The Future of Congestion Pricing in New York
New York just passed congestion pricing, to begin operation on June 30th. The magazine Vital City published an issue dedicated to this policy two days ago; among the articles about it is one by me, about public transportation investments. People should read the entire article; here I’d like to both give more context and discuss some of the other articles in the issue. Much of this comes from what I said to editor Josh Greenman when discussing the pitch for the piece, and how I interpret the other pieces in the same context. The most basic point, for me, is that what matters is if the overall quality of public transit in and around New York is seen to improve in the next 5-10 years. In particular, if congestion pricing is paired with one specific thing (such as a new subway line) and it improves but the rest of the system is seen to decline, then it will not help, and instead people will be cynical about government actions like this and come to oppose further programs and even call for repealing the congestion tax.
The other articles in the issue
There are 10 articles in this issue. One is my own. Another is by Josh, explaining the background to congestion pricing and setting up the other nine articles. The other eight were written by John Surico, Sam Schwartz, Becca Baird-Remba, Austin Celestin, Howard Yaruss, Nicole Gelinas, Vishaan Chakrabarti, and Henry Grabar, and I recommend that people read all of them, for different perspectives.
The general themes the nine of us have covered, not all equally, include,
- How to use congestion pricing to improve transportation alternatives (me on transit investment, Yaruss on transit fare cuts, Nicole and Chakrabarti on active transportation, Henry on removing parking to improve pedestrian safety).
- The unpopularity of congestion pricing and what it portends (Surico about polling, Becca about business group opposition, Schwartz on political risk, Yaruss again on why the fare cut is wise); of note, none of the authors are coming out against congestion pricing, just warning that it will need to deliver tangible benefits to remain popular, and Surico is making the point that in London and Stockholm, congestion pricing was unpopular until it took effect, after which it was popular enough that new center-right leadership did not repeal it.
- Environmental justice issues (Becca and Celestin): my article points out that traffic levels fell within the London congestion zone but not outside it, and Becca and Celestin both point out that the projections in New York are for traffic levels outside the zone not to improve and possibly to worsen, in particular in asthma-stricken Upper Manhattan and the Bronx, Celestin going more deeply into this point and correctly lamenting that not enough transit improvements are intended to go into these areas. The only things I can add to this are that for environmental justice, two good investment targets include a 125th Street subway tunnel extending Second Avenue Subway and battery-electric buses at depots to reduce pollution.
- Problems with toll evasion (Schwartz and Yaruss): there’s a growing trend of intentional defacement of license plates by the cars’ own drivers, to make them unreadable by traffic camera and avoid paying tolls, which could complicate revenue collection under congestion pricing.
The need for broad success
When discussing my article with Josh, before I wrote it, we talked about the idea of connecting congestion pricing to specific improvements. My lane would be specific transit improvements, like new lines, elevator access at existing stations, and so on, and similarly, Nicole, Henry, Chakrabarti, and Yaruss proposed their own points. But at the same time, it’s not possible to just make one thing work and say “this was funded by congestion pricing.” The entire system has to both be better and look better, the latter since visible revenue collection by the state like congestion pricing or new taxes are always on the chopping block for populist politicians if the state is too unpopular.
The example I gave Josh when we talked was the TGV. The TGV is a clear success as transportation; it is also, unlike congestion pricing, politically safe, in the sense that nobody seriously proposes eliminating it or slowing it down, and the only controversy is about the construction of new, financially marginal lines augmenting the core lilnes. However, the success of the TGV has not prevented populists and people who generally mistrust the state from claiming that things are actually bad; in France, they are often animated by New Left nostalgia for when they could ride slow, cheap trains everywhere, and since they were young then, the long trip times and wait times didn’t matter to them. Such nostalgics complain that regional trains, connecting city pairs where the train has not been competitive with cars since mass motorization and only survived so long as people were too poor to afford cars, are getting worse. Even though ridership in France is up, this specific use case (which by the 1980s was already moribund) is down, leading to mistrust. Unfortunately, while the TGV is politically safe in France, this corner case is used by German rail advocates to argue against the construction of a connected high-speed rail network here, as those corner case trains are better in Germany (while still not carrying much traffic).
