I think a lot of airport owners and operators would be upset to learn that the US government Chavezized their properties! Airports themselves are generally run as for-profit operations (even when owned by local governments), and ATC is highly subsidized via user taxes. Appropriated funds generally are used in recognition that ATC has a pretty significant national defense role (e.g., the military uses the same ATC system).
As a public good and for infrastructure, I don’t disgree with arguments for public rail per se. I do question the use of taxpayer money for subsidizing non-profitable, commuter-only lines, though, because they no longer server a broad, public good; they serve only the wealthy that can afford them versus using the existing infrastructure.
Sure, Deutsche Bahn has often been accused of using the €29 offer as a mere advertising gimmick, so they can put low fares on their ads which nobody ever pays. That’s an impression a lot of people have, and it sure would be good for the reputation of the corporation if they were more transparent about how many of the €29 tickets they actually put up for sale each month, and on which routes. But isn’t airline pricing similarly intransparent?
It also helps to search for routes and times that are not typically used by business travellers. Deutsche Bahn, like any airline, knows all too well that business passengers are willing to pay much more than private travellers, since they can claim expenses from employers or business partners. There is not much of an incentive to offer a lot of discounted tickets on these routes.
You’re comparing fundamentally different things here. You didn’t have the high-speed ICE network back then - experimental trains started running in the 1970s, but the network didn’t become publicly available until the 1980s, and it was much slower then than it is now, both because the trains themselves were slower and because the tracks between the cities were only gradually upgraded to allow for the 300+ kmph technology. Sure, there were D-Zug and Intercity and Eurocity and all that in the 1980s and early 1990s under the old Bundesbahn, but that’s simply not the same thing as a 2010 ICE.
I perfectly agree that there should be more competition in rail transportation - that’s why I advocate pulling the privatisation of Deutsche Bahn through and letting competitors operate long-distance routes as well, in a non-discriminatory manner. This would further drive down fares.
It seems to me you’re judging Deutsche Bahn and airlines by different standards. Why is Deutsche Bahn to be expected to provide services in the countryside and airlines are not? Why wouldn’t you expect airlines to provide services from and especially between regional centres as well (hell, there’s a lot of these small aerodromes around!)? Sure, you can get your run-of-the-mill flight from Paderborn or soemthing like that to Frankfurt, for people getting a connecting flight there. But show me a commercial airline offering regular scheduled services from, say, Paderborn to Dresden, if you expect Deutsche Bahn to do the same.
I know a guy who has one, but he commutes a lot between Frankfurt and Stuttgart. Costs something like five grand a year, which I think is not that much - a fancy car with insurance and everything will cost you about the same, I guess.
Are you saying that Deutsche Bahn intentionally misleads you to keep you from getting low fares? That’s quite an accusation. I agree that the online ticketing platform is not optimal, and that some staff members are not perfectly trained - but that’s just normal incompetence you’d find everywhere. Intentional misleading is yet another thing.
Well, that’s what you’d expect from discount tickets with limited availability, no? One tip, though: If you look for tickets online, you may want to toy around with the option where you can change connecting times. Sometimes the connecting time built into the system is just too long - with the good intention of allowing also elderly people, or people travelling with heavy luggage, find a route where they can actually get their connection. But if you’re a fast walker and think that you can make the change between trains in a shorter time than the period provided (which is five minutes, IIRC), you can choose the appropriate settings and find connections which the default settings would not have indicated.
I am not saying everything is alright with Deutsche Bahn - there’s a lot of space for improvement. But I think that not all of the accusations regularly tossed at it are justified, and that people judge Deutsche Bahn by a much stricter yardstick than they measure competing modes of transport against.
One very small datapoint to counter the claim of “unique”: most Londoners and those of us near London - at least those that I know - will far more readily jump on the Eurostar to get to Brussels or Paris than they will dealing with getting to an airport and flying there. Even though it has to slow down in the tunnel, the high-speed aspect of it means that it’s 2 hours (or less) to Brussels, and just over that to Paris. It’s an unnerving but very pleasant experience to walk off the train at the Gare du Nord and straight into the heart of the city, rather than screwing around with transportation from the airport.
