t even do anything intelligent on the matter with their dominance of Bavaria.
Green politics ask people to change their way of life to save the planet—less driving, flying, meat etc. That makes them the perfect populist target. Other parties just have to tell voters that the Greens are taking it too far, changes aren’t necessary, maybe even the problem doesn’t exist (i.e., climate-change denial).
The heat-pump law is a case in point. It was perfectly reasonable from the start. But it was leaked before the support programs had been defined. The opposition, including FDP, pounced and drew a caricature of the law by claiming multiples of the actual cost and blowing potential availability problems far out of proportion. These lies offered an excuse to oppose the change as unaffordable and infeasible which voters happily lapped up and ditched the Greens.
In Berlin the situation was aggravated by a very lefty local Green party with an incompetent leader. In Hesse, in contrast, a centrist party and leader had governed very competently for a decade and still fell victim to the country-wide wave of anti-Green populism. On the federal level the Greens hold up surprisingly well, polling not much worse than at the last election—unlike their coalition partners.
On the federal level the Greens are holding up relative to 2021, but not relative to 2022, when they were at one point near-tied for first with CDU/CSU because their support for Ukraine was really popular. Habeck just decided to spend that political capital on bullshit, leading to the first decline; then the right decided that negative campaigning against the Greens to the exclusion of the senior partner in the coalition was great, and suddenly Julian Röpcke was left as the only one who makes things up about SPD rather than about the Greens.
Reviewing the opinion polls makes your point about the Greens’ federal popularity even stronger: The elections actually hit them at their lowest point in three years: 14.8%. Over the following year their popularity increased again up to 23% only to drop back to the low point now. (Always at least 3 pp. below the CDU/CSU, though.)
(I doubt that many voters were irritated by the Greens’ sticking to the nuclear phase-out, which I guess you mean by Habeck’s “bullshit”. I’d suspect they generally associate higher energy prices with the Greens and that was not popular in an energy crisis—even though they managed it very well.)
(I had to look up who Röpcke is. Who cares about a random tabloid hack?)
(He’s the main reporter for Bild about Ukraine, and is notorious in NAFO for swinging between “Ukraine is five minutes from winning” and “Ukraine will lose and IT’S ALL SCHOLZ AND BIDEN’S FAULT,” neither with great justification.)
German polls tend to overestimate the Greens though… generally the Greens get less votes at election than in polls, while the CDU and SPD tend to do better than in the polls usually… maybe it’s about “strategic voting”…
More likely its that Greens are more likely to answer pollsters.
All parties did within the margin of error of polls in 2021, I don’t get this line that the polls overrate the Greens.
The green movement has been extremely poor at putting its ideas across in ways that centre right voters like.
For example there are big national security advantages of green energy over fossil fuels where you are dependent on countries we don’t like such as Saudi Arabia or Russia. And wind and solar in particular are cheaper (and in the medium term less volatile) than fossil fuels.
And for example the greens also want us to fly less, but even within Europe the number of destinations you can get to within 24 hours of travel time is pretty limited.
Don’t the Greens want high speed rail all over everywhere? Back of the envelope calculation for Boston to Los Angeles is less than a day. Not that anyone would want to do that because we have airplanes. London to Istanbul is about two thirds of the distance.
Turbines can run on almost anything. Bio-JetA from all the corn North America will have once we stop burning ethanol in our automobiles? Though soybeans are a source for oil too. They have that figured out already but we don’t it because boiling petroleum to distill it is cheaper. There are options that would probably cost more.
Not usually. The French Greens not only oppose further LGV construction but also want to reduce TGV speeds to 200 km/h to reduce train electricity consumption. The German Greens are not this insane but usually oppose high-speed rail construction and prefer investment in the legacy network to connect trains to more out of the way places that think of themselves as Real Germany and of the big cities as hideous places filled with fake Germans (P.S. those big cities are the only places where people vote Greens in large numbers); Hanover-Hamburg is an exception – the Greens are for it, local SPD is against – but usually this is the pattern.
Where did you read that it could take a single day for high-speed rail from Boston to LA would be less than one day? In terms of HSR in Europe, the problem IMO is that there’s no Pan-European rail agency to coordinate the building of new HSE railways…
I didn’t read it any where. Off the top of my head it’s 3000 miles from Boston to Los Angeles. At an average speed of 150 miles per hour it would take 20 hours? Just to be sure I checked Google maps. It’s 3,000 miles give or take a few dozen via the suggested routes. It’s all hypothetical because there aren’t many people west of I-35 and there are airplanes.
I think we have confirmation that the ‘dacker is from another planet because on our planet 20 hours “ is less than a day“.
While most people may still prefer to fly, an overnighter in comfy bed arriving mid-morning would be better than the red-eye. Equivalent to the old European night trains, currently being rejuvenated. And it would be 16 hours: 4,800 km at 300kph. So depart at 7pm east coast and arrive at 8am west coast next morning.
I said “less than a day”. Jsb is the one with questions about that.
There is a whole lot of nothing between I-35 and I-5. And not much between I-35 and the Mississippi. Sleeping cars would have…. the same market they have now… renting space on a low density sleeping car for a whole day would cost too much. Especially if it has to help pay for the 1,500 miles of “not much” between Saint Louis and Phoenix.
