Consultant Slop and Europe’s Decision not to Build High-Speed Rail
I’m sitting on a series of three trains to Rome, totaling 14 hours of travel. If a high-speed rail network is built connecting those cities, the trip can be reduced to about 7.5 hours: 2.5 Berlin-Munich (currently 4), 2 Munich-Verona (currently 5.5), around 2.75 Verona-Rome (currently 3.5), around 0.25 changing time (currently 1). The slowest section is being bypassed with the under-construction Brenner Base Tunnel, but not all of the approaches to the tunnel are, and Germany is happy with its trains averaging slightly slower speeds than the 1960s express Shinkansen.
I bring this up because it’s useful background for a rather stupid report by Transport and Environment that was making the rounds on European social media, purporting to rank the different intercity rail operators of Europe, according to criteria that make it clear nobody involved in the process cares much about infrastructure construction or about what has made high-speed rail work at the member state level. It’s consultant slop, based on a McKinsey report that conflicts with the published literature on intercity rail ridership elasticity, which makes it clear that speed matters greatly. Astonishingly, even negative discourse about the study, by people who I respect, talks about the slop and about the problems of privatization, but not about the need to actually go ahead and build those high-speed connections, without which there are sharp limits to the quality of life available to the zero-carbon lifestyle, limits that make people avoid that lifestyle and instead fly and drive. In effect, Europe and its institutions have made a collective decision over the last 10 or so years not to build high-speed rail, to the point that activism suggesting it reverse course and do so is treated as self-evidently laughable.
The T&E study
The T&E study purports to rank the intercity rail operators of Europe. There are 27 operators so ranked, which do not exactly correspond to the 27 member states, but instead omit some peripheral states, include British and Swiss options, and have some private operators, including inexplicably treating OuiGo as separate from the rest of the TGV. The ranking is of operators rather than infrastructure systems; there is no attention given to planning infrastructure and operations together. Trenitalia comes first, followed by a near-tie between RegioJet and SBB; Eurostar is last. Jon Worth had to pour cold water on the conclusions and the stenography in various European newspapers about them.
In fact, the study fits so perfectly into my post about making up rankings that it is easy to think I wrote the post about T&E – but no, the post is from 2.5 years ago. The issue is that it came up with such bad weighting in judging railways that one is left to wonder if it specifically picked something that would sound truthy and put SBB at or near the top just to avoid raising too many questions. The criteria used are as follows:
- Ticket prices: 25%
- Special fares and reductions: 15%
- Reliability: 15%
- Booking experience: 15%
- Compensation policies: 10%
- Traveler experience (speed and comfort): 10%
- Night trains and bicycle policy: 5%
None of this is even remotely defensible, and none of this passes any sanity check. No, it is not 1.5 times as important to have special reductions in fares for advance bookings or other forms of price discrimination as to have a combination of speed and comfort. The Shinkansen has fixed fares and is doing fine, thank you very much; SNCF’s own explanations of its airline-style yield management system portray it as a positive but not essential feature – its reports from 2009 recommending high-speed rail development in the United States cite yield management as a 4% increase in revenue, which is good but not amazing.
But more broadly, it is daft to set a full 50% of the weight on fares and fare-related issues (i.e. compensation), and 15% on the booking experience, and relegate speed to part of an issue that is only 10%. That’s not how high-speed rail ridership works. Cascetta-Coppola find a ridership elasticity with respect to trip time of about -2, but only -0.37 with respect to fares. Börjesson finds a much narrower spread, -1.12 and -0.67 respectively, but still the same directionally. Speed matters.
And yet, T&E doesn’t seem to care. The best hints for the reason why are in the way it compares operators rather than national networks, and relies on a McKinsey report pitched at private entrants and not at member state policymakers, who do not normally outsource decisionmaking to international consultants. It doesn’t think in terms of systems or networks, because it isn’t trying to make a pitch at how a member state can improve its rail network, but rather at how a private competitor should aim to make a profit on infrastructure built previously by the state.
The need for state planning
Every intercity rail network worth its name was built and planned publicly, by a state empowered to do so. In East Asia, this comprises the high-speed rail networks of China, Japan, Korean, and Taiwan, all funded publicly, even if Japan subsequently privatized Shinkansen operation (though not construction) to regional monopolies that, while investor-owned, are too prestigious to fail. In Europe, some networks have high-speed rail at their core, like France, and others don’t, like Switzerland or the Netherlands, but the latter instead optimize state planning at lower speed, with tightly timed connections, strategic investments to speed up bottlenecks, and integration between rolling stock, the timetable, and infrastructure.
This feature of the main low-speed European rail network frustrates some attempts at disaggregating the effects of different inputs on ridership and revenue. At the level of a sanity check, there does not appear to be a noticeable malus to French rail ridership from its low frequency at outlying stations. But then France relies on one-seat rides from Paris to rather small cities, which do not have convenient airport access, and in its own way integrates this operating paradigm with rolling stock (bilevels optimized for seating capacity, not fast egress or acceleration) and infrastructure (bypasses around intermediate cities, even Lyon). Switzerland, in contrast, has these timed connections such that the effective frequency even on three-seat rides is hourly, with guaranteed short waits at the transfers, and this provides an alternative way to connect small cities with not just large ones but also each other.
But in both cases, the operating paradigm is connected with the infrastructure, and this was decided publicly by the state, based on governmental financial constraints, imposed in the 1970s in France (leading to extraordinarily low construction costs for the LGV Sud-Est) and the 1980s in Switzerland (leading to the hyper-optimized operations of Bahn 2000 in lieu of a high-speed rail system). A private operator can come in, imitate the same paradigm that the infrastructure was built for, and sometimes achieve lower operating costs by being more aggressive about eliminating redundant positions that a state operator may feel too constrained by unions to. But it cannot innovate in how to run trains. Even in Italy and Spain, where private competition has led to lower fares and higher ridership, all the private competitors have done is force service to look more like the TGV as it is and less like the TGV as SNCF management would like it to be internationally. Even there, they do not innovate, but merely imitate what the TGV already had purely publicly, on infrastructure that was designed for TGV or ICE service intensity all along.
The idea that the private sector can innovate in intercity rail comes from the same imitation of airline thinking that led to the failure of Eurostar, with its high fares and airline-style boarding and queuing. In the airline business, integration between infrastructure and operations is weak, and private airlines can innovate in aircraft utilization, fast boarding, no-frills service, and other aspects that led low-cost carriers to success. Business analysts drawn from that world keep trying to make this work for trains, and fail; the Spinetta Report mentions that OuiGo tanked TGV revenues, and ridership did not materially increase when it was introduced due to inconveniences imposed by the system of segmenting the market by fare.
Europe’s decision not to build high-speed rail
In the 2000s, there was semi-official crayon, such as the TEN-T system, for EU-wide high-speed rail, inspired by the success of the TGV. Little of it happened, and by the 2010s, it became more common to encounter criticism alleging that it could not be done, and it was more important to focus on other things – namely, private competition, the thing that cannot innovate in rail but could in airlines.
