TGV Imitators: Learning the Wrong Lessons From the Right Places
I talked last time about how high-speed rail in Texas is stuck in part because of how it learned the wrong lessons from the Shinkansen. That post talks about several different problems briefly, and here I’d like to develop one specific issue I see recur in a bunch of different cases, not all in transportation: learning what managers in a successful case say is how things should run, rather than how the successful case is actually run. In transportation, the most glaring case of learning the wrong lessons is not about the Shinkansen but about the TGV, whose success relies on elements that SNCF management was never comfortable with and that are the exact opposite of what has been exported elsewhere, leading countries that learned too much from France, like Spain, to have inferior outcomes. This also generalizes to other issues, such as economic development, leading to isomorphic mimicry.
The issue is that the TGV is, unambiguously, a success. It has produced a system with high intercity rail ridership; in Europe, only Switzerland has unambiguously more passenger-km/capita (Austria is a near-tie, and the Netherlands doesn’t report this data). It has done so financially sustainably, with low construction costs and, therefore, operating profits capable of paying back construction costs, even though the newer lines have lower rates of return than the original LGV Sud-Est.
This success brought in imitators, comprising mostly countries that looked up to France in the 1990s and 2000s; Germany never built such a system, having always looked down on it. In the 2010s and 20s, the imitation ceased, partly due to saturation (Spain, Italy, and Belgium already had their own systems), partly because the mediocre economic growth of France reduced its soft power, and partly because the political mood in Europe shifted from state-built infrastructure projects to on-rail private competition. I wrote three years ago about the different national traditions of building high-speed rail, but here it’s best to look not at the features of the TGV today but at those of 15 years ago:
- High average speed, averaging around 230 km/h between Paris and Marseille; this was the highest in the world until China built out its own system, slightly faster than the Shinkansen and much faster than the German, Korean, and Taiwanese systems. Under-construction lines that have opened since have been even faster, reaching 260 km/h between Paris and Bordeaux.
- Construction on cut-and-fill, with passenger-only lines with steep grades (a 300 km/h train can climb 3.5% grades just fine), limited use of viaducts and tunnels, and extensive public outreach including land swap deals with farmers and overcompensation of landowners in order to reduce NIMBY animosity.
- Direct service to the centers of major cities, using classical lines for the last few kilometers into Paris and most other major cities; cities far away from the network, such as Toulouse and Nice, are served as well, on classical lines with the trains often spending hours at low speed in addition to their high-speed sections.
- Extensive branching: every city of note has its own trains to Paris.
- Little seat turnover: trains from Paris to Lyon do not continue to Marseille and trains from Paris to Marseille do not stop at Lyon, in contrast with the Shinkansen or ICE, which rely on seat turnover and multiple major-city stops on the same train.
- Open platforms: passengers can get on the platform with no security theater or ticket gates, and only have to show their ticket on the train to a conductor. This has changed since, and now the platforms are increasingly gated, though there is still no security theater.
- No fare differentiation: all trains have the same TGV brand, and charge similar fares as the few remaining slow intercity trains, on average much lower than on the Shinkansen. Fares do depend on airline-style buckets including when and how one books a train, and on service class, but there is no premium for speed or separation into high- and low-fare trains. This has also changed since, as SNCF has sought to imitate low-cost airlines and split the trains into the high-fare InOui brand and low-fare OuiGo brand, differentiated in that OuiGo sometimes doesn’t go into traditional city stations but only into suburban ones like Marne-la-Vallée, 25 minutes from Paris by RER. However, InOui and OuiGo are still not differentiated by speed.
SNCF management’s own beliefs on how trains should operate clearly differ from how TGVs actually did operate in the 1990s and 2000s, when the system was the pride of Europe. Evidently, they have introduced fare differentiation in the form of the InOui-OuiGo distinction, and ticket-gated the platforms. The aim of OuiGo was to imitate low-cost airlines, one of whose features is service at peripheral airports like Beauvais or Stansted, hence the use of peripheral train stations. However, even then, SNCF has shown some flexibility: it is inconvenient when a train unloads 1,000 passengers at an RER station, most of whom are visitors to the region and do not have a Navigo card and therefore must queue at ticket vending machines just to connect; therefore, OuiGo has been shifting to the traditional Parisian terminals.
However, the imitators have never gotten the full package outlined above. They’ve made some changes, generally in the direction of how SNCF management and the consultants who come from that milieu think trains ought to run, which is more like an airline. The preference for direct trains and no seat turnover has been adopted into Spain and Italy, and the use of classical lines to go off-corridor has been adopted as well, not just into standard-gauge imitators but also into broad-gauge Spain, using some variable-gauge trains. In contrast, the lack of fare differentiation by speed did not make it to Spain. Fast trains charge higher fares than slow trains, and before the opening of the market to private competition, RENFE ran seven different fare/speed classes on the Madrid-Barcelona lines, with separate tickets.
Ridership, as a result, was disappointing in Spain and Italy. The TGV had around 100 million annual passengers before the Great Recession, and is somewhat above that level today, thanks to the opening of additional lines. The AVE system has never been close to that. The high-speed trains in Italy, a country with about the same population as France, have been well short of the TGV’s ridership as well. Relative to metro area size, ridership in both countries on the city pairs for which I can find data was around half as high as on the TGV. Private competition has partly fixed the problem on the strongest corridors, but nationwide ridership in Spain and Italy remains deficient.
The issue in Spain in particular is that while the construction efficiency is even better than in France, management bought what France said trains should be like and not what French trains actually are. The French rail network is not the dictatorship of SNCF management. Management has to jostle with other interest groups, such as labor, NIMBY landowners, socialist politicians, (right-)liberal politicians, and EU regulators. It hates all of those groups for different reasons and can find legitimate reasons why each of those groups is obstructionist, and yet at least some of those groups are evidently keeping it honest with its affordable fares and limited market segmentation (and never by speed).
More generally, when learning from other places, it’s crucial not just to invite a few of their managers to your country to act as consultants. As familiar as they are with their own success, they still have their prejudices of how things ought to work, which are often not how they actually do work. Experience in the country in question is crucial; if you represent a peripheral country, you need to not just rely on consultants from a success case but also send your own people there to live as locals and get local impressions of how things work (or don’t), so that you can get what the success case actually is.
Pedestrian Observations 
Feel like that’s like how people from late 19th to early 20th century went to Western countries like France to learn about what can be used to develop their own country, see theories proposed there on gow to solve issues currently faced by those countries like France, them take those theory back home, then resulted in great tragedies
Yeah, and this is also related to a distinct problem with learning: the core doesn’t care about the periphery much, so the sort of people in the core who the periphery has the most access to are selected for wanting to deal with the periphery, which sometimes correlates with weird attitudes, such as colonial preference for unequal relationships or having failed or become marginalized at home and going to a place that is considered less prestigious. Examples of the former include Western missionary contact with the third world, in the colonial era but even today with American Evangelical influence on Ugandan homophobia. Examples of the latter include socialists going to poorer countries to develop them in their image (like Patrick Blackett) and more recently the FILTH phenomenon – failed in London, try Hong Kong – that’s created the globalized system of project delivery.
I don’t disagree with any of your points but would make a slightly different emphasis.
I believe this is much more a whole-society issue than just what SNCF may or may not want. Unlike the UK where the commercial and governmental attitudes concur on charging the public “until the pips squeak”, in France the ethos is that it is important to make critical stuff (transit, roads, electric power, even housing) as affordable by as many as possible. I’m not sure the state even needs to strong arm SNCF on this because all of its management have adopted this frame of mind from their elite educations. And to KISS. I mean I would think even all the Brit railfans on this blog will agree that the nitpicking ticketing on British transport is infuriating. (On this site I set out how there are about 20 various ticket prices for the Heathrow Express, almost all designed to trap you into the most expensive ticket, ie. the kind where you just show up and buy one, not a month in advance etc).
Also, I think the overwhelming reason why they created Ouigo was to pre-empt EUs Open Access policy so as to discourage/exclude true third parties. And I absolutely agree with that policy. I think the EU policy is braindead neoconservativism on competition, and it doesn’t work. I believe it may have saved France’s rail system which otherwise could potentially descend into the kind of craziness of the British. Because that’s what selective pseudo-competition does, actually wreck state services by cherrypicking or loss-leading prices followed by high prices, poorer service and a network devoid of investment and almost impossible to return to status quo ante. I mean imagine the state insisting that Brightline Florida adhere to open access and allow Virgin Trains to share the tracks and stations!
So that attitude of the state is all crucial, and the wide general consensus by the voters (despite or maybe because of widespread grumbling) that it works for them, is the thing that makes it work in France. We can see that fraying and should be very nervous about the outcome.
Of Western Europe’s big three France has by far the best long distance infrastructure but also the worst long distance ridership.
Difficult to believe operationally that SNCF has been competent.
In terms of the voters it has the largest share voting far right as well in domestic elections.
Yes, France’s has the worse Long Distance rail ridership from the airlines point of view. In billion passenger-km, SNCF’s 2022 LD ridership was 59 domestic + 7 international. DB’s 41.72 billion LD pax-km and FS + Italo’s 28.2 billion were acceptable. With 19.5 and 18.3 billion respectively, RENFE and the UK operators demonstrated what real competence looks like.
Britain is smaller so it will always be hard to compete on passenger kilometres. Its why I prefer to compare passenger journeys where we are ahead.
Also with Covid care is needed. You can’t compare 2021/22 in Britain with calendar year 2022 in France as those are very different.
Britain is not that small. KGX-EDH is 632 km and there is a lot of land north of Edinburgh. On a random date, November 13, I had 32 LON-EDI flights to choose from as opposed to 6 PAR-Bordeaux (569 km by LGV), 9 PAR-Marseille (755 km) and 23 PAR-Toulouse (713 km). TLS is expected to take a hit from the planned Bordeaux-Toulouse LGV while EDI doesn’t have much to fear from HS2 in the foreseeable future.
As for Covid, you are right but comparing 2021/22 Britain with calendar year 2021 France (LD = 43 billion domestic pax-km + 3 bn International) doesn’t change the results.
Well yes, though I found London-Edinburgh by train is only 534km (a whole 98km shorter than your figure, are you sure you aren’t using the driving distance?) and Glasgow 554km. Anyway the point remains that 84% of the UK’s population is in England and an even higher proportion of that is in the south which is why today it is the densest zone in all Europe.
I would guess that those inter-city flights are more popular than any equivalents in France because the train for the same journey is so bloody expensive, unless of course you are over 70y and disabled, book 3 months in advance and travel on the first Tuesday of the month … then it is merely expensive.
I have always seen the Euston-Glasgow WCML route quoted at 401 miles = 645,6 km. In regard to Edinburgh, your number also looks like the distance as the crow flies.
The population repartition is precisely why picking a couple of numbers in order to compare UK and France is a fool’s errand. Besides the downstream Seine valley served by conventional rail from Gare St Lazare and 30 km2 of Champagne vineyards, Paris is surrounded by cheap agricultural land where building high speed rail was easy and cheap and where TGVs can stretch their legs. Madrid surroundings are even emptier. Building HS1 and HS2 was always going to be more difficult. HS2 designers were worse than TGV imitators. They wanted to be world-beaters as if they were in a race on a short HSR segment where higher speed is never going to make a difference. HS1 lower speed and integration with the existing network was a better strategy.
SNCF is far from flawless but the kind of joke you made about UK train fares would fall flat in France. One of the drawbacks of open-access is secrecy. Competitors may have to reveal their cost structure and revenues to the State but they remain State secrets. Fixing an issue that cannot be publicly discussed is difficult.
@dralaindumas, the third furthest big destination from London is Newcastle which is only 270 miles or ~430km. And most people in the UK live only as far north or as far West as Swansea, both of which are about 300km from London – so a lot of the long distance trips will be at most that sort of distance.
Matthew, of the big three, France has the worst Long Distance ridership but only if one compares the 2023 Long Distance ridership from DB (140 million), the UK (131 million) and domestic TGVs (123 million) as if France had no conventional trains. These (subsidized) trains carried an additional 178 million Long Distance riders. Altogether, France and Germany have similar rail riderships (101 billion passenger-km) with France doing better on LD and Germany on Regional rail, well ahead of Italy (55 billion) or Spain (35 billion)
Where does the 178 million come from? Is that all the TER ridership?
Because it seems pretty unlikely that is the InterCity ridership given how few services there are https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercités
The 178 million comes from the 2023 report from Autorite des Transports. It includes Intercites which, as you know, are a shadow of their pre-TGV past, and TER trains running over 100 km which are on the rise as the enlarging Regions (their number dropped from 22 to 13) take responsibility on longer relations. Short distance TERs running less than 100 km, carried another 212 million passengers. The problem with these comparisons is that these definitions are idiosyncratic and vary with time and location.
I think it’s pretty safe that there are 175m journeys a year on London and South East or UK Regional trains that travel over 100km.
The reason I compare TGV and Long distance is that I think the sets a broadly fair. Yes it isn’t perfect as it doesn’t include the Intercités classic trains, but on the other hand it also doesn’t include Liverpool-Norwich or London-Norwich for example.
The flaw of comparing total ridership is that broadly you are just comparing London vs Paris and Paris clearly wins.
A British comedian wakes up far in the future:
” What year is it?” “2274. You’ve been asleep for 250 years”
“How did Brexit turn out?” “Too soon to tell.”
“How did HS2 turn out?” “It’s almost done.”
Excessive patriotism or not. The French have invested hugely in the TGV network and the British have made a very limited capital investment in the last 100 years beyond partial electrification and existing track improvements.
So that it is even arguable that Britain is ahead on ridership is deeply embarrassing for the French operational practices on the TGV network. And just as much as it is deeply embarrassing for us that we have so far failed to learn from our southern neighbour – hopefully Lou Haig and others are more up for the challenge.
Idiosyncrasies in aggregate statistics are the reason I prefer to deal in specific examples.
France’s population is more spread out than Britain’s, especially in terms of distance to Paris or London. For instance France’s Birmingham is Lyon; France’s Manchester and Leeds are Bordeaux and Toulouse (you can argue which is which – I’m simply making a general point). If trip rates between major cities and capital are similar then France ought to score double the long-distance passenger km as the UK.
There is no doubt France has far better high-speed infrastructure than Britain. This also means that France equalises journey time with Britain despite the longer distance. TGV’s fares are probably on the whole lower than British InterCity fares (and I’m talking fare per minute rather than fare per km). This means Paris – Lyon should have the same or lower generalised cost than London – Manchester and should achieve similar or better journeys, and significantly higher passenger km (on account of the longer distance). Britain’s London inter-city network generally runs maximum length trains and maximum frequency the infrastructure can handle, and the fares can be high because it needs to price people off otherwise overcrowded trains. TGV I think generally do run maximum length trains (they tend to run double sets) but train frequencies are far below infrastructure capacity (even on LGV Sud-Est).
Looking at journeys with comparative journey times and similar ‘country end’ populations, and using train frequency as a proxy gauge for demand realised, Lyon – Paris probably does outperform Manchester – London these days as frequencies are fairly respectable. Bordeaux – Paris might outperform Leeds – London if the (generally) hourly TGVs all achieve near 100% load factors. However, I’m pretty sure Toulouse – Paris underperforms Edinburgh – London. I’m pretty certain Valence – Paris far underperforms Preston – London. In Britain Valance Ville would have an hourly train to Paris. The current timetable at Valence is atrocious – TERs and TGVs simply do not align at Valence-TGV.
Given each respective country’s infrastructure constraints, and accepting the ‘ground rule’ that inter-city services should stay operationally profitable, then France’s high-speed operation is less effective at capturing the maximum attainable demand than Britain’s InterCity routes.
Then you have flows like Bordeaux – Toulouse, where approximately TGV and Intercite each contributes 1tp2h at exactly the same journey time. Compulsory reservations aside, the fares are different and the two train types have different ticket amendment policies, despite having virtually no difference in speed or comfort. Britain doesn’t have this kind of problems – imagine Sheffield – Leeds only having TPE and EMR specific tickets.
If vertical integration and state ownership are supposed to bring benefits, then the benefits I’m looking for are clock-face timetabling, non-operator-specific ticketing and non-train-specific ticketing. SNCF offer none of these and the British system offer all of them.
The flip side of France’s larger size is that people tend to take more short than long trips, so you should expect, at equal quality of service, much more London-Birmingham than Paris-Lyon traffic.
But some of the shorter trips such as London-Birmingham will be on Chiltern or West Midlands Trains and therefore won’t count as Long Distance at all and will count as London and South East.
I don’t know what that really means. What is your metric, and you seem so confident you should be able to present a little table that summarises it. If it is pax km, or perhaps pax per km of track, the fact that France is the biggest country in Europe is going to play a role. Doesn’t SNCF have quite a higher total pax than Germany, and that’s absolute numbers before any normalisation to population; in other words it is only going to be “worse” if you express it per km. I mean London to its second city Birmingham is a mere 162km, barely the distance across Ile de France. To its third city, Manchester, is 261km. Paris to its second city, either Marseilles is 660km or if you use total metro population, Lyon is 409km.
Anyway, as usual it is easy to criticise and claim it could be done better, but just reread Alon’s second para. Plus I didn’t comment on that issue at all. It’s not the focus of this piece …
I am comparing Long distance total passengers in the British ORR data against TGV total ridership. Not per km. I have tried to match calendar years when I have looked at the data using four quarters and adding them together.
ORR “long distance” is the LNER, Midland Mainline, Avanti West Coast Long distance Great Western services to Bristol/Exeter/Cardiff/Cheltenham (but not the Oxford and local services) plus Bristol-Leeds Cross country services. It doesn’t include the other Cross country services doing Reading-Manchester or Cardiff-Nottingham. Nor does it include the northern long distance trans pennine express services.
But look if you want to say long distance passenger km is also legitimate and France is ahead on that measure and overall it is a draw fair enough. But given the large number of TGV lines in France vs only some electrification in Britain it’s still pretty bad for France.