The most important conclusion of the story of the TGV is that France needs to keep its high-speed system but adopt German operations, just as Germany needs to adopt French high-speed rail. But in the case of New York, the important lesson to extract is that if the MTA does one thing that I or Nicole or Henry or Chakrabarti or Yaruss called for while neglecting the broad system, people will not be happy. If the MTA builds subway lines with the projected $1 billion a year in revenue, politicians will say “this subway line has been built with congestion pricing revenue,” and then riders will see declines in reliability, frequency, speed, and cleanliness elsewhere and learn to be cynical of the state and oppose further support for the state’s transit operations.
The MTA could split the difference among what we propose. As I mentioned above, I find Celestin’s points about environmental justice compelling, and want to see improvements including new subways in at-risk areas, bus depot electrification to reduce pollution, and commuter rail improvements making it usable by city residents and not just suburbanites (Celestin mentions frequency; to that I’ll add fare integration). Nicole, Henry, and Chakrabarti are proposing street space reallocation, which doesn’t cost much money, but does cost political capital and requires the public to be broadly trusting of the state’s promises on transportation. The problem with doing an all-of-the-above program is that at the end of the day, projected congestion pricing revenue is $1 billion a year and the MTA capital program is $11 billion a year; the new revenue is secondary, and my usual bête noire, construction costs, is primary.
Pedestrian Observations 
… or the city government gets addicted to the extra revenue.
One would expect something new & contentious to fade a bit over time, especially if it “works” without too much friction. I don’t know about Stockholm but the London zone mostly affected the extremely wealthy so 1. the less wealthy outside the zone wouldn’t normally access that area and 2. don’t care, but quite like, that the wealthy get charged and 3. the wealthy can afford it and indeed they were then main beneficiaries as traffic thinned in the early days, so despite all their blather, their representatives (mayor Boris Johnson) didn’t change it (it was Red Ken Livingstone’s creation) . However if it affected them, like the newly extended ULEZ (which many predict is a precursor to a wider congestion-charge zone) and you see how “popular” it is, such that it is impacting national politics.
Precisely, and it may well be considered “free” money and lead to even more waste. Or, to fulfil your requirement, be applied to purely cosmetic changes which I suppose wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing except for the screaming need for real system-wide change. Certainly it is not enough to really bring that needed system-wide change so the conclusion is that it won’t ‘work’. On top of that is there any confidence it will be implemented to work properly? And will there be lots of “exceptions” that will annoy ordinary users even more (say, like the ridiculous abuse of “disabled” parking in the UK).
Like I’ve said before, I was generally supportive of such schemes until being slowly persuaded by the Hidalgo arguments in Paris (essentially a social justice argument) allied with real system-wide improvement to transport and street utilisation. NYC desperately needs improvements that this won’t bring and might actually paper over for a short period. Further the cost of car parking and the tunnels & bridges tolls already act to deter anyone who doesn’t really need to drive into Manhattan.
Grabar got it right:
This annual billion dollars could have real and obvious impact in those areas but will hardly be noticeable in the public transit area.
London has LTNs and the ULEZ… it just doesn’t have any streets the width of Cours de Vincennes to do that kind of road-diet to. (Stockholm has some pretty wide main streets, like Sveavägen and Valhallavägen, the latter wide enough that I kept saying it’s named after where you’d go if you tried crossing it; as of when I lived there, those streets remained auto-oriented.)
Here’s one example of an attempt to leverage the income in a inventive way, maybe a version of Greenmail? I suppose clever PR. One wonders if it could work, ie. if New Yorkers will associate this whole $12bn of MTA works with the charge?
Pricing EV congestion differently from ICE vehicles like they do right now in London would reduce pollution levels and therefore help with environmental justice. If you want to solve pollution you ideally need a pollution tax in some form.
I’m skeptical of an environmental justice benefit of BEV buses. Tires produce 2000x the particulate matter that fuel does and tire wear goes up quite a lot with weight; and due to charging BEV depots will inevitably have more space constraints. Where will you put the additional charging infrastructure, Yonkers? The real solution IMO is trolley buses, combined with proper bus lanes and bus lane enforcement. But granted that NIMBYs would block trolley buses, so the long term solution is really just bus lanes and enforcement to increase bus speeds and therefore competitiveness.