At no point was there a formal decision not to build high-speed rail at a European scale. Projects just fell aside, unless they were megaproject tunnels across mountains like the Brenner Base Tunnel or water like the Fehmarn Belt Tunnel, and then there is underinvestment in the approaches, so that the average speed remains shrug-worthy. The discourse shifted from building infrastructure to justifying not building it and pitching on-rail competition instead. This, I believe, is due to factors going back to the 1990s:
- The failure of Eurostar to produce high ridership. It underperformed expectations; it also underperforms domestic city pairs. SNCF is happy to collect monopoly profits from international travelers, and, in turn, potential travelers associate high-speed rail with high fares and inconvenience and look elsewhere. One failed prominent project can and does poison the technology, potentially indefinitely.
- The anti-state zeitgeist at the EU level. This can be described as neoliberalism, but the thoroughly neoliberal Blair/Brown and Cameron cabinets happily planned High Speed 2. The EU goes beyond that: it is too scared to act as a state on matters other than trade, and that leads people in EU policy to think in terms of government-by-nudge, rather like the Americans.
- SNCF and DB’s profiteering off of cross-border travelers in different ways turns them into Public Enemies #1 and #2 for people who travel between different member states by rail, who are then reluctant to see them as successes domestically.
For all of these reasons, it’s preferred at the level of EU policymaking and advocacy not to build infrastructure. Infrastructure requires there to be a public sector, and the EU only does that on matters of trade and regulatory harmonization.
Jon Worth has done a lot of work on getting a passenger rights clause into the agenda for the new EU Parliament, to deal with friction between DB and SNCF when each blames the other when a cross-border passenger is stranded (roughly: DB blames SNCF for running low frequencies so that if DB’s last train is delayed the passenger is stranded, SNCF blames DB for being so delayed in the first place). This is a good kind of regulatory harmonization. It reminds me of the EU’s role in health care: there’s reciprocity among the universal health care systems of Europe, for example allowing EU immigrants but not non-European ones to switch to the Kasse upon arrival; but at the same time, the EU has practically no role in designing or providing these universal health care system or even, as the divergent responses to corona showed in 2020, in coordinating non-pharmaceutical interventions for public health in a pandemic.
But health care does not require large coordinating bodies, and infrastructure does. Refugee camps tended to by UN agencies that have to pay bribes and protection fees to local gangs can have surprisingly good health care outcomes. Cox’s Bazar’s Rohingya camps have infant mortality rates comparable to those of Bangladesh and Burma; Gaza had good if worse-than-Israeli life expectancy and infant mortality until the war started. But nobody can build infrastructure this way. Top-down state action is needed to coordinate, which means actual infrastructure construction, not just passenger rights.
The thinking at the EU level is that greater on-rail competition can improve service quality. But that’s just a form of denial. The EU has no willingness to actually build the high-speed rail segments required to enable rail trips across borders, and so various anti-state actors, most on the center-to-center-right but not all, lie to themselves that it’s okay, that if the EU fails to act as a state then the private sector can step in if allowed to. That’s where the T&E study comes in: it rates operators on how to act like a competitive flight level-zero airline, going with this theory of private-sector innovation to cope with the fact that cross-border rail isn’t being built and try to salvage something out of it.
But it can’t be salvaged, not in this field; the best the private sector can do is provide equivalent service to a good state service on infrastructure that the state built. The alternative to the state is not greater private initiative. In infrastructure, the political alternative is that people who are not Green voters, which group comprises 92.6% of the European Parliament, are going to just drive and fly and associate low-carbon transportation with being contained to within biking distance of city center. The economic alternative is that ties between European cities will remain weak, to the detriment of the European economy and its ability to scale up.
Pedestrian Observations 
So long as rails are shared nobody can compete. One incompetent operator using the track outside of their schedule (the train breaks, they are running late…) and everyone else is forced to be worse. For that mater one operator running slow trains can make it impossible for you to run fast trains.
The only way make private operators work is make it easy for them to build their own track. Unfortunately track is expensive and so you probably cannot make this easy enough. Still much of the track we have today was built privately – but much of it was before 1930 and so laws have changed. (even then most of it had government encouragement)
If you were to reduce Berlin to Rome to 7.5 hours most people still will fly that route. No amount of investment will make rail the dominant mode on that route.
I have seen a lot of money wasted on vanity high speed projects (like the HSL Zuid in The Netherlands) the would be better used in increasing capacity and reliability. Running regional rail at mass transit frequencies like the Netherlands and Switzerland are working on is a far more useful investment then high speed rail.
Yeah, at 7.5 hours, most people would still fly Berlin-Rome. But then the intermediate city pairs would get a lot stronger: Munich-Rome in 5 hours minus change would get a lot of mode share.
“regional rail is a far more useful investment”
No, this is a false dichotomy. Regional rail does not replace long-distance rail. They are part of a whole. Travellers need attractive options for walking, bicycling, local transport and also long-distance rail. If any of these are missing, they are likely to fall back on cars and airplanes which reduces support for sustainable transport.
This is not at all true, there are plenty of places (Paris, Barcelona) that had very high transit mode share internally before high speed rail came along (i.e. people used the metro at home despite flying to other destinations). Regional rail does not replace high speed rail anymore than local busses replace international flights, but far more people ride local transit, and commuter/regional rail* daily than take international or domestic flights. If you are looking to maximize benefit (however you define it: time saved for most people, access to jobs/education, mode shift from cars) improving local and regional transit will do so far more than long distance links.
Also if Alon is correct that speed matters, then air will always beat rail at some threshold, planes fly faster than the faster trains to say nothing of crossing oceans. So you can never fully replace long distance air with rail.
*Assuming the rail is serving a large/city or metro. Obviously regional ridership in rural areas will be less than international travel from major cities, but it will still be greater than the international travel from those rural areas.
Those are some good points, but if your comparison is with the Paris metro, then we actually agree that public transport has to be of very high quality to get people out of their cars. Part of that is getting to places beyond the reach of metros and regional rail. Paris didn’t just have a metro before the TGV, they also had fast long-distance trains (200 km/h). (Also let’s agree that trips on hi-speed rail are much longer than metro trips, so they can’t be directly compared)
Your belief that “If you are looking to maximize benefit… improving local and regional and local transit will do so far more than long distance links” is not necessarily correct.
Since 1984, the French “LOTI” law mandates the evaluation of public works (above a threshold of 83 million Euros) 4-5 years after inauguration. This is somewhat early to evaluate the public and business adaptation to a new transport infrastructure and operators are as cagey as legally possible. The numbers show that a LGV line can have a lower cost per minute annually saved by riders than a popular tram such as Paris T9 or a costly endeavor like NYC East Side Access.
The main obstacle to these evaluations is not cost. It is the UK and EU’s open access mandate. In a competitive market, precise ridership figures are a trade secret. So instead of real evaluations of projects that can cost billions, we have consultants and junk studies like the T&E one.
The UK is mostly PSOs. DfT has full access to LENNON data (including all Open Access operators whose revenue go through LENNON and ORCATS, the only exception being Heathrow Express). Conducting government sponsored Post Opening Project Evaluation (POPE) is no problem. It’s just that any consultants working on them have to sign confidentiality agreements and detailed origin-destination data have to be redacted in published documents.
