The problem is also the local transportation: in Munich we desperately need investments on the S-Bahn, which has been neglected in the past twenty years, as the majority of public transportations in the city.
There is a project for doubling the tracks in the city center, that is on a good way to become more notorious than the Berlin airport: they are talking about it since the '70, they started working in 2017, with planned opening in 2028 for ~3B euros, and now they are talking about opening it in the late '30 with an estimated cost of more than 7B euros. 1B for each km of tunnel, that's madness.
Without it, we cannot have fast connections to the airport (currently 40 minutes away from the city center), and cannot increase the number of trains, currently running in a 20-minute cadence because 7 lines meet in the city center, so 7 lines on 1 track.
Another thing I don't understand; why Italy and Germany aren't to start building the access tracks to the Brenner Base Tunnel (BBT)?
BBT is incredibly on track with all the deadlines, so if they really open it in 10 years, we will be able to do Fortezza - Innsbruck at 250km/h, and then Munich - Innsbruck at <200 km/h, as Fortezza - Verona. That's simply ridiculous.
I don't own a car and try to fly as little as possible, but it is quite difficult for distances that, frankly, should be a no-brainer.
The ICE-Terminal at the airport Frankfurt am Main (FRA) is a bless! I live in the middle of southern Germany. Sitting into the ICE and wait for FRA is joyful. It is more comfortable to reach than Stuttgart and Munich. The only annoying part is the old Stuttgart "Kopfbahnhof" but luckily this will be fixed soon. I'm thankful that the peopledecided to go for this effort, despite Germans fear changes.
Sadly ICE tickets are very expensive. When you travel with more than one person using the car is often better. If I could wish for some things:
* Affordable inter-city tickets, instead of very cheap local tickets
* An ICE every 30 Minutes (high frequency, not just high speed)
* Therefore Deutsche Lufthansa can focus more on mid- and long range flights. They prefer that and complement with the Deutsche Bahn.
* As rpadovani I hope for a connection Brenner Base Tunnel
* Munich should also become through station "Durchgangsbahnhof". These "Kopfbahnhof" thing is a weird concept from the old kingdoms and doesn't make sense. Even in Paris this concept is questionable.
* Please Germans. Get more courage and appreciate useful changes. From windmills, airport runways or train lines. It is not about ruining the landscape.
For entertainment, the (in)famous speech of Edmund Stoiber about the Transrapid. It is weird for native speakers, too.
I remember as kid that some people dreamed about the Transrapid (a high speed train, hovering with magnets). The politician above wanted to connect Munich Central-Station with Munich Airport (FJS) with it because the local trains are a pitty.
The current estimate is that the overall project will take until ~2040 (though I think we all know how that'll go) with ongoing improvements to frequency on individual lines.
I own a car and that’s single reliable mean of transportation in/around Munich. Airport line causes me always the stress since I am not sure if I am in the right part of the train or I will go to Freising. I double check it, triple check. Repeat dozen times and can relax only when train enters airport area.
As you mentioned - additional tracks through the city center are re-planned for 203x, but with current handicap on all planing and execution levels it will realistically be finished at 2050. It makes public transportation completely unreliable since the city is heavily overcrowded already. Absolutely the same story with S7 extension from Wolfratshausen to Geretsried. No way to build anything before 2040.
Let’s face the true, Germany lost grip on infrastructure projects. The fight against car goes on without offering any alternatives. In theory my journey to the office takes 10 minutes more on the train than with a car. In reality I don’t know where train gets stuck and for how long.
> Airport line causes me always the stress since I am not sure if I am in the right part of the train or I will go to Freising
That is usually apparent IMO, what do you find stressful? Having trains that split is quite common in my experience.
> It makes public transportation completely unreliable since the city is heavily overcrowded already.
That's very true. And with the 9-euro tickets, rush hours are a nightmare (and it is extremely hot these days).
> Let’s face the true, Germany lost grip on infrastructure projects.
I'm afraid that's very true as well. Coming from Italy, I expected big things from Germany, but HST is way better in Italy, to my surprise.
On a brighter note, it seems that in the last years they are accelerating on infrastructure again, both local and national. It will take years, if not decades, to see the results. However, as the says goes, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.”
Let's also call out the origins (at least partly) for this mess. Which is the obsession with a balanced budget, mainly originating with former finance minister Schäuble. The last 20 years of extremely low interest rates would have been ideal to use essentially free money (government bonds were typically below inflation) to build German infrastructure. Instead Schäuble used weird anologies to your neighbor who should not spend over their budget (the German expression is Milchmädchenrechnung) to convince people that taking out loans is a bad thing for governments. Such a lost opportunity, Germany could be so much further along in their transition to renewables, could have one of the best public transport systems in the world and that essentially and no cost for the loaning the money. Instead it has a dependence on Russian gas, destroyed renewables industry (which used to be World leading), and public transport infrastructure which is desperate for investment just when we are coming into a recession.
This reminds me how a lot of value is actually collectively created and corporations are just there to efficiently make use of government provided infrastructure. Some people got this idea that private individuals create all the value but if that were true everyone would be self employed. A debt brake basically means less gov bonds which means the same money is bidding up fewer bonds. The idea behind this is that private lending will pick up because of the lower interest rate, the irony of course is that due to the zero lower bound, there is no real point behind lower interest rates.
Fully agreed, and same goes for the Autobahn. Foreigners think it’s some super high speed no limit highway, but over 50% of the time you’ll be under a very conservative speed limit due to ongoing construction. Of course, you never actually see anyone working, it’s like they start the project and just leave it for months at a time.
In Munich (as in many other German cities) there are two different systems: S-Bahn, managed by DB (the national railway operator), and U-Bahn, that is your standard subway, managed by a local company (MVG in Munich).
The S-Bahn in Munich has only one track in the city center, so there are trains every 3-4 minutes, 20 minutes is on the outskirt.
U-Bahn has a 10-minute cadence in the outskirt, and 5-minute on rush hours: in the city center 6 lines become 3, so in there you have 5-minute cadence, and 2.5-minute in the rush hour.
I live near both stations, S-Bahn is the quicker way to go to my office, but being the station in the outskirt, I need to know when trains are coming.
We also have something similar here for more long distance and less city stations. In fact we have two operators with their own networks! Both are not nearly as frequent or reliable as the metro, sadly.
I could be mistaken, but what OP is mentioning might be closer to Renfe rodalies/cercanías than the metro (U-bahn). Maybe somebody from Munich can elaborate. Surely U-bahn is not running every 20 minutes in Munich, right?
you can do 2-3 minutes per train when every line has their dedicated tracks. with 7 lines sharing one track in the city center each train can't do better than 7*2 to 7*3, that is 14 to 21 minutes per train.
Unfortunately doubling rail in cities means you have to demolish whole swaths of the city.