The high asthma rates near depots specifically suggest that idling engines really do produce a lot of local pollution, it’s not just (or mainly) the tires.
Point taken, but is such large scale idling a necessary aspect of bus operations? I doubt it, but even if yes, I bet it could be mitigated without the in-motion environmental justice issues with BEV buses. For instance, if aircon is necessary you could use shore power at the depot the same way that cruise ships can use shore power to reduce emissions locally.
IIRC, tires produce a lot of particulate matter by mass, but it’s in relatively large particles that cause little health impact. Whereas combustion byproducts are just the size to cause health impact.
Trolley buses are certainly better than BEV buses, but maybe a realistic compromise would be BEV with trolley wires for only part of the route so that the necessary battery size is much smaller. Or maybe hybrid buses which I imagine avoid the idling problem.
Okay, that’s a reasonable point. So I did a little more digging, and tire wear contributes more to PM2.5 than exhaust:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S026974912301285X
Plus, those heavy tire particles are not benign in terms of the environment either, asthma is not the only environmental justice issue.
BEV trolley buses would indeed be a good idea where the routes allow for sufficient charging.
Hybrid buses are one option, CNG would likely also help depending on the route. MTA does have some CNG bus operations, so expansion is perhaps another good option for congestion pricing dollars.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if express rush hour buses do end up being better on net if BEV.
BEVs produce less brake dust than fossil fuel vehicles so I believe the particulates level out with ICE vehicles.
What, due to regenerative braking? Easy solution to that is hybrids then, not BEVs. All fossil fuel buses should be hybrids except perhaps for long distance highway buses.
Legitimacy with the public is so important. Just-more-money disease is such a problem in Anglosphere transit agencies and advocates. As is victim-mythologies where “if only evil X hadn’t”, absurd given American Federalism means US transit city/states have plenty of fiscal resources if they should so choose.
The UK its the-evil-Tories-Nu-Labour narratives even though anti-transit policies are and were consistently supported by Far Left/Left Nationalist/Green. The failures of BR Postwar, plus Tyne-Metro, Scotrail, Merseyrail and Leeds Metro* because local Labour machines are run by NIMBY homeowner cabals whose response to transit is “lets build somewhere else if we build at all” (Newcastle is the worst). And New Labour was a dud on transit because it prioritised NHS and libraries just Outer British want and not raising taxation of the SE.
*Leeds has mass transit i.e. two electrified raillines that connect to Bradford/Skipley and Wakefield, they are just so badly run that they’ve built a fake-victim complex around a dud tram system that didn’t get built because cost-benefit analysis showed it wasn’t very good. Which given Sheffield’s are dud (trams on busy mainlines well done, S.Yorkshire).
Freshly reelected Sadiq Khan is promising to build 40,000 council homes… by 2030. So, a bit less than 1/1,000 people on an annual basis; Ile-de-France is building around 2-2.5 social units/1,000 people annually.
You think that’s bad, Labour borough councils have been increasing the number of social homes by…buying private housing (despite owning car parks and a few golf courses, plus lots of infill regeneration estates). I have some more confidence in Starmer and co willingness to try than over Khan who is just timid. But the reality is that making housing affordable in London means destroying the UK as we have known since 1945 (if not 1923).
I rather doubt Starmer is bolder than Khan on… Anything, really. Brexit, ULEZ, and the recent green investment walkbacks come to mind. But I dunno if he happens to be good on housing policy.
Brexit is just the reality. You can chose the UK or the EU. You can’t have both. The UK is in Turkey/Bosnia/Serbia position i.e. mediocre client state pretending that’s its some great multi-ethnic Imperium that’s been hard done by Brussels. The UK is based on the assumption that the English are worthless unless they are Britain and Britain is great unlike England. And if Britain is great why does it need the EU?
Most of the promises were vapourware anyway after all that’s what Corbynism was. The fiscal arithmetic didn’t work. Housing is serious, lots of discussions in policy circles, daring to talk about building the green belt. The reason it won’t work is that it would destroy the UK because everything North of Warwickshire is a zombie community that lives on land speculation supplemented by welfare and subsidy.