The problem with EU states’ implementation of the Fourth Rail Package, is that most countries were more interested in protecting their state operators’ monopoly than providing a integrated rail service. Transport authorities have generally not set up their own LENNON or ORCATS and the result is an increasingly fragmented railway away from the state operator. The closest I think think of is the Netherland’s nation-wide OV-Chipcard system – but even that relies on users touching off and back on at company boundaries, rather than users simply buying a TOC-agnostic origin-destination ticket while an algorithm works out how to reimburse operators (standard practice in the UK).
I remember a discussion recently about high speed rail in Switzerland, where someone mentioned we ought to build a dedicated line so Zurich would only be one hour from Geneve.
My reply? Why do we need Zurich to be only one hour from Geneva? The same applies elsewhere. Do we need Munich to be five hours from Rome by train? Is there really such a high demand on that route?
One of the things that I notice amongst rail advocates is that there is a certain blindness there. We are a group that travel by train for our everyday business,, and we travel by train long distance too. But we tend to overlook that for a large part of the population train is not even on the radar. Not for local transport, not for long distance travel.
If we want to change that we need more investment in everyday public transport. Because once people are used to taking the train to work, to go shopping, they also may then take the train to go on holiday. And there we need easy, comfortable trains, not necessarily high speed rail.
Given that we do not have unlimited funds to invest, I think we should invest in regional rail first. In most countries if 5% of the car drivers move to public transport the number of passengers this has to move doubles. If we really want reduce car dependency we need every regional train in Belgium, The Netherlands, Switzerland, and the denser parts of France and Germany to run every 10 minutes.
That is what must be done.
The same reason we need every other transit system: people want to be someplace else, and the less time they spend getting there the better. (there are a few cruises – both land and water – where the scenery is the point and so travel time should not be too short). If we had Star Trek instant teleportation to everywhere in the universe that would be ideal. (note that Star Trek didn’t have everywhere in the universe, I’m not sure what the limits were, but since it was fiction that doesn’t matter) Laws of physics and are current engineering limit us to less.
The question isn’t should we have a fast train from point A to point B – the answer is always yes. The question is will enough people use it to pay for the costs to build and run the thing.
It’s a false dichotony.
If there is a need / opportunity and if there is a economic way of serving that need you do it. You don’t need an ideological framework to decide local vs long-distance. You can apply a consistent economic appraisal framework. There will be plenty of interventions at all sorts of distance brackets that will be worthwhile.
The economic engines need good long-distance connectivity for agglomeration. For reducing carbon emissions passenger km is the big price (not just passenger journeys) and getting mode switch from aviation is a big component in decarbonisation. It’s about doing what you reasonably can ‘if you can’t do 100% then you shouldn’t bother’ is an idiotic argument.
There’s a fair bit of passenger aviation between Munich and Rome/Milan/Venice/Florence, so getting that mode switch is worthwhile. It’s not about local vs long-distance either – Germany doing Brenner North Access means more capacity on the classic line for regional services between Munich and Innsbruck – places like Rosenheim get more capacity and improved reliability because long-distance trains are no longer in the mix. Freight capacity also increases.
You get a good investment case when one (relatively simple) scheme delivers multiple outcomes – and in the case of Brenner North Access you get long-distance mode switch from aviation, improved regional service levels and freight mode switch from HGVs. It’s a no brainer.
They don’t take airplanes frequently yet they find their way to the airport and fly away. Why do they need to use the train every day to take one, a metropolitan area or two or three away?
You are wanting the EU to be something it cannot be. The EU only has legislative powers and limited partial funding abilities. It cannot force – it can only enable. Legislatively enabling means outlawing exclusionary / protectionist practices.
The EU has no means of forcing pre-separation SNCF or pre-separation RENFE to become as competent as SBB or pre-separation NS. All the EU can do is to legislate to liberalise the network to bypass the incompetence of SNCF and RENFE. One big challenge for providing good cross-border services is the ‘running my train on your network’. Yes, there already existed good cooperative practices in Central Europe, but the EU couldn’t force the likes of RENFE or SNCF into voluntary good-chap behaviour – the only way to ensure fair access was to mandate separation of track and trains.
The Italian high-speed system with the 4tph Rome – Milan frequency puts SNCF-dominated French high-speed network to shame.
On comparable conventional networks, Prague – Bruno and Prague – Ostrava enjoy a far superior level of service than Marseille – Nice or Marseille – Montpellier.
In the absence of strong state-directed service planning, competition land > state monopoly land.
Q.E.D.
The EU could actually fund fully-fast lines between major cities. It’s funding the hard parts – Brenner, Fréjus, Fehmarn – and could if it wanted also add a smaller amount of funding to ensure that Munich-Verona and Hamburg-Copenhagen trips are fast (Lyon-Turin is happening on its own as I understand it). It’s also funding enough sundry infrastructure projects around the Union and coordinating things that it doesn’t fund, like letting Stuttgart 21 be included in the Paris-Budapest axis, that it could co-fund key links like Saarbrücken-Frankfurt or the low-speed gaps in Belgium between Brussels and the Dutch and German borders.
EU funding for transport projects come from the CEF with fixed budgets. It can realistically only provide top-up funding for a small number of projects that hit European integration and/or helping poorer member states. EUR37 billion has been granted to the transport sector since 2014 and the 2021-2027 budget is EUR 25.8 billion. This is pretty small beer. To widen the funding scope would require considerable increase in member state contributions, and in the current financial climate that’s just not going to happen.
https://cinea.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/cef-transport-eu25-billion-available-infrastructure-projects-across-eu-2024-09-24_en#:~:text=Under%20the%20CEF%20programme%2C%20%E2%82%AC,billion%20in%20the%20transport%20sector.
It’s not just a matter of funding – consent and national politics are another key blocker. The EU isn’t the United States of Europe – it’s a bottom-up club made of sovereign states – each country has its own politics that’s best left to the individual country to work through. German local politics delay things; Spanish national / regional spats delay things. EU’s current legal and financial carrots and sticks are already seen by some as ‘too much Europe’ – to be seen to bypass or undermine local political processes in order to accelerate HSR construction could well spell the end of the EU. Things like Aachen Bypass, Ulm Bypass and Augsburg Bypass are unfortunately seen as unGerman and only Germany’s own political cultural change can address that. I’m an ardent Europhile and even I see the need to tread carefully.
If Germany drags its heels over Brenner North Access the EU doesn’t have any treaty powers to change things.
“The EU isn’t the United States of Europe – it’s a bottom-up club made of sovereign states – each country has its own politics“
The first part is only true in the sense that the EU sees itself as not wanting to be that. Too bad, that’s its obvious future, for several reasons (including some good and some bad).
The second part is pure bullshit. The member states give up their sovereignty when they join. This is perhaps not written down as such because there exists a formal process of secession.
The third part is already becoming false. The powers and existence of the EU Parliament (with its faction-formation rules) has driven the outright creation of some national parties (e.g. Momentum is transparently the Hungarian daughter of ALDE) and significant convergence between preexisting parties. But then again, currently Fidesz and the US Republican Party are boasting about their ideological cross-pollination. It’s perhaps less legible from the outside, but idiots (I assume of all compass directions, but my experience is with right-wing types) who don’t even speak English have nonetheless picked up quite a bit of the previously distinctly American “nutter” package. This also includes ongoing information channels; when covid arrived, I heard my (monolingual Hungarian) aunt claim that it was caused by 5G maybe a week after I first read the claim in English.