Even the Japanese have these problems with their Shinkansen. There is no space unless you go underground.
As an American with no high speed rail access (yeah Acela, I know), I can only imagine what its like to debate over the finer points of differences in high speed rail.
Instead this was news to me:
> France is currently undergoing an energy crisis, because the heat wave is such that river water cannot safely cool down its nuclear power plants
Nuclear capacity curtailed due to a heat wave? That's a failure mode I'd not heard of.
> the heat wave is such that river water cannot safely cool down its nuclear power plants
Yes - a risk for all thermal power plants, since they need a cooling loop to re-condense the steam before putting it through another cycle in the turbines.
(In general it would be physically possible to still run the plant, but regulatorily impossible because the outlet water would be too hot and people don't take kindly to boiling a river and destroying its ecosystem)
They've got egress cooling water limits of 26-30C (78-86). It's an entirely manufactured problem.
There's trivial solutions to this, but they all probably run into other regulatory stupidity.
They could easily solve this just by offering giant 38-40C (100-104F) pools open to the public near their plants.
Or, just have a parking lot sized winding halfpipe before draining into the river, or otherwise easily make up for the missing cooling tower capacity.
In Iceland thermal plants will release boiling temperature water into rivers that didn't have it before, nobody thinks twice about it, as people are used to the natural equivalent.
You'll want to make sure to give the fish a way out, but otherwise the only notable side effects are some algea buildup.
> They've got egress cooling water limits of 26-30C (78-86). It's an entirely manufactured problem.
> There's trivial solutions to this, but they all probably run into other regulatory stupidity.
> They could easily solve this just by offering giant 38-40C (100-104F) pools open to the public near their plants.
> Or, just have a parking lot sized winding halfpipe before draining into the river, or otherwise easily make up for the missing cooling tower capacity.
> In Iceland thermal plants will release boiling temperature water into rivers that didn't have it before, nobody thinks twice about it, as people are used to the natural equivalent.
> You'll want to make sure to give the fish a way out, but otherwise the only notable side effects are some algea buildup.
this will be my go-to example of how random computer programmers on HN have such profound over-confidence about things they know nothing about that their opinions on anything other than programming are actively dangerous. it is a good reminder for everyone else who still has self-awareness, though, to doubt themselves more when talking about topics they don't know anything about.
If you mean the over-confidence of asserting that water you can comfortably swim in (31C / 88F) would "boil a river" as the GP did, I agree.
There's been ongoing discussion about nuclear power on HN for months now in response to the Ukraine/Russia crisis. This question of French nuclear cooling keeps coming up.
After mulling over it for a bit the French nuclear regulator has arrived at the solution that I'm advocating for here, i.e. deciding that perhaps it's not such a big deal that the cooling water is a bit over regulatory limits[1].
But I'll admit that I'm not too familiar with France's nuclear industry and regulator. Perhaps it's all run by over-confident computer programmers.
Aside from one's own expertise it's an important skill when reading the news to try to parse out whether the latest news about the sky falling is really something to be concerned about in the longer term, or just overinflated reports about easily solved implementation details.
I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out how say having an empty pool the size of the Blue Lagoon next to a French nuclear power plant could serve as a thermal buffer on hot days. The examples of using public swimming pools adjacent to nuclear plants as thermal buffers was meant to humanize the ballpark of those numbers.
> They've got egress cooling water limits of 26-30C (78-86). It's an entirely manufactured problem.
There is nothing "manufactured" about not wanting to cook natural water bodies and the flora and fauna that live in said water.
Even very minor changes can have massive effects for everything living in, and around, such waters, as they are part of a bigger ecosystem these changes will also end up affecting wildlife outside of those waters.
> They could easily solve this just by offering giant 38-40C (100-104F) pools open to the public near their plants.
Did you do the math how big they would need to make these giant pools to effectively dissipate the heat? Where is the water for those giant pools supposed to come from?
> Or, just have a parking lot sized winding halfpipe before draining into the river, or otherwise easily make up for the missing cooling tower capacity.
From what material will that winding halfpipe be made, to have good thermal conductivity, while still having the stability to support such a massive structure and the pressurized water going trough it?
> In Iceland thermal plants will release boiling temperature water into rivers that didn't have it before, nobody thinks twice about it, as people are used to the natural equivalent.
Iceland is also not exactly known for its summer heatwaves, even without those I'm pretty sure they still monitor the temperature of those rivers to make sure it doesn't pass certain thresholds.
> You'll want to make sure to give the fish a way out, but otherwise the only notable side effects are some algea buildup.
Algea that will deprive the water of oxygen, thus killing a lot of other flora and fauna if they build up too much.
I could actually see that working pretty well in the winter, but only then. Nobody in their right mind would go swimming in 40 C° hot water during the summer when the sun is blasting down.
Going swimming in 40 C° hot water is rather dangerous. That’s the maximum safe temperature for a hot tub that you sit in for 10-15 minutes. It’s above body temperature and will prevent your body from cooling. A comfortable temperature for swimming is around 30 degrees, lower in summer.
I know at least one nuclear power station in France uses the hot water to run a crocodile wildlife exhibit next door. I can confirm that visiting it does feel like the start of a disaster movie.
That's interesting, do you happen to know which one & which wildlife exhibit?
I suspect it'll come down to a "not really" in that it's using electric cooling rather than some direct thermal connection. I.e. it could use grid electricity from anywhere, it just happens to be near a nuclear plant. But perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised :)
> When the plants were planned and designed no-one imagined that summer temps of +40C were going to be usual.
More problematically this lack of imagination was then used to save cost by not building cooling towers: the plants with such issues are generally those next to large rivers for which it was assumed the river flow and temperature would always be sufficient, so the expense and visibility of cooling towers could be done away with.
You're making it too simplistic. There's ecological issues, there's engineering issues, and yes, there's also regulatory issues (in an ideal world, they would be fixed in a single day, but we don't live in one).
The article argues that German should stop asserting superiority over France and start building a real high speed rail. The thing is that the German ICE can go fast, but not in Germany as only a few rail line allow it.
The best example is Stuttgart Paris where you spend nearly as much time in Germany as in France, except that you only have to cover 170km in Germany and 500km in France.
About nuclear reactor, the river can cool down the reactor, but fish will die. Thus the power generation is limited in summer for reactor cooled by rivers.
"Looking forward rather than backward, nothing in Germany’s urban geography is an obstacle to a connected high-speed rail network. With central stations and less of the population living in truly isolated rural and small-city communities, Germany can expect to greatly surpass any other Western intercity rail network if it builds high-speed rail, more than reaching DB’s pre-corona 250 million ridership target."
Given a certain proportion of journeys that you want to cover with high-speed rail, I'd say polycentricity still means you need to build more infrastructure than under a monocentric (France) or linear (Italy, Japan) model.
