9 ms·

European governments shrinking railways in favour of road-building

poxwole 3y ago
That's a shame
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  Why? Roads go where people want to go. Trains go where planning authorities want people to go.
  - kalupa 3y ago
    Wait, planing authorities don’t plan roads?
    - CamperBob2 3y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path Road planners can respond to shifts in demand by reallocating resources. It's not easy, but it's possible. No such thing when it comes to fixed rail. Fixed rail involves investment of staggering amounts of money under the assumption that things will be exactly the same 50 years from now as they are today. In any other context, hackers would be mortally offended by such a proposition... but for whatever reason, hackers love trains.
      - tenacious_tuna 3y ago
        > but for whatever reason, hackers love trains. There's a weird inversion that happens around the concept of "freedom" w.r.t. cars--everyone insists owning a car is the ultimate expression of freedom, but they never pay heed to the fact that you, the human, become bound to a world built for rolling metal boxes when you own a car. You can only go places that have parking for it, you become responsible for driving yourself wherever you want to go. With public transit, I can do whatever I want. I don't have to hunt (or pay) for parking, I don't have to worry about not having an extra beer when out with friends. If on a whim I decide I'm going over to a friends house or if I just want to explore the city, I don't have to circle back to where I left my car to continue my journey (or return home): I hop aboard the train from the nearest station. When I'm on regional rail to visit a friend a few hours away, I'm not stressed about traffic or timing my bathroom trips--I get a snack and a drink from the cafe car and use the bathroom when I want, otherwise watching a movie from the comfort of my train seat. Moreover, a car is a liability: it requires fuel, storage, maintenance, all of which have varying prices at the dictates of entities beyond us. War overseas? Gas prices go up 30%. Need to park at your apartment? That's another $100 a month. Weird sound coming from the wheel? Could be anything, I hope you've got a trustworthy mechanic. Let alone insurance! But the subway is $2.50, the bus $2.25. I can get to the airport faster than I could drive, for less than I'd pay in gas, and I don't have to pay parking storage fees. Cars turn our cities into endless expanses of pavement just to hold our idle vehicles when we're not using them. They isolate us from our world and our communities, limiting us to experiencing everything through metal and glass. Cars are the ultimate expression of wealth separating one from the world: of course hackers love trains and transit.
        thehappypm 3y ago
        “ With public transit, I can do whatever I want.” Not really? You can only do things that some planning board sets up a route to get you from A to B. With a car, every A to B is possible.
        tenacious_tuna 3y ago
        > You can only do things that some planning board sets up a route to get you from A to B No, I have an entire grid of transit options to go most places within the city. It's not just A to B, it's anywhere along the co-ordinate grid formed by all the transit routes, plus what I'm willing to walk or bike. Moreover, it provides far easier access to most of the places I do want to go than driving would. With a car, A to B is possible given that (1) there's car parking at both ends, (2) there isn't overwhelming traffic in-between those two points, and (3) that anywhere else you might want to go also meets those criteria. Providing (or guatunteeing) (1) (2) and (3) results in massive expanses of parking lots which are rarely ever filled, massive expanses of stroad to support all the traffic trying to get to those parking lots, and pushes everything further apart just to support cars, all requiring maintenance and upkeep. Not that trains don't, of course they do, but they're far more efficient in terms of space and money usage to person-miles travelled.
      - panick21_ 3y ago
        You clearly have no idea how a actual transport system works. You are so hilariously and completely wrong train infrastructure its not even funny. Go back 50 years and look at the train usage patterns then and now in places like Japan and Switerland. There are some rails that have been around for 100 years and have been used in many different ways. Going from mining, to transport to tourist attraction. Rail planners regularly adjust train length to adjust for demands. Frequency of certain routes can be increased or decreased. If you actually think about it for a while, you realize you need transport where people live. And people don't move to new places in a year or two, new cities don't just pop up. Many city in and villages have been there for literally 1000+ years, they aren't moving. So the idea