Building housing and infra south of that line means destroying the Celtic Fringe and the North of England more utterly than Thatcher could ever dream. Building housing requires reforming local government which in turn requires devolving taxation, i.e. the South gets to keep more of its money for its own needs. Right now if an English locality builds housing the money goes to the Treasury and no extra money in grants for higher population (if its a Celtic locality under the Barnett formula they get a subsidy because Celts are superior beings).
Starmer will attempt being UK’s Erdogan i.e. Rais buying a generation of life to a failing Imperium via property booms and repression, but he may very well be the UK’s Gorbachev. Discovering that once you start reforming the “planning system” at the heart of your Empire’s ideology, nobody wants the husk. Starmer believes in the British Labour dream; that there is single British nation whose master class is the single British working class served by the Centralised British Nation state. He really does. Problem is that its worthless, a dream from a country that never really existed.
Borners:
If true then they are slowly shuffling towards the right endpoint: Two of the four states, Scotland and NI, are bound to separate. If done within the EU it isn’t nearly as traumatic as some imagine (which is why it is weird that the EU resists Catalan and Basque movements). Consider having Schengen and the Euro currency … which NI will achieve de facto by joining Ireland.
As usual (Little) England is the problem.
“Little England” god you’re a xenophobic twat. All the communities in the archipelago suck balls. England’s just at the bottom of the pile paying for everything, suffering acute national-dsyphoria and being denied therapy.
“Bound to separate” I wish. I really do. But Sinn Fein, SNP and co really really don’t want it. If they did they would start talking about the future where something called England exists*. Instead you read their documents and there is no England only a UK which pays them money after their Independence and takes all the blame for the Celtic fringe being a bunch of corrupt Hard-Right parasite societies feeding off England/the EU/NATO/taxpayer globally.
Of course being a believer in the British Imperial ideology you have to think England is worthless because if its not then who do you scapegoat for being a corrupt xenophobic babyboomer? That’s hilarious nature of the UK since it was founded, “little England” is worthless.
Spain is very very different because Castille isn’t England i.e. a super unitary nationality nor is Catalonia Scotland. There are lots liminal commuities between a Castillian-Spanish mainstream and Basque/Catalonia. Huge numbers of Basques live in Navarre (which has its own traditions), plus you Aragon and Valencia as intermediate communities. Plus lots of migration from South/West to the richer northeastern communities (only Wales has a comparably sized English community). Plus there’s Galicia and the Canaries. And Las Rojas, Andalucía and Madrid make the English North-South divide look puny.
*”but there’s no England to negotiate with” they say, meanwhile Polish Solidarity started writing treaties recognising a future independent Ukraine/Lithuania’s borders before they took power in Warsaw in the late 1980’s and before the USSR truly started to collapse post-1990. They could start disscussing how they’re gonna the missing 5-25% of GDP that is English tribute payments to the Republic/NI/Scotland/Wales.
One of the strongest arguments for Labour walking back the green investment is this blog.
Because spending £100bn over a parliamentary term and getting £25bn of benefit sucks.
Stage one is doing some small cheap projects where a small team can keep the costs sensible.
Scale isn’t the problem given how quickly you can scale up if you want to (Turkey). The issue is admitting you have a problem and learning from others. But I suspect Reeves and Starmer are just too high on the Great British ideology to admit the state needs procurement reform. Labourites really believe that superior morality can solve problems through will.
Also if you plan a housing boom based on New Towns you’re gonna need scale anyway for water/roads/electricity alone.
The problem is the system is rotten top to bottom. A state that is based on the assumption that’s its majority are worthless and need to be conversion-therapied into an Imperial identity is going to fail. FFS almost all of Starmer’s policies are England-only but you’ll only ever see them say “Britain” or “the country”. Dead-naming is not a good basis for policy.
N/B When somebody in Britain talks about “boldness” or “radical” its when they are demanding nothing change except somebody else be the scapegoat/money bag. I.e. Thatcherism with British-leftie characteristics*. But given even Corbyn couldn’t discuss things like “Dutch/Swedish levels of taxation for welfare”. Instead its magic spending promises as the opposite to Tory magical tax cuts.
More positively the fact there is no money does make for radical change potentially. However, a lot of left-wing “radicals” are a bunch of conservative cowards who refuse to eat consequences and compromises but instead masturbate to Good Progressive/Socialist Tsar fantasies.