Maybe we need an ICE-Express (I know what ICE stands for). An ICE shouldn't have to stop in every city, that's what ICs and and regional rail is for. It gets ridiculous on lines through the Rhine-Ruhr area, all very large cities that on their own merit an ICE stop, but they're spaced five minutes apart. There is definitely a need for real high speed rail, Hamburg to Munich in less than 3h should be possible, it takes around 6-7h now.
Yeah, if I'm not mistaken a lot of the tracks for the french TGV and also the japanese Shinkansen (literally means new main line) are separated from the tracks for slower trains like cargo and regional. But whenever I see the protests of people when there are plans for new tracks I start doubting that I'll ever see a fully separated high speed rail network.
It is slow because it shares the track with other trains. The point of high speed rail network is to connect big hub together without removing existing network. The stop would be every 150/200km.
Imagine a Munich Berlin in 2h, that would kill any flights between the two cities.
It makes no sense for ICE to stop in every small town. The entire point of express service is to prioritize speed over coverage. And that entails building enough rail capacity to avoid being throttled by slower lines.
But my understanding is that this is about environmental regulations that prevent power plants from heating the river water by too much.
The plant itself would be able to run totally fine with the current water temperature, but it would raise the temperature beyond what environmental regulations allow.
Instead, Europe is now burning Coal and Lignite. Which of course is much worse for the water temperature in the long run…
Coal power plants have the same cooling problem as nuclear power plants. And looking at some rivers in Europe at the moment the problem with power plants using water for cooling isn't just heating up rivers too much, the water levels are dangerously low to the point of some rivers almost disappearing, there are some famous examples of that in Italy this year.
Indeed. It's beyond my level of understanding, as long as I've been alive this has not happened, though I understand that historically it has happened, and whenever it did it was followed by at least one year of famine.
Germany is the one that's closing reactors, over post-Chernobyl/Fukushima fears, and burning coal instead. It also has a surprisingly powerful coal lobby.
Three reactors while France has half of theirs offline. The irony is that if Germany is going to extend their NPP, it will be because the next German stress test runs under the assumption of a major French power plant outage. I can only already see the jubilant HN threads how this is a win for NP, when it's actually a testimony of its failure.
> I can only already see the jubilant HN threads how this is a win for NP, when it's actually a testimony of its failure.
All the experts on HN and Reddit already switched from "France is amazing, Germany dumb" to "The French are idiots for not having invested into nuclear power. Germany still dumb."
Not only Germany according to that map [1], other countries like Spain and UK which rely mostly on natural gas also cover for France power these days. Your point about Germany is still valid though.
This argument makes no sense, do you have number?
The French reactors are shut down in summer because there is less electricity demand and you have an abundance of solar power. Under European market law, you are obliged to buy renewable energy if it is available.
The real problem is going to be this winter, where EDF needs to repair its nuclear reactors before the start of winter, in order to provide electricity for France and Germany. And that situation is pretty much due to the lack of vision of Germany and Merkel.
It explains why currently, even though gas is so prohibitively expensive, we still run gas powered plants at the moment, and also why even with relatively low transmission capacity between countries there is still big impact on energy prices.
The tl;dr is: Energy prices are determined by taking the most expensive auction price that is required to cover the load at any given moment. Everyone who offered a cheaper rate may sell the energy, but receives the highest price that was accepted. This means that prices are highly non-linear and susceptible to supply shocks. Even though the changes from import to export with respect to France are small, a rather small reduction in cheap nuclear power immediately makes it a lot more profitable to produce energy, also making coal and gas viable again.
Also note that this model explains the cheap price of nuclear and solar: You "only" need to ROI your initial capital eventually to turn a profit. When push comes to shove you would rather sell at any price above 0 (or at least a very low bottom) rather than turning off your plant and getting no income at all. You cannot do that when you still have significant operational expenses for fuel (coal, gas, stored water).
On electricitymap you can see this behaviour in action as well. Even with something like 50% solar production, prices remain high, when suddenly, the prices collapse below zero after a certain threshold was reached.
Also note that in these cases, the prices in France and Germany decouple. Customers on the German energy exchange might get paid to use energy while in France spot price still is upward of 10-20 ct/kWh.
Also:
> Under European market law, you are obliged to buy renewable energy if it is available.
Do you have a source for that? I think that guarantee only applies to Germany. And then it only says that the suppliers always get paid for the energy they could produce, wind and solar can and will still get turned off physically.
And from what I have written above it pretty much follows that renewables will always be bought if possible, because they have no fuel costs and letting them run is during positive prices always more profitable than shutting them off.
Note though that many renewables are not even sold on the energy exchange and rather influence the market indirectly as most energy utilities have fixed delivery contracts with the producers and only buy/sell the excess on the spot market.
The big energy suppliers burning coal all sit in Northrhine-Westfalia, the most populous state in Germany.
Migrating away from (black) coal (used mostly in the steel industry) has caused big issues in the Ruhr area ("Strukturwandel", structural shift, meaning migration of significant parts of the workforce from coal to other sectors) in the past, which also means that the population is very wary of phasing out lignite as well. Pretty much everyone knows somebody who lost their job in a mine. Some cities like Gelsenkirchen are still structurally weak, like a lite version of Detroit. This means that politicians mow give expensive political gifts to the coal industry to provide retraining opportunities or early pensions, just so they can claim that they do not "forget" the workers this time.
While in fact, there is maybe 30k people or so in all of Germany employed by coal and its dependent industries. And nobody cares that the wind and solar industry lost 100k or so workers over the last decade due to avoidable regulatory issues and the resulting low project volume.
Anyways, you should not underestimate the amount of respect the coal workers always had in the Ruhr area. Digging coal in a below-ground mine is still the essential definition of "honest work" and sacrifice here. It's probably somewhat comparable to how military service is treated in the US, including the occasional "thank you for your service" and all. There are shrines dedicated to St. Barbara, the patron saint of mining, sprinkled everywhere, because people regularily prayed for their husbands, fathers, brothers, sons and friends to come home safely each day. Children learn the Steigerlied in school and sing it before football games. It's even worse than a lobby, the population mostly supports special treatment for the coal workers, as the mining and steel industry is still part of the cultural DNA.
Interesting. Parts of Britain were very similar. Things like every mine union chapter had its own brass band and the mine unions took great pride in thier traditions and thier local communities. Basically it’s neglected miners and steelworkers and other closed down heavy industries in the north of England that voted for Brexit just to pull the rug out from under everyone else because they were thrown on the scrap heap by Thatcher in the 1980’s and those areas never recovered. The liberal voting cities told the mining folk they were idiots for voting for brexit and so they switched allegiances from Labour (closely linked to the unions) to the Conservatives who were telling these people they were going to fix things for them, ‘levelling up’ the North of England. This hasn’t happened there is not even a coherent plan for how it could happen and the new candidates for prime minister are all going on about how they’re going to be more like Thatcher than the others, forgetting that the people who just switched to them hated her for destroying thier way of life. So be careful! Don’t disrespect the miners they will cause chaos if you annoy them!!