that we shouldn't build a train to them because 'who knows about what happens in 50 years' is just beyond idiotic. If you government is actually smart, they make sure to build transport where they expect people to move. Sweden did this very nicely in Stockholm for example where they built out the train routes and zoned for living along those routes. And guess what people moved there. This idea that each person is some rugged individualist who at any point my get up and leave to start a new colony somewhere over the horizon is ridiculous. People generally move to places where infrastructure exists. > Fixed rail involves investment Rail can be built and still used for 50+ years just fine. How many times do you have to repave and rebuild a road in the same time. Once you actually do the math and you are not guided by 50 year of propaganda, its clear that trains are a far better investment. And also, just by the way. The US had a huge amount of fixed infrastructure, that was already built. And then dropped. It clear wasn't the up front investment cost that was the issue. > but for whatever reason, hackers love trains. Maybe they have thought about it for more then 5min.
  - r9295 3y ago
    Roads go where car drivers want to go*
  - evomassiny 3y ago
    a couple of reasons: * cars destroy cities, they take huge chunks of the public space, * air pollution, * noise pollution, * safety, * fast floods favored by impermeable soil covers, * social inequalities (not having a car make you less capable in a car centric environment), * climate change
    - CamperBob2 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - namaria 3y ago
        That's a whole lot of cope.
    - zolbrek 3y ago
      *cars destroy cities Interesting take, can you give an example of a nice city destroyed by cars?
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - undersuit 3y ago
        Most US cities require parking to be built when you build a new location. You know what my city doesn't require? A safe connection between the required city side walk through the required parking lot to the business.
      - evomassiny 3y ago
        Houston comes to mind, it has a very low walkbility index (see https://pedestriansfirst.itdp.org/ https://pedestriansfirst.itdp.org/).
        CamperBob2 3y ago
        People are free to leave at any time, yet the city has a population of almost 2.3 million. Not bad for a "destroyed" city.
  - cinntaile 3y ago
    Both roads and railroads are built based on current and future demand. By planning authorities.
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    Roads also go where authorities want them to go. Have people actually bought into this 'F-150 cross country rover' blabalbal. Buy a Cybertruck and solar panels and live of the grid driving threw the desert. Wtf is this nonsense? Do people not need water, electricity, internet, school and other things that all depend on 'the authorities'. I will tell you something about true freedom. When I was 15, me and friends went from Switzerland to Czech Republic by our-self in the train. Parents didn't have to drop us off anywhere. We just went. And today, I can literally get up, without thinking or planning, walk a couple minutes, and be anywhere in the country 2h later. I can can drink and go home no problem. But I guess its a much better solution to just keep telling people 'don't drink and drive', because that has helped so much. It continually amazes me how 40000 a year die, plus an unimaginable amount of property damage, policy cost, medical cost, infrastructure cost and so on and so on. And the defense for that is 'freedom bro'.
delfinom 3y ago
>At the same time, the report found, European governments had shut down more than 2,500 train stations since the mid-90s. They also closed about 8,523 miles (13,717 km) of regional passenger railway lines. Yea but how much of that was the "people all moved to the cities leaving villages to rot away" problem that other countries face including Japan and the US? Europe was very much and still has many scattered villages and small towns in each country that are disappearing as time goes on. They had trains, people used them to move and leave grandma/grandpa on their farms.
sschueller 3y ago
I don't think you can argue exactly that Switzerland is prefering road expansion instead of rail. There is still an enormous amount spent on rail but the huge NEAT investment is done and now some failing old road tunnels are in need of work and the costs are tremendous. One such tunnel requires building a 3rd because closing one of the two for x years is economicaly worse for the country than building the 3rd. The 3rd tunnel however will be closed at the end of construction and can not be used to expand capacity. It will be a service tunnel only. Also Switzerland just presented their 2035 [1] and 2050 [2] rail plans. The 2035 plan alone includes several new tunnels and new/upgrades to rail stations. The expansion at Zürich Stadelhofen alone is estimated at 1.1 billion Swiss francs and that is not the main train station in Zürich. Zürich Hartbrücke also need to be upgraded and is estimated over triple digit millions as well. [1] https://company.sbb.ch/de/ueber-die-sbb/projekte/nationale-programme/step-as-2035.html/ https://company.sbb.ch/de/ueber-die-sbb/projekte/nationale-p... [2] https://www.bav.admin.ch/bav/de/home/verkehrsmittel/eisenbahn/bahninfrastruktur/ausbauprogramme/perspektive-bahn-2050.html https://www.bav.admin.ch/bav/de/home/verkehrsmittel/eisenbah...
