5 ms·
It's not usually obvious how shaving off one hour of travel time impacts cities. Several years ago, the TGV line was completed between Paris and Bordeaux — redu
by zahma 5y ago
It's not usually obvious how shaving off one hour of travel time impacts cities. Several years ago, the TGV line was completed between Paris and Bordeaux — reducing the trip from three hours to two. The arrival of the TGV meant that Bordeaux saw exponential growth ever since and especially during the height of the pandemic.
Even before the quarantine made everyone reconsider why the hell they were also confining themselves to Paris, wealthy and mobile Parisians saw the opportunity to make Bordeaux home and commute when they needed to. I credit that almost entirely with the arrival of the two-hour TGV. It's as if three hours was too much time, and two hours was the magical threshold that made living between the two cities feasible.
Now it is teeming with Parisian opportunists, and I totally understand why. Paris has been crowded, polluted, and unreasonably expensive, and Bordeaux was quite literally the opposite: laid back yet sophisticated, beautifully framed along the Garonne river, and with easy access to nature and the ocean. But now with the sudden influx of Parisians, there is some malaise among the Bordelais that the city has fundamentally changed not only in demographics, but in cost and culture.
The before and after effects are palpable. I saw Bordeaux before the boom started. In 2016/2017, it was sleepy and still cleaning the blackened grime off the building façades. The rents and cost of living reflected a city still growing, but the city itself has long been wealthy and home to a UNESCO world heritage site. Now there are cranes everywhere. New developments are cropping up around the city, and the costs of rents and living have soared. It even feels louder. The housing stock is depleted because the newcomers have purchased everything. That's not all bad for landholders and property owners, but it really sucks if you're just trying to make your way into the market, let alone a student trying to rent something.
A part of me feels like it's a lost treasure that's now been overrun by the same people who make living in Paris so exasperating. I guess this is the nature of change, and I attribute it almost entirely to the TGV line. French life will always be centralized in Paris, and so without these high-speed lines, there is little reason to think Bordeaux would have grown so much if not for the reduced travel time.
- nspattak 5y agoThe upgraded TGV almost halved the time in the Paris-Bordeaux line from 4-4.5 to 2:15. This was a huge difference and combined with the convenience of the train station being close to the center as opposed to the airport, meant that people can easily go on a daily trip to Paris by train. However, the city has been developing heavily before that and Parisians who wanted a nicer place to spend their quarantine have plenty of other places to go to, either in the west part of the country or the south. In my opinion what needs to be done to further decentralize the country away from paris is to improve the connection between the other cities, eg Bordeaux Marseille is 6h by train!
- agumonkey 5y agoNote that I have a colleague who often suffers a 2h long commute to go to work. She could live on the other side of the country and take the same time.
- dopidopHN 5y ago2h plus métro time once she gets in Paris. Easily 30 min unless she works right next to the train station. But yes
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- choeger 5y agoI think that's an astute observation. For families, even one hour of commute can be too much (depending on the job and details of childcare facilities) and people that have to show up every day (usually lower-wage positions) cannot make this work at all. This means that the two-hour commute will have some filtering effect. towards professionals that can work from home or maybe earn enough to support a family from a single income. That effect will be even more aggravated if the two hours do not include the way from and to the train stations. So it's easy to see that the effect on the receiving city can be quite pronounced.
- mytailorisrich 5y agoThe same happened when the high speed track was completed from Valence. Before that TGVs had to slow down between Valence and Marseille. This combined with the new station near Aix-en-Provence saw a boom in real estate in the area and Marseille. Suddenly, your swimming pool in Provence was 3 hours away from central Paris, with cheap tickets if you started early.
- hef19898 5y agoSame happened almost a decade ago to Marseille and Aix-en-Provence. At least my collueges working in the South told be so.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoBut Marseille benefited from a bit of gentrification :) It's a much different place than Bordeaux.
- throw0101a 5y ago> A part of me feels like it's a lost treasure that's now been overrun by the same people who make living in Paris so exasperating. In the words of Roy from The IT Crowd: > People, what a bunch of bastards. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZHLkTHuPJs&t=52s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZHLkTHuPJs&t=52s :)
- secretsatan 5y agoI can easily see 2 hours being the maximum, most train services don't start till around 6:00 am, giving you little leeway to be in at work for eight or nine
- bambax 5y agoWhat is often forgotten in this kind of story is that building direct lines between big cities tends to asphyxiate whatever sits in between. Ruffec is about 2/3rds of the way between Paris and Bordeaux. The TGV that goes from Paris to Bordeaux used to have a stop in Ruffec. Not any more, because they had to build a completely new line for the last leg of the trip, that goes through the countryside. In fact there are now ZERO direct trains from Paris to Ruffec; to get there you need to change trains at Poitiers, which can be complicated if you're old or you have lots of luggage. The train from Poitiers to Ruffec is a regional one that stops everywhere. Going from Paris to Ruffec used to take less than 2 hours and now takes at least 3. So high speed train isn't about helping transform urbanites into country people; it's about moving urbanites around.
- cromka 5y ago> So high speed train isn't about helping transform urbanites into country people; it's about moving urbanites around. Brilliant observation.
- BeFlatXIII 5y agoThe flip side of the coin is that a high-speed system that has stops at all the struggling towns along the way ceases to be high-speed, no matter the maximum track velocity.
- bambax 5y agoActually, no. You can have trains that stop some stations, some at others, and yet some more that are direct. It used to work quite well. Now it's not possible anymore because the new line avoids the towns.
- mc32 5y agoThe NYC subway has the concept of local and express trains. They use the same right of way with much of it four-track. So you can provide a slow train that makes every stop and the express which only stops at major stations.
- deetsb 5y ago
- agumonkey 5y agoI think the high speed line is only part of the equation. The reality is that Paris is becoming insufferable, housing cost, traffic jams, tense people, quality of life in general .. a lot of people started to run backwards to the countryside.
- _delibash_ 5y agoIt's not the nature of change, it's the nature of capitalism.