We have to work within the current treaty realities.
I doubt the EU will do more integration treaties in my lifetime.
They’re not going to do more formal treaties, just creeping eurofederalization – for example, EU-wide fiscal policy was considered unthinkable and then it happened during corona. What I’m saying is that the creeping eurofederalization can include a low two-figure billion budget for completing approaches to key cross-border projects, like Frankfurt-Saarbrücken, Munich-Kufstein, Fortezza-Verona, Hamburg-Puttgarden, Brussels-Antwerp, Cologne-Aachen, Basque Country-Dax, etc.
Fair, I could see that happening. That said the biggest cross-border problem is the timetable and that feels bilateral at best.
If we look at the new Paris-Berlin train that takes 8 hours, well even if you count the cross border bit as Strasbourg to Karlsruhe it is only 50 minutes of that trip. And if you count it “cross border” as Strasbourg to Appenwier where it joins the Rhine line which is a German mainline it is only 24 minutes on a stopping TER service. Difficult to argue it couldn’t be 15 minutes or so at most to do that trip non stop with the current infrastructure.
And sure that isn’t exactly quick but so what? The gain from speeding it up is at most a few minutes.
It’s a cross-border line from where the trains branch off the LGV Est mainline toward Frankfurt all the way to Frankfurt, in the sense that the German cities on the way are small enough that a domestic network has no reason to build a high-speed line. That’s why I’m talking about the need to invest in approaches and make sure they’re fast, rather than just 200 km/h as is the plan for the Italian side of the Brenner Base Tunnel and connection to Bologna.
Frankfurt South Station to Berlin Hbf is 340 miles by road, assuming rail distance is the same at an average of 150mph as per the Paris-Lyon TGV that trip would take ~2h20.
Frankfurt South to Karlsruhe is 86 miles by road and Karlsruhe to Strasbourg is 57 miles by road – at 90mph which the London bound British express trains typically average on 125mph/200kmh lines that trip would take ~1h40.
As per the timetable Strasbourg to Paris is 1h45 on the fastest services. Even with 15 minutes of stopping time over 3 stops and without any cross-border investments the whole trip should be able to be done in 6 hours or a little less. That should get you a respectable market share with a reasonable service level of ideally hourly service.
Berlin-Frankfurt is doable in a bit more than 2 hours once Erfurt-Fulda-Hanau is built (and this is planned); the road distance is kinda indirect.
I do also accept hourly is a lot.
But 3tph Paris-Strasbourg with 1tph extending to each of Berlin, Munich and Zurich feels objectively reasonable. They can be 8 or even 4-5 car trains in the likely case where there aren’t enough passengers to justify a 16 car service.
5 car trains to Germany would actually help with reliability as you could run a 5 car service from Strasbourg to Paris 3-4 times an hour and then plug in up to two 5 car services from Germany and still fit in the platforms when there was a delay.
@Alon Levy I highly doubt project-level EU intervention can meaningfully happen with ‘creepy federalisation alone’.
Frankfurt – Berlin isn’t going to be 2 hours. There’s only Gelnhausen – Wildeck Honebach. Germany’s politics is such that the line had to be diverted to serve Bad Hersfeld to obtain local consent. The remaining projects are all 160-200km/h upgraded tracks (my reading is Eisenach – Erfurt is considered fait accompli). There’s a weird mix of NIMBYsm and parochialism going on in Germany and only German domestic politics can work through that. The EU just wouldn’t get involved in drawing lines on maps and would stay well clear of being responsible for someone’s back garden view being affected or town being bypassed. This is the kind of EU over-reach that could throw the European project into jeopardy.
Berlin-Frankfurt is something I can see internal German politics produce – Erfurt-Eisenach and Fulda-Hanau are pretty likely to happen, and there are already some voices pointing out that wenn schon, denn schon regarding delay-prone shared sections like Berlin-Halle and Munich-Ingolstadt. The older generation of rail advocacy thinks 160 km/h ought to be enough for everybody and finds HSR distasteful, but the younger generation is different, and eventually the Greens are going to notice that all of their voters live in cities that would get served by a 300 km/h network (the party is already in favor of the Hanover-Hamburg-Bremen Y-trasse, it’s not consistently NIMBY) and that transportation matters for their agenda.
Frankfurt-Saarbrücken is where some EU coordination would be helpful, because, on pure domestic service, it’s a weak line.
I don’t see the need for Frankfurt – Saarbrucken – tricky terrain and tricky local politics. Just do a cut-off between north of Strasbourg and somewhere around Baden-Baden which would be a much smaller scale undertaking.
I agree that T&E study is cack. Almost all of the criteria listed are frills or gimmicks. Service frequency or clock-face timetabling don’t even feature. When SNCF comes near the top and NS near the bottom you know something has gone wrong. Of course there’s what questions you ask, but there’s also that chasm between stated preferences and revealed preferences. People take the basics for granted and are easily excited by the frills. By all useful measures of trip rates and financials, NS trumps SNCF several times over. There are probably cultural factors too – things large surveys like these don’t deal with very well. From an incredibly unscientific samples – I find the Dutch hate NS and the French rather defensive about SNCF.
At the end of the day, when you have network A carrying 500 happy passengers and network B 1000 grumpy passengers, network B is objectively the better network but network A will come top in surveys.
The British having world leading compensation is part of why our ridership stays high.
Getting all your money back makes it much easier not to care about a 2 hour delay – and it pressures the operators to deliver decent service.
I actually think you should get £100/hour compensation after 2-3 hours – would get some of the more tedious ultra-long delays fixed more quickly.
If the French/Spanish actually cared about using the infrastructure they have already built to a decent standard then we would move along nicely even without much if any extra money.
An issue is that social/economic ties between countries are weaker than expected in Europe despite of the common market because of different language/cultures/countries etc. Even EU flights are very disproportionately within the same country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_passenger_flight_routes#Europe_(2011%E2%80%932022)
Though I think some obvious inter-country HSR routes like Madrid-Lisbon and Berlin-Dresden-Prague-Vienna-Bratislava-Budapest make sense.
Another issue is the long-term stabilization of air travel costs due to more fuel-efficient aircraft, optimized LCCs, stabilization of fuel prices due to fracking+EV substitutes, and no EU taxation of aviation fuel (which should be changed). Also, privatized inter-country bus services are much cheaper than rail travel for budget travelers.
With the EU, there definitely are elements within the bureaucracy that are stuck in the 1990’s. But I don’t think its so much government by nudge, but that a system whose successes rely either on trade integration through regulation (airlines, telecoms, industrial projects). If you have a hammer everything will look like a nail.
When the EU starts developing institutions it requires explicit member state demands or its coming out of developments from the previous institutions pushed by crisis, hence FRONTEX coming out of the demands of Frontier states for support from behind-the-lines or the banking integration out of the Eurozone crisis. Or the emergence of EPPO out the interaction of West European suspicion of the other states and desire in E.Europe for anti-corruption agency outside the power of local corrupt populists. The problem here is that there doesn’t appear (to electorates/politicians/Eurocrats) to be crisis that pushes a Seldon Crisis moment, just generic mediocrity.