I’m not saying much of that at all. The fact that in the UK the distance from the capital to the two next biggest cities is one half to one quarter that for the equivalent in France means that more people in the UK are likely to travel between those cities than in France. It gets worse for the next tier of French cities (Bordeaux, Nice, Toulouse, Montpelier etc.; Lille is the only exception, even Strasbourg is 400km) ie. given how much of the UK’s population is in the SE and south in general, compared to the spatial spread of France it is no surprise. Actually I am a bit surprised that France has more pax than Germany which is much more compact with its big cities much closer to each other and most in one linear arrangement (except for the capital), and don’t really understand why, unless Germans are irretrievably enamoured of the car and their autoroutes. If it is because as Alon has hinted, that their trains aren’t fast enough with sub-optimal routes that deters travel then that confirms what I said about the much longer distances in France being largely responsible for the lower travel than the UK (by how much I still don’t know).
I am unconvinced that these differences (and I’m still not clear on what they really are) are due to policy or strategic decisions between SNCF and whoever is doing the same thing in the UK. The causality being assumed seems pretty dodgy logic. I am also not clear on what people believe would improve it. I am impatient for France to complete its HSR network but it is a slow process especially with the remaining gaps being the more difficult and expensive bits.
France has higher rail modal split by p-km than Germany and the UK. This is not about the country’s size, and neither is the higher p-km/capita figure, because #1 in Europe on both is Switzerland.
In 2023 the TGV had 122 million domestic passengers as per https://www.railjournal.com/fleet/tgv-fleet-squeezed-by-growing-demand/.
In Britain there were 131 million domestic passengers on the franchised operators with about another 5 million on Open Access long distance services as per https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/usage/passenger-rail-usage/table-1221-passenger-journeys-by-sector/ and https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/usage/passenger-rail-usage/table-1223-passenger-journeys-by-operator/
To be fair the French international services as per the above source number 34 million vs 10 million for Britain as per https://mediacentre.eurostar.com/mc_view?language=uk-en&article_Id=ka4Rz000002KzmBIAS
Given those figures it is difficult to believe that the Paris-regional long distance services don’t have (perhaps significantly) higher ridership in France and that where the ridership is weaker than Britain is the long distance services in the regions.
Even if it isn’t quite as good as I have stated given the French have faster more reliable trains, cheaper and clearer ticketing costs, better urban transport in pretty much every city etc etc the fact that they aren’t ahead on long distance domestic ridership doesn’t point to the TGV operations being particularly strong.
@Alon, what does rail mean? Does it include trams and metros? Because those are definitely much better in France than the UK.
And the French definitely have higher overall ridership numbers for rail – presumably because the suburban/regional trains into Paris have higher ridership than the suburban/regional trains into London.
@Matthew Hutton
So you are saying:
France, domestic + intl = 156m pax
UK, domestic + intl = 146m pax
For the questions being argued it is important that RER/S-Bahn and certainly Metro+Trams are not included, and apparently that hasn’t been resolved? Like I have requested several times, the actual data needs to be compiled and posted in a clear fashion. And normalised to population which would push UK figures down a tiny bit but Germany by a more significant margin. So far it doesn’t look like a big difference.
My point in my last post remains: shorter distances (and much shorter ones in Switzerland, Netherlands and Austria etc) result in more so-called long-distance rail travel. One can learn from tiny countries like Switzerland but it would be naive to imagine practices necessarily transfer to very different countries. Ideally we’d have the data on average length of journeys which, necessarily, would show what I have been talking about. Causality would still be an inference, however look what happened when the Paris-Bordeaux LGV reduced from 3h to 2h: ridership increased a lot and the line became the second most used in France (>60m pa).
Plus, MH, I have no particular position on SNCF. Doubtless they could do better but I’d suggest that Ouigo was a pretty savvy move. I attribute French transit being better than most places I have been, to the overall governance system and in turn, voter acquiescence. One problem is the relatively poorer rural rail made much worse in France due to geographical size. Though I recall they have improved that quite a bit due to devolving to the regions. As I’ve said on this blog several times, I’m hoping tech will come to the rescue, ie. driverless trains and battery-electric-trains to reduce costs, remove diesel dependence without the expense of building catenary and things like Draisy. Sacha Claus, Open Access is not going to do a single thing to improve that issue unless you think other operators want to run money-sink low-patronage rural lines.
This makes it sound almost as if there were a rail “system”. How are the connections between TGVs and trains off the LGVs? Is there even a less-than-miniscule amount of trains that could connect with the TGVs? Regional rail with five-hours-gaps in the middle of the day? What is there that could be destroyed by open-access operators?
The main argument against open-access is that they are picking the cherries and are thereby reducing revenues that are used to cross-subsidize the low performing routes. Does this exist in France?
Cross-subsidies do exist in France. A new entrant cherry-picking the best liaisons will face high access charges and therefore cross-subsidize secondary routes.
It is fair to say that there isn’t a rail system. SNCF will run TGVs wherever they are commercially profitable, while the connexions will be at the Regions’ discretion. The Regions’ pride insure that they are much better than what you suggest but there can be delays. The SNCF-financed LGV Med opened in 2001 with out of town stations in Valence, Avignon and Aix. Avignon-TGV TER service only started in 2015 because the regional line had to be built and financed locally. Service is half hourly, as on Valence-TGV TER platforms. Aix-TGV is served by buses every 15 minutes.
SNCF is relaxed about these connexions for two reasons. Private car ownership is high enough that out of town TGV stations are accessible to almost everyone. Aix-TGV has huge parkings with cars coming from up to 150 km away and parking fees bringing much more money than any TER could.
This is a terrible attitude by a state-owned railway company that’s supposed to have a social conscience.
If SNCF thinks the commercial Paris market at Valence is 3-hour gaps between trains at Valence TGV (oh and it doesn’t bother connecting with TER services) and 2 trains a day to Valence Ville then it simply isn’t very good at business.
In 2023, in a city of 64000 located 530 km from Paris, Valence Ville station served 2.565 million, more than the 2.1 million using the station in Carlisle, a city of 70000 at 480 km from London. In addition, 2.3 million took the TGV in Valence-TGV. These numbers are attained with a relatively small number of trains though frequencies are not as bad as you pretend. There are 3 direct TGVs to Valence Ville in 2h30, 10 to Valence-TGV in as little as 2h10, with a connection reaching Valence Ville in less than 3 hours in most cases. What numbers would make you reconsider your negative view of SNCF’s business acumen and who in the UK or elsewhere is achieving them?
As for social conscience, SNCF’s duty is to follow the law. Current laws say that the TGV must be financially successful, and that the TERs are the responsibility of the Regions, not of SNCF. The situation in Aix-TGV with people driving from the Cote d’Azur is unfortunate but again is not SNCF’s responsibility. SNCF’s 1989 plan for the LGV Mediterranee included a 110 km branch leaving from the vicinity of Aix-TGV and reaching Frejus at the edge of Cote d’Azur. SNCF offered to build it with her own funds but NIMBY action in the Aix County was strong and political support was missing.
To be honest the Aix situation is OK – it is what it is. What is not OK is where there is generous infrastructure at Valence and SNCF sits on lazy timetabling.
What’s the point in having a state operator if it doesn’t do anything a passive private operator doesn’t do? There are enough services to Montpellier / Marseille / Nice for the timetable to be regularised to provide a clock-face hourly call, and with French infrastructure utilisation it wouldn’t be difficult for SNCF to be pro-active with their regional authorities to coordinate timetables. It should use its national operator position to lobby regional governments to specify better connected timetables – because SNCF can have its long-distance timetables ready so the regional authorities specify increments at very low risk. SNCF gains commercial revenue and the regional government has a high likelihood of its connecting trains earning good money. SNCF can exceed its obligation to the regions and while staying within the financial envelopes of their PSO contracts, and SNCF can write a better commercial timetable while maintaining profitability.
Carlisle – London is 3 hours 24 minutes on a typical direct train with. Valence Ville – Paris Lyon could be consistently 2 hours 35 minutes with an efficient interchange at Valence TGV. Make sure similar connections are provided in the Lyon (bigger than Preston) and Marseille / Montpellier (similar to Glasgow and Edinburgh) directions. That’s nearly a whole hour of journey time advantage. Have that as a consistent hourly timetable then I would expect Valence passenger numbers to outperform Carlisle by 50%.
You are asking “What’s the point in having a state operator if it doesn’t do anything a private operator doesn’t do ?” Well, SNCF did what no other private or public operator on this planet has been able to do. It successfully financed the construction cost of high speed lines linking Valence with Paris, Belgium and the Channel Tunnel. This requires financial discipline with larger and less frequent trains but the public doesn’t mind. Valence has more than twice similarly-sized Carlisle ridership. Italy and Spain’s AV networks were each more costly than SNCF’s LGV, were entirely financed by the taxpayers, and collectively have less than the passenger-km numbers of the TGV. If the clients are happy, who are you to complain?
The TERs are another story. There is only one real client, the Region, who covers about 70% of the operating costs. Following the EU mandate, the Regions will look at the offers from various operators. Mid-2025, Transdev will take over the Marseille-Nice services and other lines will follow. Whether they are successful won’t be known for years.
You are confusing SNCF Voyageur and SNCF Reseau. Yes they were vertically integrated in the past and infrastructure and operation were ‘one cost’, but we are talking about the current operating model. SNCF Voyageur pays SNCF Reseau a track access charge some of which goes towards paying off the infrastructure. That’s exactly the same as any train operator paying any infrastructure owner – of course the rate may vary but the principle is the same. SNCF Voyageur should stay profitable – I have no problem with that. A private company maximises profit, but a state owned company should maximise social value while not making a loss. Otherwise what’s the point in having a state owned company?
There are three things that are true:
Of course the extent to which such GJT reduction can be offered while staying in profit would have to be subject to detailed analysis on a case-by-case basis, but your blanket implying that any such attempt would surely plunge SNCF into the red is simply not credible and is frankly lazy.
Again I come back to the topic of thought leadership. I’m not talking about behaviour as a PSO holder as part of your day-to-day responsibilities. I’m talking about having an independent industry voice. SNCF’s ‘sign contract – make money – keep shtum’ behaviour is what you’d expect from a passive private operator. It’s not befitting its role as a state owned dominating company. In short in the PSO market I expect SNCF to be much more than Transdev.
I am not implying that increasing services and demand would plunge SNCF-Voyageurs in the red. I am simply saying that this is what SNCF-Voyageurs believe. They are constantly and discreetly doing the case by case studies you suggest and have gained some credentials. However, the paths requested by new entrants suggest that, like you, they believe in unmet demand. I may not be there anymore but time will tell who was right.
You are always extolling the brilliance of NS, the NS that made a mess of HSL-Zuid, with its much delayed and over budget opening, the infamous failures of Fyra rolling stock and crumbling viaducts, and argue that SNCF is not showing the leadership you rightly expect from a State-owned enterprise. I think SNCF has shown it. By launching a dozen of high speed rail projects roughly delivered on time and on budget, and with ridership matching or exceeding expectations, they have make HSR uncontroversial in France and to some extent elsewhere, and limited the power of nimbyism. Again, who has done better?
If SNCF Voyageur believe that then opening themselves up to competition is the only way out.
I can travel Eindhoven – Amsterdam once every 10 minutes. In no metropolitan area in France am I able to do it. NS wins hands down.
All of the world’s best-in-class rail system start with timetabling (clockface, frequency, connections) as step 1. Pretty much all of Germanic countries. Italy is following suit. Central Europe is making great strides. SNCF somehow thinks its political environment is absolutely unique and the only way it can make money is by running an airline on rails. Either everybody else is wrong or SNCF is wrong.
The TGV starts with timetabling as well, in a way. It’s not at all the same timetabling principles we use in Northern Europe, and on the whole the French concept is inferior, but it absolutely integrated infrastructure with timetable development and rolling stock. The infrastructure is designed to ensure every tertiary city can get direct trains to Paris at maximum speed: Lyon has a bypass (even though Part-Dieu was built explicitly to facilitate through-service), junctions are built to enable direct service to secondary cities that were kept off the main line, the cities between Tours and Bordeaux have loop tracks.
That’s why I contrast it with private service provisions. Private companies would imitate TGV service delivery on the stronger city pairs, given infrastructure similar to that of the LGVs; they’ve done exactly that in Italy and Spain. They can’t imitate Swiss or Dutch service delivery, with its timed connections. And they don’t build their own infrastructure, so when the EU tries to shift its strategy toward encouraging more private competition, all it’s doing is wrecking the ability to institute a Dutch model, without instituting a French one because Paris-Berlin in 8 hours is still terrible regardless of whether it’s direct or with a change between a TGV and an ICE at Frankfurt.
The only one who is wrong is Weifeng Jiang who cannot understand that this is a horses for courses problem. The Japanese predict how well a railroad company should cover its costs given the area’s population density in inhabitants/square km. According to the formula, (density/4.25) + 20 = operating ratio. French rail should therefore be able to recover 49% of its costs, the Italians 67%, the Swiss 68.9%, the Germans 74.8%, the British 85.9% and the Dutch 142%. In comparison with her European neighbors, and especially the Netherlands, France can ill afford the off-peak low seat-occupancy ratio typical of clock-face scheduling.
Given these findings and the strong competition from the airlines, SNCF has concluded that running an airline on rails was the way to go. The numbers suggest SNCF was right. It is the best in class in HSR with HSR passenger-km per capita the highest on the planet. The overall passenger-km numbers are not bad either since they match the ones in more populous Germany and are well above the ones in Italy or the UK. As for the Netherlands, passenger-km figures seem to be a State secret.
TGV doesn’t start with timetabling, it starts with journey time. A six-year-old can do that.
Timetabling means ensuring hourly timed connections at Valence TGV – which nobody at any level of government or SNCF have ever shown any interest in. The French have never delivered nor shown any interest in the Dutch model – there is nothing to wreck. In the absence of a Dutch model competition is the next best thing – as we see in Italy and the Czech republic where their main line timetables are becoming clockface far more so than SNCF monopoly land. The only thing the EU can’t do is to impose a Dutch model on an uninterested France.
Based on the Italian and Czech experience, my prediction is that saturation of the network from competing operators will eventually prompt SNCF Reseau to make operators take standard hour paths, and that’ll be an outcome infinitely better than the current SNCF mess. Or SNCF Voyageur will suddenly want clockface to differentiate itself from its competitors (one can only hope).
The Dutch and Austrian governments are free to continue with their ‘all services under PSOs’ model.
There is no relationship between high-speed rail construction and operating model. There is no ideology shift – the two things are entirely separate. If governments want to control the timetable it can simply let a PSO. In practice decisions on building HSLs in mainland Europe are seldom based on detailed timetable assumptions – apart from the well known ‘takt’ countries.
Paris – Berlin is crap because Germany is dragging its heals over its domestic HSLs – Mannheim – Frankfurt and Frankfurt – Fulda – Eisenach. There’s nothing in the Lisbon Treaty that allows the EU to force Germany into accelerating those projects. In the mean time Germany’s constrained timetable structure means the paths south of Karlsruhe and north of Frankfurt don’t match, so the train has to take the slower route via Darmstadt. Again, there’s nothing in the Lisbon Treaty that enables the EU to meddle in member states’ detailed timetable planning.
@dralaindumas, even given that the West Coast Mainline and Manchester central area are both overcrowded. Carlisle still has half hourly all day service to Newcastle, hourly all day service to London, Glasgow, Edinburgh (with two operators) and Manchester and two hourly direct service to Liverpool. That is a miles better service level than Valence in France has with a similar population.
And just judging population in a place is kinda weak. Haddenham and Thame Parkway has 784k passengers a year but is only in a village of 5000 or so. But the area around it has a much higher population given you can get to London in 35-40 minutes.
Also I am sure Windermere-Oxenholme or Falmouth-Truro or St Ives-St Earth connect with the fast London trains a lot better than the connections at Valence TGV.
@dralaindumas
That formula might be a quick ready reckoner to see what’s a HSR market, but it’s next to useless for detailed corridor-level planning. Aggregate passenger density tell you nothing about population distribution. France’s population is concentrated in a small number of large centres – it has a favourable railway geography. Then it’s generalised journey time and income levels that drive trip rates and willingness to pay – there are always tunes to play – the difference is how hard you try.
It’s passenger minutes that matter, for time is what the passenger perceives not distance, and much of the railway’s costs is a function of time (number of trainsets and staff required). For equivalent passenger minutes in the UK and France I’d expect France to report double the passenger km.
So tell me
You are running a railway service between population centres. It is one horse for one course unless you believe in French exceptionalism.
In all my time discussing and working with railways, almost everyone sees timetabling as non-negotiable. Yes, people will debate the specifics around in vehicle time vs wait time / interchanges, direct services vs hub-and-spoke, but everyone understands the value of same-minutes-past-each-hour. At worst you’ll have someone being slightly awkward and defensive and hiding behind politics. I’ve never encountered anyone outright dismissing clock-face timetabling or defending airline-on-rails. I’ve never seen such brazenness. I’m astounded.
Weifeng Jiang, at times I agree with you, for example your recent posts about the EU’s high speed rail policy and powers. Sometimes I disagree and sometimes you don’t understand me. I am not dismissing clock-face timetabling. There are obvious advantages. However I am just a passenger and I am not ready to call whoever is making the Paris-Lyon schedule incompetent because I don’t know the constraints.
A ten minutes headway between Eindhoven and Amsterdam is fantastic. If the Netherlands were a French province, the NS would be by far the best French regional operator (and the worse long distance one).
Under the EU mandates, the French Regions are looking for candidates willing to run their TER services better than SNCF. The bar is not high but NS does not seem interested. My point is that these are different courses. NS international excursions under the Abellio brand are seemingly coming to an end.