> Nuclear capacity curtailed due to a heat wave? That's a failure mode I'd not heard of.
It's not a new problem [0], it's become somewhat of a regular issue in parts of Europe during summer heatwaves [1]. As the heatwaves will become worse, and the water scarcer, this will become an even more regular issue.
France is currently affected particularly badly because a big chunk of their reactor fleet is also going trough long-overdue maintenance.
It's actually absurd that it costs me ~£15-25 to fly from London Stansted to Hamburg (1 hr flight), but 145 euros (one way) to get the high speed train to Munich (6 hours).
The regional trains are absurd. The platforms are completely congested with human bodies, and even the long double decker trains are often totally full. To me it seems that there simply aren't enough services every day to carry the capacity of people who want to use the trains. Even before the 9 euro ticket it was borderline unusable. I did a midday Monday journey last September from Hamburg -> Lübeck -> Stralsund -> Samtens and each part of the journey apart from the last was totally full. Lübeck -> Stralsund was ran by nah.sh but it was an absolutely tiny train with even barely any standing room, let alone seating. Germans just accept it and groan, in classic German fashion: this is how it is, it's not going to change, just accept it.
This is what I wish th EU did. Instead of grand posturing and spending billions of EUR on moonshot projects and unaccountable policy projects, I wish they brought all EU nations together and spend the billions needed to do two things that I think would have quite the effect.
1. Build out a robust and modern electric grid that spans EU without country wise policy restrictions, allowing distributed domestic generation of power such as solar roofs, windmills in farms etc, while the existing nuclear reactors supply base load power. Any new renewable energy project should simply be plugged and play.
2. Build out a similar high speed rail network that doesn't have country wise signalling/power/track changes such that one does not have to worry about "connecting" Dutch, French, German, Swiss and Italian trains on a trip across.. Instead a singular train operator being able to run a train that seamlessly runs all the way through without changes. Also, while at it, make the train operators compete on EUR/KM of operation so that the costs become competitive with intra-EU flights.
We are missing leaders with long term thinking. Every politician I hear keeps trying to say what their voters want to hear for the immediate term and get elected to office.
> Build out a similar high speed rail network that doesn't have country wise signalling/power/track changes such that one does not have to worry about "connecting" Dutch, French, German, Swiss and Italian trains on a trip across.
All of Europe except Spain and Ukraine/Russia/Belarus runs on standard gauge anyway, and at least in Spain every new or renovated track is being laid with dual-position sleepers so that they can easily be retrofitted. Modern locomotives can use all power systems (25 kV, 15 kV AC, 3 kV DC) and the major security systems. For signalling, new tracks at least in the high speed sector are all prepared for ETCS.
The only thing needing exchange at borders today is the locomotive driver, and even that is not necessary if the driver speaks the language of the country and knows the signalling system there (e.g. it's pretty common that freight train drivers run the trip from Germany to the Netherlands and back).
Finland uses 5 ft gauge, Estonia a mix of 5 ft / 1520 mm, and Latvia and Lithuania 1520 mm. (And then Rail Baltica will add standard gauge to the mix in the baltics).
No, they are different gauges with shared historical roots (5ft was the original Russian gauge, 1520 mm late Soviet redefinition). While the tolerance ranges for the two gauges overlap, they're not identical, nor is either a superset of the other. Trains can be built to be interoperable, but are not guaranteed to.
And either way, these countries are in Europe by any definition and not on standard gauge.
> Instead a singular train operator being able to run a train that seamlessly runs all the way through without changes
Isn't that the case already? Or are the high-speed trains that go from Paris to Belgium / Netherlands / Italy / Spain just regular speed outside of France? I'm quite sure, at least the ones going North (UK/BE/NL) use the same tracks as the trains doing Paris-Lille (city in the North of France, close to Belgium).
> Also, while at it, make the train operators compete on EUR/KM of operation so that the costs become competitive with intra-EU flights.
I don't know if that's such a good thing. There are routes that are much more profitable than others. It's my understanding that, at least in theory, the profitable ones "subsidize" the others, such that people can actually use them.
I don't think that having new companies showing up on the Paris-Lyon line, for example, will be a net positive for the country as a whole (that's by far the most profitable line in France).
Or maybe force the new ones to serve all the other lines? I don't know what the best solution would be.
Sure, there are some NightJet services by OBB that cover routes like Amsterdam - Vienna. But, that's far too few and mostly covers Vienna to X. But, my hope is that EU leaders would take pride in connecting all major cities to the EU fast rail "grid" so that you can travel from anywhere to anywhere without changing connections just like cheap flights these days.
Amsterdam - Innsbruck (for Ski trips)
Amsterdam - Florence
Amsterdam - Berlin
Amsterdam - Barcelona
Amsterdam - Copenhagen
are all examples that could be direct trains that run frequently such that taking a flight for these should feel like a chore. Of course, I am listing all from Amsterdam because that's where I live. My point is a Rail grid network criss crossing Europe would be super beneficial to the society to remove many cars from the road and many planes from the sky. Heck, these routes would bring added benefit of subsidising freight transport across these population centers.
Yes, EUR/KM operation might come with its flaws. But, if that rail grid is treated as essential infrastructure, and business are allowed to run their train services not the grid competing with each other, it will be a revival of the golden era of trains, and public transport.
I do think that would be a great idea. I absolutely hate taking the plane because of the whole airport circus, so would definitely support such an initiative.
I think that governments might also buy into that, at least to a point. For example, in France, they passed a law looking to ban very short flights for which a rail alternative no longer than a few hours exists (four, I think).
> Isn't that the case already? Or are the high-speed trains that go from Paris to Belgium / Netherlands / Italy / Spain just regular speed outside of France? I'm quite sure, at least the ones going North (UK/BE/NL) use the same tracks as the trains doing Paris-Lille (city in the North of France, close to Belgium).
Yes they are, but that's only the high speed lines. In the Netherlands we have just one, towards Belgium and it's construction was extremely costly and troublesome. It has not delivered on it's promises, one planned service has been within the first year.
Towards the East we don't have any, and yes the ICEs from there run at slow speeds in the Netherlands.
That is actually an EU project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-European_Rail_network and they are working on it, but it will take decades to complete, I follow closely the Berlin-Palermo axis for personal interest, and plenty of sections are still just announcement in some press releases.
I think the OPs point was that this should all have been done in the past so we could enjoy the fruits of this labour now. I do agree this was neglected way too long even after we knew global warming was a real thing.