- badpun 3y ago
  > One such tunnel requires building a 3rd because closing one of the two for x years is economicaly worse for the country than building the 3rd. So there IS a country where decision makers actually consider the costs caused by traffic jams due to road maintenance!
wtp1saac 3y ago
Being in the US, it’s a shame these countries are making this same mistake. I’m probably warped being in Gen Z, but cars/car-centric infrastructure seem like a fundamental mistake, and a shameful investment. Everyone should have a right to walkability, and frankly in my experience, cities without it feel substantially less pleasant. Having good inner-city transit and inner/inter-city rail makes places feel so much nicer and more developed. Obviously, cities with good transit are substantially rarer and probably far worse maintained in the US than Europe, so I’m sure Europe is in an overall far better spot with it - but I struggle to understand the appeal of developing against walkability and transit-ability in 2023.
- zolbrek 3y ago
  I struggle to understand the appeal of walking in the rain and snow and cuddling with strangers on public transport in any year, and that's without bags of groceries. You can walk if you want, everyone should have the right to drivability.
  - M1ch431 3y ago
    Everybody should have access to all modes of transportation that are sustainable and comfortable to them and the people around them. Transportation should be accessible. Period. Be it high speed rail, car, bus, e-bike, e-scooter, etc. As long as what you are doing is safe, and you're not harming yourself or other people, you should be able to use whatever the hell kind of gadget you want to in order to get to the places you need to go. You shouldn't have police coming up to you telling you what you can and cannot put on the road because the laws are ancient and stagnant - and only get changed if there is a profit incentive. You shouldn't have to worry about getting run off the road/sidewalk/crosswalk because the people who planned/make the roads think it's a good thing to build thin, one-lane on each side, roads, with no bike lane, with no shoulder or a very small shoulder, with poorly-maintained sidewalks, etc. We really need to rethink how roads should work, how traffic lights should work, suggest speeds instead of set limits, and update our infrastructure. And standardize, standardize, standardize. And specifically, here in the US, we need to change to the metric system, like the rest of the world. But that probably will never happen.
thehappypm 3y ago
I’ve said this for a long time: rail infrastructure is just too expensive to be worth it, with a small number of exceptions (Japan for example). Even people in Europe prefer to fly or drive because of costs.
- zolbrek 3y ago
  Don't forget the people who prefer to drive because they're not handcuffed to a train schedule.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- M1ch431 3y ago
  It's high time that we stopped worrying about what's deemed expensive, and worry about what we can do to make the planet and its people healthier and happier; and their lives more fulfilling. We have the technology and means to do better than we ever have before in every area; and at least here in the US, we're ripe to have this infrastructure put in place. We need a true Green New Deal, not a watered-down bill that allocates funding to the few to accomplish nothing or something small-scale and localized. If we added thorough, accessible high speed rail infrastructure for transportation AND freight here in the US, we could reduce our fossil fuel emissions and dependence by a pretty large factor. And make travel more dignified and safe. It's absolutely ridiculous how we ship and receive goods - and it's absolutely ridiculous that the best means of travel from any place more than a few hours away is essentially just air. The roads are laughably bad, and they are clogged to the brim with tractor-trailers. It's time to stop. The real, measurable cost of continuing fossil fuel dependence is higher than we know or predict most likely, and justifying continuing this solely because doing better is "expensive" or "problematic" just shows the lack of leadership we have and the massive tumors that we need to excise. The amount of jobs that a national infrastructure deal would create are staggering, and the new, more sustainable economies of scale that would develop around it are priceless.
  - panick21_ 3y ago