Bankruptcy in North-Rhine Westphalia was one of the last straws breaking this camel back. It’s a small world and the operations were transferred to the German subsidiary of a French operator, Transdev.
@dralaindumas Yet you know enough to launch a staunch defence. There’s no knowledge asymmetry between defending something and dismissing something. You’ve side stepped my points again.
One might debate the economics of running more frequent off-peak trains. My 3 bullet points above aren’t about that – they are about organising and presenting the existing levels of service more regularly and more efficiently, something you seem to struggle to grasp. I put that simply to a blind spot. For SNCF to have such a blind spot is pure incompetence. Regularity and the flexibility are monetisable utility to the consumer that can drive both volume and yield – SNCF not even acknowledging that is incompetence. This is something a railway can uniquely provide well that coaches and airlines can’t – to simply throw away a railway advantage is incompetence.
SNCF fundamentally doesn’t understand they provide a railway service. They don’t publish platforms as part of the public timetable like their Germanic neighbours do. At large stations they don’t have a generic ‘paid area’ that passengers can enter and exit with any valid tickets – instead they gate platforms individually and 1000 TGV passengers are funnelled through 2 at a time; or at ungated stations they only announce the platforms after they’ve set up a manual cordon. They go out of their way to introduce the worst aspects of air travel onto the railway. This is incompetence of epic proportions.
As far as I am concerned, you and the other SNCF basher Matthew Hutton are the ones with a blind spot. The TGV outperforms other HST networks in terms of ridership. The TGV lacks regularity, flexibility, high frequency, coordination with local services, distributed power and some of the ICE comforts. The empiric evidence is that what it offers, speed, one seat ride, guaranteed seat and low fares is simply more important.
High frequency is a good thing if financially sustainable but is not enough. Most of the long distance ridership moved to Valence-TGV but Valence-Ville still serves more passengers than Carlisle Station’s much more frequent trains. Unless they are combined with high frequency and regularity as achieved in Switzerland, the benefits of clock-face scheduling can also be elusive. How important can they be if the trains are often late as in Germany? Maybe daily users can memorize and deal with more haphazard SNCF-type schedules and occasional users need to consult the schedules regardless of their nature.
In regard to your bullet point of “any trains permitted picketing” on the TGV network periphery, I suppose SNCF wants to preserve the integrity of the TGV. People would game the system, board the TGV in Hendaye with a TER ticket and “forget” to step down at Bordeaux St Jean before the high speed run to Paris. These passengers would create frictions in the often sold out TGVs. The same reasoning is, I believe, behind the manual cordons and the absence of generic ‘paid areas’ in SNCF main stations.
What’s good with guaranteed seating if you aren’t guaranteed travel? What you call ‘integrity of the TGV’ is just allowing SNCF to be lazy. Revenue enforcement on TGV is easy – offering a true railway product should come before the operator’s own convenience.
LGVs have oodles of capacity – implying clockface scheduling on LGVs would lead to German levels of lateness is the height of stupidity. You can’t get more incompetent than an empty network with sold-out trains.
SNCF’s commercial operation is all gimmicks and no basics. If it’s already reasonably successful just imagine how much better it could be if it actually did the basics?
I did not imply that French clock-face scheduling would result in German levels of lateness. I said “Unless they are combined with high frequency and regularity as achieved in Switzerland, the benefits of clock-face scheduling can also be elusive. How important can they be if the trains are often late as in Germany.” In 2023, 87% of French Long Distance trains were punctual. While this is better than Germany’s 64% and Italy’s 67%, France needs to be closer to Switzerland’s 98% punctuality to actually benefit from your suggestions of clock-face scheduling, more frequent TGVs, and tight connections between the TGV and the TER.
Few French believe SNCF could simultaneously add trains to its core LGVs and improve punctuality. SNCF seems to agree. It is betting on rolling stock with higher capacity and lower operating costs without making punctuality its #1 target. You are entitled to see it at another sign of SNCF’s incompetence.
No, plenty of people have experienced good rail service and have experienced SNCF’s abuse and incompetence and simply-giving-no-fucks, but we simply don’t have the energy to engage with the sort of crazed monomaniac Stockholm Syndrome keyboard warrior embodiments of the “Elon Musk / weird nerds / valid criticism” meme. It’s exhausting and unproductive.
A normal person travels or reads about something foreign that seems desirable and wonders how that thing works, questions whether it is more than superficially desirable or just “grass is greener”, asks how much that thing costs, and then sometimes goes on to question why that good-sounding foreign thing can’t happen locally, or maybe advocate directly for local implemention of the weird foreign thing.
The “weird nerd”, rather, just goes 100% deep into Stockholm Syndrome defence of everything and anything that is familiar or provincial … even if, especially if, they don’t work for or profit from the defence of the organization or practiice or individual, especially if they are actively abused by the organization or individual. Everybody else is wrong! The leopards won’t eat my face! I have ths one weird statistic that shows that we do one thing better than you, therefore everything we do is better than everything you do, because that’s how weird statistics work!
It’s great that you love SNCF so much. I just hope for you the love is reciprocated! You put a lot of effort into it, and it would be sad if SNCF were utterly indifferent to your affection.
Abusive one-sided imaginary relationships can be hard to witness, but at some stage you just have to walk away and say “well apparently they think they are happy be exploited by a (borderline or otherwise) psychopath, I’ve tried everything I can, there’s nothing we can do, I hope their illusions sustain some sort of pleasure, I hope no harm comes to them.”
FYI it’s a total give-away when utterly deranged “Jacobs bogies are safer than ICE, therefore ALstom, therefore SNCF, therefore FL0 airline 4ever 🥰💕😍😘💞💓💘💝💖” enters the disussion. Because it always does, and always has for two decades I’ve been reading Weird SNCF Nerds expressed their weird love for a weird domestic airline run by weird grande école types. Everybody knew the Jacobs safety had to make an appearance. It always does. Unrequited love just works that way.
No, the give away is that you are misquoting me. I never said that “Jakobs bogies are safer than ICE”. I said “SNCF also believes that the articulated design is safer in case of derailment” during the Consultant Slop discussion. I am neither endorsing nor criticizing SNCF’s viewpoint. I am a physician, not an engineer, and I know enough about statistics to understand that the empirical data are too limited to support any hypothesis.
You don’t understand me. I am skeptical of the advantages of clock-face scheduling and tight connections to regional trains in the French context because, like most French, I don’t trust SNCF. Numerous TERs trains simply don’t run because someone goes on strike or on sick leave without notice. We are not victims of unrequited love because we don’t love SNCF in the first place. What I am saying is that numbers don’t lie. The TGV is a success, not because it is the best, but because it is good enough.
@dralaindumas, Britain benefits from clockface scheduling with only 85% of trains being on time (within 5 minutes for regional/London trains and 10 minutes for long distance) which is I am sure worse than France.
And the connecting TER services can wait for a late running TGV – or be too frequent for it to matter.
SNCF’s experience with guaranteed TER connections is that they are not popular. Clients, whether we are talking about regular passengers or the Regions who may participate in the financing, prefer single seats rides. This is why the LGV Sud-Est, Atlantique and Est programs were accompanied by electrification of downstream legacy lines.
I also think huge numbers of riders who might be prepared to put up with a bit of pain don’t use the train at all because depending on your exact departure time your journey ends up being completely different, look at Lille-Chamonix, a whole series of different routes depending on when you leave. It’s unmanageable.
There is a transportation system that gets you from where you are to where you want to go without any complicated stops, if you choose. It’s an automobile. It’s truly truly too too bad other methods are more complicated.
@dralaindumas, if the choice is a half-hourly interchange service or two trains a day I think people will take the former.
And everyone has occasional short term cancellations, the normal solution is that you run enough service to compensate.
@adirondacker12800, driving to the mountains for e.g skiing has the disadvantage in the winter that you have to drive in snow and speeds especially in Europe are limited, it is tough to exceed an average of 60mph here in Britain.
@dralaindumas ‘German punctuality’ is only relevant if you can reasonably argue an incremental increase in TGV service level in the context we have been discussing would lead to a deterioration of punctuality to German levels. Swiss and Austrian base frequencies are hourly and sometimes two-hourly – similar to the average frequencies of most TGV services – the frequency at which they recognise the importance of clockface scheduling and timed connections. The points you raise are either irrelevant or wrong.
If French long-distance trains are less punctual than Swiss trains that operate on much more intensively used infrastructure, then that’s further evidence of SNCF’s utter incompetence. Maybe TGV’s boarding procedures and SNCF’s lack of timetabling rigour are reasons for the lower punctuality??
Your defence of SNCF has become comical. It’s not even ‘SNCF is doing its best’. It’s going out of your way to defend non-clockface timetable; going out of your way to evade incremental costing. The temerity is flabbergasting. It’s pure SNCF exceptionalism.
SNCF’s conclusion of timed connections vs one-seat ride is simply wrong. If they are right, then Switzerland and Austria and scores of other European railways that operate on similar frequencies and journey time profiles must be wrong. No, it’s SNCF that’s wrong.
When you started defending platform scrums it was clear you were not discussing matters with goodwill – you were simply being defensive for defensive’s sake. Or Stockholm Syndrome if you will.
You are as confused about medicine as about railroading. Stockholm syndrome and being defensive for defensive’s sake are different concepts. The one being defensive was Bejerot, the psychiatrist who had intervened in the hostage situation. One of the hostages, Kristin Enmark, criticized him and he dismissed her on a newscast by describing a new syndrome “Norrmalmstorgssyndromet” named after the square where the robbery took place. The international press popularized the concept as Stockholm syndrome. To its credit, my profession never recognized the syndrome. Describing a new psychiatric condition without ever meeting or talking to his index case, Bejerot was simply misogynistic.
My profession also understands that “The operation was a success but the patient died” is a joke. The process is never more important than the outcome. While SNCF-Voyageurs doesn’t proceed as you like, it cannot be uniquely incompetent while having higher modal share and passenger-km per capita than most of its peers.
The question of clock-face scheduling may be reviewed in the next months and years. The Regions must open their TER services to competition and, if someone offers clock-face scheduling, the bid will be evaluated as it should. Unlike on this blog, the evaluation will be made by people who know their region and will have to finance their choices. For the time being, let’s respect the process, and in a few years evaluate the results.
In one breath you say French railway will never be as good as Swiss, and now you declare it ‘good’.
You have not put forward a single convincing argument why adopting clockface timetabling and more flexible ticketing / boarding practices would lead to a worse outcome.
You are good at describing what you know but not good at discussing what’s relevant. In describing that track access charges seek to pay back the fixed cost of construction you fail to recognise suppressing the number of trains run as a perverse outcome. In defending compulsory reservation you fail to acknowledge trains selling out as an unnecessary poor outcome. You fail the grasp the concept of incremental impacts. You bring up irrelevant dimensions where no realistic trade-offs exist in the concept of French HSR.
Infrastructure is doing the legwork of France’s OK railway outcome. You are confusing correlation with causation. You observe two things and decide to put ‘because of’ between them. France’s OK railway outcome is despite SNCF’s operation practices not because of it.
Infrastructure is in the base – it’s given. The question is whether the operation is as good as it could be given the infrastructure base. The discussion is never about whether France’s railway outcome is ‘good enough’ but whether ‘it could be better’. Again, this just shows your repeated attempts at steering the conversation towards what you know rather than what’s relevant.
I never said that French railways or SNCF were good. I said that people are buying TGV tickets en masse because the product is “good enough”. Clients are not rail fans comparing the TGV with their favorite train. They look at the alternatives for the trip they want to make and ridership numbers prove that the TGV offer is very competitive on the French long distance market.
Clock-face timetabling is convenient for the costumer. However, because demand fluctuates, it means running more trains when demand is low, at a cost. Subsidies are needed. Communities can decide from themselves whether the benefits outweigh the costs. I respect their decisions and so should you.
You said that “In describing that track access charges seek to pay back the fixed cost of construction I fail to recognise suppressing the number of trains run as a perverse outcome” and that I failed to acknowledge trains selling out as a unnecessary poor outcome of compulsory reservation. Disagreeing with your illusions is not a failure. Adding trains has a cost at peak times too. Furthermore, the passengers who currently pay peak fares on sold out TGVs could find cheaper seats on the new offerings. SNCF would get a few additional costumers but its overall income and revenue would drop.
If you don’t believe me, look at what happened when more seats became available on Spanish AV. As stated by Joan on this blog: “New competition left RENFE with no choice but to cut their fares by almost 40% on its main corridors, from 12 cents/km in 2019 to just 7.5 cents/km in 2023. In the same period, high speed ridership grew by 45%.” Do the math. Let’s assume 2019 ridership on the competition affected corridors was 10 billion passenger-km. Revenue would have been 10 bn x 0.12 = 1.2 billion Euros. In 2023, ridership would reach 14.5 billion passenger-km but with average fares of 7.5 cents, the aggregate HSR revenue drops to 1.0875 billion. As for income, it is gone. RENFE AV used to turn a profit. It is now loss-making like its competitors.
Unlike Spain’s HSR, the Champagne, high fashion and diamond producers want to protect income, and rely on planned scarcity. As a tropical destination, St Barths is just “good enough” in terms of scenery. You can find nicer beaches nearby. While its competitors poured concrete in order to host a larger crowd, St Barths restricted capacity inflation. It is now a meeting point for super yachts, celebrities and millionaires. Hotel rates are eye-watering high during peak season.
St Barth’s poverty was once an embarrassment to the Swedish Crown who gave it back to France. Its financials are now strong enough that it can afford to opt out of the French welfare system. SNCF will never be able to do so and must serve the masses but at the same time would upset its lenders if it went the way of Spanish AV. Yield management, mandatory reservation, high seat occupancy ratios, gigantic TGVs and congestion charges are the tools SNCF use to stay on this middle way.
Subsidies aren’t needed for clockface intercity trains here or in Switzerland or in Austria or in the Netherlands.
@dralaindumas, in Britain London Paddington, London Euston, London St Pancras (domestic), London Marylebone, Birmingham New Street and Manchester Piccadilly are all capacity constrained as are at least some of the lines in West Yorkshire, Kings Cross isn’t really capacity constrained but other parts of the East Coast mainline are. And all of this applies off peak as well as the morning peak.
Those constraints, and there are others, make it very difficult for Britain to materially increase our long distance train ridership. Probably the only real easy thing we could do would be to lengthen the Cross Country services to 10 cars.
To the same standard with regards to France possibly parts of the LGV Sud Est are capacity constrained at peak times. It’s difficult to imagine any part of the French network is capacity constrained.
To give examples: Paddington has 15-16tph as far as airport junction on the fast tracks and 11-12tph to Reading off peak, I believe Euston-Milton Keynes is a maximum of 14tph off peak? Then the Manchester Piccadilly throat has 60tph across it in all directions and Birmingham New Street has 40tph?
@dralaindumas, Spain has a population of 50 million vs 70 million in Britain. We have ~2 long distance passenger journeys per person per year. If the Spanish managed that that would have 100 million AVE rides a year whereas currently they have 1/3rd of that number.
100 million rides at €0.09/km is more profitable than 22 million at €0.12/km I am sure.
And again the Spanish and French have invested more in infrastructure so are less capacity constrained than Britain.
You are right but this is my point. With 160 million TGV passengers annually, most of them Long Distance, at an average E0.096/km. France is already there. Therefore SNCF cannot be uniquely incompetent.
Current Spanish ticket prices are financially unsustainable. If they go up will the new passengers go back to the concurrence ? In the meantime, Spain is preparing to host increased traffic. Adif is expanding capacity at Atocha and Chamartin, while working on a second AV station in Barcelona and a through one in Valencia.
@dralaindumas, depends on your starting point.
If your starting point is a blank canvas then sure doing broadly similarly on long distance passenger numbers per capita to Britain and Germany is respectable (the Germans managed 140 million in 2023 as per https://www.deutschebahn.com/resource/blob/12763368/17b53e6d0a856015d0f6d598a7508c4e/DuF2023_en-data.pdf)
If your starting point is the long distance infrastructure investment France has made which is very strong then the French outcomes are actually pretty disappointing. I mean sure better than Spain, but still pretty disappointing. Especially when on top of that long distance investment Paris certainly has tonnes and tonnes of spare capacity at its main stations and approaches by any reasonable standard.
Looking at the starting point may somewhat explain the modest ridership of the first rate AVE. The Iberian gauge network was second rate with many curvy single track sections and a low ridership.
As for France and Germany, let me fix it for you: “Given the Euro 47 billion investment made on the NBS/ABS by 83 million German, which is more than the 44 billion spent by 67 million French on LGVs, then the German outcomes are actually pretty disappointing. I mean, sure better than Spain, but still pretty disappointing.”
@dralaindumas the incremental cost of running an offpeak train is usually lower than the existing average cost (you are not incurring additional fixed costs) so don’t need the existing average revenue to justify it. And I’ve said it before – the timetable is a monetisable concept above the individual train that can justify higher ticket prices for those that want open / last minute tickets – so a lower seat occupancy need not mean a materially lower revenue density per train. Allow standing – so your peak trains have >100% load factors and have high yield passengers. They can cover the occasional marginal losses of off-peak trains – the clock-face off-peak trains are the option value in the higher ticket prices these passengers pay so it’s not cross subsidy in the traditional sense. Profit and loss should be accounted at the ‘all-day-timetable-being-an-integrated-product’ level. You said you didn’t see evidence of suppressed demand, then you said compulsory reservation is required because trains get sold out. At least be internally consistent. Excusing SNCF for not bothering to accommodate excess demand, and there being no excess demand are two very different things.
What is more, if a single deck TGV is profitable, then a double-deck TGV can run profitably at a single-deck occupancy (averaged across the whole day).
Oh look, when SNCF is strong armed by SBB suddenly clock-face timetable works on the Basel and Geneva routes, and TGV trains can be part of the non-compulsory-reservation general timetable when inside Switzerland. Is TGV Lyria under ‘railfan illusions’?