According to 2018 report, EU has invested 24B EUR on HSR since 2000. The effectiveness of that investment can be debated, but HSR has definitely been recognized by EU for a while now.
I meant more the generalist approach of allocating budget to fight climate change going to so many things that _does_ contribute to climate change, but not getting to the big picture. Subsiding a fraction of the cost of heat pumps, subsidies to business to "go green", etc admittedly help, but my point is they are tiny bandages to a large wound that is about to kill you.
From this[1] it says EU has spent 20% of total budget or 220 Billion! to tackle climate change, and I just wish that was a good high speed railway or a better Energy grid that will facilitate adding more renewable sources to the grid without red tapes.
Yeah, it currently sucks, but at least there's an hourly connection from my hill-billy village to the capital (with 2x changing trains), and it seems now that getting rid of such 'non-profitable' connections is off the table for the foreseeable future. There's a lot construction work going on in the last months which is really inconvenient for travellers, but at least it shows that the Bahn is investing again in their infrastructure.
I've been travelling by train between my home village and the capital for the last 20 years or so, and in general things have gotten better. More modern trains with air conditioning even far away from the big intercity connections, prices for frequent travellers are reasonable (with Bahncard 50), on average few delays (at least on my connection - the last few months have been pretty rough though).
If anything, comfort on the ICE connections is regressing, I'm not a fan of the new ICE4, it feels much more cramped than the old ICE3. A few more highspeed tracks in East Germany would also be nice.
> It's actually absurd that it costs me ~£15-25 to fly from London Stansted to Hamburg (1 hr flight)
This isn't really fair. You're looking at the cheapest possible fare - a loss leader - that few people actually pay. And those that do pay it end up paying significantly more in ancillary fees. You pay ~$30 for a personal item onboard, ~$50 for a checked bag.
The right way to figure out more or less what folks are actually paying to get between Stansted and Hamburg is looking at PRASM (passenger revenue per available seat mile) but I can't seem to find a published number for European LCCs.
> You're looking at the cheapest possible fare - a loss leader - that few people actually pay. And those that do pay it end up paying significantly more in ancillary fees.
Not at all. My parents visited and they didn't bring a bag. Just because Ryanair pressure you into paying more, doesn't mean that you have to. When I went home I took one carry on bag between my wife and I, so I payed the extra £20, still WAY cheaper. It's a fair comparison
EDIT: I can't reply because rate limited (as always). Fuck HN.
You can't seriously compare flying on Ryanair with just a carry-on rucksack to swimming the English channel. That's absurd. And even with the added baggage it is still way cheaper.
You can still bring a carry-on rucksack on your Ryanair flight for that base price, and many people do. You get one carry-on for free, and have to pay for the additional carry-on and/or a checked bag. A carry-on rucksack is easily enough for a weekend visit, or even a week if you stretch it. Why are you treating it like some kind of insane thing to do?
> How much time and money did you pay to get to and from the airport? How early do you need to be at the airport for check-in/boarding? How long does it take to get out of the plane and out on the street?
2 hours for check-in, and maybe an hour to get out. It doesn't cost anything to get to and from the airport for me. So sure that's a reasonable amount of time, but in the end it's still way cheaper, and I'd arrive at the HBF in advance anyway.
The point is that Hamburg -> Munich should be cheaper than London -> Hamburg
How much time and money did you pay to get to and from the airport? How early do you need to be at the airport for check-in/boarding? How long does it take to get out of the plane and out on the street?
It doesn't matter what you or your family did, it matters what folks do on average.
It's possible to swim the english channel free of charge, but that doesn't make $0 a fair comparison against the train. You don't benchmark Costco by the price of its rotisserie chicken.
Ryanair isn't flying planes just for you, they're flying them for average customers, so it makes sense to compare average fares. What if there's only two $15 tickets made available per flight? The problem is you don't know how many they're making available at a given price point or how they're distributed - it's a trade secret. That doesn't make cherry-picking the lowest possible value a fair comparison point.
What would you consider a fair comparison?
Oh, i and all my friends often go no-bag. I have clothing in four different countries. My mother has a wardrobe of things at my place and my sisters. She flies with nothing, too.
Again these are anecdotes. I've certainly done that too but I've also paid $200+ for a short hop on Ryainair when it was the cheapest option, picked an extra legroom seat and checked a bag too. The point is that expensive fares and ancillary fees subsidize cheap loss-leader fares. It's a complex system and you have to consider it as a whole instead of looking just at the subsidized loss-leaders when making a cross-mode comparison.
I would consider a fair comparison point to be for a given flight:
1. Sum total spent on airfare by all passengers on a flight - PLUS.
2. Sum total spent on ancillary services by all passengers on a flight.
3. Divided by the number of passengers on a flight.
And average it out across all flights between the city pair over a year to eliminate the effects of seasonality and timing.
Without having access to Ryanair's revenue management data this is the best we can do.
If you don't see the reply button, please just wait a bit instead of editing your own answer. It helps to give you (and your interlocutor) a chance to have a more thoughtful discussion. But if you really can't wait to write down your witty comeback, here is a trick: the reply button is only hidden when it's a thread, if click on the link to the comment that you want to reply to, you will see the text area for replying.
Anyway, back to the regular schedule...
> It doesn't cost anything to get to and from the airport for me.
Of course it does. At the minimum, it is the price of the train ticket to get you back to the city. If someone is picking you up at the airport, they are paying for parking and their time to travel back and forth.
> The point is that Hamburg -> Munich should be cheaper than London -> Hamburg
The issue is that your plane ticket does not include all the externalities that it should. You are being subsidized by other passengers and you are not paying for environmental damage caused by the plane, the cost of the infrastructure to support the airport, etc, etc.
When I take the train in Germany, I try to make sure to have a direct train as I have been left stranded several time and missed my connection.
When it happens, you are obliged to hop in the next train, where you don't have a seat reserved, and you are forced to look around for a empty seat.
Of course you are not alone in this situation and you end up in a totally full train.
Not really true. If you have a full price / flex ticket you can take any train you want, and if you have a discounted ticket you are obliged to go to the info desk and they will give you a connection to take. They will also give you a new reservation.
Connections do get missed, and if they do you are entitled to a 25% money back for 1 hour, and 50% for two hour delays.
Is it? People seem to think that planes are fancy and new and trains are old technology, therefore it's absurd that flying is cheaper. If you think about all the infrastructure that needs to be built and maintained for high speed rail that doesn't for flying, it makes a lot more sense. Also consider that high speed rail is in may ways just as technologically sophisticated and new as airplanes.
I don't know why people expect train travel to always be cheaper than flying.
Air travel does not require much costly infrastructure while building a high speed train track over hundreds of miles is very costly, especially when there's the sea in the way.
It's not about "cheaper", it could very well be "the train should not consistently be twice the price".