The masochists who take red-eye flights aren’t the same market as people who would be willing to pay for sleeping cars. At the end of the service day there are too many planes on the West Coast and not enough of them on the East Coast. The airlines have to fly planes back, they might as well sell the seats. They only exist eastbound and there are options at more conventional times, going in either direction.
If you were going to do High Speed rail in the United States there would be a decent amount of pressure to run some trains from New York to Chicago pretty fast – likely non-stop or with very limited stops. From Chicago if you built a high speed line to Kansas City and from there upgraded the route of the Southwest chief to ‘West Coast mainline’ standards and built a high speed line from Kingman to Las Vegas and then down to LA you could probably still do the whole trip in a day – 2.5 hours from LA to Kingman at 150mph average like France, 12 hours from Kingman to Kansas City at 105mph average like the west coast mainline and 10 hours from Kansas City to Boston via Chicago at 150mph average like France – that is just over 24 hours in total.
If the train makes a lot of stops it’s not high speed because it make a lot of stops. If doesn’t make some stops it can’t pick up or drop off passengers.
It’s essentially pool table flat between Appalachian Mountains and the Rocky Mountains. Why would they build something so slow? Saint Louis is as far from Indianapolis as it is from Kansas City. Why would the train go to Chicago? There is approximately nothing west of Kansas City. At Indianapolis it could connect to existing tracks that go to Ohio. Where there is Columbus and Cleveland.
Maybe you would go a different way. But the Southwest chief has a top speed of 90mph already. Upgrading the existing line from 90 to 110mph without tilting, electrifying and buying tilting trains seems a lot more plausible than any other options for a higher speed trans-continental service.
I’d get on a airplane if I wanted to go to Kansas City. Why would it go a different way? It makes a lot more sense to build high speed train tracks between Indianapolis and Saint Louis than Saint Louis and Kansas City. There are a lot more people east of Indianapolis and not many west of Kansas City.
It would cost too much for the few people who don’t want to fly. 110 mph passenger trains catch up to more 80 mph freight trains. Which means you need more three track sections. Which cost more money to build. It cost money to maintain the tracks for 110 mph service. And the gazillion grade crossings. It takes almost 31 hours to get from Kansas City to Barstow. Spend hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars to upgrade it to make it 15, in some alternate universe, there might be two trains a day in each direction. It would cost too much.
What you would do is not the important factors. what matters is what the combination of everyone on earth would do – over the next 50 years. Of course most people live on a different continent and so they would have to fly. However some people do live close enough to Kansas City that a train – if it existed – would be a reasonable option. Alon generally uses Metcalfe’s law by which he concluded that Kansas city would get around 3.5 million riders per year. That isn’t nobody, but it also isn’t enough to be worth the construction costs.
Of course a lot can change in 50 years (and we could even go to 100 years). If the US gets good at building transit – both high speed national routes and lower speed local routes: in this fairly tale world the costs to build is lower than Alon expects, while ridership would be above his model and so it is worth building that line.
I think about this because in a world where HSR to Kansas city makes there are a lot less drivers on the road and I’ve lost enough friends to car crashes.
Alon’s High speed rail plan for the eastern US has a line from Chicago to Kansas city in it without reservations. Don’t forget there is also some ridership from Kansas City to destinations to the East – and that adds up to not nothing.
A high speed line from Kansas City to the east may makes sense. The dots on the map west of there are for itty bitty little, extra wide places along the road and unless you want to ban cars and automobiles, will never make sense.
What this post fails to mention is that the German Greens are at their core a NIMBY party (even if it was mentioned in a previous post on this blog to some extent). IMO the problem with the Greens is that they don’t realise that despite good intentions implementing their policies is more difficult than the alternative. Also they have a smug style which is off-putting to many people who don’t agree with them politically…
And I would actually argue that the current economic crisis in Germany can be blamed at least partly on the Greens and their ideology. For example, the shutdown of nuclear power and the high electricity prices in Germany are really mostly a fault of green policies. As for EVs, they were subsidised until now in Germany and thus making many taxpayers who don’t want to buy an EV angry because they are paying for other (often quite wealthy) people to buy EVs while they have to drive their old cars… So it’s not surprising that the Greens are being blamed for many of the problems on Germany currently, and it’s also not surprising that the AFD is profiting more than any other party in Germany as they are the most “Anti-Green” party…
I honestly don’t think Habeck is smugger than the Niedersachsen gang of SPD with their lecturing style. Even Scholz is smugger, with his constant ‘splaining last year about Ukraine, where he’d very publicly do something Ukraine didn’t want (like, say, not send the heavy weapon system it most wanted), and then react to criticism by lecturing the questioner that well, actually, Germany was sending a lot of military aid comprising other things. The complaint isn’t really “they’re smug”; it’s “they’re smug and are not the type who Axel-Springer editors expect to be in authority.”