Your claim that any move towards clockface scheduling would lead to losses is plain wrong. Your contempt for customers is palpable. A railway should be run by people with a vision, a government owned company should have maximising social value at its heart (subject to suitable financial constraints like non-loss making), and shouldn’t treat profit maximising as a passive ‘through whatever means’ numbers game. One should always look for continuous improvement – ‘good enough’ should not be anywhere near your operating philosophy.
Spain is merely experiencing growth pains – current losses are but temporary once unfair competition is ruled on and once background growth catches up – railway is a long game. Ultimately the long-term social value of Spain’s growth in journeys far outweighs the temporary financial losses.
SNCF is run by conservative, passive, Z-lister accountants. It deserves to face the full force of competition.
I do not owe any loyalty to anyone and am under no obligation to respect anything SNCF does.
When the TGV network and mainline terminals are running with oodles of spare capacity, any talk of ‘planned scarcity’ is pure contempt.
@ Weifeng Jiang : Don’t take it personally.
I’m just a lowly bookkeeper. I’m sure accountants could come up with umpteen different ways to allocate costs for another train. Whatever which way you contort what, it costs money to run another train.
@adirondacker12800, running extra trains when you have spare capacity doesn’t cost much as the railways costs are largely fixed.
So it cost money. Unless some billionaires decide they want a 1:1 scale railroad someone is going to have to pay to run almost empty trains. And except in railfan fantasies the accountants are going to want to allocate fixed costs to running those trains.
@adirondacker12800 So Swiss and Dutch railways are run by railfan fantasies?
Stick to being a lowly bookkeeper, for you clearly don’t understand businesses (competent ones anyway) make decisions on aggregate marginal revenue vs marginal costs.
Competent businesses close down for the day when there are no customers. Not running a train costs less than running a train no matter how hard you clap or how many times you click your ruby slippers.
@adirondacker12800, there aren’t no passengers off peak, just fewer than peak. Running an all day service in France would get more passengers from the French regions, Britain, Germany and the Low Countries using the train.
It would also get more elderly and people with young children who would like to travel in the middle of the day when it is quieter/they are up.
Competent businesses understand the customer and what makes the customer buy. Large grocery stores in the US all have a large display/selection of expensive exotic cheeses that they lose money on because almost nobody buys them. However they know the customers see the expensive cheese and then buy more of the cheap cheese and so it is worth it.
I expect competent transit operators to understand that customers who only ride peak still expect off peak service of some form just in case something happens and they have to get home early/late. Thus they will run the empty train from time to time, that train loses money but the safety net for customers makes it worthwhile to run. Customers who think they might not get home (right or wrong) will find an alternative.
Now a competent operator will measure to see if the fear of not getting home is really what keeps people from riding. There are also alternatives to running the empty train (we will pay your taxi home is common). So don’t take the above as a given they will run the empty train. However if the operator hasn’t done something to see what the effect of running the empty train does to the bottom line they are incompetent.
The question isn’t the warm fuzzy feelings railfans get from running empty trains the question is whether or not it costs money to run trains. Operators make decisions you don’t like. Life is tough and that’s too bad.
@henrymiller74, I don’t think there is much if any evidence that the British private operators ever in general ran an intensive off-peak service that didn’t cover the marginal costs of doing so.
Sure during Covid they did, and perhaps in general the late night services earlier in the week also fall under that, but I think in general stuff is run on a market basis.
It’s not true about absolutely every single train but there is a reasonable level of busyness on trains across the day every day of the week with Chiltern with some services every single day having standing room only – https://timetables.chilternrailways.co.uk/#/timetables/3280
And Chiltern really doesn’t serve anywhere particularly big other than the Termini.
@henrymiller74 – well put. It’s about what you define as the product – a shop is an integrated product with interdependencies between the different items it stocks and how things are stocked / laid out. The total is greater than the sum of the parts. Profit and loss is accounted at the overall product level – try to attribute costs and revenues at too disaggregate levels and you get perverse outcomes. On the railway the product is the all-day network-wide timetable, not the individual train you catch at a given time. The option value of off-peak services and later last trains do get captured in willingness-to-pay. And this is on top of the fact that off-peak trains are NOT empty. Paris – Basel having a consistent all-day timetable dispels the ’empty off-peak train’ myth.
This is about commercial acumen, not about operators being charitable.
Retailers spend all that time, effort and money to make money. If a particular item isn’t making them money they stop stocking it.
@adirondacker12800 You have heard of loss leaders right? And having physical stores justified not on the basis of pure own profitability but as a promotional investment to boost online sales.
There were stores before the internet. There were stores before there were computers. There were stores before there was electricity. The stores that don’t make money don’t stay around for very long.
@dralaindumas, I think the French have got a lot more bang for their buck on infrastructure spending than the British and Germans – good for them frankly.
Although the lack of medium sized places along a lot of the French LGV routes helps (there are few towns even the size of Princes Risborough along the LGVs) – as does the generous legacy infrastructure into Paris especially.
France’s geography gave SNCF a lot of bang for its buck. When you build HSR to Paris, you go through agricultural land and you serve at the same time the main city, the capital and the country’s international airport. Germany had to choose between Berlin, Bonn and Frankfurt and started by choosing neither. Their ABS address congestion issues but are too short and disjointed to make most people forget that there is a highway and there is or was a commercial airline on the route.
Nevertheless, SNCF deserves some credit for hitting the mark in terms of construction cost and duration as well as traffic on its dozen LGV projects. NS failed to do so with HZL Zuid, and on the Betuweroute. Hanover-Wurzburg’s traffic is about half of what was predicted on the passenger side and one third for freight. Trans-Manche traffic predictions diverged markedly. In the end, SNCF’s LGV Nord got it right and Eurotunnel shareholders got wiped out. The ten year late opening of HS1 late did not help them or HS1 owner. London & Continental Railways was soon after taken over by the British Government for 2 Pounds and a boatload of debt. Orly Airport’s connection to the RER B was selected instead of SNCF’s RER C option. OrlyVal opened ahead of schedule in 1991 but was bankrupt one year later because ridership was less than 30% of what was expected. The private sector project was also selected ahead of the public sector one for the Perpignan-Figueres LGV. The concession was supposed to run for 53 years but TP-Ferro gave up after 3, with traffic at about 15% and 50% of expectation on the freight and passenger sides.
@dralaindumas, part of why the channel tunnel has underperformed is the budget airlines. The other part is SNCF running poor quality services within France to connect with the Eurostar.
I mean that’s really the issue with it. Eurostar services Paris and Belgium well, and serves Cologne and the Netherlands to an OK level and Switzerland/Milan/Turin to a little below that. Beyond that it is very impractical unless you are a railfan to travel to destinations beyond that – so unsurprisingly they have struggled to get the expected passenger levels.
With regards to the Perpignan-Figueres LGV, I would say given the appalling service level that hitting 50% of expectations is pretty good actually. Paris-Perpignan is hourly or close enough, if it ran hourly properly and all those services continued to Barcelona and ideally Madrid I think it would see a lot more usage. Hourly services leaving Montpellier and maybe ~6:30am and leaving Perpignan at ~7:30am to Barcelona/Madrid would help too. You don’t need to wait for the first Paris train of the day to begin service.
Perpignan-Figueres service is so bad you cannot really go from Perpignan to Barcelona for the day even though the trip time is under 90 minutes, in contrast Fort William-Glasgow or even Mallaig-Glasgow for the day is very possible with a trip time of 3h45 or even longer.
In fact even given the significantly longer trip time on the West Highland line the first train from Mallaig/Fort William arrives in Glasgow an hour before the first service to Barcelona and the last return leaves two hours later from Glasgow than the last one from Barcelona.
The Netherlands got unlucky with HSL Zuid construction quality and rolling stock procurement. On the operational front however, Prorail has published a clear and simple vision of what the infrastructure could accommodate (up to 8-tph domestics and 4-tph internationals). There’s a programme of Amsterdam area network reorganisation works going on, informed by a clear timetabling philosophy, that’ll improve capacity and performance through Amsterdam, and it’s clear that NS is going in the same direction as Prorail. I foresee NS putting on additional ICDs to Breda, Dordrecht and Brussels once additional ICNGs are in place. The only operator dragging its heels is the SNCF-controlled Eurostar exercising ‘planned scarcity’ and earning unethical excess profit on the deliberately supply-constrained Paris – Amsterdam service.
No, the Netherlands did not get unlucky with HSL-Zuid. The 2015 parlamentiary report ‘Reizigers in de kou’ described corruption as the firms doing the earthworks colluded to raise prices. It found outrageous behavior by NS who ordered unproven rolling stock through an Irish shell structure in order to avoid paying taxes to the same government who had to bail them out twice when things did not work out. It found incompetence on the part of the junior minister overlooking the project. It calculated that HSL-Zuid would cost the Treasury 11 billion euros or about 1500 euros per capita over a PPP concession running up to 2031.
Ten years later, with NS having to slash high speed surcharges because HSL-Zuid is slowly sinking in the muddy Dutch soil, this sum needs updating. In ten locations, speed is limited to as low as 80 km/h after cracks were discovered in the viaducts. The Infraspeed alliance who won the concession blames the government for allowing the use of 21 tons per axis locomotives on an infrastructure built for the 17 tons per axis HSR standard. The only lasting certainty is that the HSL-Zuid saga represented a death sentence for the Dutch high speed projects towards the East/Germany and the Northern province, and that Weifei Jiang will blame SNCF.
So looking at the data again which Alon has updated to 2023 inflation (which is probably good of them to be fair) so HS1 with urban approaches and dense population is $150m/km, and Belgium with cherry picking for simplicity is $50m/km, so HSL Zuid which has density and isn’t cherry picked for simplicity but doesn’t have urban approaches should be what, $70m/km?
So it costing $135m/km or double that isn’t exactly great, but nor is it the worst ever. Difficult to believe that alone would cause no further construction. It’s far less bad than HS2 phase 2 for example. I think people would bite your arm off for doing HS2 phase 2 for £100m/km in todays money.
The biggest barrier is probably the weak Brussels-Germany ridership which is weak in part because Belgium only does easy high speed lines and won’t do the more challenging/expensive Brussels South-Brussels North-Antwerp. Likely also ridership would be better if DB/Eurostar managed a half hourly Brussels-Germany service, perhaps going a bit further than Rhine-Ruhr and Frankfurt.
The other likely barrier is weakish Brussels-France ridership, for which SNCF/Eurostar have to get the full blame.
HS2 was always going to be more expensive than HSL-Zuid. The Netherlands are not affected by sprawl. In Holland, the population is concentrated in the Randstad or rim city around the Green Heart, an expanse of agricultural land. The conventional rail network serves the Randstad and avoided the Green Heart, HSL-Zuid cuts through it. Land acquisition costs were only 307.9 million Euros as opposed to 5 billion for HS2.
As for “the weakish Brussels-France ridership, for which SNCF/Eurostar have to get the full blame”, what are you talking about ? Off season, Bruxellois can choose between 21 daily TGVs towards Gare du Nord, 7 towards Lille, 7 to CDG, Marne-la-Vallee and beyond. In addition, 3 very low cost Ouigo Train Classique serve cities along the original route to Gare du Nord.
21 daily TGVs is really not a lot for Paris-Brussels, is the point. Paris-Lyon is 31, and that’s at (slightly) longer distance than Paris-Brussels; OuiGo offers cheap fares without forcing passengers to use the classical line.
Those who believe the TGV is a train say that SNCF’s offer is equally stingy on the domestic (seat occupancy ratios of 77% in 2023) and international (73%) sides. Those who see the TGV as an airplane on rails can say SNCF is equally profligate in terms of capacity on offer. Everyone should agree that SNCF doesn’t discriminate. Seats on offer are roughly proportional to demand.
The per-km fares on domestic TGVs are around half what they are on Eurostar/Thalys, of course the demand is lower on Paris-Brussels than on Paris-Lyon.
@ Alon. The difference in fares between domestic and international TGVs is an major factor but it may not reach 100%. According to the Autorite des Transports it was only about 50% in 2019 (10 vs 15 cents/p-km).
@dralaindumas What’s all that got to do with timetabling?
In October 1986, the European transport ministers agreed on a high speed rail link between Paris, Brussels, Koln, Amsterdam and the Channel Tunnel. It is not as if the Dutch were taken by surprise. The Am-Ro-Bel report evaluating high speed rail was published in 1977, well before SNCF thought of its LGV Nord. Yet, the LGV Nord opened on time and on budget in 1993, and HSL-Zuid was 16 years late, over budget and dysfunctional. LGV Nord was designed, financed, built and operated by SNCF with a rolling stock developed over years in collaboration with Alstom. HSL-Zuid was financed by the state and in part by a complex innovative PPP structure, the operator and rolling stock were selected after tendering and nothing worked as planned. The SNCF did not handily win this race because its executives are geniuses and the Dutch are not. It won because it had a complete coherent package. You keep berating one or another part of the package because you don’t understand it works as a whole.
I am not saying that the it is the world’s best. The Tokaido Shinkansen operations are awesome with rolling stock, signaling, turnouts and employees routines thought and developed as part of the package. Since the sixties, high level SNCF executives have spent months in Japan studying it. One of their senior executives was biracial and bi-lingual. Yet, SNCF developed the TGV as its own thing, adapted to French geography. US/Canadian Class 1 railroads can poach each other executives because they play the same game with interchangeable rolling stock but, despite universal admiration for the Tokaido Shinkansen, railroad operators around the world are not trying to hire JR Central executives. They understand that there is no secret recipe. You cannot buy the whole package including the geography. This is why NS operations including clock-face scheduling seem to work very well in The Netherlands but NS foreign ventures were not particularly successful. Operators like NS, CFF, DB are not rushing to compete for TER franchises by offering clock-face scheduling. They understand that it is not that simple. The market studies and work needed to participate in a specific TER tender cost between 2 and 3 million Euros. You don’t know the place, haven’t done the studies, and should realize that you don’t know better.
To be fair it is hard to offer clockface TER services when the TGV doesn’t run like that.
And I mean to reply to your other comment I am not sure broadly hourly service between the biggest city in the EU and the EUs capital is that impressive. Especially as Paris and Brussels are both rail hubs for their respective countries.
@ Matthew Hutton. The TGV is thought as an airline on rails. You generally don’t have to change trains. If flexibility is something you want, you can buy the equivalent of business class fare, i.e. higher priced ticket you can freely exchange up to the last minute.
Nobody is dismissing SNCF’s excellent infrastructure record. Good infrastructure does not depend on shit timetabling. SNCF becoming better at timetabling does not depend on it dismantling good infrastructure. There is no causal relationship. ‘Yeah but I’ve got really good infrastructure’ is irrelevant to the topic of timetabling.
For what it’s worth, if HSL-Zuid and Fyra are obvious cock-ups, then NS being good at timetabling does not excuse these cock-ups.
It really is quite simple. With a bit of Swiss arm twisting Bellegard gets an all day consistent two-hourly timetable to both Paris and Geneva. This alone is enough to demonstrate the ‘France can’t have clock-face timetabling’ line is utter cack. If clockface-timetabling works commercial for Bellegard it will work for Vallence. France has ready access to Swiss teaching and refuses to apply the learning to the rest of its TGV network. It’s pure arrogance.
Credit where credit is due – the regions are rapidly moving towards clock-face timetabling. Strasbourg – Mulhouse – Basel has just become half hourly in the December 2024 timetable, albeit with some imperfections. SNCF’s commercial operation is the laggard. The poor timetabling on Paris – Strasbourg is embarrassing.
Clock-face timetabling doesn’t seam to be a priority for SNCF’s commercial arm. As you said, they are laggards in that respect. Filling the seats is clearly their main concern. My disagreement with you is about the importance of the issue.
Like most, I am an occasional TGV user. I do about 8 trips a year between a couple of stations in Provence and 2 or 3 in Ile-de-France. A perfect clock-time schedule would not make a difference as far as I am concerned because I would not remember it.
I am confident the heavy users who travel several times a week have the imperfect current schedule in memory or at their immediate disposition in their smartphone. The other inconveniences you have been mentioning like the lack of flexibility don’t apply to them. Their MAX card gives them the right to a large number of free reservations (250 or 450 depending on the card), free reservation changes and access to sold out TGVs. Given the distance they are most likely TGV captives and their main concern is comfort as SNCF may decide to turn their preferred TGV into a Ouigo, punctuality and prices.
And the single deck TGVs on Paris – Brussels have lower capacity than the Duplexes on the Lyon runs.
@Alon, I would argue the demand for Paris-Brussels should be higher than Paris-Lyon.
Like if you were in Paris and wanted to go to pretty much anywhere that isn’t Lyon by train you wouldn’t use the Paris-Lyon TGV and would use a different direct TGV. Whereas if you wanted to go from Paris to anywhere in Belgium or the Netherlands by train then you would use the Paris-Brussels Eurostar service. So the population of the Lyon node might be 3 million vs 30 million for the Brussels node.
Now sure the Brussels node is much looser but the extra people should add up to something. Even if they are only using the train to Paris an average of 5% as much as people in Brussels that is still 50% of the Brussels demand because there are 10x more of them – so would give a total of 150% of the expected Brussels demand.
Brussels also presumably has more business travel due to the EU.
@dralaindumas, the lack of flexibility is a massive problem for anyone who has to change trains if there is a delay. It is also a massive weakness for anyone who has journey where the comparison is driving as that has ultimate flexibility.
This shit is simply unbearable to read. It’s Adirondack3k-level of incoherent logorrheic reflexive defense-of-the-oppressor Stockholm syndrome.
“I have learned, through great pain and travail, how to evade the very worst of the beatings administered by SNCF, therefore you, too, have an obligation to undertake the long and painful Great Journey after which you may, aided by luck and perseverance and moral fortitude, emerge, aided by a MAX card and unwavering and fanatical devotion to the <strike>Spanish Inquisition</strike> SNCF, and perhaps the only endure the less barbarous levels of punishment. Perhaps. But only if the Torture Nexus quota is not exhausted that day. But perhaps you will be punished anyway. That is what we have learned is our lot in life. And so much you.”