Also in my personal experience planes don't simply get cancelled (or replaces with one without my reservation) 1/3 of the time, which is an actually reasonably correct number for me taking trains in Germany.
Full trains are not the most pleasant user experience. But from a business point of view, why wouldn't DB optimize the load and instead run half-empty trains?
> but there are sensors to ensure the train’s mass does not exceed a maximum level, which can be reached on unusually crowded trains
That's the "great" thing about the old Intercity trains from the 80s (some carriages are even from the 60s, being initially used in Trans Europe Express Trains[1]): They don't have this feature. Those trains can and will be filled up until it's physically impossible to push more humans into it. Makes a great Sauna in the summer! :D
> The natural response of most German rail advocates is to sneer at the idea of high-speed rail
Yeah, seperate stations (edit: platforms, they can share the building) for high-speed trains will probably never happen, sadly. And as long as high speed trains share the platforms with regional trains, disruptions and delays will always affect both.
It's nice that you can drive from Munich to Augsburg in 20 minutes on a seperate high-speed track, doesn't help you if a broken down regional train blocks the station and everyone has to wait for hours. :/
You don't need separate stations, just enough separate tracks. Berlin Hbf for example has its ICE trains mainly arrive in the basement level, with regional and local trains on physically higher levels (worth seeing for anyone visiting). But most large cities' main stations have 10+ parallel tracks, usually with a large junction a km or so each side to let trains funnel into the correct platform (see e.g. Hannover: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/52.3813/9.7435). Plenty of room for local, regional and ICE trains to be all together.
Yes, you're right. That was what I actually meant, sorry for being unclear. They should share the actual building, but not the platforms and (idealy) tracks.
> That's the "great" thing about the old Intercity trains from the 80s (some carriages are even from the 60s, being initially used in Trans Europe Express Trains[1]): They don't have this feature.
The limiting factor is breaking. The PZB train safety system require that you get down from 160 km/h to zero within 1000 meters. For trains that do not have the break hundredths to make this, the maximum speed needs to be reduced. Freight trains usually have a maximum speed of 100 km/h or lower. Or, for passenger trains with varying amounts of mass, impose a mass limit.
Better brakes are difficult because the friction points between the wheels and the tracks are small. The french have approaches on this.
LZB and ECTS help by giving the conductor in-cab information about oncoming signals, but installation on the tracks has been sluggish. IIRC ETCS is mandated to replace LZB, but ETCS is quite expensive.
Right, but those old carriages don't have weight sensors. So there is no way of knowing if they are overloaded or not, apart from optical estimation, right? Break hundredths are entered manually on those trains, AFIAK.
I'm not saying that it would be legal to drive an overweight IC in the upper PZB setting. :D
But I've used Intercitys (and old regional trains) that were so full that not even the conductors could move anymore. That doesn't happen anymore with the new trains. I have a hard time believing that the railroad carriages were not overloaded at that moment.
> Yeah, seperate stations (edit: platforms, they can share the building) for high-speed trains will probably never happen, sadly. And as long as high speed trains share the platforms with regional trains, disruptions and delays will always affect both.
This is the case for some stations, e.g. Berlin Hbf or Dresden Hbf.
Anecdotally I've never experienced delays due to waiting in front of the station there, unlike e.g. Hamburg or Hannover where platforms are shared.
You could (I would even say those would be seperate stations then, even if they share the building), but virtually no station is build that way and it would cost quite a lot of money to "untangle" the tracks. Probably too much money.
Doesn't help that most high-speed trains drive on a mix of seperate high-speed tracks and normal tracks shared with regional and freight trains, making complete seperation impossible. :/
Fortunately, they'll never happen. How are you supposed to get your connecting regional train if it doesn't stop at the same station? And it's often a huge advantage of rail that your journey starts and ends near the city center.
You're absolutely right, I meant seperate platforms and tracks that can (and should) be in the same building as regional trains. Like Berlin Main Station or Shinjuku in Japan.
The 9-Euro-Ticket is not usable for intercity connections, so I am not really getting the point how this is connected to DB is getting worse and worse. This is a development for the last 10-20 years. When you ride a train regularly, I did for a few years 3 times a week 3h Berlin/Leipzig, you see how broken the whole system is. I’d always say if you would run any other company with such a customer experience, you would be out of business in no time. I think the core problem is huge and extremely traditional management.
There's maybe some connection: Due to the 9-Euro-Ticket there were (in my experience) often delays in regional trains (mostly due to trains being too full). Regional trains share the infrastructure with high-speed trains. So I would find it believable that they influence each other.
But yeah, it wasn't great beforehand, the trend was already there and it's not the 9-Euro-Tickets fault, IMO.
> I think the core problem is huge and extremely traditional management.
IMO a big part is also the neglected infrastructure. Many trains are new and old rolling stock is being upgraded, station buildings are being renovated, but the tracks and the signaling is often very old. There is just so much you can do when your (station) signaling still uses relays from the 60s.
> There is just so much you can do when your (station) signaling still uses relays from the 60s.
That's modern. About a quarter of the network still uses purely mechanical signalling and switch operations - that technology is literally and in every sense from the era of the German Kaiser Reich days.
True (and there is a nice video from Tom Scott[1] where he uses one of those things), but almost no high-speed trains[2] use those parts, AFAIK.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TLcaJdsRr0
[2] with the exception of a few "weird" Intercitys that take very strange routes to reach tourist destinations like Berchtesgaden
As one counterexample is enough to disprove your "[2]" :-) :
Until it'll be bypassed by the new Rastatt tunnel, there's at least one mechanical signal box left between Karlsruhe and Offenburg (Durmersheim) which sees regular and frequent intercity traffic. Until very recently there used to be another one immediately north of it (Forchheim) [1], but due to the construction works for the junction with the new high-speed line it was replaced with a new computer-based interlocking in 2018.
[1] And a mechanical block post in-between, but that one was more or less permanently switched out and was probably last used in 2009, when during construction works the parallel line via Ettlingen was closed,
If you look at the map, filter for active signal boxes only and also remove "Elektrische Stellwerke" from the default filter, you might be able to discover whether the are any other mechanical or electro-mechanical signal boxes left on any of the main intercity routes.
(And since you mentioned Berchtesgaden: It looks like that whole line was switched to ESTW-operation (for non-Germans: computer-based interlockings) in November last year.
It's not connected at all, it's just a good scapegoat to hide the absolute mismanagement and corruption in the German government and state-owned private companies(boy do we love those)
>I think the core problem is huge and extremely traditional management.
Not saying that this is not a problem, but bulky management is a constant for DB, even during the years where it was considered world-class. I think it is the budget cuts and the resulting lack of infrastructure.
What you see is a problem amplifier. Any problem related to any train, track or signal is amplified there and becomes a much bigger problem, for too many trains and people. Some of the tracks you see are high-speed tracks reserved for high-speed trains, but the problems spread to those too.