Also I disagree with the rhetorical point about complaining the EU doesn’t act a state. Not because it isn’t but because the EU’s advance as…state system requires the member states push it that way. Obviously France-Germany are the big roadblocks. But
N/B I would also totally own this being the UK exporting its misgovernance, as with Europe’s underperformance in IT*. If you’re building HSR the London-Low Countries-Paris is Europe’s Tokaido or Beijing-Shanghai-Guangdong.
*You have no idea how annoying it is dealing with Brexit Techbros thinking the EU is responsible for all their problems because it fines American big tech puny amounts. Then you ask them to describe US product market regulation and they dissolve into incoherence.
Also on the Japanese privatisation case. You underrate the JR’s ability to innovate without government. A lot of the key innovations of the Shinkansen since 1987, the abandonment of cafe cars, the super-optimisation of JR Tokai to N-700 Nozomi to maximise through-put efficiency etc show willingness to take political heat. Things that no European operator has truly dared to do. And also experiment most notably with JR East’s trying out double-deckers for the Joetsu shinkansen, which didn’t work but they didn’t overcommit. Its also bad e.g. JR Tokai making sure that the safety systems for the two halves of the network separated at Tokyo state don’t integrate.
I the key to railway conglomerate model that Japan has is that they have timetable i.e. operations autonomy, and autonomy on basic every day capital funding decisions (e.g. station repairs, upgrades and rolling stock). Monopoly power abuse is controll through the operator-specific cost-plus price regulations, the presence of alternatives (cars, planes, legacy privates, highway buses) and the conglomerates involvement in more competitive side businesses.
Indeed in Japan JR Freight is going through a crisis right now with multiple derailings and its the closest to the Franchise model in Japan owning very little track itself.
That said if one looks at the most incompetent operators in Japan its JR Shikoku, Kobe Subway, Kyoto Subway and depending on your interpretation JR Hokkaido**. I.e. the most public operators. (And the only two bus operators that aren’t shit in Japan are private too, Nishi-tetsu and Odakyu’s Kanagawa Chuo).
**JR Hokkaido’s hard because its the government in Sapporo and Tokyo that made it hold onto to so many dud lines at the expense of building both the Hokkaido Shinkansen and maxing out the Sapporo urban network and the core Asahikawa-Sapporo-Muroran-Hakodate-Seikan Tunnel.
Why do you say the Kyoto Subway is incompetent? I agree that it seems unsatisfying, but I’m curious what your take is.
Personally, I’ve used it a fair amount, but my feeling is that the station location is the biggest problem. They aren’t really convenient to most destinations, and even the ones that seem like they are on paper aren’t actually great. (E.g., the long walk to transfer from JR Kyoto to the subway.) I’ve speculated that a lot of the route was chosen to avoid historic/archaeological sites, but I haven’t found anything backing that up. (If I read Japanese better, I might be have found more.) Similarly, it could probably do with another line or two and a Tozai line extension to the west, but that’s also not easy.
Oh boy where do I start. Kyoto Kotsu (Kyoto Public Transport), makes a ton of mistakes.
There are some failures that are Kyoto city’s fault rather than Kyoto Kotsu. The biggest one being NIMBYs around the Tozai and Karasuma line areas that aren’t major tourist sites. You can’t afford that given how small Kyoto is. Apartments and hotels would have meant a bigger and better ridership to pay down the construction debts/subsidise the buses.
Also Kyoto and JR West made some big mistakes on conventional lines. Now don’t get me wrong, the new stations, and double tracking the Sanin/Nara lines has been a real achievement but there are a bunch of missed connections (Hankyu) and above all the failure to connect Saga-Sanin-Nara lines in a s-bahn through-running is just incompetence.
And yes the infamous dismantling of the tram network in the 1970’s was mistake instead of doing what Hiroden did and modernise the network on German principles. Looks like the new mayor is going to try with a line connecting the Keihan systems in North-Kyoto. But they need bus lanes like now. They can whinge about how tourists are ruining Kyoto, but those giant avenues are worse.
N/B A lot of this is about Kyoto’s toxic local politics. Where the Communists stronghold in Higashiyama basically NIMBYs everything it can, while Commies and local LDP agree to hate the Koreans (North of Kitaoji), the Burakumin (South and West), the New Religion. The trad institutions (the temples, the shrines, the Sake brewers, the artisanal guilds) say no to anything that looks like Kyoto might change.
This means you have a local LDP machine that wins by consistent but small margins, which means they alternate between stupid giganticism and do-nothingism. This isn’t unique to Kyoto, Kobe has a version of this too, albeit less NIMBYism and a lot more stupid infrastructure gigantism (Kaigan line).
Interesting, gives me a lot to think about. I think I misinterpreted your original post as (1) being about the subway specifically, rather than the whole agency, and (2) being about operations, rather than construction decisions.
I agree with most of these complaints, especially since I’ve spent hour-long trips on the Kyoto city bus pretty regularly. The -jo are certainly wide enough for BRT. (Myself, I’ve always been in the “bring back the streetcar” faction, but sure, bus lanes would be easier and a huge improvement over the present nightmarish state of affairs.)
I do think the bus operations have been evolving — this year I saw offboard fare collection at some of the busiest stops, for example. It’s a slow process, and there’s still a lot of low-hanging fruit, in my opinion. Personally, the easy operational thing I really want from Kyoto Kotsu is just reasonably-priced transfers between buses and bus/subway. I think it would let them reduce the number of bus lines that cross the entire city, which are of course expensive to operate and irritatingly slow.
JR’s complete failure to connect with the Hankyu line really is baffling, and god yes, through-running the San’in and Nara lines would be so much nicer. But yes, the extra frequency this year (presumably from the double-tracking) has been pretty handy.
Oh it makes complete sense, given that Hankyu and JR West are rivals for the Osaka-Kyoto traffic even though within Kyoto their networks are complimentary. The former is more valuable to both. Of course its long term stupid since their true enemies is the car, demographic declines and railways have network effects.
Again it required Kyoto city to make the call by 1. Paying for it. 2. Moving Sain station 700m west, to give better coverage of that part of Kyoto.
No I did somewhat undersell their recent changes, the combo of financial pressure thanks to population exodus, COVID and “Overtourism” has finally broken some political stalemates. But its not enough.
They should definitely have an LRT network, the main proposal connecting Eizan and Randen is a good start, then build a gride with the Randen to Omiya and then go through Higashiyama.
But that all depends on taking road away from cars, which is bus lanes and tourist centre light-BRT is the way to go in the interim.
Now that the Tozai line exists they should just upzone along it (especially in Yamashina) and long run interline with Keihan Uji line.
Nara-Sanin line is relatively easy, you just need a viaduct to provide a flying junction just west of Kyoto tation.
Oh and I forgot the new 20 Series is over budget. This incompetence just ruins public trust.
I mean its not all their fault, Kyoto government overbuilding roads in peripheral areas plus the moving of the arts university to a really expensive location while ignoring the fiscal, tourism and transportation issues; classic Kyoto.
The fixed fares of Shinkansen may be (very) good from the convenience of a business traveler, upper middle class person or high-income tourist, but in practice means that the system out price the median japanese person, that instead takes cheaper transportation.
Dynamic pricing would mean more poor people on Shinkansen trains during off-hours, that now sit on slower options, while a lot of half empty trains run during a lot of the day.
