6 ms·

Spain's efficient high-speed trains have transformed people's lives

66 points by saguntum 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Innervisio 3y ago
A personal note from anecdotes i had this year on Spanish trains. 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.
- cordenr 3y ago
  They seem to use a similar model to low cost airlines. Depending on when you travel and when you buy the ticket, the price varies dramatically. 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.
- fooker 3y ago
  Not everything has to make money, especially public infrastructure.
  - diggan 3y ago
    Also, a good railway increases profits elsewhere, in addition to fares, as people can cheaply and relatively comfortable travel across the country.
  - angio 3y ago
    Trenitalia has to make money since it's partly a private company.
    - fooker 3y ago
      If it's critical infrastructure, it'll get nationalized anyway when struggling.
  - Innervisio 3y ago
    Correct, but Iryo is a private company, although the railway in Spain is publicly maintained i guess by Renfe. So i believe Iryo should make money, specially (as mentioned in another comment below) it's part of Trenitalia. But i'm definitely not an economist.
    - unflxw 3y ago
      The public railway infrastructure is maintained by Adif [1], which is owned by the Spanish state. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrador_de_Infraestructuras_Ferroviarias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrador_de_Infraestructu...
- zxspectrum1982 3y ago
  Iryo and Ouigo only arrived in Spain recently. They are selling tickets at cost or even below cost to gain some market share. Ouigo has already stopped some routes because the losses were insurmountable even in a promotional period. 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.
  - f233f2 3y ago
    +1, Iryo and Ouigo are recent and they are losing money. Renfe has always been tremendously expensive - more expensive than a car or plane. 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.
    - Innervisio 3y ago
      This is also my concern, that it does not look realistic and hence my initiative to start commenting in the topic. What is the reality and intention of only privately held companies with such small fares? 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.
      - f233f2 3y ago
        Unfortunately, no, prices haven't dropped for Renfe fares. Coupled with: https://twitter.com/el_pais/status/1716776148049285585 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.
pjmlp 3y ago
While Renfe trains are great travel alternative, they only transformed people's lives, for those people that live close enough to the train stations where they stop. 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.
- diggan 3y ago
  > 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.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    As someone with roots in Iberian penisula, across both countries, where I lived half of my life and routinely come back to, approaching 50y, anecdotallyis what I see when people are forced to drive from small towns. 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.
    - ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago
      > public transport isn't available everywhere, connections get dropped, delayed 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.
      - pjmlp 3y ago
        Barcelona is one city, one of the richests in the Penisula, and the capital of the Catalonia region. 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.
Agingcoder 3y ago
It’s interesting to see that low population density is an advantage here - it’s usually described as a financially obstacle for most infrastructure projects ( telco, etc )
- em-bee 3y ago
  it's high density urban centers with empty countryside in between. the problem with low density is that many areas don't have enough people close enough to any station to be able to get there without a car
- unflxw 3y ago
  In Spain, there's usually no "density gradient" between the core of a city and its suburbs. 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)
tbdenney 3y ago
Having lived in both Sevilla and Barcelona, the high speed lines (until very recently only operated by RENFE as the AVE service) are really amazing and a great value. Also, RENFE has a media-distancia service that isn't quite high speed rail but still pretty fast and efficient, that serves routes like Barcelona-Valencia in ~3.5 hours. 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.
- Bluestein 3y ago
  The whole "Eurorail" "pissing match" between jurisdictions/countries, where you have to confirm/book everything, sometimes manually, ostensibly because of "interoperability" issues ... ... is sad.- It would be a gamechanger for Europe, were it to function in a frictionless, integrated, simple way.-
inglor_cz 3y ago
To be honest, Spain is almost ideal for high-speed trains. Big conurbations with millions or at least hundreds of thousands people, separated by mostly empty land where few people ever see or hear the trains rushing to and fro. 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.
- stuaxo 3y ago
  Yep, with HS2 the engineering came in under budget. Tory councils bringing legal objections pushed the price up.
psd1 3y ago
Spanish politics is based on coalition; when a government is voted out, it generally retains a significant presence in the next government. 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.
- unflxw 3y ago
  While I hope that Spanish politics continue to be based in coalitions, this is a very recent phenomenon, with a two-party political system historically dominating the country's politics, a tradition that predates the democratic system itself. [1] 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. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turno https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turno
lapinot 3y ago
Necessary rebuttal: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2013/12/high-speed-trains-are-killing-the-european-railway-network/ https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2013/12/high-speed-trains-...
- xctr94 3y ago
  Good article as a rebuttal. One caveat: the comparison between high-speed and conventional rail is overshadowing the privatization/market forces of the operators themselves. HSR will be invariably more expensive to run because the energy costs are much higher, but a lot of that price tag is — I assume — the profit margin of the private company. Public rail can run at cost, but private can’t.