Is it possible to build such intersections better, so they don't amplify problems to such a degree? Absolutely.
Blaming "management" is a fine thing to do to do when you've no clue what's wrong or how it could be fixed, but you want to blame someone. Nice and generic.
Nice article. The German rail is working on modernizing the network with the use of Artificial intelligence based dynamic timetable optimization (a major issue when delays occur is to dynamically readjust the timetable) and Autonomous trains. Additionally making use of 5G based communication and ETCS L3. Unfortunately, due to the mission critical nature, these changes will be slowly rolled out 2027 onwards and major changes are expected only from 2035. https://digitale-schiene-deutschland.de/en/digital-rail
These are all the typical "cool tech" items sold to the manager who do not understand the problems they have are not solved by it alone.
All the issues Germany has Switzerland would also suffer under if it ran it's rail network the same way. Money must go to the right places and maintenance is crucial. The Swiss network is not perfect but it doesn't have all the issues the Germans have and we have no autonomous trains, no AI dynamic time tables (not yet) and no ETCS L3 (not yet or very limited).
While I am totally down for bashing DB, as you can see from other comments, let's also face reality: Switzerland has 1/10th of the population and 1/9th of the surface, with an entirely different population distribution.
Unfortunately, lessons from small countries cannot easily be replicated in bigger countries (as for people that mention Estonia for digitalization: they are great, but there are 3 cities in Germany that have more population that the _entire_ Estonia)
There is something fundamentally flawed in the maintenance cost of the Deutsche Bahn. According to the Deutschen Instituts für Wirtschaftsforschung (DIW) it's costing the Deutsche Bahn 312,000€ per year to maintain a single kilometer of rail tracks. Given that and the already high subsidies of 10 billion € just to keep DB running, any kilometer additional track built is just increasing that hole.
I feel we are in a shit triangle here. Ticket prices are too high <-> quality is too low <-> overall cost is too high. There have been ongoing attempts to fix this by increasing rider amounts but at Germanys population density it's impossible to ever get even near to Japanese levels [2] of low total kilometers built with high usages. After my interpretation of things there is some innovation necessary to bring the per KM cost down before the Deutsche Bahn can play a more important role in the transportation.
On the same coin the cost of public transport for families vs. car ownership is just ridiculous. I've got a family of 5 - For every German intercity route going by car is significantly cheaper than going by train - usually 5x cheaper but often more. Same is true for traveling within a city that isn't your hometown (where you might have a monthly ticket). At this point I'm not even sure whether this is a problem that can be solved socioeconomicly.
I feel electric cars, robotaxis and in the future electric planes are much more likely to solve the larger part of of transportation than that railway is going to do it. Especially given that building another set of rails now in Germany is going to take from planning to delivery 15 years. The change of technology should be planned in.
At Chaos Computer Club a few years back, David Kriesel presented an analysis of the on-time performance of the Deutsche Bahn, based on a systematic scraping of their API.[0] One of the surprising things he explained: if a train never arrives at a station, it's not late, according to the Deutsche Bahn.
> if a train never arrives at a station, it's not late, according to the Deutsche Bahn.
I think most rail systems do this; it would be considered a reliability problem, not a punctuality problem.
You definitely have to be careful with the definition of these things, though. For instance, Irish Rail considers intercity rail to be on time if it's within 10 mins of schedule. Commuter is within five minutes of schedule. Given that, at peak times, some commuter services run once every ten minutes, and thus are ~always on time per this definition, it's wise to be a bit skeptical of the punctuality reporting.
>Given that, at peak times, some commuter services run once every ten minutes, and thus are ~always on time per this definition, it's wise to be a bit skeptical of the punctuality reporting.
I think that makes sense. If a commuter train leaves every 10 minutes, but due to some technical problems, the first train of the early morning leaves 20 minutes late which then continues through the day, does that mean every train is late? The users wouldn't know the trains they're using should have actually ran 20 minutes ago, they just know a train is to go every 10 minutes.
The ideal measurement would be to get as good a model of day-to-day passenger flows as possible, then simulate the journey times based on both the nominal timetable, and the "actually-ran" timetable in order to also quantify the effects of missed connections.
I think the Swiss actually do something like this, whereas in Germany they've only comparatively recently started doing it, too, and even then I think they're currently only looking at long distance trains, so connections to/from regional trains don't count (and never mind local public transport).
It may make sense from some technical standpoint, but it does not make sense from a rider experience standpoint.
If you set out on a high-speed train journey, but your train stops at a station halfway to your destination, waits for an hour due to technical problems and then is canceled, that's a delay from the rider's perspective. However, when the Deutsche Bahn publishes its official on-time statistics, this train will not be counted as late.
In its public messaging, the Deutsche Bahn emphasizes its on-time rate. "We have an on-time rate of 65%" sounds like "You'll arrive on-time 65% of the time." If you're actually sitting in the middle of nowhere, with the next train an hour away, that doesn't feel like being "on time."
Italy is often mocked as incompetent, but wow, their HSR is nice! DB is such a joke by comparison. If Austria increases their train speeds, it will be the worst railway around.
Germany desperately needs to electrify more. The trip from Zürich to Munich took an extra 30 minutes because locomotives had to be switched for the non-electrified part of the track in Germany.[1]
Also they finally need finish the access to the Alpentransversalen[2] which because of NIMBY and other things is extremely delayed.
Fun fact: The Zurich-Munich electrification was paid by an interest-free loan by the Swiss confederacy, in order to finally saturate the North-South line from Germany to Italy that was heavily expanded in Switzerland.
The trains are still always delayed by 30 min because it’s single track on long stretches and delays always happen in the German and Austrian part of this line.
And the Basel-Karlsruhe line is still not finished.
Genuinly curious - can locomotive run on batteries (which it drags behind it, in a form of a train car) for the tracks which are not electrified? Or is the cost (or sth. else) prohibitive?
Yes, they are doing exactly that, having a normal electric train which has batteries under the cars (no extra waggon) for 40-200km of not electrified track. It’s for regional trains though with lower energy needs (and because non electrified long distance tracks really make no sense).
Linking German Wikipedia because it has long history of them and current projects,
You only need to look at a German rail road crossing to immediately see they are either extremely lazy or completely incompetent. The bars close, then there’s a 5 minutes wait, then a tiny train passes at about 75km/h, then they open. If there is a station next to the crossing, the bars close before the train is even at the station and remain closed while the train is stopped.
If the track would be used at anywhere near capacity the crossing would simply never open.
This appears to be the case in Switzerland as well, or at least various intersections in multiple cities that I would be repeatedly stuck at while living there, so I'm not sure this is a fundamental problem. Level crossings aren't ideal for at-capacity tracks anyway, which is why they're usually avoided in urban environments.