What the hell is wrong with humans that they seek to inflict suffering on other humans?
No-one is forcing anybody to take a TGV. High Speed Rail commuting is a lifestyle choice requiring stamina and a good income because it can be hard on the wallet. On the other hand, real estate savings are significant. Professionals make this choice in accordance with their spouses. High speed rail give them more options in term of viable commuting range. They are the opposite of hostages who can’t decide for themselves.
Californians won’t have this opportunity anytime soon. Rancho Cucamonga is not an attractive destination and CA HSR is planning a 120 km trek along the slow rail corridor between San Francisco and Gilroy, but you can keep your sour grapes for yourself.
Both of our mommies taught us how to read a schedule.
@dralaindumas, if you want people from not Paris to use the TGV, especially people from neighbouring countries, then yes you do have to support people changing trains and to provide a reasonable experience when there is a problem.
Alon, as usual, this is a good piece but you lean too much towards essentialist explanations. SNCF is not doing this or that because its executives come from the airlines but because, beyond the interest groups you mentioned, it is reacting to events it cannot control.
On one hand, you have the 1990’s rise of low cost airlines, whose cost of available seat-km is half of legacy air carriers and very competitive with the TGV, new long distances coaches known as cars Macron, and more efficient automobiles. The other hand is the EU open access mandate with the threat of competition on the few very profitable long distance routes. France was never thrilled by the concept and pre-empted its effect by turbocharging yield management. Early in the 21st century, it was decided that variable and generally higher access charges (congestion charges that went beyond the level needed to pay off the construction cost) on the core network were the way to go. This is the scissors effect SNCF Voyageurs had to deal with. It can’t raise fares because of the competition and its access charges are increasing. It had to improve its own efficiency.
Double deck TGVs and Ouigo’s 2013 launch were some of the tools. Cutting the on board crew and restauration services improved turnaround time with Ouigo’s TGVs running 700 000 km/year, twice as much as the InOui ones. It used peripheral Paris stations with lower access charges. The ticket control on the platforms was later extended to all TGVs because it works. It is mostly automatized with gates reading QR codes. In 15 minutes, 1000 passengers can be screened with a 2 or 3 person team taking care of the few low quality cell phone screens or print outs blocked at the gates. This is simply more efficient than sending the same team on a 2 to 4 hours journey and prevent deadbeat passengers from boarding and creating trouble in the trains.
On the contrary, Spain’s Adif kept access charges low, at a level covering maintenance costs and nothing else. This lead to intense competition, very low ticket prices, and losses for all AV operators. Time will tell what is the better model but suggesting that Spain’s management “bought what France said trains should be like” doesn’t make sense. Spain has her own legacy, from Iberian Gauge, subpar conventional network, and terrorism to deal with and is doing her own thing.
I don’t think separating low cost brand of train operation from maon brand save much cost? Like if an airlines land at a faraway airport instead of key airport, usually handling fee would be cheaper, landing fee would be cheaper, slot are cheaper, terminal usage are cheaper, and so on. But I don’t think train stations used by train companies are likewise affected?
Train stations are likewise affected with one difference, ownership. Airports are owned by local authorities and Ryanair is known for hard bargaining, threatening to move out if it doesn’t get a discount disguised in advertising slots the airports should buy on the Ryanair.com website. Railroads operators cannot play that game because competing stations have the same owner, SNCF Reseau in France, RFI in Italy. Rail routes are less flexible than aerial ones but in Paris, Lyon, Lille, Nimes and Montpellier operators can choose between stations without much time penalty. The same is true in Turin, Milan, Florence, Rome and Napoli.
Rail and air have different enough properties to throw off this whole comparison.
I agree with your points 1 and 2.
Point 3 is wrong as we are talking about the TGV. Mandatory reservation from 1981, and since 1995, yield management based on American Airlines Sabre software are the tools used by SNCF to reach a 80% seat occupancy ratio.
I also disagree with point 4. I said 15 minutes were needed to check a thousand passengers because I was talking of Paris Termini. Not a lot of space is necessary. The gate complex is as large as the platform and located at its end. Passengers then walk to their assigned seat which can take minutes on a 400 m long TGV. Some platforms can also be accessed through additional gates below ground further down the platform. Altogether, for the time being, the protocols maximize work force productivity, and not space utilization in France large stations.
Through stations have a couple of gates located around the middle of the platform and smaller number of passengers. Gates could do the work in 3 minutes but also typically open 15 minutes before the train arrival to let passengers leisurely reach their spot on the platform. Dwell time is just one or two minutes.
As for gate free platform access, the last time I saw it was in a small station located on the conventional network and apparently unmanned at the early hours the TGV was calling.
Part of the discussion here is that each detail of actual practice on the TGV (or on any other existing system) may or may not be a good idea (never mind the worldwide best currently known), even if the system overall is a great success.
Thus for point 3, just because SNCF has decided to allocate 2nd-class seats purely by yield management, doesn’t mean that another allocation mechanism known to economics (or a combination of multiple) wouldn’t work even better. For instance, selling 2nd class tickets with seat reservation as an option, while significantly rolling back the complexity of the yield management (e.g. “peak/off-peak” time-of-day or “midweek/FriSatSunMon”) particularly on the basic fare. This way, in the peak usage periods some of the passengers who didn’t want to pay for the reservation will, stochastically and in proportion to the overload, have to stand. Which inconvenience will redistribute some fraction of the passengers to the less crowded trains. (I forgot to mention that because turbulence is a thing, on airlines everyone older than “lap infant” must have a seat. Whereas trains don’t pose a risk to passengers travelling standing up, thus broadly speaking they have always been tolerated even on long-distance trains. First class is possibly an exception, inasmuch as the presence/absence of standees might be a class marker (in the sense of “what sort of clothes do people of this social class wear?”) and part of what a 1st class ticket buys is to travel in a space coded with the right class markers. If this part is real and in demand, then obviously the railway cannot sell it with individual tickets but has to put in a blanket mandate for seat reservations in 1st class. I’m OK with that, but clearly such reasoning does not apply to 2nd class when the railway is competing with and imitating low-cost airlines. BTW I’m only using a two-class system as an example; I’m not making a claim that two is the correct number of classes. I understand experimentation with this, and with interior design, is ongoing.)
For point 4, I’m not sure if I correctly understood which part of your claim refers to en-route stations with limited passenger turnover and which to termini (Paris or otherwise). What I meant is that even at major cities, with close to 100% passenger turnover, the boarding/alighting between train and platform should fit in a handful of minutes (even less with level boarding, etc.). And even if this is a terminus, a tight operation (“outbound driver already stands on the platform as the inbound train rolls in”) should be able to fit many of the necessary tasks into the same timeframe. Thus “if you want to”, and design for it, 4 platform tracks per HS track-pair should be enough, as far as the operation of the trains is concerned. If terminal operations (whether limited by ticket checking or not) make less efficient use of platform tracks, i.e. use more platform tracks per trunk, then — again: they either turf out other trains, or are wasting extremely valuable real estate. Whether the latter takes the shape of incandescently expensive terminal expansion projects (Anglosphere, apparently) or the railway sitting on a footprint established a century ago, most of which is no longer actually necessary for modern operations (parcels office, airport-style waiting rooms/lounges, a large number of platform tracks and even more facilities scattered on the approach to the station, because turning a train involves juggling pilot engines and reversing tender engines). If the railway has no better idea what to do with their station footprint (notably, running more trains into the station) than to make its operations more slack, the relevant decisionmakers should start getting €€€ signs in their eyes. (Just the interest on the value of the excess land pays for how many extra staff, in perpetuity?) This is the context for my saying “either get rid of the gates, or ensure as high throughput as in Japan”.
Details of TGV operations must be understood and may only make sense as part of the system. The system evolves in reacting to the changing landscape around it, a landscape obviously different than the one in Texas.
For example, the setup you describe works in Tokyo but will never work in France where, outside of the LGVs, TGVs share tracks with other trains, go through road crossings and borders. The short turnarounds imposed by a 4 platform station only work if the arrivals are always on time. SNCF has more space and a longer turnaround prevent cascading lateness. Lately, I noticed Paris cleaners boarding the TGV as soon as the arriving passengers were on the platform, suggesting an attempt to shorten the turnarounds but I didn’t try to measure them.
Mandatory reservation not only guarantees that you have a seat, but there is usually enough space for luggages without blocking the alleys and that there won’t be a standing passenger leaning over your shoulder. Mandatory reservation used to be cumbersome, coming on a supplementary document, after a visit to a sale agent. Nowadays most InOui and all Ouigo tickets are bought online, reservation included, and no-one is complaining. If scheduling is difficult, one can buy flexible tickets allowing last minutes changes.
Oh the SNCF gate management system is awful. They could be like the Dutch, where all trains have platforms published in the timetable and passengers can get through gates without specific supervision. The way SNCF only announce platforms some 10 minutes before departure is just retarted.
And mandatory reservation is no good if it means I cannot travel. Faced with a choice of standing in someone’s armpit for 2 hours in the vestibule and being told to come back in 2 days time before all the trains are fully booked, I’d gladly take the former over the latter and pay for the privilege. 1000 passengers standing on top of each other pay more revenue than 800 comfortable passengers.
As for luggage space – TGVs have some of the worse luggage provisions possible – not just lack of space but the carriage layouts make getting luggage to the right space is extremely cumbersome / unintuitive. The Swiss have it right with having seats in bays so the inter-seatback space can be used as additional luggage space. The TGV double deck design also has no actual capacity advantage over a flat floor distributed traction train like the Velaro or the ETR1000.
In a classic terminal platform, and Tokyo etc are elevated so don’t count you basically need a minimum of 20 minutes to turn a 400m train around. 2-3 minutes to physically get the passengers off the train, 6 minutes for the slower passengers to walk down the 400m of the platform, 2-3 minutes to allow pre-boarding of the elderly/disabled/school groups, 6 minutes for the slower passengers to walk up the 400m of platform and 2-3 minutes for the physical boarding itself. So 18-21 minutes overall.
Once alighting passengers are off the train, they wouldn’t much care if it burst into flames. They most certainly won’t mind if it rolls away while they are still walking on the platform.
Likewise, boarding passengers arrive onto the platform whenever, which is to say, most of them will be there before the train arrives. Nor is there any requirement that they find their assigned seat (or equilibrium distribution of non-assigned seated pax, and/or standees, as applicable) before the train can move; this is not an aircraft.
There is no great blood feud between alighting and boarding passengers, such that the two groups must always be kept apart, lest they turn the station into the stage of a Shakespeare play.
Thus — with a few PSAs to not be an asshole — the time limit is that required to unload a packed train and re-pack it. By your numbers, ~5 minutes, but the beautiful thing is that this is purely a matter of trading off vehicle design with other characteristics. If you badly wanted to prioritize fast turnarounds (and station stops) at the expense of seating capacity, you could get something very much like a metro train. Usually you wouldn’t want to push the tradeoff quite that far, and correspondingly the features that implement that tradeoff — the number and width of doors, extent of “vestibules”, width of aisles — are not as extreme. But we are talking price.
Matthew Hutton, just stop.
Blink twice if the Anglosphere consultants are way up in your business.
Don’t blink if you don’t feel safe enough to blink twice.
We understand. We’re here for you.
The TGV is only such an intercity success because it downprioritize regional trains. Here Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese design choices are much better.
Some of that is a feature of France unusual urban structure (which it also reinforce), but far from all of it.
In most contexts it is a bad pattern to follow.
A problem is that agricultural land values are often higher in other countries/regions (even after adjusting for PPP), so paying 30% above market might be a lot. Agricultural land is worth about 6000 Euros per acre in France ($2,623.93 USD per acre), which is higher than in the past. Agricultural land in east Texas and California is worth much more because of 2x higher productivity per worker in agriculture in the U.S. and minimal property tax for agricultural land. For example, the average value is 13,400 per acre in California. Texas and California’s HSR projects also go through the central valley and east Texas which have the most valuable and productive agricultural land in those states.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1093866/evolution-average-price-agricultural-land-meadow-france/
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2012865117
https://www.nass.usda.gov/Charts_and_Maps/graphics/farm_value_map.pdf
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/agriculture-value-added-per-worker-wdi
This is probably a benefit for a Mumbai-Delhi HSR as much of it could go through lower-value semi-arid land. It also helps explain why some places like Morocco and Uzbekistan might be able to build at-grade HSR cheaply. But other parts of India can have extremely high agricultural land values at PPP (from my anecdotal knowledge it’s generally much higher than $2,623.93 per acre). There are probably similar issues to with high agricultural land values in Java, Indonesia.
How much of the cost differential does land value alone account for? I expect for TGV vs CAHSR it’s not a lot; a big portion if you include legal battles, is my bet.
As for Morocco — the land is cheaper, but note that their HSR does go through some of the country’s prime agricultural land (coastal plain, and expansion plans to the Gharb).
Land acquisition costs represented 5% (LGV Sud-Est), 5.7% (Paris Bypass), 9% (LGV Rhone-Alpes), 10.4% (LGV Mediterranee), 7.48% (LGV Est-1), 5.93% (LGV Bretagne) of the construction costs. Britain’s HS2 will probably be in the same range.
By law, all medium and large-sized French public work projects are evaluated after completion. For HSR lines, the report known as Bilan LOTI will be close to 100 pages long and compare various costs and benefits projections with the outcome 4-5 years after opening. Half of the reports do not mention land acquisition costs because they are a minor issue.
Offering a premium on land acquisition, and building a few stations beyond the ones that are commercially justified, are smart moves. Delays caused by legal battles, public protests and lack of political support are much more costly. These lines are typically built with borrowed money which must include the interest accruing for years on unfinished projects. These projects are comparable to surgery. You can’t do it against the patient’s will, you have to know where you are going (geologic surveys before tunneling), and the procedure must be as fast and painless as possible.
Thanks for the numbers. So based on these numbers, all other costs being equal you would expect CAHSR to cost maybe 10% more on land acquisition costs. Of course, those other costs are definitely much larger for CAHSR than TGV, and somewhat less for AVE.
As for number of stations… Does seem that if Texas wants to copy the TGV they may benefit from adding a station in Temple analogous to Merced, California and Waco analogous to Ourense, Galicia.
Probably line drawers need some kind of equation with a large number of terms to determine station placement, including population/public support/land cost, but without a large number of examples to fit the terms (and empirical ways to determine constants such as public support), it’s likely to be a Fermi estimate.
Crayonista need to get in touch with reality first.
Step one is understanding that when the dots on the map are widely spaced it’s because they are farther apart in the real world. Just because there are no dots between Saint Louis and Kansas City and none between Kansas City and Denver doesn’t mean they are equidistant.
………..The lack of dots very likely means there are no people.
Step one and half is understanding that passenger railroads exist to move passengers.
Step two is understanding that the dots don’t all have the same number of people,
The dots with lots of people close together should be connected first.
Distance, people. It can eliminate a lot of the dots. It’s not particularly complicated. Except when it comes to Stamford, navel of the universe center of the cosmos.
Except for a few toll roads in the Midwest and Northeast, that had a lot of cooked books, making the bookkeeping look better, how many roads make a profit?
How many airports? Where the books are cooked really really hard.
Even if the land is worth $25000 an acre or $60000 a hectare then even if the line averages 100m wide (and the LGV Sud Est averages half that width, you are still talking a premium of $200,000 a km or a total of $800,000 a km. It’s a lot, but if you reduce your project cost by 10s of millions a kilometre it is well worth it.
This is also why I am keen on intermediate stations, if a Japanese style Shinkansen station with passing tracks costs $50m, then if it saves you $10m/km in mitigations it is well worth it. Especially as a slower service allows you to charge less for the slower train and more for the express one and therefore increases your profits – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
Question is, how often will you end up doing that?
At California prices (see Sid’s post), $13400/acre over (1km x 50m = 500 acres) gives us $6.7 million per km, so if we use your metric that requires a station every 7.5km or more to breakeven. 3 million euro per km in France, so a station every 16.7km or more. The potential for everyone demanding a station saying that it will reduce costs is vast. There’s also the non-capital costs of running a station, maintenance and labour nevermind the time costs. Also, price discrimination on the basis of speed is a poor model for HSR unless you have 300kph HSR and 500kph maglev IMO.
1000m x 100m is 100,000sqm. One acre is just over 4,000sqm. So there are just 25 acres in 100,000sqm.
My bad, I read “ares” on wolfram alpha as “acres”. Forcing “acres”, I’m getting 12.36 acres/km at 50m, so $50 million/(13400*12.36) is about 300km to breakeven. That should be about the same using French land costs and 100m width, and is 232km with a 30% price premium. So we get to the other end of the spectrum, which is that it simply does not make sense to add stations to reduce land acquisition costs.
I don’t think I am being clear.
In terms of paying a premium for the land that is about compensating those directly affected by the project and covers the inconvenience of moving or using new fields or compensation for stuff on peoples land that they enjoy but that has low market value.
In terms of stations I am thinking of the (slightly) wider community who will be affected visually or with e.g road closures etc and giving them a benefit.
In particular I am thinking about e.g. public opinion forcing unnecessary tunnelling for HS2 under the Chilterns and that if you added a stop that you would have been able to get away with maybe a 1km tunnel rather than a 20km tunnel which would have saved you a lot of money.
For the umpteenth time you can’t pay more than market value in the U.S. so contemplating it is railfan wankery. And it’s railfan wankery to think there needs to be a station out in the middle of farmland where there are very very very few people because it’s FARMLAND. Stations are for passengers and there needs to be actual people to become passengers.
@Matthew
Well, we’d need some kind of natural experiments to really figure that out — much more complicated than just land compensation.