Guardian isn’t that different to the Telegraph (hence why a certain racist boomer Aussie loves it). Just a different bunch of Imperial Conservatives who wish to preserve the social order at other’s expense.
*This includes the Separatist parties who couldn’t decolonise a cake if it meant admitting the English were anything more than sub-human. Reading Sinn Fein or SNP documentation is like reading Camden Lefties only with more explicit racism*.
>can’t have both [UK and EU]
Why not? It worked fine for a while. France still maintains internal colonies somewhat democratically even.
I don’t think this is anyone’s serious argument, it seems to me that Brexiters are arguing for return with a V — that is, Britain is not great and mostly because of the EU; and that remainers are mostly arguing that the EU is needed regardless of whether those remainers are pro Britain as many in the London area are (polls of British identity are high in London).
Ultimately, the EU is a bunch of countries, moreso than a bunch of people. That’s why the EU is anti Catalan and Basque (&c.) independence without federal approval.
Certainly the UK is not great at choosing the right green investments, but there are plenty of good ones available to it such as more North Sea wind.
Well, left wing parties the world over have been captured by bourgeois concerns. That’s not at all limited to the UK, and can be seen in e.g. San Francisco (housing, like in London), Kerala (ag policy AFAICT), PRC (patronage system), and so on in different ways.
@Borners, Lou Haig’s rail plan specifically mentions learning from the Swiss.
Cosigned.
-Alon, they/them.
TERF island is consistent. Only people with two X chromosomes are women, because anybody else will rape you in the toilet. The English have to be British otherwise they’ll be evil racist Imperialist nationalists. The principle is simple; people shouldn’t be who they are, they have to be who the social order needs them to be.
Okay, 1. England is pathologically Bougie. We invented it. Labour has never not been Bougie, see Labour 1945 government’s property portfolio (i.e. they made a killing including St A. Bevan). Kerala (and W.Bengal) is better seen as pre-1960 Irish style conservative small holder agriculture paid for with emigration.
PRC is what happens when you take Das Kapital as a model for “Capitalism”. The purest expression of Marxist ideology’s idea of “Capitalism”. Ruling committee of Bourgeoisie, excess production, reserve army of labour, Imperial expansion of markets etc etc. And its so so very different from the Bougie Parliamentary systems Marx (and Lenin) hated so.
The problem isn’t investment choice, UK’s been okay at investing in offshore wind. The problem is state capacity is lacking to procure at competitive costs (esp for Nuclear). Furthermore the NIMBY structure of the state means lots of veto points to doing it. I really stress how misleading it is to read generic left-wing British pieces, they refuse to take logistics and state capacity seriously, its all morality plays designed to avoid difficult choices e.g. dismantling the NIMBY 1947 system and the dominance of propertied wealth over earned income.
So did the Williams report. But thanks for the heads up
(Kerala and West Bengal were not at all the same under CPI leadership; for one, West Bengal got more castist under CPI, whereas Kerala was the exact opposite. But also, no, postwar Labour did not build a remittance-based economy.)
I don’t get the idea that only the English are “evil racist imperialist nationalists”, plenty of Scots/Irish/Welsh were too. Especially Scots.
Sure, but still bourgeois nonetheless. As I said, in different ways as the local class structure and party membership interact.
I suspect that the rot for nuclear is far broader than just in the UK. China can build nuclear for reasonable prices, the EU/UK/US cannot; UK and US have the typical anglosphere consultant issues but France in particular does have large state capacity to plan and build nuclear. The whole field needs a rethink in order for it to be useful in the green transition as opposed to a waste of capital. I’m pro nuclear, but not as is on a cost basis.
Quite right, it is insanely stupid idea. The Aussie Boomer Xenophobe reproduced some of it upthread which is pure Guardian British Imperial Ideology. Read a Caroline Lucas or a David Olusuga. The latter just did a TV series “look how racist the British Empire was, and the English are the worst of all which is why they must stay loyal subjects of the UK which is less racist than them because reasons”. Its not completely unique, if you look a Soviet Union constantly warning against Russian Chauvanism…only to do tons of it.