Shinkansen fares are very high compared to incomes in Japan. I dont think it is a success.
In China and Taiwan fixed fares are much cheaper, but instead tickets frequently run out, and you may frequently wait at the station for 5 hours, while 26 or 40 sold out trains depart.
Yes, Shinkansen prices off leisure travellers and that’s not a good model for Europe. It’s possible to have the best of all worlds by having a mixture of any permitted and train-specific tickets as widely practiced in many parts of Europe. You can have peak open fares and off-peak open fares too.
European trains are expected to carry grannies with suitcases, and backpackers with their levels of willingness to pay. If your business model cannot support an Interrailer turning up without a reservation (SNCF I’m looking at you) then you are not operating a railway.
Grannies with suitcases and backpackers also mean Shinkansen turnarounds are not a good example to follow for Europe.
The worst example of fixed fares I have seen was in southwestern China where high speed rail goes through mountains, meaning it is 6-9 times faster (instead of 2-4 times) than legacy trains and roads.
Still fares are national and fixed by km, meaning all demand goes to the high speed rail (good in theory), while nothing can be bought at reasonable hours even a week ahead (very very bad). Basically only travel agencies and people booking many weeks ahead have tickets.
China is a prime example of why compulsory reservation doesn’t work. Rationing demand is the laziest way of responding to demand. China also has Spanish/French levels infrastructure utilisation – you could say with such a rapidly expanding system it’ll take time for rolling stock to catch up so give it a few more years. Spain and France are basically mini-Chinas when it comes to HSR timetabling and ticketing. Spain even has the security theatre.
There is no such thing as a Spanish/French levels infrastructure utilisation. Competition improved the numbers but Spanish AV utilisation level is still about one third of France’s.
China has French and Spanish HSR construction costs, and LGV level infrastructure utilisation. The difference is that French HSR fares can pay for construction costs in a generation. At current Chinese levels, they don’t. The World Bank who financed some of the first PDLs noticed that average Chinese salaries were increasing faster than fares and suggested raising HSR ticket prices but the administration is not in a rush.
All you are saying is one third of sh!t is sh!tter but that doesn’t change the fact both are sh!t, and they are the same type of sh!t as China shi!t.
China’s travel market supports a far higher level of infrastructure utilisation than currently achieved. Under-capturing willingness-to-pay affecting the ability to scale up supply is one issue – an issue also affecting France. China falls into the same camp of ‘not knowing how to run a railway’ – no concept of clockface timetabling (not even on the busy Shanghai Beijing – where a line with a theoretical capacity of at least 18tph is capped at 14tph achieved on a small section and only for certain periods of the day), then there’s the retarded boarding procedures involving several holding pens (Spain is no better, France is only slightly better).
Then again in China it’s politics first economy second. Tracking people’s exact movements is more important than offering a true railway product. Much of the economic liberation from the late 80s notwithstanding there remain hangovers of the planned economy – annual price rises of government run services according to inflation is an alien concept. When faced with the chronic problem of train tickets selling out there are only blunt political instruments and not smart economic ones.
Among the three, China is uniquely shitty in that it’s national rail operates little to no decent regional/short distanaced conventional intercity services, especially where HSR is present (except for a few loco-hauled long distance trains reservced for the poor). So almost all regular traveller would opt for the HSR, leading to unnecessary congestion.
This is especially the case between Shanghai and Hangzhou, where there’re roughly ~150 trains per day per direction on the HSR, while there’re only 8 intercities on the legacy line, even though the legacy stations are more city centered (e.g. Jiaxing Station vs Jiaxingnan Station) and the legacy line supports a maximum speed of 140-160kph.
As a solo foreign tourist, I only needed the Shinkansen one way, as I didn’t need to return to my original city I arrived in Japan. So for me it was reasonably priced. But for a family of tourists it might be around $1000 round trip Osaka-Tokyo, so obviously they’ll just take the family car. Car ownership in Japan is relatively high despite high rail use, so families typically own at least one car they can use for long-distance leisure travel. Japanese airfares are also typically somewhat competitive.
According to MLIT, in fiscal 2023, expressway buses across all of Japan accounted for 68.5 million trips and 14.2 billion passenger-km.
Meanwhile, the nationwide Shinkansen network saw 400 million trips and 96.4 billion passenger-km. The Tokaido Shinkansen alone accounted for 160.7 million trips and 52.9 billion passenger-km.
The difference can’t all be tourists (only 25 million of them entered the country that year) or business travellers (for whom flying is also an option). The average Japanese traveller is still taking the Shinkansen.
I am going to Japan and am considering going to Nagoya from Tokyo as a day trip. The £150 return fare is definitely putting me off.
If you could get a £75 advance or an off peak only ticket or a cheaper Hilary/Kodama ticket that would be tempting.
The Tokyo-Nagoya Nozomi return fare is ¥22,200 (or £113). That’s not far off, say, a London-Cardiff day return booked one month in advance (£107 by my search) or a London-Manchester day return two weeks from now (£110 by my search).
Yeah and Nagoya isn’t worth a 1 day visit on 2 week jaunt, unless you are into Cars or Ceramics or really keen on authentic castles (Inuyama is schlep to get to compared to Hikone though).
One thing to keep in mind is Shinkansen is optimised for domestic day traffic, you spend more on the train so you can sleep in your home bed. Its actually a problem for tourist sites that are worth an afternoon but can’t convince people to stay the night (which along with food is where the money is).
There is a point that Shinkansen are expensive than they necessarily need to be, but that’s because
1. The taxpayer/Ministry of Finance want the train companies to payoff the construction debts. And in fairness this structure is a transfer from train users to taxpayers which is probably redistributive…probably.
2. Shinkansen fares are high as part of the unwritten social contract between the JRs and the government, fares pay for the loss making DMU lines many of which should have been closed a generation ago otherwise. Its why JR Shikoku and JR Hokkaido are desperate for a Shinkansen, and why JR Kyushu was only privatised after the Kyushu shinkansen mailine was shown to be a success. Furthermore, its clear that JR Tokai inherited the social mission of the Maglev from JNR (now of course JR Tokai’s Eternal President Kasai Yoshiyuki interpreted that dream and manipulated the politics according to that interpretation).
Just remember, its not just JRs are privatised and have shareholder fiduciary responsibilities, they are also net taxpayers, they pay VAT and corporation tax (which is relatively high in Japan).
I think it is a fair point. Shinkansen market share have grown over time, and today is a bit less of the luxury option it was 30 and 15 years ago, on its main lines.
Still I think the high prices have consequences, and tickets are objectively high relative incomes.
And even if the modal split is high, there are probably lots of totally abandoned trips due to high prices, not visible in modal share percentages, but at high cost to the welfare of not very rich Japanese, and the functioning of Japan as a society.
I would say that applies to all transport across Japan.
Japanese expressway buses are more expensive to use than their European counterparts. From a quick search, a Tokyo-Nagoya return on JR Tokai Bus is ¥6,200 (€38) at the advance discount rate, while London-Manchester return on FlixBus on the same dates is €18.50.
As for air travel, a Tokyo-Osaka return next month will set you back at least €76 (on Peach), while a London-Edinburgh return on the same dates starts from €40 (on EasyJet).