66 points by saguntum 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

A personal note from anecdotes i had this year on Spanish trains. 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.

cordenr 3y ago
They seem to use a similar model to low cost airlines. Depending on when you travel and when you buy the ticket, the price varies dramatically. 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.
fooker 3y ago
Not everything has to make money, especially public infrastructure.
- diggan 3y ago
  Also, a good railway increases profits elsewhere, in addition to fares, as people can cheaply and relatively comfortable travel across the country.
- angio 3y ago
  Trenitalia has to make money since it's partly a private company.
  - fooker 3y ago
    If it's critical infrastructure, it'll get nationalized anyway when struggling.
- Innervisio 3y ago
  Correct, but Iryo is a private company, although the railway in Spain is publicly maintained i guess by Renfe. So i believe Iryo should make money, specially (as mentioned in another comment below) it's part of Trenitalia. But i'm definitely not an economist.
  - unflxw 3y ago
    The public railway infrastructure is maintained by Adif [1], which is owned by the Spanish state. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrador_de_Infraestructuras_Ferroviarias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrador_de_Infraestructu...
zxspectrum1982 3y ago
Iryo and Ouigo only arrived in Spain recently. They are selling tickets at cost or even below cost to gain some market share. Ouigo has already stopped some routes because the losses were insurmountable even in a promotional period. 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.
- f233f2 3y ago
  +1, Iryo and Ouigo are recent and they are losing money. Renfe has always been tremendously expensive - more expensive than a car or plane. 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.
  - Innervisio 3y ago
    This is also my concern, that it does not look realistic and hence my initiative to start commenting in the topic. What is the reality and intention of only privately held companies with such small fares? 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.
    - f233f2 3y ago
      Unfortunately, no, prices haven't dropped for Renfe fares. Coupled with: https://twitter.com/el_pais/status/1716776148049285585 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.

pjmlp 3y ago

While Renfe trains are great travel alternative, they only transformed people's lives, for those people that live close enough to the train stations where they stop. 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.

diggan 3y ago
> 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.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  As someone with roots in Iberian penisula, across both countries, where I lived half of my life and routinely come back to, approaching 50y, anecdotallyis what I see when people are forced to drive from small towns. 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.
  - ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago
    > public transport isn't available everywhere, connections get dropped, delayed 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.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Barcelona is one city, one of the richests in the Penisula, and the capital of the Catalonia region. 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.

Agingcoder 3y ago

It’s interesting to see that low population density is an advantage here - it’s usually described as a financially obstacle for most infrastructure projects ( telco, etc )

em-bee 3y ago
it's high density urban centers with empty countryside in between. the problem with low density is that many areas don't have enough people close enough to any station to be able to get there without a car
unflxw 3y ago
In Spain, there's usually no "density gradient" between the core of a city and its suburbs. 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)

tbdenney 3y ago

Having lived in both Sevilla and Barcelona, the high speed lines (until very recently only operated by RENFE as the AVE service) are really amazing and a great value. Also, RENFE has a media-distancia service that isn't quite high speed rail but still pretty fast and efficient, that serves routes like Barcelona-Valencia in ~3.5 hours. 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.

Bluestein 3y ago
The whole "Eurorail" "pissing match" between jurisdictions/countries, where you have to confirm/book everything, sometimes manually, ostensibly because of "interoperability" issues ... ... is sad.- It would be a gamechanger for Europe, were it to function in a frictionless, integrated, simple way.-

inglor_cz 3y ago

To be honest, Spain is almost ideal for high-speed trains. Big conurbations with millions or at least hundreds of thousands people, separated by mostly empty land where few people ever see or hear the trains rushing to and fro. 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.

stuaxo 3y ago
Yep, with HS2 the engineering came in under budget. Tory councils bringing legal objections pushed the price up.

psd1 3y ago

Spanish politics is based on coalition; when a government is voted out, it generally retains a significant presence in the next government. 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.

unflxw 3y ago
While I hope that Spanish politics continue to be based in coalitions, this is a very recent phenomenon, with a two-party political system historically dominating the country's politics, a tradition that predates the democratic system itself. [1] 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. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turno https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turno

lapinot 3y ago

Necessary rebuttal: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2013/12/high-speed-trains-are-killing-the-european-railway-network/ https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2013/12/high-speed-trains-...

xctr94 3y ago
Good article as a rebuttal. One caveat: the comparison between high-speed and conventional rail is overshadowing the privatization/market forces of the operators themselves. HSR will be invariably more expensive to run because the energy costs are much higher, but a lot of that price tag is — I assume — the profit margin of the private company. Public rail can run at cost, but private can’t.