Also the post-war UK has never had successful procurement of anything complex. Anyone who reads histories of the UK nuclear industry or Aerospace since 1945 or housing. We’ve never had a technically proficient civil service. Post-1979 Thatcherite consultantocracy made things worse, but its also a result of the state’s lack of competency (and legitimacy).
Now before Alon comes in and says the Victoria line/Electrification was built at good costs I would point to the troubles of Jubilee line, but also the structures that kept infra costs from exploding pre-1979 was iterating pre-nationalisation ways of doing things. Which is why all of those infrastracture sectors had horrendous operation costs performance, and deteriorating cost efficiency before as wages rose and best technique changed. Hence 1970’s Jubilee has cost problems even though it doesn’t have many of the design problems (gigantism) of the 1990’s expansion.
The corner case of French regional rail you are referring to is a dubious case. While many French or German believe that the TGV’s success came at the price of conventional rail neglect, this belief is based on the zero-sum assumption that the successful entities must have stolen the wealth of poor ones, not on actual data. Traffic on conventional French trains went from 38 to 40 billion passenger-km between 2004 and 2019 even as the numbers downplay the traffic on the legacy lines. For example, a TGV East journey from Paris to Sedan, Saint Die, Remiremont or Luxembourg using the legacy rails and stations over a significant portion of the journey is entirely counted as a TGV trip. Political debate is not necessarily rational and the same is true in NY.
As you have shown, MTA’s main problem is construction cost and slow pace, and Congestion Pricing will not fix that. However, being highly visible, this new tax will be assumed to have a major effect. NY authorities will need to make sure that Congestion Pricing brings tangible and immediate benefits because its opponents will blame it for any downturn in NYC fortunes. With Mayor Adams distancing himself from the scheme it is difficult to be optimistic.
What does conventional French rail look like without the Parisian suburban services?
The highly subsidized regional services (TER) carry about 20 billion passenger-km/year. Traffic is up 66% since the organization was devolved to the Regions in 2002 and about twice as much as UK’s Regional traffic outside of London & South East.
German regional trains carried 57.3 billion p-km in 2019 (source, p. 55), up from 40.5 billion in 2004; this includes S-Bahns but not U-Bahns, which are legally trams.
Regional trains represent about 56% of pre-Covid and pre-D-Ticket rail traffic in Germany. Corresponding figures were 70% in the UK thanks to strong London area commuting, 53% in Italy, 41% in Spain, and only 35% in France where Long Distance, i.e. essentially the TGV, predominates.
The real problem with French TER services is the lack of S-bahn style operations in the regional cities. That’s the missing element of the French mix. Instead they do passable trams and the occasional subway system. Plus keeping large city centre depots for reasons.
The plan is to build about 10 more RER systems, so Macron is on the same page as you here.
Annual ridership of the passable French trams was almost 1.5 million/line-km pre-covid. The Canadian and Swiss lines were in the same range at 1.6 and 1.4 million/km. My English is poor so I let you choose the adjective for the Polish (1.07 m), German (980 k), Dutch (910 k), Belgian (816 k), Spanish (516 k), British (504 k), and American Street cars & LRV lines (301 k).
“Shit”
“Utter, total, worthless shit”
“WTF”
“WTAF?”
“Shit”
“Just shit”
Yeah, French trams and metros are fine. The problem is really the lack of good regional service outside Ile-de-France. So the modal splits in the central provincial cities are fine, but then their suburbs have low modal splits. As of 2014, Toulouse is 26% (Haute-Garonne: 13%), Nice is 25.4% (Alpes-Maritimes: 13.1%), Bordeaux is 26.7% (Gironde: 11.1%), Strasbourg is 27.7% (Bas-Rhin: 12.9%), Marseille is 25.9% (Bouches-du-Rhône: 14.2%).
Disclaimer; France is better at these things than any Anglophone country.
If those statistics include Paris, then are useless given Parisian tramways work only because they integrate with the RER and Metro.
French modal split manages to be only slightly higher than the UK despite effortlessly better infrastructure. And given roughly similar weighted population density that suggests something is going wrong. Passenger density is useful at the individual line, but without the context of modal split its not very good.
France needs to learn from Germanic-Nordic regional transit infrastructure design/operation philosophies.