@adirondacker
It depends on the state, but some states have loss of business compensation as part of eminent domain. So the case law exists in some states. California has “loss of business goodwill”, but I didn’t find anything for Texas with a quick search; any Texas lawyers please chime in whether the Texas constitution prohibits a law similar to California’s that provides this.
Goodwill is an intangible asset booked in the proprietorship accounts. They are going to want to see how much you have been imagining that to be. Going back years. And will probably want to talk to your insurance agent about your business continuity insurance. And your banker. And look at your state taxes All sorts of places to ferret out information.
. …. You tell the bank one thing and the tax assessor another and the insurance agent a third thing that’s fraud. So is telling the DOT fantabulous stories about the worth of things. They are going to get market value and reasonable expenses. No matter how much clueless railfans thrash about.
adirondacker, I’m not sure what your point is. Yes, business expenses are more complicated than 30% flat, but that’s all workable.
Goodwill is an asset. You don’t get the point because clues like “goodwill is an asset” don’t sink into your thick skull. I’ll cut and paste this again:
For the umpteenth time you can’t pay more than market value in the U.S. so contemplating it is railfan wankery.
I was hoping that phrasing it as
They are going to get market value and reasonable expenses. No matter how much clueless railfans thrash about.
Might filter through. Apparently not.
Inflating your expenses, which aren’t assets, liabilities, income or propietorship, is fraud. So is inflating you income or assets. Or deflating you liabilities. Pesky pesky arithmetic and double entry bookkeeping.
I bet the Supreme Court would rule that you were allowed to pay the landowner more than their land was worth. And its not just the ultra corrupt current court that would.
No they wouldn’t because they haven’t in the past. More than once.
https://law.justia.com/constitution/us/amendment-05/16-just-compensation.html
While interesting I don’t see anything in there about paying more than just value. There is a lot about paying less. There is also a lot about just value being more (in some cases) than fair market value because of various factors.
In any case that is about eminent domain. The proposal here is more like “your property is worth X, so we will pay 1.1X (that is 10% more than our determined just value) if you sell now without going through eminent domain. Most, realizing they will lose in court, will take that offer (and the rest only get X plus have to pay their lawyer) – leaving only a few cases where you were way off on just value. Note that this is a blanket 10% more to everyone. If you offered that 10% more to your brother in law and everyone else just X that would be corruption.
The other point that I was trying to make before but perhaps this is better is this. You offer 90% of the population in 1850 £100 to move out the way of your trainline (£10k in today’s money adjusted for inflation) and they would take it. Now you probably have to offer £750k or something to get that level of take up.
And no one, since 1787, have come up with any variant of any cockmamie, wacko, ideas any of you come up. Nobody? Really? At all, since 1787? 237 years to come up with any of them and no one has.
And you can’t do it privately, you will run into people who refuse to move at any price.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holdout_(real_estate) They everybody else wants their extra 7 percent until you run into a holdout who wants 10.
It’s all the schemes, fantasies, reverie and visions of clueless railfans having a circle jerk.
You offer market price +20% subject to them leaving within 12 months or whatever is considered reasonable. Or you allow them to itemise their costs above market price – realistically with the deadline being what the court decides.
It’s exactly like https://www.gov.uk/tax-relief-for-employees/working-at-home
Good, have your fantasies in Transitvania. You can compare them with the fantabulists in Railfanlandia. And assorted trainspotters. Here in the U.S. they market value and reasonable expenses. Like they have been getting since the Constitution was approved in 1787. And multiple Supreme Court decisions.
Define close. ( Pesky pesky pesky arithmetic… ) They are both passenger railroads. It took all of 30 seconds to check Wikipedia for the population of Spain and the population of France. Ya, know, how many prospective passengers there might be on a passenger railroad. In nice round numbers the population of Spain is 70 percent of France’s. ( Used some magic arithmetic to find that ). But I have no idea how much either in passenger counts or percentage “close” is. And for someone who loves to cook the books about PPP etc. how much poorer and therefore less likely to travel are Spainards compared to the French. ….Arithmetic……
In 2023 Spain had 30 million riders on their high speed rail network. This compares to 120 million for France.
If France followed UK best practice and ran broadly an express train every 30 minutes from everywhere to the capital and an express train every sixty minutes between plausible station pairs outside the capital then I bet they would get more like 250m passengers a year if not more.
Matthew Hutton:
That’s an idea. That’s an awful lot of express trains needing an awful lot more train sets and an awful lot more staff. Even if they achieved that quarter billion pax would they be making money? In fact with French government strictures (dr Alain can tell us) I doubt they would be allowed to spend such money to get started. This really does seem to be railfan territory. I’d like it to be all MagLev please, sir.
@Michael, as we have discussed many times most of the railways costs are fixed, so yes if you can get more passengers you will make larger profits. Aside from buying some extra trains (but to some degree you would get efficiencies with the existing stock) the only significant infrastructure you would need to build would be making the Paris-Lyon line four track – which if you were getting tens of millions of extra passengers would pay for itself.
@Matthew Hutton
So now you want the state to double the track Paris-Lyon to enable competitors? They are not going to do that especially as the plan to increase capacity is to build the central LGV ie. Paris-Orléans-[Clermont-Ferrand]-Lyon. Though that might be in deep freeze. This also reveals how ridiculous the notion is. Why should France or SNCF modify their network to satisfy some ridiculous and unproven (if not disproven) neocon theory.
BTW, Dr Alain or Dr Alon, shouldn’t Switzerland be bound by the EU’s OA directive? They may not be part of the EU but as part of the EEA-EFTA have to comply to most rules such as freedom of movement, as Norway does too.
@Michael, if you can’t accept that the higher ridership on British domestic long distance trains vs France isn’t down to frequency which is literally the only thing we are better at then I suggest we agree to disagree and avoid discussing it again.
You continue to write that as if you have proven it, or that it is an obvious fact. It much more fits the hypothesis that service (frequency) rises to meet demand. Everything I have read about Southern, the biggest rail franchise in the UK (carries the most pax), is that they were failing to meet that demand from breakdowns, cancelled trains, failure to meet crowded timetables. That is, it had nothing to do with Southern creating demand. I’ve laid out some reasons as to why rail travel demand increased so much in the UK in that era.
Your interpretation is simplistic. Having said that, it is complex and multiple factors affect the outcome. Distance has to be one of those factors. You may be right that there could be an effect of increasing frequency in some circumstances but assuredly there is no 1:1 correspondence between frequency driving demand.
In France, the Paris-Lyon route consistently showed increasing demand such that they first doubled the train (1×8 cars to 2×8 cars) and then doubled again using duplex trains. Of course they also increased frequency until at peak it was a train every 4 minutes or so. More recently the Bordeaux line (l’Océane) showed a similar phenomenon when the route was made LGV all the way.
The current plan to increase LGV Sud-Est capacity will replace the TVM cab signals by ERTMS level 2 by 2030. As part of the process, the line will close during 101 hours next month. Peak capacity should reach 16 trains/h instead of 13. Cost is expected to be 720 million Euros, 700 provided by SNCF Reseau and 120 by the EU. Quadrupling the line as suggested by MH would be very challenging. It crosses the Morvan hills through cuttings and earth works. I don’t think these structures could be widened without long interruptions of operations.
The alternative POCL plan you mentioned was frozen for 10 years in 2018. Various routes were considered, longer and often slightly slower than the original LGV. I expect the freeze will be prolonged. In the meantime, there will be multiple closures on the Paris-Orleans line to improve signaling and renew tracks. Paris-Clermont frequency should increase to 9 return trips instead of 8 once the new CAF EMUs are ready, and power supply is strengthened on the northern section of the route.
As for Switzerland, I have never seen any mention of the EU Open Access policy. As Alon stated, Switzerland rail has all the best metrics. Brussels trying to fix Swiss rail would be hilarious.
It’s not a question of the “EU trying to fix Swiss rail” but whether EU rules apply. And then if some company/entity might be opportunistic and crash the party, obviously cherrypicking the best routes etc. Maybe SNCF who already run trains into 2 major cities (and built the first rail in Switzerland at Basel). And what the Swiss would think of such action. You may be right that it is intrinsically ridiculous but I would say the same about France and more, that the very notion is ridiculous ideology run rampant (force competition no matter what).
Alon wrote that France is second only to Switzerland in pax per capita, so why does France need fixing anymore than Switzerland? BTW, I have repeatedly said that while there may be lessons to be learnt from Swiss rail I think it is comparing apples v oranges with one sixteenth the land area (and even less if developable/habitable land) and one sixth the population–it makes more sense to compare it to Ile de France! Ditto for The Netherlands Randstad which really is a version of Ile de France. Yet some people will insist on making those inappropriate comparisons.
Whether the Open Access rules apply is a valid question but I don’t have the answer. Applying them to Switzerland would anyway be ridiculous and upset the Swiss.
SNCF and SBB cooperate through the TGVs Lyria serving Basel, Geneva, Lausanne and Zurich. The Confederation has also been a partner in the development of the TGV network, financing the reopening and electrification of the “ligne des Carpathes”, a short cut used by Paris-Geneva TGVs, and 66 million Euros or 3% of the cost of the Rhin-Rhone LGV. Cooperation was also the philosophy on the LGV Est with SNCF running the Paris-Stuttgart route and DB the Paris-Francfort and possibly Berlin one, and on the PKBA/L.
Evidently, the EU policy favors competition over cooperation, and I agree that it is unfortunate.
@Michael, the British private train operators all increased frequency and then got higher ridership. Private businesses didn’t just do that for fun. They did it because they thought it would make money.
I mean honestly you cannot believe that ‘the cities are further away’ in France counters literally every other measure where the French are ahead. Especially as ‘the cities are further away’ also makes driving less competitive.
Switzerland actually rejected EEA and is not part of it. However, it signed later with EU a series of bilateral treaties that have quite similar scope. As far as I know there is nothing regarding rail in these treaties.
Switzerland participates in European freight corridors (Rhine-Alpine corridor, North Sea-Mediterranean corridor), and allows non discriminatory access to the tracks.
@weismann
Of course they do. And they built the Gotthard Base Tunnel to capture a large fraction of freight heading from northern Europe to southern Europe, which will be lucrative.
My point was that I doubt the Swiss would be happy to cede any control of those railways or tunnels they funded* and built to random entities trying to exploit the EU’s Open Access directive. Someone says it doesn’t apply to them so it’s moot, but my point remains. It might be one example of why they don’t join the EU even though as a member of EFTA and Schengen they have to follow a lot of EU law.
*I seem to recall they did receive some EU funding in the final stage of construction so presumably gave certain guarantees. Probably unnecessary and any significant restrictions would have been rejected. And giving access to freight companies is not the same as what Open Access stipulates.
Certainly in the UK all rail freight is open access. I would be surprised if it wasn’t commonly open access elsewhere in Europe too.
They didn’t build it to ship cheese to Italy. 30, 40, perhaps even 50 seconds to read a likely Wikipedia article and click through to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRLA
I’m not quite sure what you are referencing, but it was 100% built to transport cheese (and all other traded goods) thru their country and to reduce pollution & impact on their roads. I agree that even less than 20 seconds is probably required to understand this:
The point is that you don’t have to speculate on their motivations or on the financial arrangements.
Train sets are not a problem. In recent years, SNCF has sent perfectly working electric locomotives, comfortable Corail cars and TGVs to the scrape yard for no compelling reason. Ideally, SNCF staff could simply be more productive.
Capacity is a serious concern. It went down some 15% on the conventional network with the adoption of safer automatic train control known as KVB. The bottlenecks are being evaluated because France’s next big thing may be the development of provincial S-Bahn/RER under the SERM acronym. Fixing them will be costly. Freight by-passes are standard in Germany but creating one in Lyon is expected to cost 4 billion Euros. Add a couple billions to quadruple 25 km of tracks between St Pons and Grenay and the subsidies needed to operate loss-making commuter rail. I have no idea where is the money going to come from. This is a very different proposition from the Lyon TGV bypass, the 116 km Rhone-Alpes LGV opened in 1994. Adjusted for inflation, cost was about 2 billions in 2024 Euros and loans were paid back through ticket sales in 20 years.
I am not sure what Michael Hutton means by express trains. In France they were long distance trains stopping maybe once every 50 km, i.e. more often than the “trains rapides”. They are less common now that 90% of long distance rail traffic is by TGV. The remaining ones are loss-making because seat occupancy is about 30%. Frequency could be improved but again who is going to finance it?
I am trying to be inclusive in my language and cover a bunch of different things – broadly I mean a train that is at least approximately as quick as driving over a given journey. Certainly all TGV services would be covered by this.
With regards to the French intercity services depending on the train length 30% occupancy should be profitable with good operations. Certainly in the UK Hull Trains must have been making a profit pre-Covid and covering all of their costs with an average of 200 passengers a train.
The problem with very general statements is that the same words could mean very different things to very different people, and you end up in disagreements without actually knowing what you are disagreeing with. ‘Everywhere’ and ‘plausible city pairs’ require a lot of qualification. It’s often better to go straight into examples.
Thinks like Paris – Lyon to Paris – Bordeaux ought to be half-hourly all-day. Paris – Marseille ought to be hourly all-day for example. This is a blog comments section and arguments are necessarily heuristic. I would make the following arguments
For smaller markets I wouldn’t get too hung up on whether something is precisely hourly or two-hourly. Through timetabling there are ways of achieving effective hourly frequencies with two-hourly trains. The details here are less important than having a clockface structured timetable.
A lot of France is very rural and will only ever justify welfare level services like Scotland’s far-north line. There are however lots of parts of France that resemble Switzerland or Belgium. Take the Montpellier – Nimes – Avignon corridor – in population terms that’s similar to Geneva – Lausanne – Vevey-Montreux. This corridor ought to support a 2tph express service with an extra 2tph stopping services operating in segments. In France’s urbanised areas the quality of the classic infrastructure isn’t bad – double track with generous stations and ruling 160km/h line speeds.
Then there are basic things like treating a train simply as a train. On classic corridors with lowish frequencies, where classic-running TGVs and TERs have similar journey times it makes no sense to have the two train types belonging to completely different ticketing systems. Bordeaux – Hendaye for example, those TGV trains are rarely full and they should simply accept passengers with non-train-specific regional tickets. Often you don’t need to increase physical frequency to increase effective frequency for the passenger.
As far as I am concerned, this talk about clock-face or increased frequencies from and towards Paris addresses an imaginary problem. I have been using the TGV for over 40 years and I can’t think of a single occasion where I could not find a convenient one between Provence and Paris. With Ouigo taking care of the price-sensitive clients, I don’t see any pent-up demand to fill half hourly TGVs.
There are real problems like the TGV-induced degradation of short distance relations like the Avignon-Nimes-Montpellier one. After WW2, Avignon was a busy mainline station along the PLM line. It was for a while a key station on the TEE network with correspondence between the Barcelona-Geneva Catalan Talgo and the Avignon-Milan Ligure. With the 2001 opening of the LGV Mediterranee, this hub function was lost as most of the long distance traffic moved to Avignon-TGV and the Paris-Languedoc TGVs bypassed Avignon altogether. Avignon Centre station was left with a skeletal local service.
For years, I used to transfer there to a local train and was the only passenger stepping in or out of the EMU at a small station close to my family home. Local commuting was done by bus and no-one besides a rail fan would think about taking a train. The service between Avignon, Nimes and Montpellier was only slightly busier because it passed through Tarascon. At the time, every young male in the South-East of France would receive a train voucher to visit once its army screening center. The service is now hourly, still a far cry from the frequency and reliability of the one along the Lake Leman. Switzerland is obviously way ahead with high quality public transport to every location, the Lausanne metro and a straightforward CFF/SBB website instead of the irritating SNCF one. Nevertheless, the changes in Avignon Centre and surrounding stations over the last decade are impressive. Lines closed to passenger traffic for up to 75 years were reopened as well as a new rail link to Avignon-TGV. TER ride and rolling stock quality are excellent. Ridership is surprisingly high with passengers having to stand at peak hours. Most people still drive but, for those using public transit, the TERs are now the default option and the busses a less convenient alternative. Montpellier and smallish Avignon are now served by modern trams with Montpellier’s network as dense as any in Switzerland or elsewhere.
Montpellier’s network is no way near as dense as that of a comparable Swiss geography. The rest of your post is just an odd mix of making excuses and arrogance.
You say there is no pent up demand then you go on to describe a classic case of service improvement leading to release of pent up demand. Which is it?
Turn-up-and-go is a whole different paradigm of travel. You don’t have to keep looking at your watch before your departure. You can allow a meeting to over-run; you can stay a bit longer with your friends and family; you can stay for one more drink; you can go for that extra toilet break. You only need to remember one number (the minutes past the hour) and +30 and you don’t need to check any journey planners. To say this would do nothing to reduce a passenger’s generalised travel time and increase the propensity to travel and willingness to pay is pure nonsence.
Whenever a defender of the Mediterranean norm says or implies ‘we don’t need to be like Switzerland’ they are just simply being defensive.
I described the changes in the region, saying that the TER service was still “a far cry from the frequency and reliability seen along the Lake Leman” and adding that “Switzerland was obviously way ahead with high quality public transport to every location”. Your translation of my words into “we don’t need to be like Switzerland” is simply dishonest.
We can try to be like Switzerland. Montpellier’s trams which currently run on a 46 km network, larger than the one in Geneva, are an example. One year from now, the network should reach 60 km, not too far behind the 73 km of tracks in larger and more populous Zurich. However, I don’t think we will catch up. We can only correct some of the mistakes made for decades.