Duh. Why do you think I said I spend hours trying all options? Because I try all times and days, work days and weekends, early noon late, to find the cheap tickets, and yet come up empty. While the airlines do offer cheap options.
I’m against further privatisation, because what we’ve got already has not lead to any competion with lowered prices. The only thing the small private companies do is pay lower wages, while asking for comparable prices. And the Bahn has cut services and routes continually since they stopped being DB and started preparing for the stock market.
The only way I can see that privatization would be helpful is if the politicans got off their asses and tightly regulated minimum services to be provided and minimum wage and a fair, easy to understand ticket system. Without that, I see no evidence against things going further downhill the more private it becomes, because only profit counts then, not the customers.
Because I’m judging Die Bahn against airline standards on regional services; I’m comparing the current standard to what should be. Die Bahn is one means of transport comparable to the car - where roads go everywhere and are upkept; planes are for a different reason. That’s why even the Bahn vision of future mobility (and the reasonable Greens, and VCD and ADAC!) is of “combined mobility”: you use public transport to get to the main station, take the train long distance, rent an electric car at your destination, travel small distances with a rented bike.
Well, 2nd class is about 3600 Euros a year -which is only worthwhile if you travel really around a lot like a public person (Harald Schmidt has one, as he told in an interview in the Nov. ed. of mobil, but then, he doesn’t hurt for money).
I don’t know how much a fancy car costs, because again, that’s not the comparision. Since train should be standard both for enviroment and for the normal population, train needs to be affordable. The standard is therefore not the middle class Facharbeiter with his income, but the single working mother. Can she afford a train ticket to visit the Schwarzwald, or is an airplane journey to Turkey for one week trip cheaper? Yes, it is, and while I agree that’s wrong and needs to be fixed, as long as it is that way, people will use cheap airlines because they can’t afford the Bahn, not because they have wrong impressions.
First, I’m not saying they mislead me, I’m telling you that the system is set up wrong. Whether that’s a programming mistake or intentional, I don’t know. But if you can explain what I experienced without calling it a mistake, I’d like to hear it.
Secondly, Pro Bahn and Stiftung Warentest each regularly test the counter personal on how good they are at advising normal people (that is, not-frequent travellers) on special savings, and they regularly fail like a bomb. The first times, die Bahn speaker said “Oh, so sorry, we will try to train our personnel harder”, but lately, they don’t seem to bother anymore. Hey they want to earn money, who cares if some poor Schmoe pays too much? That’s the impression the management gives because Look! Stock market! Privatisation! All private is good!
Actually, quite the opposite. The standard change time is rather short, esp. if you have a lot of luggage and several platforms. You have to esp. choose for a change time of 10 min. or longer!
And the better travel options I mean never come up. Like being required to change in Düsseldorf, which means walking 10 platforms, when changing in Duisburg is only 2 platforms. I don’t know if you know, but the search for “connections” and for “buying tickets” is exactly the same. It’s not a problem of cheap tickets (well, in the sense that I’m bound to the worse connection), it’s a problem with the connection algorithm in the first place that doesn’t show up certain things that a seasoned traveller knows.
Keep in mind that population and density are very different. Just because you have a lot of people, doesn’t mean your urban center is dense. Density is very, very important when making any public transit decisions.
That said…the biggest reason we don’t meaningful high-speed rail in North America is quite simple. Automobile ownership and operation is cheap and subsidized. Ridiculously cheap parking relative to areas with solid high speed rail networks is also a major factor.
Living in Paris I wouldn’t envision flying to Lyon (Paris-Lyon being the first and most used TGV line, and also, population-wise being somewhat comparable to Tokyo/Osaka), it would make no sense. I would have to go out of Paris to the airport, wait, fly, land somewhere outside Lyon, find my way into Lyon. With the TGV I go from city downtown to city downtown in two hours.
I hardly can see in what circumstances it could make more sense to fly. The proportion of people flying between those two cities is probably minuscule in comparison with the number of passengers travelling on the TGV.