The other advantage of s-bahn is that its about leveraging existing infrastacture better. Lord knows Marseilles hasn’t helped itself by trying to Metro spam instead through-running its extensive North-facing legacy networks. And Lyon’s decision to have an express-tram suggests they are looking for heavy-rail superior speed to trams.
This isn’t just a matter of transportation. The choice of cities in France to keep-historic middle rise/high density cores and then sprawl outward consistently sabotages attempts to decrease car use. Its also hitting into affordability wherever the urban area is hitting beyond the limits of car technology (Paris, Lyon, Marseilles*). That’s why a s-bahn/RER networked centred on a redeveloped legacy train station is the way to go. Yes Lyon has done some of this, it should do more if it really wants to be a 2nd city properly. It’d also help those sprawl suburbs.
*Marseilles is expensive considering its poverty. Indeed its probably a key reason why its poor despite size/geography.
The French tram revival was acknowledgment that the Germanic world was right to keep and improve its networks. Average traffic density outside of Ile de France is a respectable 1.29 million/km.
The Regions financing the TER services are also aware than their German counterparts get more trains-km for the same amount of money and are putting pressure on SNCF and other operators.
Germany’s rail share of modal split is only better for freight. French rail share of passenger traffic was 9% in 2015, 8% in 2021 and 10.2% in 2022 versus Germany’s 8% in 2015 and 6% in 2021. The only neighbor France has to look up to in that regard is Switzerland.
Are you sure the French are correctly counting rural road journeys?
Because I have a hard time believing that the French have significantly lower overall journeys than the Germans or British.
If anything the need to buy a baguette every day means French rural journeys should be higher.
I believe these French and European stats are accurate.
Whether the French are driving less are more than other Europeans I don’t know. It is thought that the average French needed to move about 14000 km/year between 2008 and 2014 and 14500 up to 2018. I don’t have more recent figures and numbers for neighboring countries. With TGV annual ridership around 940 km/capita and Long Distance rail passenger-kms at 400% British ones one does not need to look further to explain the slightly better rail market share. The TER and trams may get some attention in these pages but they are anecdotal in terms of French mobility.
But how do the British do more journeys overall than the French when we don’t need to buy bread every day and we have less holiday?
And yeah we travel less distance – Britain is smaller, that makes sense.
Great Britain is not small, hence the name. A trip from London to Thurso is about 1100 km. However, most of the population is concentrating on a third of the island, the polygon between York, Dover, Bournemouth, Cardiff and Liverpool. The Lignes a Grande Vitesse leaving Paris encounter Scottish level of population density, around 70/km2, for about 200 km (Nord and Atlantique), 300 km (Est) and 400 km (Sud-Est) before approaching significant destinations while the average population density along the HS2 route to Manchester must be about 2000/km2. The average trip length on Virgin’s West Coast Main Line, about 196 km, would have left a Parisian in rural territory, a Madrilene in barren land, and a Londoner in Birmingham, while the average TGV trip length would bring a Londoner to Newcastle, Carlisle or Penzance.
Consider what a locale with near-infinite money spends on subway construction. Saudi Arabia is flush with cash. Riyadh is building 109 miles of subway (85 stations) for $22 billion.
$22,000M/109mi = $201 million/mile
Riyadh has a population of 7.6 million (like NYC) and is growing (unlike NYC). It hosts an annual F1 race. It is the capital of Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is hosting the 2034 FIFA World Cup. Riyadh is hosting an official World Expo in 2030.
Don’t forget to multiply by 2.1 for the PPP conversion.
Assuming numbers are consistent (they aren’t and I don’t want to figure that out; perhaps a good blog topic), that’s 40b.p/km / 65m.people for mainland France and 57.3b.p/km / 84.6m people for Germany; so that’s only modestly higher for Germany (0.68 ratio) than France (0.62 ratio).
Passenger kilometres does bias towards larger countries, because France has much higher passenger kilometres than the UK but much more similar overall passenger numbers.
Yes, but in this case it’s not the size of the country that matters but rather the size of the urban area. So to properly normalize for that, you need to adjust for the pop/ridership and size of each area. For instance, Lyon (France #3) has 515km^2 of area and West Midlands (UK #3) about 600. Numbers seem harder to find for Germany, since I don’t want to use the rural parts of German metropolitan areas.