That's a shame

CamperBob2 3y ago
Why? Roads go where people want to go. Trains go where planning authorities want people to go.
- kalupa 3y ago
  Wait, planing authorities don’t plan roads?
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path Road planners can respond to shifts in demand by reallocating resources. It's not easy, but it's possible. No such thing when it comes to fixed rail. Fixed rail involves investment of staggering amounts of money under the assumption that things will be exactly the same 50 years from now as they are today. In any other context, hackers would be mortally offended by such a proposition... but for whatever reason, hackers love trains.
    - tenacious_tuna 3y ago
      > but for whatever reason, hackers love trains. There's a weird inversion that happens around the concept of "freedom" w.r.t. cars--everyone insists owning a car is the ultimate expression of freedom, but they never pay heed to the fact that you, the human, become bound to a world built for rolling metal boxes when you own a car. You can only go places that have parking for it, you become responsible for driving yourself wherever you want to go. With public transit, I can do whatever I want. I don't have to hunt (or pay) for parking, I don't have to worry about not having an extra beer when out with friends. If on a whim I decide I'm going over to a friends house or if I just want to explore the city, I don't have to circle back to where I left my car to continue my journey (or return home): I hop aboard the train from the nearest station. When I'm on regional rail to visit a friend a few hours away, I'm not stressed about traffic or timing my bathroom trips--I get a snack and a drink from the cafe car and use the bathroom when I want, otherwise watching a movie from the comfort of my train seat. Moreover, a car is a liability: it requires fuel, storage, maintenance, all of which have varying prices at the dictates of entities beyond us. War overseas? Gas prices go up 30%. Need to park at your apartment? That's another $100 a month. Weird sound coming from the wheel? Could be anything, I hope you've got a trustworthy mechanic. Let alone insurance! But the subway is $2.50, the bus $2.25. I can get to the airport faster than I could drive, for less than I'd pay in gas, and I don't have to pay parking storage fees. Cars turn our cities into endless expanses of pavement just to hold our idle vehicles when we're not using them. They isolate us from our world and our communities, limiting us to experiencing everything through metal and glass. Cars are the ultimate expression of wealth separating one from the world: of course hackers love trains and transit.
      - thehappypm 3y ago
        “ With public transit, I can do whatever I want.” Not really? You can only do things that some planning board sets up a route to get you from A to B. With a car, every A to B is possible.
        tenacious_tuna 3y ago
        > You can only do things that some planning board sets up a route to get you from A to B No, I have an entire grid of transit options to go most places within the city. It's not just A to B, it's anywhere along the co-ordinate grid formed by all the transit routes, plus what I'm willing to walk or bike. Moreover, it provides far easier access to most of the places I do want to go than driving would. With a car, A to B is possible given that (1) there's car parking at both ends, (2) there isn't overwhelming traffic in-between those two points, and (3) that anywhere else you might want to go also meets those criteria. Providing (or guatunteeing) (1) (2) and (3) results in massive expanses of parking lots which are rarely ever filled, massive expanses of stroad to support all the traffic trying to get to those parking lots, and pushes everything further apart just to support cars, all requiring maintenance and upkeep. Not that trains don't, of course they do, but they're far more efficient in terms of space and money usage to person-miles travelled.
    - panick21_ 3y ago
      You clearly have no idea how a actual transport system works. You are so hilariously and completely wrong train infrastructure its not even funny. Go back 50 years and look at the train usage patterns then and now in places like Japan and Switerland. There are some rails that have been around for 100 years and have been used in many different ways. Going from mining, to transport to tourist attraction. Rail planners regularly adjust train length to adjust for demands. Frequency of certain routes can be increased or decreased. If you actually think about it for a while, you realize you need transport where people live. And people don't move to new places in a year or two, new cities don't just pop up. Many city in and villages have been there for literally 1000+ years, they aren't moving. So the idea that we shouldn't build a train to them because 'who knows about what happens in 50 years' is just beyond idiotic. If you government is actually smart, they make sure to build transport where they expect people to move. Sweden did this very nicely in Stockholm for example where they built out the train routes and zoned for living along those routes. And guess what people moved there. This idea that each person is some rugged individualist who at any point my get up and leave to start a new colony somewhere over the horizon is ridiculous. People generally move to places where infrastructure exists. > Fixed rail involves investment Rail can be built and still used for 50+ years just fine. How many times do you have to repave and rebuild a road in the same time. Once you actually do the math and you are not guided by 50 year of propaganda, its clear that trains are a far better investment. And also, just by the way. The US had a huge amount of fixed infrastructure, that was already built. And then dropped. It clear wasn't the up front investment cost that was the issue. > but for whatever reason, hackers love trains. Maybe they have thought about it for more then 5min.
- r9295 3y ago
  Roads go where car drivers want to go*
- evomassiny 3y ago
  a couple of reasons: * cars destroy cities, they take huge chunks of the public space, * air pollution, * noise pollution, * safety, * fast floods favored by impermeable soil covers, * social inequalities (not having a car make you less capable in a car centric environment), * climate change
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - namaria 3y ago
      That's a whole lot of cope.
  - zolbrek 3y ago
    *cars destroy cities Interesting take, can you give an example of a nice city destroyed by cars?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - undersuit 3y ago
      Most US cities require parking to be built when you build a new location. You know what my city doesn't require? A safe connection between the required city side walk through the required parking lot to the business.
    - evomassiny 3y ago
      Houston comes to mind, it has a very low walkbility index (see https://pedestriansfirst.itdp.org/ https://pedestriansfirst.itdp.org/).
      - CamperBob2 3y ago
        People are free to leave at any time, yet the city has a population of almost 2.3 million. Not bad for a "destroyed" city.
- cinntaile 3y ago
  Both roads and railroads are built based on current and future demand. By planning authorities.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  Roads also go where authorities want them to go. Have people actually bought into this 'F-150 cross country rover' blabalbal. Buy a Cybertruck and solar panels and live of the grid driving threw the desert. Wtf is this nonsense? Do people not need water, electricity, internet, school and other things that all depend on 'the authorities'. I will tell you something about true freedom. When I was 15, me and friends went from Switzerland to Czech Republic by our-self in the train. Parents didn't have to drop us off anywhere. We just went. And today, I can literally get up, without thinking or planning, walk a couple minutes, and be anywhere in the country 2h later. I can can drink and go home no problem. But I guess its a much better solution to just keep telling people 'don't drink and drive', because that has helped so much. It continually amazes me how 40000 a year die, plus an unimaginable amount of property damage, policy cost, medical cost, infrastructure cost and so on and so on. And the defense for that is 'freedom bro'.