That’s your OP but it’s not backed by anything but your gut feeling. There’s a serious dose of ethnocentrism for an American to be awed by the Japanese Bullet Train and say “why hasnt anyone else in the world built a high speed train”. Plenty of countries have. Some of them are highly profitable systems. They’re technically quite advanced. The French TGV system has ran at a top speed of 357.16mph, compare to the record of 361 mph for the Bullet Train.
Both systems are facing their technical top speed limits now , and a new kind of tech will have to be used to enhance performances.
So, maybe reformulate your question as “Why has the US never invested in high speed train when several industrialized nations have been doing so for decades now?”.
P.S: and another thing that makes high speed train desirable is the connection with a well developed intra city transport system. I would say both the Japanese and the French system rely on this.
Schnitte’s and constanze’s discussion reminds me of why I never took the trains when I was in Germany specifically and Europe in general. I had a car. I had gasoline. I had the ability to go 160+ kph (even outside Germany). And I had a little bit of time. It was simply easier to drive between Amsterdam, Cologne, Duisburg, Ghenk, Ghent, Paris, and Tours. For a lot of the same reasons, I drive from Detroit to Toronto, or Detroit to Chicago, or even Detroit to Louisville (except, substitute planes for trains). Oh, and there is train service from Detroit to each of those.
Of course when I was actually stationed in Hanau as a poor soldier, I used the trains all the time, just not whatever the fast ones were then (InterCity or something?). We had a community car that I contributed towards, but no one wanted to let anyone else take it out of town for the weekend. Even on an airplane in non-first class you get assigned seats (except for crappy airlines). Not so on Germany trains. Frankfurt to Berlin was the worst travel experience of my life as a result.
For example, let’s look at Chicago - St. Louis. This is a route which is frequently mentioned for high-speed rail outside of the Northeast Corridor.
Such a train would almost undoubtedly have, as its end points, downtown Chicago (probably Union Station) and downtown St. Louis (probably Gateway Station). It’s roughly 300 miles from one city to the other (I-55 is pretty close to a straight shot, and the Amtrak route follows that route, for at least part of its way). Depending on traffic, and your exact start and end points, it can be a 4 to 6 hour drive.
If I live in, or near, downtown in one of those cities, it’s fairly simple to get to the proper station. Via high-speed rail, that’d make it somewhere between a 2 and 3 hour trip from downtown Chicago to downtown St. Louis (2 hour is probably best-case, since that’s the highest speed of the Acela). (For comparison, taking an Amtrak train between the two cities today takes 5:30, which doesn’t really save much time.)
But, a lot of the population in U.S. “markets” isn’t concentrated in or near the central city. In Chicago, for example, much of the population growth is occurring in the outer counties. Naperville, for example, is a suburb, about 30 miles west of downtown Chicago, which now has a population of about 150,000. If I live in Naperville, in order to get to Union Station, I need to either drive downtown (which can take an hour or more depending on traffic), or take Metra (the commuter train, which takes a half-hour if you get an express, or an hour if you get stuck with a local).
So, I’ve likely added an hour onto that quick 2-to-3 hour high-speed train trip, just to get to the train. If my destination isn’t in downtown St. Louis, I could easily be adding another hour on the other end. And, suddenly, high-speed rail doesn’t look that much more attractive than driving.
Japanese freight trains and sleepers run all night, on different lines parallel to the Shinkansen tracks.
Shinkansen lines ONLY carry shinkansen trains, there is never any delay for freight or slower local passenger trains. The same solution would work in the UK, for proper high speed rail this is what you need, completely separate lines that ONLY carry high speed rail. That’s how they get that 6 second punctuality figure.
OK, yeah London-Paris via Eurostar is maybe close to having the same reputation as the preferred option over flying… when they extend the Eurostar trains all the way to Amsterdam and Geneva then it’s getting closer… However Eurostar’s are delayed for all kinds of reasons, snow, leaves on the tracks, industrial actions, while JR keeps that average of 6 seconds within expected date even when they have 2 meter snow falls on the area around Mt Fuji on the Tokaido Shinkansen
This is a very good point… there are all kinds of hidden subsidies to both Road and Air Travel… for example Aviation jet fuel is usually not taxed anywhere near the level that Diesel or Petrol is in almost all developed countries. If it was the cost of air travel would be much higher and maybe rail would be more competitive.