Peach is €115 return for the weekend of the 24th January Narita to Kansai including a checked bag on the evening flights vs EasyJet being €130 return Luton-Edinburgh on the evening flights including a checked bag.
So it depends what you are doing.
Parking is expensive relative to incomes, private car use is expensive relative to income. Japan wants users to internalise their infrastructure demand costs. For the benefit of taxpayers. It has its virtues. Comparing to the UK where the ideal is that some magic (Socialism of Magical Labour government/Free markets as directed by Thatcherite Central Government) will pay for everything.
Also there is a big X factor, that partially explains why the Shinkansen operators don’t engage in lower prices which is that because of the work culture Japan, rush-hours and holiday seasons (the big 3 Obon, Golden Week and New Years) means demand is relatively inelastic.
N/B Matthew Hutton if you want a better deal on a Shinkansen daytrips, JR Tokai has basically none, the others do, JR East has a bunch of passes, some of which you can also double up in JR East’s Greater Tokyo network. E.g. daytrip to Sendai, then next day to Narita
https://www.jreast.co.jp/multi/en/pass/eastpass_t.html
Alon,
You mention that one failed prominent project can poison the high-speed idea. Is CAHSR going to do that in the USA?
The Acela and California HSR did that in the US; the Acela’s meh performance, and California’s inability to deliver, led to fatigue by the time of the Biden stimulus.
CAHSR got a huge grant from the Biden infrastructure package, roughly the same size as its AARA+FY10 money in nominal dollars with a better match ratio. BLW also got a large grant. A bigger problem was no HSR planning was done in the previous decade outside those two projects and Texas, the latter of which wasn’t capable of submitting an application at the time the money was handed out.
HSR is now a mature concept. Other than the fundamentals of where you build it (which is dictated by hard physical constraints and politics) there’s nothing in the nitty gritties of operation that have any bearings on how you design the line. One the line is built operators will just run trains in ways that are physically possible.
There’s nothing special about how TGVs that are somehow specially adapted to the French LGV network only possible from government masterminding. In a standard 8-car duplex TGV a standard class car has 80 seats and a first class car has 60 seats – guess what almost exactly the same as the standard and first class coaches in an 8-car ICE3Neo or 8-car ETR1000. Yes the end coaches in a TGV are marginally longer than the tapered end coaches of the (true) MUs but the TGV buffet car offers zero passenger capacity. There is almost zero capacity advantage in the TGV design. The poor access/egress and acceleration of the TGV are pure bugs for zero features. This is all because of some weird obsession with not having underfloor motors. To stick to the powercar design when the single-deck, flat-floor, distributed traction design is standard and mature is pure nationalist fad.
The line about the Fourth Rail Package causing governments to lose control over how infrastructure is used is simply false. There’s nothing stopping government from letting a PSO and stipulating the exact timetable it wants to run on the HSL it has just built.
SNCF’s obsession is with weight and capacity. While the ICE 3neo (460 tons for 439 passengers) and the ETR 1000 (500 tons for 457 seats) come at over 1 ton per seat, the Duplex TGVs (380 tons for 508 to 600 pax depending on the configuration) are in the 750 to 600 Kgs/seat range. SNCF also believes that the articulated design is safer in case of derailment.
SNCF would not mind distributed power but Alstom has so far been unable to fit it on the “Jakobs” look-alike bogies. This is why SNCF is for the time being sticking with the TGV formula instead of switching to the HSR EMUs present on Alstom catalog. The TGV-M which is expected to enter service in 2025 should simply be a significant improvement on the previous generations in terms of capacity and energy use.
Fair point. TGVs are lighter than the ICE Neo and ETR 1000. The weight to seat difference is exaggerated though as the DB and TI go for space inefficient interior designs by choice (bike spaces, large toilets, compartment seating, large crew compartments for DB and Executive Class for TI) – normalise for those and you get closer weight-to-seat ratios.
SNCF is alone in considering the weight-to-seat ratio and Jacobs bogie design to be important above all else, where almost the entire rest of the world is going the other way. Let’s not mention the incredibly inefficient rolling stock utilisation on SNCF land. I’m sorry, I stand by my point on nationalistic stubbornness.
Still, there is nothing in France’s LGV configuration that depends on using TGV-type stock. If someone came along and replaced the operational concept with trains with ‘generic HSR operation’ with better acceleration, better dwell time management and similar capacities (based on Velaro or Zefiro platforms) the system would work far better.
Sure, the French LGVs happily accept EMUs but SNCF’s business plan doesn’t include changing the laws of physics. Acceleration will not be improved by exchanging TGVs with a better power/mass ratio (24.42 kW/t on the Avelia Euroduplex) by Zefiros ETR 1000 (19.6 kW/t) or AVE 103 type Velaros (17.39 kW/t).
By the way, I made a mistake on my previous post. The new permanent magnet engines fit on an articulated TGV bogie but SNCF does not see the need.
Someone else will come along with a business plan that has a better understanding of physics.
At low speeds the maximum acceleration depends on the proportion of weight that is on powered axles – i.e. ‘grip’ is the limiting factor rather than power. At higher speeds grip becomes less relevant.
With better acceleration and dwell management stop a typical TGV intermediate call can save around 1.5-2 minutes – shave 1 minute from the standard 3-minute well, and shave 0.5 or 1 minute from the initial acceleration curve.
Yes, at low speed tractive effort (per mass) is the limit of acceleration. At high speed? Power per mass.
This is significant enough that the newest commuter EMUs come with a burst power feature, allowing their motors to be driven well above their nominal power rating, because they will be able to cool back down during cruise.
That means that TGVs are optimized for the “airlines on rail” model. They spend most of their time at high speed. The TGV 001 prototype sent power to the intermediate bogies but the motors were a nuisance. Nowadays, lighter motors can be installed without a problem. They have been running on Italo’s AGV for years but SNCF does not see the need for the TGVs operating on the LGVs or Spanish AV.
The TGVs have been safe, popular (France has the highest HSR passenger-km ridership per capita on the planet), and economical. Most years, SNCF’s long-distance arm is profitable despite relatively low ticket prices and high tolls.
There are other models. JR Central’s Tokaido Shinkansen is awesome but does not seem to be transferable. China’s HSR program is impressive but the finances are difficult to evaluate. The end of the Cold War interrupted the financing on Italian political parties by the Soviet Union and the CIA. Between Christmas and New Years Eve 1991, Italian congressmen and women worked over time. The entire Alta Velocita/Alta Capacita program was voted two days before the EU directive requiring EU-wide open tendering of the works came into law. The works were predicted to be cheap and 60% of the money would come from private investors. Private investors like the Port of Genova have since said that they were not interested by a third tunnel under the Passo Dei Giovi because their hinterland was too small to make transfer of the containers on the rails viable but the works started anyway. Finally, the program will cost about ten times as much as predicted, private investors are missing, and user’s financing close to zero. Before the opening of Italy’s AV to competition, a small fraction of the 13 Euros/train-km toll payed by high speed trains was put aside to pay some of the construction costs. In 2016, to avoid NTV’s bankruptcy, the tolls were cut by about one third and only cover maintenance costs. Spain’s AV tolls are at the same level, about one fourth of the average ones on Paris-Lyon and Tours-Bordeaux LGVs, but all AVE operators including Ouigo Espana are losing money. As far as I am concerned, more high speed trains per hour are a gimmick until such level of service is proven to financially sustainable.