As for pent up demand, Ouigo took care of it in my opinion. Turn up and go is great but is rarely how people travel long distances. Traffic to Paris is not going to double because you pass from a hourly TGV with mandatory reservation of a bi-hourly open one. Seat occupancy is simply going to decrease from the 80% typically seen in TGVs and commercial aviation to the ICE 40%. The average TGV service carried 561 in 2023, against 391 in 2015, around 270 on DB Long Distance, and 116 on the average UK train, and the ones between Provence and Paris are above average. These numbers will continue to increase as the first higher capacity TGV-M should enter service on this line. There is no free lunch. You can’t have the below 50% seat occupancy typical of unreserved trains and the 6 Euros/100 km average fare seen on this distance on the Ouigos. SNCF has chosen the latter and it seems the new entrants will have the same policy.
In regard to the TER, I am reluctant to talk about pent-up demand outside of large markets like Lyon, Marseille-Toulon and Cote d’Azur. The increased ridership is directly related to an improved offer (the TERs are way more pleasant to use than the buses they replace) but can we really talk about demand when 70% of operating costs are covered by subsidies? Switzerland, which typically expects ticket sales to cover 50% or more of the operating expenses is ahead on that metric as well.
@Weifeng Jiang turn up and go is generally understood to mean service so often that you don’t look at the clock at all you just go to the station/stop when you feel like it and the next one comes so fast you don’t worry. The longer the wait the more annoyed people get, if people would have to wait too long they will start demanding schedules. It is very expensive to run this style of service which is why it isn’t common, but it should be the goal of all service – people with service this frequent don’t wonder if maybe a car would be the better option. The good news with this is you have to be frequent but since nobody is watching the clock you don’t have to keep and particular schedule – just make sure whatever someone gets on gets there fast.
What you described is generally called clock-face schedules. This is second to turn up and go service, but it is a lot cheaper and so the right answer for most services. When you don’t need to keep a schedule and the wait isn’t too long you will look at the clock to decide if the meeting is ending and you should leave now, or stay to talk in the hall afterwards. However if the wait is too long you become less and less willing to just wait. Because people are watching the clock you need to be on time for them.
Note that both of the above are only useful if you have free seats and fast ticketing so that you can get on the next train/bus. If people cannot trust that then can just get on the next train/bus anytime they feel like it you have lost the freedom the above applies. In that case it is far more important to ensure their entire trip is scheduled (working with other operators if you can’t do door to door) and make their planned trip work. If you have to hold up a train so someone can make a transfer do it and make up the time. Make up time is critical – you cannot make other people late! Which in turn makes this impossible – at the least you must handle when things go wrong.
Intracity vs intercity is somewhat different as to expectations. Intracity show up and go really shines at 5 minute or less headway, and starts to fail at 7 minutes. I’m not aware of anyone running show up and go intercity service so I’m not sure what level of service people would call show up and go for longer trips (pre 9-11 I knew of airlines running 15 minute headways for their most popular route and they advertised show up and buy your ticket at the gate). For clock fast schedule half hour is the most you can get by with before people give up finding ways to kill time and look for an alternate way; intercity they will put up with hour waits and maybe even 2 hours.
Competition matters as well. I’m told in Manhattan people consider 12 minutes show up and go – but that is because driving is so bad there are no alternatives.
@henrymiller74, I think half hourly has to be considered turn up and go for intercity as that is what the best performers on intercity frequency typically manage.
@dralaindumas, if there are 116 passengers on the average British train that isn’t a terrible load factor. The average British train has 6 carriages as per https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/media/b21mng22/passenger-rail-usage-apr-jun-2024.pdf and train km vs vehicle km.
This points to an average load factor of 30% which seems pretty sensible.
A 30% load factor on conventional rail is indeed sensible. One cannot do much better outside of yield management and mandatory reservation. The 2023 numbers were 30% for the Transilien, Ile-de-France’s TER, and 36% for the RER. As you know, both are crowded at peak hours. The problem is that these load factors do not cover French operating costs. The average TER passenger pays 8.13 Euro cents/km when the operating costs were 26 cents/passenger-km at the 2023 37% load factor. Many Regions are opening their TER service to competition well ahead of the legal deadline in search of lower operating costs and more reliable operations than with SNCF.
On long distance trips, the TGV competes without operating subsidies with airlines some of which fly as a cost well below 10 cents/available seat km. Tolls are higher than in neighboring countries in order to pay back some of the construction loans. It is a difficult and low margin business but three new private ventures, Le Train, Kevin Speed and Proxima, want to join SNCF, Trenitalia and RENFE on the crowded LGV network. Time will tell whether these new entrants can make it.
@dralaindumas, quite a bit of the 26 cents/passenger-km is fixed costs – so if more trains were run with more passengers that cost would go down.
True. The Regions have to decide whether to invest for growth, and where, but resources are limited and the TER already represents about 20% of their budget. One option for investment known as Service Express Regional Metropolitain, a regional variant of the RER with clock face scheduling was inspired by Switzerland “Rail 2000” plan. Some Regions are also asked to participate in the financing of LGV extensions. The two can be linked. One cannot envision more frequent regional service or a Bordeaux-Toulouse LGV without major investments in the current bottlenecks south of Bordeaux and north of Toulouse. The Regions must also design the bid process for future TER services and evaluate the responses. They need to question potential TER or TGV customers on their requirements. Outside contractors can provide some help but they are now busy, so the Regions are also building in-house transportation expertise.
@dralaindumas, I find it difficult to believe there are any bottlenecks in the French railway system. By British standards every TGV could be run out of Gare de Lyon I am sure.
@dralaindumas – apologies, my eyesight didn’t see the end of earlier post referred to city tram networks. I agree French cities tend to have excellent tram or metro networks – this makes it all the more puzzling that service level falls off a cliff once you get to regional and long-distance leaves a lot to be desired.
By intercity standards a 30-minute frequency is turn-up-and-go. You can afford to just rock up at the station and see how long until the next train – especially if you are a bit merry with wine. It’s easy to kill 20 minutes at the station or the surrounding neighbourhood. For weaker demand, even hourly and two-hourly is helpful – you don’t need consultant the timetable.
If Ilisto and Proxima are proposing hourly services on the three main corridors then clearly they consider there to be pent up demand. Having yet another compulsory reservation carrier is one way of serving that pent-up demand, but in my view even better would be to have operator-agnostic non-compulsory reservation ticket that offers true flexibility.
I don’t think it’s a matter of doubling service level – in most cases it’s just filling (off-peak) holes in existing schedules and making departures consistent minutes past the hour, which would use relatively marginal additional resources, so don’t need a huge demand uplift to cover the marginal costs.
High seat occupancy is not a virtue, neither is cheapness necessarily. Consistent high seat occupancy is a mark of poor quality, and you are turning away travellers with a different price-quality point. People are willing to pay for flexibility – and yes flexibility requires a lower occupancy level so that walk-up passengers have a reasonable chance of getting a seat – and there is willingness to pay for that too. You create a demand segment that is higher yielding so your higher frequency train service remains profitable at a lower occupancy (but overall you are carrying more people). You create a new cohort of high-yield travellers and some of the existing travellers trade up for flexibility. You retain the existing cheaper train-specific fares for the demand segment that values low cost over flexibility so their welfare is not affected.
A key point is that regularising the off-peak timetable carries only a small marginal cost, so the off-peak walk-up fare need not be expensive to cover the marginal cost of providing off-peak clock-face services and you create a really good-value product for leisure travellers.
In some cases it doesn’t involve additional resources at all. Bordeaux – Toulouse and Bordeaux Hendaye sections generally have spare capacity. Just create a type of ticket that allows walking up to any TGV, IC and TER service, so that passengers get full benefit of the hourly timetable.
The Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary have clock-face schedules on their main axes. Things like Prague – Brno and Prague – Pardubice / Olomouc are almost turn-up-and-go across much of the day, across the state operator and Regiojet. Now Supercity and Regiojet do have compulsory reservation, but anecdotally it seems the competing carriers have settled at a level of supply with modest occupancy rates so the jeopardy of trains being sold out is now extremely low, so you can reasonably buy a ticket at the last minute. Maybe this is a situation Ilisto and Proxima will force SNCF into and it’s the next best thing from Germanic ticketing.
At the end of the Ceske Drahy recognises the value of clock-face scheduling and frequent services and are able to provide a competitive product on legacy infrastructure. If the Czechs can do it France has no excuse.
France’s excuse for the lack of clock-face scheduling is that it is not in her hands. Passenger rail traffic on legacy lines is now largely the responsibility of the Regions. Clock-face scheduling has been implemented between Dijon and Lyon in 2007, in Alsace in 2008, Lorraine in 2013, Champagne-Ardennes in 2016, Bretagne in 2017 and this December between Marseille, Nice and Vintimille with a 15 minutes headway.
The walk-up tickets you suggest for the Bordeaux-Hendaye or Toulouse TGVs have been on sale for over 20 years around Lille in a program is known as TER-GV for Grande Vitesse. The services are obviously faster than regular TERs and are quite popular, requiring a lower subsidy par passenger-km but so far other Regions don’t have a similar scheme.
@ Weifeng Jiang. High seat occupancy may not be a virtue but French citizens may view SNCF’s attempt at doing more transportation with less trains-km or Euros as worthy of some praise. SNCF would not survive without hefty taxpayer support, currently estimated at 20 billion Euros per year. These subsidies mostly finance maintenance and operations (108 billion passenger-km + 29 billion ton-km) at a rate of 14.6 Euro cents per unit (passenger and ton)-km. How much subsidy would be needed to raise the service to the levels you are suggesting ? Looking at Swiss and UK figures might give us an idea.
In 2023, Swiss Rail operations received 5.06 billion Francs of subsidy (+ 1.3 billion for expansion projects) while carrying about 26 billion passenger+ton/km (0.194 Fr/unit-km). At the current exchange rate, the operation/maintenance subsidies were worth 20.7 Euro cents per unit-km.
For the 12 months up to March 31, 2023, the UK taxpayers supported their somewhat privatized rail operations to the tune of 12.2 billion pounds (+ 8.9 billion for Network Rail enhancement and HS2). UK’s traffic of 68.73 billion units-km gives an average subsidy of 17.75 p or 21.46 Euro cents per unit-km.
We can only speculate about what would happen if French rail subsidies were raised about 50% to UK or Swiss levels. If past is prologue, the Languedoc-Roussillon region would extend its questionable policy of heavily discounted or free transit access, the 150 km Montpellier-Perpignan LGV, the missing link between the French and Spanish HSR networks would be built sooner than expected, and SNCF unions would go on strike in order to capture a share of the bonanza. We should also see more frequent TER service between Montpellier and the Rhone Valley, the long term goal the Languedoc Region used to justify its 780 million Euros contribution to the Nimes-Montpellier LGV bypass financing.
There’s a failure at the national level to implement liberalisation and devolution properly. There should have been national regulations placing obligations on all railway undertakings to accept walk-up tickets and a system of revenue allocation set up. That SNCF, being the industry incumbent and de facto industry leader in France has been completely absent in any thought leadership w.r.t fares and timetabling is totally unforgiveable.
In the case of Bordeaux – Hendaye, the TER standard fare at ERU41.50 tends to be higher than TGV’s dynamic fares. I don’t believe there are any public sector affordability reasons why TGVs can’t simply accept the standard fare. All there needs to be is a revenue allocation mechanism.
Kudos to the various regions for implementing clock-face timetabling. It would be especially embarrassing if SNCF’s erratic commercial timetable ends up being the blocker to regions being able to fully implement clock-face timetabling on their local networks.
@dralaindumas, Britain has a lot of clockface services even given greater network constraints and a mostly privatised system. France should be able to manage as well.
HS2 is being built because your region’s rail network has capacity issues. Any fear that the Languedoc-Roussillon might one day face a similar problem was put to sleep by the 2017 opening of the Nimes-Montpellier bypass. The main obstacle to short TER headways is not the shortage of track, it is its abundance. The Languedoc-Roussillon Region is responsible for over 1000 km of lightly used single track lines connecting the coastal line with lightly populated mountainous areas in the Massif Central and Pyrenees. Shutting down these lines would save a considerable amount. The Region could then offer a higher level of service such as clock face scheduling on the 400 km of double track rail with reasonable commercial prospects, or even re-open lines in the thriving Montpellier area but these are difficult political decisions largely unrelated to the technical capacities of the rail operators.
@dralaindumas, I bet those lightly used lines have a way worse service level than the Fort William in Scotland does. So yeah maybe those lines should be closed, but a start would be actually making them plausibly usable. I bet especially in the mountains that the scenery is good.
And yeah for sure HS2 is addressing capacity constraints but even so the trains even on the extremely capacity constrained West Coast mainline run clockface or near clockface.
Your bet is statistically sound. Annually, SNCF is running a smaller number of trains than the UK operators (386 vs 461 million train-km) spread over a much larger network (29000 vs 16100 km).
@dralaindumas – I question the sanity of an operating model that is so dependent on subsidy and where a marginal increase in supply almost always translates to a marginal increase in subsidy requirement.
In an equivalent location in the Netherlands or Switzerland, regional services on the Montpelier – Avignon – Marseille axis would be priced at a level that generates an operating surplus, and the PSO authority would be incentivised to expand services to increase that surplus to cross-subsidise to loss-making rural lines.
I do feel you have moved your goalpost from claiming the French model is great to defending why it’s OK it’s shit. And you’ve danced around between commercial markets and subsidised markets and seem to get confused between marginal cost vs revenue and total cost vs revenue.
We have talked about three types of corridors
In all those cases, the topic of regional funding (or lack thereof) is either totally irrelevant or at best misguided.
Put this this way, the service levels on Marseille – Montpellier and Marseille – Nice are far worse than Prague – Brno or Prague – Ostrava – corridors with very similar corridor population distribution and infrastructure capabilities.
All countries and all railway undertakings have to navigate their domestic politics – it’s how proactively you navigate and engage with it that matters. SNCF is completely silent and passive.
The Netherland’s Prorail has its long-standing network aspiration – giving operators and PSO authorities directions on how they can all improve their service provision:
https://www.treinreiziger.nl/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Het-Aanbod-van-ProRail-2030.pdf
OBB Infrastructure has their 2040 network vision (there are detailed timetable diagrams):
https://www.bmk.gv.at/themen/verkehrsplanung/ausbauplan/zielnetz.html
DB Netz has this (again with detailed timetable diagrams):
https://www.deutschlandtakt.de/konzept/
Poland has published their detailed white paper on its Horizontal Timetable
https://www.cpk.pl/en/the-white-book-on-railway-development
Where is SNCF Reseau? Where is its thought leadership?
People don’t take that many trips per year.
Societies create transit systems. Transit systems don’t create societies. You can’t transplant one thing from one nation’s transit system to another nation’s transit system with any idea of how it will work. There are a vast array of variable that differ even between societies; even those that seem to be similar to the casual observer. What has worked well in France may not work in Spain or England. It certainly won’t work well in the US. What will work in the US is what has worked in the US, a delicate balance of the interests of public and private institutions. That means expanding the role of states, localities, and for-profit organizations in passenger rail in the US.
The ancient Egyptians built the Nile River? The Mesopotamians built the Tigris and Euphrates? The Chinese the Yellow and Yangtze? Hmm.
Rivers don’t “work.” Rivers just exist. They don’t do anything. Human do things with rivers. Humans do things with the earth. The earth didn’t create France’s train system.
Yes, rivers just exist. People didn’t have to build, create, assemble, manufacture, forge, make, fabricate or any other word, to use it as the transportation system they built a society around.
People built transportation systems around rivers until they didn’t. The centers of growth in the US today are not along navigable rivers.
To play devil’s advocate: in the form that rivers exist naturally, most of them aren’t navigable, or only in a very restricted sense. It was only in the early Industrial Revolution, the 1700s, that people started making large-scale improvements to the navigability of rivers: building locks, weirs, levees, and reservoirs; dredging; redirecting smaller brooks to supplement flow where needed. Even towpaths are not necessarily natural; larger lowland rivers in particular tend to have a broad marshy coastline unsuited for towing. Likewise, we take for granted that a seagoing ship can pull up to a pier and unload directly onto land. Even well into the 1800s, quite often this was not actually possible! Despite looking tiny compared to modern ships, the oceangoing ships of the sailing era quite often had a deep enough draft that they couldn’t come particularly close to land; instead they had to anchor farther away, lightering their cargo, i.e. unloading onto (a) small vessel(s) that shuttled to the shore. (Also worth a mention: in ports subject to tides, it was common that ships could only float in or out at high tide; at low tide, they settled onto their bottom — they had to be designed to be able to take this.) Both were solved with copious dredging and the invention of the tidal dock: yes, ships still could only arrive or depart at high tide, but lock gates shut in water at the high-tide level, thus buoyant support and mobility within the docks could be maintained.
All of these had to be invented, constructed/financed, and operated. Construction and maintenance in particular involve a whole lot of work that people wouldn’t for their own personal interest do — as can be seen in the fact that between Europe becoming agricultural (a few thousand BC) and ~1700 AD, they didn’t. Something something joint-stock company (and its prerequisites) something. Suddenly turnpikes, canals, plate-/railways and more beside.
Now, taking the above seriously, it would seem to me that Matt is arguing that the US is incapable of building HSR because it lacks some key social technology/-ies. On the one hand, for a passive observer studying the system (society) this is a literally true conclusion/inference. On the other hand, for an activist seeking to influence the behavior of the system, the “technology” is so minimal as to be not worth calling it by this name — we are talking about 2-3 of Alon’s “good practice” posts, basically.
The situation is entirely analogous to the housing cost nonsense of large US and Canadian cities. Zoom out and the description “apparently these countries lack the ability to build a large quantity of housing in cities, except in Montreal” is straightforwardly correct. Zoom in and it’s zoning/parkingminima/twomeansofegress/NIMBY-OPM-corruption.
The centers of growth in the U.S. are around navigable estuaries which most people call rivers. Fun fact, the biggest port in the U.S. is the Port of Houston. It sprawls and a lot of it is petroleum products. Is Houston grow-y enough for you? That doesn’t change that people have been using rivers to transport stuff since someone figured out floating stuff was easier than walking.