>At the same time, the report found, European governments had shut down more than 2,500 train stations since the mid-90s. They also closed about 8,523 miles (13,717 km) of regional passenger railway lines. Yea but how much of that was the "people all moved to the cities leaving villages to rot away" problem that other countries face including Japan and the US? Europe was very much and still has many scattered villages and small towns in each country that are disappearing as time goes on. They had trains, people used them to move and leave grandma/grandpa on their farms.

sschueller 3y ago

I don't think you can argue exactly that Switzerland is prefering road expansion instead of rail. There is still an enormous amount spent on rail but the huge NEAT investment is done and now some failing old road tunnels are in need of work and the costs are tremendous. One such tunnel requires building a 3rd because closing one of the two for x years is economicaly worse for the country than building the 3rd. The 3rd tunnel however will be closed at the end of construction and can not be used to expand capacity. It will be a service tunnel only. Also Switzerland just presented their 2035 [1] and 2050 [2] rail plans. The 2035 plan alone includes several new tunnels and new/upgrades to rail stations. The expansion at Zürich Stadelhofen alone is estimated at 1.1 billion Swiss francs and that is not the main train station in Zürich. Zürich Hartbrücke also need to be upgraded and is estimated over triple digit millions as well. [1] https://company.sbb.ch/de/ueber-die-sbb/projekte/nationale-programme/step-as-2035.html/ https://company.sbb.ch/de/ueber-die-sbb/projekte/nationale-p... [2] https://www.bav.admin.ch/bav/de/home/verkehrsmittel/eisenbahn/bahninfrastruktur/ausbauprogramme/perspektive-bahn-2050.html https://www.bav.admin.ch/bav/de/home/verkehrsmittel/eisenbah...