If access charges are priced to recover construction costs, then it makes even more sense to run as many trains as possible to spread the fixed cost. If SNCF Reseaux varies access charges according to demand then it’s acting in the best interest of the railway. If it maintains high charges despite operators knocking on the door then it’s trying to protect the monopoly of its sister company and should be invesgated for anti-competition.
SNCF Reseau LGV access charges vary with demand according to a complex formula. The process was not found to be anticompetitive by the EU.
SNCF Reseau paid for the connections with the legacy lines but was too indebted to finance the Tours-Bordeaux LGV. The access charges are paid to the builders consortium LISEA until July 2061. SNCF-Voyageurs said that they can’t make a profit there unless the TGVs are pretty full. Recently, two new ventures, Le Train and Proxima, announced they were respectively ordering ten Talgo Avril and twelve TGV-M to compete on the Atlantic corridor.
Either SNCF believes its current supply represents the maximum the market can support given the existing track access regime;
Or Le Train and Proxima believe there is untapped demand that can be met profitably under the current track access regime.
The two cannot simultaneously be right.
In 2013, SNCF’s 520 TGVs offered a total of 220 000 seats. In the following years, lower gasoline prices, combined with strikes, terrorism, the rise of access charges, low cost airlines, long distance bus services known as Cars Macron and the Blablacar ride sharing platform put the TGV economic model under stress. SNCF cut down on capacity and relies now on 376 TGVs for domestic services. These TGVs are larger but 30 000 seats were lost. They run harder because motors require less maintenance but it is widely believed that SNCF was taken by surprise by the post-Covid rebound and that the market can support a larger number of services. Trenitalia and RENFE are already providing some. Le Train and Proxima want to do the same and note that they ordered trains with concentrated power when other options were available.
So they scraped TGVs that worked rather than see if they could get British/Low Countries l/German environmentalists/people who don’t like flying to ride the train.
What a dysfunctional organisation.
These trains do not fit in the British gauge and cannot be legally certified for Chunnel Tunnel operations. Should SNCF run shuttles between St Pancras and Ashford until HS2 opens?
SNCF should run a serious service to Lille, Brussels and probably Amsterdam.
It should be timed to connect with the Eurostar from London where possible.
An access charge regime intended to recover the fixed cost of construction should not penalise the running of more trains. If it indeed is the case that a change in the level of access charges contributed to a fall in the level of service, then that is the mother of all perverse outcomes.
In those early stages of liberalisation and separation, SNCF group had the unique responsibility of shaping an industry structure that had the right incentives. It could have made representations to the French government to have services operated under non-subsidy commercial-risk PSOs and with access charges split into fixed and variable elements, so that a PSO holder or PSO authority would be incentivised to run more trains as the incremental access charge would only be a variable one. Where we’ve ended up suggests a fundamental failure on the part of SNCF Group.
If it’s not incompetence it’s malice. Which is it?
Someone should point that out to these people
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/11/21/we-have-northeast-corridor-runtimes/
I think you’ve unknowingly stumbled on the root of the problem: investment in HSR should come at the expense of investment in airports and highways, not in regional rail. At the end of Spain’s big push for high speed rail, it had underused airports and highways that needed government rescuing, while local services (Cercanías and Rodalies) were crumbling. HSR is not a commuting solution.
HSR can be a commuting option with a thoughtful design with high station frequency, and multiple suburban stops.
The taiwanese HSR is mostly such trips, and you can have very very high capacity, if you run long trains at 15 trains an hour or so which is possible with dedicated tracks, maybe slightly less with mixed local/express service.
But you need to keep down per trip costs. The sacrifices made for intercity traffic is trivial, if you maintain a mix of local and express travel. Any thoughtful cost/benefit analysis, treating all humans/trips/travel hours the same will reach this conclusion i think. It is political economy prioritizing intercity travel that leads to different design choices (or very very non-dense urban fabrics).
Spain might be a case where a continuous spacing of stops makes little sense die to extreme urbanization, but that is no excuse to not drop several stations in every major city.
AVE, TGV and ICE are very different beasts to Cercanías, RER, and S-Bahn, the first was designed for inter-metropolitan travel and the second for inside-metropolitan travel. 15 trains per hour and lots of stops look to me like a faster commuter rail, and nothing remotely similar to what has been built in Europe.
Now, your point makes sense to me, I don’t think it’s a dumb idea to use the technology of high speed rail to complement regional rail. I think Barcelona would benefit if some long distance Regional or even Rodalies services could use the high speed lines through the city as shortcuts to avoid messing up with the most capacity-critical Rodalies. And technically it’s possible to commute from Ciudad Real to Madrid or from Girona to Barcelona.
But my point here is that we tend to conflate the technology with the service. AVE or TGV give services that are the same as planes or out-of-metropolitan highways. It does not make sense that they fight for budget with commuter rail, just because they all use steel wheels.
Note in Spain particularity, Spanish cities have their several heavy rail train stops, the complexity comes with the fact that high speed network is designed at international gauge and conventional network at Iberian gauge so the two are very separate pieces of infrastructure.
Well Taiwanese HSR run Shinkansen trains and are clearly technologically and with regards to speed HSR.
Main point being that there really is no good reason to not let the category HSR overlap fully with regional trains. If you build a dedicated track for HSR, build a lot of stops along it, even though not all trains are going to stop at every single station. This is neither about service patterns or technology, but rather how to plan stations, along tracks that are being built. For a Spanish example, the Catalonian HSR tracks clearly should have more intermediate stops. It goes through a very dense region.
If necessary let the urban/regional structure evolve based on the new alignment of the HSR, as is common in Japan, China, and Taiwan.
The other advantage of suburban stops is you can add passing loops or turnbacks that allow to do padding and overtakes outside city centres. That gives Japanese HSR greater reliability and more rapid timetable recovery than other systems.
Hint hint HS2 with its 6 platforms at Euston just like Jr Tokai in Tokyo station, build some new town stops at Aylesbury, Brackley, Kenniworth.
I do see the sense in what you say, but it’s hard to imagine it in practice for a few reasons. The first one, being that this investment would compete with the local transit projects. And if your system has problems of capacity and reliability, thinking about high speed seems a fancy luxury. Second, one of those extra stations does actually exist, Catalan government demanded a link to El Prat airport (“because others have it, and we cannot be less”), and Spanish government built the stop in El Prat town, useless for the airport, but pretty good as an intermodal station. Then all politicians met there, cut the ribbon, and never ever put any service stopping there <cynical>because Adif doesn’t want their super duper milking cow BCN – Madrid services lose any time because there’s a peasant regional in the way</cynical>.
@Jordi, you either don’t allow local trips on the high speed trains or you price them much higher like in Japan.
Come on, giant asteroid.
Or global warming.
Or bird flu.
Because humans (I am one – I checked) are becoming too stupid to survive.
Turns out they screwed up their calculations for Switzerland, which is now in position 11.
https://www.rts.ch/info/economie/2024/article/cff-une-erreur-de-calcul-les-fait-chuter-au-11e-rang-des-compagnies-europeennes-28741009.html
The US interstate highway system was the largest examples of “state planning” on earth.
Quick Note: State planning is state planning.