If railways, either animal powered or steam powered, haven’t been invented yet, it’s difficult to integrate them into your transportation system. Same with internal combustion engines whether they go in trucks or airplanes. Nowadays we build freight transpiration around containers. Cheap shit from China got on a container ship at the Port of Guangzhou, which is on the Pearl River, went through the Panama Canal to get to Port Newark and then by rail to the distribution center in Pennsylvania and by truck to here, the overwhelming distance the cheap shit took is waterborne. That whole elaborate scheme revolves around the container.
The fancy smancy made in Italy with bronze die pasta you pay too much money for is very likely made with North America wheat that got shipped on an ocean going vessel. In Duluth. And back to the U.S. on a container ship. Not very river-y between the time it leaves Duluth on the western end of the Lakes until it gets to eastern end. gcmap.com says it’s 777 statue miles or 1250 kilometers from the Duluth airport to Kingston Ontario’s.
That didn’t stop them from floating stuff down to the seacoast and transhipping it to an ocean going vessel. ( Clever chemists can tell the archeologists that the tin in Bronze Age bronze, found in the Eastern Mediterrean, likely came from Cornwall. So people have been doing this for a very long time.) (Or the pottery expert on Time Team saying something like “third century from France” while they are digging up a villa in the U.K. )
The British Second Agricultural Revolution freed up labor to do stuff like mine sea coal to ship to London. And then things like automating the weaving. And the pottery. Which then means there is more stuff to ship. And labor to dig the canals.
@Basil — it really is quite remarkable how much cheap energy enables. To adirondacker’s point, the first cheap energy is probably using river and ocean currents, and the wind; the second is coal.
Dallas, Austin, Denver, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville,
The real estate industry loves to crunch numbers and they don’t agree with your unsupported assertions. Though a naked list of cities isn’t asserting anything.
Matt:
Unfortunately your list is mostly of cities founded near rivers. It’s true that thanks to railways, interstates and air travel, river transportation is less important today. But I think adirondacker’s point holds, which I would characterize as: initially societies come together mostly because of in-situ transportation nexuses that existed, so your cause-effect relationship doesn’t hold.
https://www.visitdallas.com/explore/dallas-history/ “Dallas started as a small trading post along the Trinity River”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Austin,_Texas “surveyed the planned townsite of [Austin], near the mouth of Shoal Creek on the Colorado River“
https://www.denver.org/about-denver/denver-history/early-denver-history/ “boomtown that was springing up on the banks of the South Platte”
Okay you get Salt Lake City, but it’s initially built by a society who was trying to live in isolation separate from a world that had just run them off their prime real estate along the Mississippi River at gun point. Also it helped that the Donner Party struggled the year before to cut a wagon road into the Salt Lake Valley (thus ensuring their late arrival in the High Sierra)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Phoenix,_Arizona “The history of the city begins with Jack Swilling, a Confederate veteran who in November, 1867 on a visit to the Fort’s camp was the first to appreciate the agricultural potential of the Salt River Valley.[45] He promoted the first irrigation system, which was in part inspired by the ruins of Hohokam canals. Returning to Wickenburg, he raised funds from local gold miners and formed the Swilling Irrigating and Canal Company, whose intent was to build irrigation canals and develop the Salt River Valley for farming.”
You can argue for Atlanta as well, since it was sited based on a planned railroad not a river: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Atlanta
Charlotte also is because of a railway, not a river: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte,_North_Carolina “The city’s first boom came after the Civil War, as Charlotte became a cotton processing center and railroad hub. By the 1880s, Charlotte sat astride the Southern Railway mainline from Atlanta to Washington, D.C.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville,_Tennessee “Nashville quickly grew because of its strategic location as a port on the Cumberland River, a tributary of the Ohio River; and its later status as a major railroad center.”
Looks to me like even the cities not on rivers, were located because transportation infrastructure existed, not that people built cities and then infrastructure came to them…
Kitsune, I believe Dallas, Austin, Denver, and Phoenix are not sited on navigable rivers (except for really small boats). So the rivers aren’t transport infra, but water infra in dry areas. Compare to say Paris (navigable, and also a ford), Cairo (navigable, and also a ford), London (navigable), Albany (navigable), and so on. Many cities are sited where a river’s navigability ends, e.g. Albany, Minneapolis, Córdoba (formerly navigable); this is a clear indicator of the importance of a navigable river in these instances.
Pedantically (because I grew up in Minneapolis), St Paul was where the Mississippi becomes unnavigable (and also a great geology for building a river port). Minneapolis has the largest waterfall on the Mississippi and thus where you located if you wanted to use water power, shipping between the two cities was done via land. These days we have dredged the river and now you can ship to beyond Minneapolis.
Dallas, Austin, Denver and Phoenix all became significant after the rail road and so they didn’t need rivers. If it wasn’t for the rail road (and later highways) none could have become significant just because you can’t ship enough food via animal (or slaves) to feed a city. You need something with more capacity to haul food than oxen to grow a city and pre railroad that was water.
Once you have a city it tends to grow. There is no technical reason we could build the world’s most populated city in Wyoming – we would have no problem shipping everything needed to support a city of that size there. However socially people are not going to be interested in leaving their friends and families to move there. You will have a hard time attracting business to move jobs there without people to work those jobs, and even the few people willing to move there can’t without a job – and so criticism you care to place on existing cities vs this new fictional city (which we can assume is better ignoring all the compromises that go into why the city is that way) just isn’t enough to make it better than an existing city.
Matt:
What my first post (and second of this article) was all about.
If we put to one side that US society is f’ed (and we’re about to find out how badly) I’d disagree by supporting the notion of “build it and they will come”. To a degree Brightline Florida shows that. And I remain convinced that if someone/anyone built true HSR between LA and LV (not just to the edges) it would be an unqualified massive success and would make a measurable impact on American’s overall attitude to HSR. However this is not really contradicting your (and my) statement: the first successful fast train would be changing society that little bit back towards civilised. Yeah, not gonna happen.
How can you say “build it and they will come” but also that frequency is irrelevant in terms of the number of customers you will attract?
Matthew Hutton:
I don’t say it is irrelevant. You have elevated it to be solely responsible for the increase in pax in the UK and that it could add 100 million pax to SNCF. Somewhat magical thinking. Also with “build it and they will come” means a change from frequency of zero to something.
I think you’re right … that we have run this discussion out.
“What will work in the US is what has worked in the US”
Define “works”. I’m being a little pedantic here, but it’s kind of a crucial thing to define, given the scope of the conversation, here.
Pretending that any particular solution works as well as any other particular solution because that particular solution is a product of the creation of its related problem is a little bit circular.
You don’t need my view. What has ‘worked’ in the US, in your estimation?
What I mean to point out here that defining something as a success or failure depends entirely upon how you expect things to go, what your values are. What “works” in the U.S.–what can be called successful about it–is that we’ve generated immense stores of capital that could be used to do a lot of things, aside from the obvious enrichment of certain classes of people; the generation of that capital is an obvious value the U.S. has.
What doesn’t work is that not only does using capital in that way has limited return on investment, so to speak, because people only are ever going to get so much utility out of material good. We also almost completely lack either the ability to invest in public welfare–which I define as broadly as possible, as “producing a (broadly construed) good life for absolutely anyone currently residing or who would in the future like to reside here”–and we lack the cultural preference for doing so (obviously to a significant extent, these two trends are a positive feedback loop), even though its placeholder (keeping capital with the capitalist class) has necessarily limited value.
In the U.S., this dichotomy is probably most evident in our high expenditures and healthcare, transportation, private education, and that our outcomes aren’t meaningfully materially better than other wealthy nations’. There’s a limit to what private sector activity can do, and sectors where it makes sense to rely more upon the public sector to produce an outcome.
But, that is because of my aforementioned conception of public welfare, and my valuation of that over most any other societal good. “Societal good” is just not something most Americans are used to even thinking in terms of, never mind valuing on its own.
I have taken a bit of time to get there but to be fair to Matt who made the point initially Brightline clearly works to a greater or lesser degree.
It goes both ways. A new transit system can reshape patterns of travel and commercial/cultural exchange, which can alter the way social activities are organised, or create new ones.
If you’re going to consider an unfathomably vast array of variables, then differences at any level of analysis would void any attempt at comparison/extrapolation. What has worked well in New York may not work in Pennsylvania, and what has worked in the Bronx may not work in Queens. Drawing the line at the nation is arbitrary and reads like a justification for incuriosity. We can and should find lessons that can be reasonably generalised based on broad (not necessarily exact) similarities in context – between districts, cities, regions, and yes, nations.
Interstate highways clearly reshaped America. They ‘worked’ because localities, states, construction companies, property owners, would-be property owners, and the national government all supported the interstate highway vision. It was not an imposition by any one institution. Decisions about where the interstates were to go, where exits would be, and who would own the interstates were state and local. The money was predominately federal and came from gas taxes. It succeeded because it acknowledged many different interests, including for-profit interests from car companies, real estate developers, and construction companies who built the interstates. Interstates DID work differently in New York than in Pennsylvania. The interstate highway example is not on of “reasonably generalized” broad similarities. It’s an example of how to get greatly varied people and institutions to work together. It worked in a thousand different ways in a thousand different places and would not have worked if it had been one plan for all.
I said generalisable lessons. Your analysis of interstate highways (which I don’t necessarily disagree with) is precisely that, since you could apply the core insight of stakeholder interplay/engagement to other comparable situations (e.g., places with friction between levels of government and competing interests). The execution may have been ‘a thousand different ways in a thousand different places’, but it reveals an underlying concept/principle that is very much transferable.
The “lesson” is that without a thousand different points of input, underlying concepts are meaningless in the US. I don’t think that what created interstates in New York City created interstates in Texas. I think different interests saw different things in plans for interstate highway. It’s almost a misnomer to call it a ‘plan’ or ‘system.’ Even modest attempts to impose particular principles on interstates would have created opposition. This is all specific to the US, too. Americans saw examples of limited access highways in Nazi Germany, but that is where the German influence on US transportation ended. American interstates were built in decentralized public/private ways built on centuries of American precedent. The US did not in any way borrow German examples of how or why to build limited access highways, even if the German and American road systems may seem to be similar creations with common origins.
Passenger travel in the US will only work to the extent that it offers many points of participation by many interests, including for-profit interests and interests that see passenger rail very differently. Only then will Americans accept the creation of a large and sustained funding stream for rail infrastructure as they have done for interstate highways. Privately-owned trains owned and operated by multiple operators operating over tracks owned by separate, sometimes for-profit, organizations built with a combination of local, state, federal, and for-profit money is the path forward for passenger rail in the US, not Amtrak. The lesson for passenger rail today in the US are to be found in the past of passenger rail in the US, not in Europe or Asia in the present.
Matt:
Pure denialism. Pure nativism. No accident it all happened under Ike who was shocked by 1. seeing German autoroutes and 2. the difficulty early in the war of transporting materiel across the US to the west coast.
But those attitudes do show why the US has so much trouble adopting world best practice. First it has to convince itself that it was actually invented ‘here’ even when it isn’t. What a mess it produces.
The extent of Germanic influence on the US interstate highway system was Eisenhower seeing them. That was it. I have no influence over US transportation policies or practices in any way. You can’t point to me as an example of anything. Societies create their transit systems. Transit systems don’t create societies.
There were limited access highways in the U.S. when Eisenhower left for Europe. Because they were open before we declared war. The Roosevelt Admin had a plan for a system of 40,000 miles of highways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal-Aid_Highway_Act_of_1944
Which didn’t get much of anywhere until the yokels from the hinterlands were lured in with lush lush Federal subsidies.
US Interstate highways are certainly influenced in form by Nazi Germany, but the rationale goes back even before the 1919 convoy in which Eisenhower took part. That convoy used the Lincoln Highway (1913) until its terminus.
Adirondacker, it’s my understanding that the prewar numbered route system was only mostly not limited access, do you have a good source on that? I’d be curious to read or skim it.
So, the German example was even less significant than that!
They were figuring things out. There are some very strange, odd peculiar, interchanges on interwar roads.
The Holland Tunnel opens which causes gridlock in Jersey City so they build stuff that includes the first cloverleaf interchange. Which supposedly was a tourist attraction.
The most visible part of it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulaski_Skyway
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Turnpike#History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merritt_Parkway#History
The Robert Moses roads didn’t all simultaneously spring from the earth in 1951 either.
By the time they are building the New Jersey Turnpike they’ve more or less figured things out and a really short way to describe “Interstate Standards” is to build stuff like the New Jersey Turnpike.
Being able to point out that the Nazis were able to mobilize on the limited access highways that look very much like the Pennsylvania Turnpike get severely condensed to “Eisenhower ( insert some myth here)”
HOW did the Nazis build limited access highways? Things that look alike are not necessarily alike. The organizational structures that created US interstates and Nazi highways were vastly different. The German highways were built by New-Deal style make work projects funded and built by government directly. No construction companies and no gas taxes because there was no significant private car ownership in Nazi Germany. No federal mix of resources. Government officials simply marked alignments on maps and paid low wages to out-of-work men in each area to come and build them with their bare hands.
You can’t argue
and then argue that looks don’t matter.
Adirondacker, thanks for the info about the Pennsylvania and NJ Turnpikes. I wasn’t sure how much of the limited access aspect of those was post war.
No they didn’t. The yokels from the hinterlands had to be dragged kicking and screaming into it with lush lush Federal funding. The standards for the construction, signage etc is “Build stuff like the New Jersey Turnpike”. States get to select the shape of the state highway blazes and not much else.
Everyone was not on board with having everybody drive everywhere.
A few highlights
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_revolts_in_the_United_States
Yet, the interstates were built because local and state political coalitions were able to easily overcome local challenge. The revolts were local as were the responses to them. No officials in DC grandstanded over highway placement. Superficial issues of appearance aside, the important questions of where they would go and, very importantly, where the exits and entrances would be were decided locally and with the implicit approval of each state’s representatives and senators in DC.
Allowing communities to choose their own exit locations on a highway is important.
They were ovecome because rich people wanted to drive places on decent roads. So they lured people who think it’s faintly immoral if not downright immoral to travel, with lush lush Federal Funding.
There are 435 Congresscritters and I’m sure lots of them grandstanded over how much bacon they were bringing home. Either from their office in Washington D.C. or at the ribbon cutting. Just like they do today even if they voted against the funding providing the bacon. And the ones who had funding cut because the locals were fractious, they grandstanded that they stopped the placement.
Yes, Congress men weren’t grandstanding against interstates. They were grandstanding FOR interstates. Why? Because they saw support from them in every direction they looked.
They didn’t see support from everywhere they looked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_revolts_in_the_United_States
No matter how hard you clap or how often you click your ruby slippers you can’t change history.
My God your pollyannaish vision. Capitalism: the greatest good for the greatest number!
The interstate system is a continuation of the real, wholly consistent, unwavering, 304-year-long American history: use of the power of the state to crush opposition and enrich property speculators.
Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same. As. It. Ev-er. Was.
You are the most cynical person alive.
Nov. 12, 2012
Georgetown University
“In dealing with poverty here and around the world,
welfare and foreign aid are a Band-Aid. Free enterprise is a cure.”
“Capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid.”
Paul David Hewson, born in Dublin, Ireland in 1960.
Investor, philanthropist, venture capitalist, businessman,
Nobel Peace Prize nominee.
Better known as Bono, lead singer for U2, net worth ~$600 million
Neither can you, Adirondacker. Those were modest, symbolic, and ineffective protests. They had no impact on the politics of interstates.
Getting an Interstate canceled is the epitome of an effective protest. There were many cancellations. Clap harder.
…and another interstate 10 miles to the north or south or east or west took it’s place adding the capacity of the interstate that was not built. It all happened at the local and state level and a truly epic amount of interstate lane miles were built regardless. There was no meaningful opposition that thwarted interstate construction. It tinkered on the margins in a few places.
Protests in many states that canceled many highways is not support by “all”. Clap harder.
You have a child-like understanding of human societies.
I’ll see your ad hominen and raise you with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_American_Cities
Many many many people were against highway building for many many reasons.
Seek professional help.
I don’t need help, professional or otherwise, to find Wikipedia articles that contradict your fables.
Hi Alon, this is a good piece as usual, but when you have some time you should take a look at the latest Spanish high-speed ridership figures: https://www.cnmc.es/sites/default/files/5441138.pdf
High-speed rail is booming in Spain. Ridership in the main corridors is around twice your Shinkansen demand prediction model and it is still growing. This is in part thanks to the new competition that left RENFE no choice but to cut their fares by almost a 40% on its main corridors, from 0,12 eur/km in 2019 (when RENFE was the only player) to just 0,75 eur/km in 2023. In this same period, high-speed ridership grew by 45%. High-speed rail has shattered almost all air travel demand within the Spanish mainland. This is not to defend the current EU model of competition but for once competition has brought much needed cuts in fares.
Also, I am not convinced by the idea that a too segmented fare structure is damaging long distance rail demand in Spain. It could had been the case a few years ago but definetly not now that most demand is concentrated on the standard-gauge, high-speed lines, where all long distance services have very similar travel times and all operators use airline-like pricing.
I don’t think anyone can say “too fragmented” fares damage anything.
People whine about fares here, and frankly our fares are insane, but the UK has great long distance ridership.
I bet Japan would get a lot more Hakata-Tokyo passengers if the base fare was Tokyo-Shin Kobe plus ¥1000.
People in the USA whine about the heath insurance industry, but some of them still have liver transplants or measles immunizations, so it’s hard to see there’s an issue.
There’s no way you can argue that the US is cheaper for healthcare.
Like if you could get a flu jab for $30 here in the UK walk in only 8am-6pm, but one in the US was $15 if you booked an exact advance appointment online, $30 anytime 9-5 or $60 6am-9am and 5pm-9pm then you could argue the US system was actually better even though it was more complicated.