Spain's efficient high-speed trains have transformed people's lives(theguardian.com) |
Spain's efficient high-speed trains have transformed people's lives(theguardian.com) |
I used the company Iryo, which its mother company is Trenitalia. After living in Germany, i was positively baffled by the quality of the trains, the cleanliness, the speed and most even more relevant and what made me jealous: The price.
A ticket Valencia - Madrid costed 14eur. Which immediately made me wonder about how do they even manage to make money?
In Germany, the high speed trains have the same quality, but by no means the price. Impossible to see that price for a Deutsche Bahn ticket.
For visiting other cities in Spain, it’s always cheaper to just pay a flight to Madrid and get a high speed train to somewhere. But this is also benefiting from the geographical position of Madrid into the country.
Kudos to Spain for this and i wish they can keep low prices with high quality of travel for its citizens.
If you want to look at actual prices, look at RENFE (AVE) prices. Even RENFE's own AVLO loses money, it's there only to counter Iryo and Ouigo until they will rise prices or go bankrupt.
These train travel success stories are anti-personal transportation propaganda. They want to push you to using trains and then they will raise the prices - they want you not travelling anywhere if you are poor.
I recently travelled midweek from Lleida to Madrid return for €40, but I've also paid more than €100 for the same when traveling around the weekend.
I only wish the international high-speed routes in Europe were easier to book and the prices were lower. It's still at least 2-3x the price to take a train from Barcelona-Amsterdam for instance (which I recently did) then to fly. I have no problem with the much longer duration of the train journey but they need to do something to get trains more competitive price-wise with air, perhaps by increasing taxes significantly for short-ish (<2-3 hours?) plane trips when a viable rail alternative exists, and using that to subsidize the train tickets? I don't know what can be done but it's going to be impossible to convince the public to go on a train for longer trips when both driving and flying are way cheaper.
It would be a gamechanger for Europe, were it to function in a frictionless, integrated, simple way.-
This article is from the Guardian and it would be fair to mention that densely packed English countryside is on just another level when it comes to NIMBY obstacles. Any high speed track out of London must either be wholly underground, or cut through hundreds, if not thousands of private gardens, and their owners will be hard to placate. Population density of Southeast England is pretty extreme even for Western Europe.
The UK looks like it's about to send the tories to the shadow realm, so they have zero incentive to do any long-term thinking.
My belief is that Sunak has cancelled this project out of sheer spite, to salt the earth for when the next government restarts it, so that in five years' time they can do their customary blame-it-on-labour bollocks. And they aren't expecting any votes from the north anyway.
My heart goes out to those who had their homes compulsorily purchased, but if they now buy them back, they will only be purchased again. The obvious winners are developers who sweep in to buy in the expectation that they'll be CPOd at a higher price in a year.
The Tory party is broke and in need of donations to fight the next election. If any of their donors then buy land back from HS2, I shall be cross.
For what it's worth, I believe the plan is to keep most of the land that was purchased for HS2, as to make it possible for the project to be restarted at a later date.
The core of the city is dense, the suburbs are equally dense, and the conurbation's edge is a street which has a five-story building on one side and farmland on the other. Outside the conurbation, it's primarily farmlands and forests, with even small towns following a similar pattern.
That is, the density of a given area is either somewhere in the thousands of people per square kilometer, or in single digits.
(Some cities do break this pattern to some extent, but it's mostly isolated phenomena, such as the suburbs of Madrid around the A-6, or the continuum of housing along the Costa del Sol)
And if one needs to take their car to one of those stations due to lack of transport alternatives, they end up doing the whole travel by car anyway.
I'm not sure this is true, but I haven't seen any official numbers to support this or what you're saying.
Anecdotally, consider the Maresme line ending in Barcelona. Plenty of people take their car to Mataro or the smaller stations before/after, and take the train in to Barcelona leaving their car at the stations, as entering Barcelona in the morning is a big hassle with a car.
Entering big cities is big hassle with the car, yet plenty of people put up with it, due to the convinence that public transport isn't available everywhere, connections get dropped, delayed, or carriages are taking more passengers than they should.
Also, high-speed trains are a lot (2x, 3x or more) more expensive than the traditional trains were, for a very small time savings (15-20%) in many cases, which means a lot of people cannot afford to travel by train anymore. So yes, high-speed trains transformed people's lives but not always in a positive manner.
I'd expect them to have cheaper tickets between the same cities, if you don't care about the speed.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrador_de_Infraestructu...
As more and more of the main cities are brought into the high speed network, the traditional network is given less funding and less service, to the detriment of the smaller towns served by it. However, it is important to note that this trend was already underway before the high speed network was in place.
The remaining regional train between Barcelona and Madrid, for example, takes eight hours by the schedule (nine or ten in real life) while the high speed trains take three hours or less.
Occasionally, some services survive that use the high speed network for most of the trip, then switch to the traditional network for the last leg of the trip.
[1]: https://nitter.net/pablomarinas_/status/1361406780757200898
What i've heard is that, before, Renfe had a monopoly and since these new players came into picture, the prices have dropped dramatically in Renfe ticket fares. So definitely is good to see the benefits, but is it now also Renfe losing money and would the quality decrease? This would be a bad scenario for everyone then.
Coupled with: https://twitter.com/el_pais/status/1716776148049285585
There clearly is a reason for all of this: they don't want you travelling if you are poor.
This is 100% not the case in Barcelona.
> or carriages are taking more passengers than they should
Perhaps at the absolute peak of rush hour, but the roads are just as bad at that time as well.
Think outside of the box, of the rest of the other people outside Barcelona, specially the regions that aren't that full of money on their ayuntamiento.