What I meant isn’t individual politicians, but rather something similar to “The Smug Style in American Liberalism” stuff from Vox magazine… IMO the German Greens do have a big problem with this as they are convinced that they are the only party with the”obvious ” solutions to the problems of modern Germany… maybe they are correct (though I doubt it as I’m suspicious of any ideology or group or individual claiming this), but most people don’t like to be lectured by those who they feel don’t like them and their lifestyle etc (that’s part of the reason why Trump got elected)…
The EV subsidies were actually strongly progressive: highest for cars costing less than 40k, 1/3 less for more expensive ones, and no subsidy at all for cars above 65k. So the main beneficiaries were the middle class while the rich with their big cars got nothing.
The energy prices are high mainly due to the merit-order pricing system in which the most expensive active generator (fossil) determines the price for all. The tax share has dropped below 30%. Experts dispute that the nuclear exit made much of a difference. Even in nuclear France the bulk price is sometimes higher than in Germany.
It still seems that many blame the Greens for expensive electricity. This may partially be due to bad communication on their part but certainly also due to anti-green populism (i.e., lies) by their political opponents (mostly CSU and FW but also CDU and FDP).
There is no denying that the energy transition will be expensive and one way or another the population will have to pay for it. All major parties except the AfD pay lip service to decarbonization. But most simply have no plan how to do it nor how to pay for it.
Abandoning nuclear power certainly was a very big mistake by Merkel.
To expand a little – if we want people to install heat pumps and have electric cars we are probably talking about tripling domestic electricity usage. Especially as for hot water heat pumps aren’t particularly efficient.
So having something like nuclear that is popular with local people (due to the good quality blue collar work that nuclear power plants create) is actually pretty helpful. Given that wind, solar and nuclear only produced around half of the UK’s electricity demand last year (and I believe Germany is similar) – that is a lot of wind turbines and solar panels. Rooftop solar probably isn’t going to be enough to meet that.
You forgot to mention dunkelflatte. The U.K.’s grid operator says there isn’t a distribution problem until 70 percent of the cars are electric. The U.K. isn’t very sunny but it does have a lot of wind. It doesn’t have to all be PV. And they don’t all have to be on rooftops. Singapore thinks it’s a good idea to put the solar panels and batteries thousands of kilometers away in Australia. There is a proposal to put some of the U.K.’s solar and wind in Morocco. Do things like that and dunkelflautte isn’t a problem because the generation isn’t local. And all of it keeps getting cheaper and cheaper.
… not rooftops. Cover my employer’s parking lot with solar panels there is enough area to charge my car. And have it charged so my employer can use it as demand rises in the afternoon. And on the weekends it can charge a few shipping container sized batteries that shaves my employer’s peak demand charges even more. There are many solutions and they aren’t all rooftop solar.
Electric cars have the advantage that because they can be charged overnight that they are using excess power and capacity that is required in the daytime anyway.
Heat pumps on the other hand need to run potentially all day – perhaps avoiding the 4-7pm peak.
Not to be anti-heat pump. I know about the hot water as I am getting one installed – but there are challenges. Cost is another one – the project as a whole including a hot water tank and making space for that is costing £5k even with the £7.5k government grant.
Um, um, the sun doesn’t shine at night. There won’t be many nights when there is excess power.
While your commute is being recharged at work, your panels at home can be charging your residential battery that lets you sip electricity if at all during peak. I just priced heat pump water heaters at the big box stores. They are twice the price of conventional electric water heaters. And more or less drop in replacements for them in most cases. The installation cost would be the same as a conventional water heater. I don’t heat domestic hot water with electricity. I’m not interested in installing one. If the subsidies they are advertising are true, it would be free.
Heat pumps run all the time in the sunbelt. And except for Texas the grid doesn’t melt down when there is a cold snap. If you are importing electricity from Morocco and Iceland you don’t have to worry about dunkelflatte.
You keep forgetting to mention once a decade dunkelflatte.
I mean to be fair the heat pump part is still 350% efficient in terms of electrical energy heating the water – which is way better than 100% efficiency from a traditional immersion heater, it’s just that there are heat losses from the hot water tank which holds things back.
And there are heat losses from the tank with conventional immersion coils too. Or a gas fired one or an oil fired one.
The nuclear phase-out was not initiated by Merkel but by Schroeder’s red-green coalition in 2000 in an agreement with the industry (“Atomkonsens”). In 2010 Merkel delayed the exit by 14 years, only to revert this decision half a year later. They botched the new law, leading to massive compensation payments to the industry.
Merkel’s big mistakes were (1) this incompetent nuclear flip-flop and (2) failing to sufficiently grow renewables and the grid to replace nuclear.
You forgot about base power… I mean, just looking at the economic news from Germany, it’s quite obvious to me that high energy prices are a major reason for the current economic crisis in Germany…so yeah, it’s because of renewables not being as cheap as their proponents claim to be (btw I’m not against renewables at all, but IMO they aren’t optimal economically in a densely populated country such as Germany…on the other hand, they work very well in combination with Hydro Power as baseload power in countries such as Norway and Canada, but Germany need nuclear as CO2-free baseload power)…
It’s not 2004 anymore. Newly installed renewables are so cheap that long distance high voltage DC lines are attractive. The batteries are a lot cheaper too.