badpun 3y ago
> One such tunnel requires building a 3rd because closing one of the two for x years is economicaly worse for the country than building the 3rd. So there IS a country where decision makers actually consider the costs caused by traffic jams due to road maintenance!

wtp1saac 3y ago

Being in the US, it’s a shame these countries are making this same mistake. I’m probably warped being in Gen Z, but cars/car-centric infrastructure seem like a fundamental mistake, and a shameful investment. Everyone should have a right to walkability, and frankly in my experience, cities without it feel substantially less pleasant. Having good inner-city transit and inner/inter-city rail makes places feel so much nicer and more developed. Obviously, cities with good transit are substantially rarer and probably far worse maintained in the US than Europe, so I’m sure Europe is in an overall far better spot with it - but I struggle to understand the appeal of developing against walkability and transit-ability in 2023.

zolbrek 3y ago
I struggle to understand the appeal of walking in the rain and snow and cuddling with strangers on public transport in any year, and that's without bags of groceries. You can walk if you want, everyone should have the right to drivability.
- M1ch431 3y ago
  Everybody should have access to all modes of transportation that are sustainable and comfortable to them and the people around them. Transportation should be accessible. Period. Be it high speed rail, car, bus, e-bike, e-scooter, etc. As long as what you are doing is safe, and you're not harming yourself or other people, you should be able to use whatever the hell kind of gadget you want to in order to get to the places you need to go. You shouldn't have police coming up to you telling you what you can and cannot put on the road because the laws are ancient and stagnant - and only get changed if there is a profit incentive. You shouldn't have to worry about getting run off the road/sidewalk/crosswalk because the people who planned/make the roads think it's a good thing to build thin, one-lane on each side, roads, with no bike lane, with no shoulder or a very small shoulder, with poorly-maintained sidewalks, etc. We really need to rethink how roads should work, how traffic lights should work, suggest speeds instead of set limits, and update our infrastructure. And standardize, standardize, standardize. And specifically, here in the US, we need to change to the metric system, like the rest of the world. But that probably will never happen.

thehappypm 3y ago

I’ve said this for a long time: rail infrastructure is just too expensive to be worth it, with a small number of exceptions (Japan for example). Even people in Europe prefer to fly or drive because of costs.

zolbrek 3y ago
Don't forget the people who prefer to drive because they're not handcuffed to a train schedule.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
M1ch431 3y ago
It's high time that we stopped worrying about what's deemed expensive, and worry about what we can do to make the planet and its people healthier and happier; and their lives more fulfilling. We have the technology and means to do better than we ever have before in every area; and at least here in the US, we're ripe to have this infrastructure put in place. We need a true Green New Deal, not a watered-down bill that allocates funding to the few to accomplish nothing or something small-scale and localized. If we added thorough, accessible high speed rail infrastructure for transportation AND freight here in the US, we could reduce our fossil fuel emissions and dependence by a pretty large factor. And make travel more dignified and safe. It's absolutely ridiculous how we ship and receive goods - and it's absolutely ridiculous that the best means of travel from any place more than a few hours away is essentially just air. The roads are laughably bad, and they are clogged to the brim with tractor-trailers. It's time to stop. The real, measurable cost of continuing fossil fuel dependence is higher than we know or predict most likely, and justifying continuing this solely because doing better is "expensive" or "problematic" just shows the lack of leadership we have and the massive tumors that we need to excise. The amount of jobs that a national infrastructure deal would create are staggering, and the new, more sustainable economies of scale that would develop around it are priceless.
- panick21_ 3y ago