Coming from the Netherlands I know that this is a solvable problem if there are limits to the delays caused by the bars being shut. It’s just that if the company that sets this up doesn’t need to care, they don’t care.
I would like to see someone advance an idea that all rail should be fully subsidised and free to use. Because rail creates massive economic gains by increased mobility, but modern rail companies struggle to maintain a modern infra while trying to make money and competing with coach and planes. If they just focused on running trains things could be much better.
All public transit in Luxembourg is free, and they are investing in more buses and trains at a pretty fast rate.
Alternatively a country could stop subsidizing cars. It’s weird that people complain about investment in trains but fail to realize roads are extremely expensive too and gas taxes don’t come close to covering costs.
There’s virtually no free parking in Japanese city centres and all highways there are tolled. For one person the tolls are similar to high speed train fare, and it’s a no brainer to travel by train instead of car for most destinations.
You sure about that because when I did some quick math on US road spending I found it would require about a $2.50 tax per gallon to fully fund our yearly road construction costs with taxes [0] and Luxembourg charges $2.23 per gallon [1] which is just 10% shy.
Luxembourg traditionally had very low farebox recovery ratios (something around 14 %, and definitively much lower than Germany, even if you account for things like reduced fares for students), plus it's a small state that still is somewhat of a tax haven.
Free runs into the issue of capacity management. Prices, even token prices, serve to limit some consumption. Without it, free transit mostly serves to divert people from walking and cycling, not cars and planes.
Guangzhou planned to offer free transit to ease congestion during the 2010 Asian Games. It was cancelled after a few days; metro ridership doubled, causing queues of up to twenty minutes to enter stations, and eight stations turned exit only to relieve emergency levels of overcrowding. Most rail transportation could not handle the crush of additional riders from free rides.
> free transit mostly serves to divert people from walking and cycling, not cars and planes
Source for this claim? I would be surprised if it holds true.
> Most rail transportation could not handle the crush of additional riders from free rides
This is a problem with the infrastructure, not free rides. Of course capacity planning has to be adapted to keep up with increased usage, but thats literally what we want. We want more people to use public transportation, limiting or capping usage is the wrong approach IMHO.
> Residents of the Estonian capital of Talinn have been able to ride public transportation for free since 2013. Last year Estonia’s national auditor issued its assessment of that policy: It had induced many additional transit rides, but it failed to reduce car journeys. Dunkirk, France, and Frydek-Mistek, Czech Republic, have adopted free transit as well.
> “There’s no evidence at all that cities introducing fare-free public transport have seen their car traffic reduced,” said Mohamed Mezghani, the secretary general of the International Association of Public Transport, which has published a policy brief on the topic. “Most of the [new] people taking public transport used to walk.”
> The story was similar in Santiago, Chile, where researchers randomly assigned free two-week transit passes to residents. Those receiving the free passes took 12% more trips overall, but they did not drive less.
> If free public transportation failed to attract drivers in relatively transit-rich Europe and Santiago, there’s little reason to think it would fare better (pun intended) in the U.S., where scant transit service acts as a deterrent. An extensive 2012 study by the National Academies of Sciences noted that fare-free experiments undertaken in Denver (1978-9) and Austin (1989-90) failed to reduce driving; most new trips were taken by those lacking access to a car.
> Three MBTA bus routes went fare-free last August, and data showed that ridership on the 28 line rose 38%. (Other Boston bus routes, where fares were still collected, also saw increases, but smaller ones.) A survey of riders indicated that 15% of riders were new — but the fare-free rides replaced more biking and walking trips (8%) than driving (5%).
—-
Limiting or capping usage is the reality in most major cities because we cannot build our way out of the induced demand. Guangzhou is no slouch to public transport construction, in 25 years they have gone from zero to 621km of metro (the third largest system in the world) and yet even they cannot handle the capacity crunch. If there is no hope at Chinese levels of metro investment it’ll be impossible for anyone to actually build enough.
Someone made a point recently that the UK government's plan to counter inflation by reducing the tax on petrol (by 10p/litre) amounted to roughly the same cost to the taxpayer as making all public transport in the country free. So it's something that's not outside the realms of possibility, it's just very unlikely that either of the major parties would actually do it.
In the UK if you make public transport free the main beneficiaries are going to be Londoners and people in the South East. So this is a political issue because people will then complain that everything is always for the benefit of the "London bubble". On the other hand, cutting petrol price makes most of the country happy.
Well that is certainly possible (and speaks volumes to how areas like the North of England repeatedly get the short shrift) but I think the main take-away for me is that the 10p fuel duty reduction was seen as no big deal ... but a "free public transport" policy that would move the country closer to their emissions goals and make people's lives better while reducing financial burdens would've been considered a ridiculous, impossible extravagance.
As has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the national rail networks in DE and UK is already operating at near-capacity so adding more passengers wouldn't exactly help, but making it cheaper to use local bus, tram and train networks would be brilliant.
I am not sure free public transport will make such a big difference. It would probably make some people commute by train instead of driving where that's possible because of cost. On the other hand there is also a push to switch to EV cars nationally so what would impact emissions the most is not clear to me.
This not just the North by the way. Most of the country drives with the only public transport being very impractical buses. Really this is the same in many European countries as well.
Offering free train rides should only be used as incentive to use trains more.
When the rail infrastructure is alreay overwhelmed as it is in Germany it really doesn't make sense without first massively investing in the infrastructure - which will take decades.
There is something very wrong going on in Germany AND France where, despite the nice speeches, investment in railway infrastructure is being run into the ground. If nothing changes, expect disaster-level quality of service within a 5 years time.
Significant portions of the Berlin to Munich route run at 300km/h (the section from Halle via Erfurt and then to Bamberg). Of course, you have to be on one of the ICE3's that are actually capable of 300km/h - the others max out at 250km/h...
There is a project for doubling the tracks in the city center, that is on a good way to become more notorious than the Berlin airport: they are talking about it since the '70, they started working in 2017, with planned opening in 2028 for ~3B euros, and now they are talking about opening it in the late '30 with an estimated cost of more than 7B euros. 1B for each km of tunnel, that's madness.
Without it, we cannot have fast connections to the airport (currently 40 minutes away from the city center), and cannot increase the number of trains, currently running in a 20-minute cadence because 7 lines meet in the city center, so 7 lines on 1 track.
Another thing I don't understand; why Italy and Germany aren't to start building the access tracks to the Brenner Base Tunnel (BBT)?
BBT is incredibly on track with all the deadlines, so if they really open it in 10 years, we will be able to do Fortezza - Innsbruck at 250km/h, and then Munich - Innsbruck at <200 km/h, as Fortezza - Verona. That's simply ridiculous.
I don't own a car and try to fly as little as possible, but it is quite difficult for distances that, frankly, should be a no-brainer.