Lets take the proposed VFT train corridor between Sydney and Melbourne. In pure return from the ticket sales it’s nonsense… you’d never pay it back… But in terms of the benefits to Australian economy and competitiveness it would pay itself back many times over.
A 3 Hour journey on the Sydney / melbourne 1000 km distance would mean that towns like Goulburn, Bowral, Wagga Wagga and Wangaratta are suddenly within 1 hour of a major metropolis. Currently all those towns are dying, there’s no jobs, everyone is moving to the big cities. the VFT would save them, like it revitalized small towns in Japan that were dying before the Shinkansen. Then there’s the benefit in reduction of carbon emissions and the potential boost to tourism etc etc.
The Americans on this board will hate this, but the obvious benefits from the massively expensive cost to get proper high speed rail setup (and the inability of private companies to ever fund it) is a pretty good argument for socialism to me..
But that’s what we’re all saying, you can’t justifiably get “proper” high-speed rail setup throughout most of the United States, therefore I have nothing to hate. If it were feasible, it wouldn’t necessarily be a socialist program. We free market capitalists understand such basic concepts as “infrastructure” and “public good,” too. I fervently disagree with tolls roads, for example. Lacking competition, my public water system is important infrastructure. But high-speed rail in the vast majority of the United State isn’t about socialism/free-markets, but about emulating some other country just because you think something’s a good idea without thinking about the economics behind it. Even socialist countries have to worry about economics.
Certainly you could if you look at the bigger picture and not just the returns from ticket sales. A dedicated high speed 300kph+ network on seperate tracks connecting New York / Boston / DC to Chicago and throughout the larger midwest towns would revitalise the dying rust belt towns in the same way I’m saying it would for the small towns that are currently more than 2 hours drive outside Sydney and Melbourne.
It would be a massive overtaking which could only be government funded, but so were the US National High Way System and the Apollo Program and Manhatten project.
Think you could get that US east coast to mid west high speed rail network for $3.7 Trillion? That’s how much the financial bailout cost in 2009… Does anyone on here really think it’s better that it got sent BACK to the bankers that caused the problem in the first place?
Not true, but it isn’t designed for passenger use. So many posters hre, very much in love with the romance of train rides, ignore that the US loves practicality. And as it happens, heavy freight is a heavy, heavy user of rail traffic. This is why you’d have to vuild all-new lines for a very limited market which wouldn’t use them all that much. It’s a bad investment, in a way the highways were not.
This being another example of the unrealistic expaectations. People can alreayd easily get to any of those rustbelt cities. It’s easy. You can hop in your car, take aplane, ride a bus. You have several varied options.
And… people mostly don’t. The cities have bad economic environments for a variety of reasons. Just improving transportation to a place doesn’t increase the number of people who neccessarily go there. More to the point, your nice mental concept for your train service isn’t going to work. I can see some ridership, but not much, and not enough to make it worthwhile. Amazingly, the rest of us don’t find the thought of subsidizing the amusement of free-spending liberal city-dwellers who like to disdain cars terribly exciting.
Second, stop arguing this is GQ. If you would like to make a GD post, go ahead. Or petition a mod to mvoe the thread. It’s obvious you have an iopin you want to vomit forth rather a question to be answered.
Thanks for your post which is devoid of any meaningful substance except your own ignorant opinions… In contrast I am providing hard facts and research papers…
Eg here’s a paper that might enlighten you, how about reading section “4.2 Example of urban redevelopment near shinkansen station” ?
Cars and planes are both effectively subsidised. If car drivers had to pay the full cost of road construction and jet fuel was taxed like other fuels then those forms of transport can’t pay for themselves either. I don’t live in the US but if I did I’d resent subsisiding your redneck gas guzzling lifestyle from my hard earned tax dollars.
And you wouldn’t have to. In the US, motorists pay the entire cost of all highways and a little over half the cost of local streets (which, of course, we had even before autos).
Commercial aviation pays for itself as well through excise taxes, landing fees, and passenger facility charges. Except in small cities, airport construction is done with revenue bonds repaid from landing fees and the like.
