Most European rail networks are not profitable. Night trains have approximately never been profitable for anyone, anywhere. They survived only due to government subsidy, and those same governments are not subsidizing the high-speed trains. The price difference has nothing to do with high-speed vs low-speed and everything to do with government subsidy.
Cheaper and easier transport will always increase demand; either you're for cheap transport or against it, and if you're for it you accept that it will be used by commuters living further away from the cities they work in. Making the rail networks cheaper, as the author seems to advocate, would only increase this effect. Or is the argument that leisure travellers care more about cost and commuters care more about journey time? Maybe, but the rail network would be completely unsustainable without commuter traffic.
And as someone who travelled by EuroCity, they weren't the land of milk and honey this author portrays; they were (and still are, in Eastern Europe) frequently several hours late, leading to missed connections. I do think there are cases for some international trains to be scheduled more sensibly (Italy's high-speed trains that then sit for 30 minutes in each station on the way up are ludicrous; Eurostar has sped up by several minutes over the last few years by eliminating less popular stops), but at some point you simply can't match the speed advantage of true high-speed rail.
The specific route complained about here is a dogleg for connectivity reasons; what you're not seeing on his map is the line from Calais (and thence from Britain) coming down to meet it at Lille. There are winners and losers in any routing decision (basically the high speed lines her are a tree centered on Lille, so rather than two distinct lines from Paris to Brussels and Calais there's one line that branches. Longer than a direct train, but it avoids building two distinct lines), but as a Brit I'm profoundly grateful for this one, which makes day trips to Paris or Brussels plausible in a way they simply weren't before.
Yes, I think this is closer to the real problem here: Politicians just loves these big, glamorous infrastructure projects, and anything "train" also tastes green, so that's double the glamour for the same money, and any unintended consequences are, well, unintended, so who can possibly blame them for it?
HS2 has already been heavily criticized for overly optimistically assuming away all problems with the line, and it would not surprise me one bit if one of the assumptions in the cost/benefit analysis is that all existing passengers will use the new line at double (or whatever) the cost, and that the older slower line can close.
The main rationale for building HS2 is that the West Coast Main Line is close to capacity. They aren't going to close the WCML. I believe the plan is to use the freed capacity for more frequent local trains in around Birmingham.
On a related note, it's amazing how little the underlying WCML issue gets mentioned in HS2 stories.
That's because the sexy story here is 'politicians spending money on glamour projects', and not something dull like 'out of capacity rail line desperately needs relief'.
Nobody mentions the rationale, because it's practically impossible to intelligently argue against. It's like the world's greatest strawman.
Sorry, maybe I'm misunderstanding, but are you claiming that it's practically impossible to make intelligent arguments against HS2? Or just that it's practically impossible to argue that the WCML is running out of capacity (without necessarily assuming HS2 is the way to fix that)?
The latter. There's plenty of sensible criticism to be made of the current project plan, but it's really hard to get away from the fact that we're out of capacity. The quickest, cheapest and least disruptive way of fixing that is to build a new railway line. At the moment, we just have some ridiculously rabid partisan public 'debate' where you are either in favour of the HS2 in its current entirety, or you think we shouldn't be doing it at all. There's a huge spectrum of insight that's being lost, and that's what makes me a sad panda.
I think he meant it is practically impossible to argue intelligently against the need to add capacity to the WCML, so nobody mentions it because they would rather argue against the strawman of 'policians are only doing HS2 to look good'.
I believe that the plan is to run both as the current line is over capacity.
As an avid UK train user, but not frequently on that route I support high speed rail plans in general.
I'd like them to build the phases in the opposite order - first the links in the North, then down to London.
A sad fact of the rail privatization, and the rail in general is that governments seem to prefer the large infrastructure projects rather than ongoing subsidy. From an environmental standpoint commuting by train should be much cheaper than by car, but for many places in the UK it is far more expensive.
What I can't figure out is: If rail is so efficient and road travel so inefficient, why is it that rail travel costs more than road travel, even when the government subsidises rail companies and heavily taxes fuel and parking?
To be fair, subway travel in dense cities like NYC tends to be substantially cheaper than road travel in most cases. (Think taxi vs. subway -- the taxi can sometimes, but not always, get you there faster, but you'll pay a lot more. If you have multiple people in the taxi it becomes more competitive though.)
Also, are you counting the cost of the car? If you don't have to buy/rent the car then road travel might look cheaper than it is.
Nonetheless, in general I agree with you. I suspect there's a greater demand for rail travel, pushing prices up. Nearly everyone I know prefers rail when they can, since they don't have to drive or sit in traffic, but chooses road often, primarily for cost and convenience reasons.
In the US at least, government subsidizes driving quite a bit. Mandatory free parking is one of the biggest examples: building parking on all roads (which has an indirect tax on alternative transportation methods by reducing density -- worse for walking, biking, buses, and trains); forcing commercial developers to create free parking lots; etc.
Gas taxes also do not cover the entire costs of roads, nor do they cover the environmental costs. In the US they're also free of sales tax -- another subsidy compared to other goods, though shared by many transportation options.
All that aside, like another commenter said, in a place like Manhattan driving is definitely the more expensive option. This would be true elsewhere if more areas did not subsidize driving or have policies outlawing the density necessary for alternative transportation methods to succeed.
Roads are free to use which is a ridiculously huge subsidy. Also, driving is a lot more expensive than you might think it just involves a lot of sunk costs which people ignore.
EX: Driving a cheap car 15,000 miles per year with 3$ gas 30mpg = 1,500$. Except insurance is ~90$ a month which adds 1,080$ a year. A combination of maintenance / car payments / depreciation runs around 200$ a month adding 2,400$ a year. Live in town that's generally 100$ a month (12,00$/year) for parking at your apartment which is generally close to break-even for an apartment complex. Ignoring other fees like tolls etc your talking about 6,180$ a year for 15,000 miles or 41.2 cents a mile which is far from cheap.
“Entertainments may be taxed; public houses may be taxed; racehorses may be taxed…and the yield devoted to the general revenue. But motorists are to be privileged for all time to have the whole yield of the tax on motors devoted to roads. Obviously this is all nonsense…Such contentions are absurd, and constitute…an outrage upon the sovereignty of Parliament and upon common sense.”
That's cute, but the reality is that if you impose a severe tax on people who behave in a certain way, those people are going to expect something in return to justify the discrimination. Using tax as a weapon for implementing social policy is always a dangerous path, and it will remain so until politicians don't always have to answer to their electorates sooner or later.
Indeed. Most people still cling to the belief that NI funds the NHS, instead of just being "income tax plus". Having said that, TV tax does fund the BBC.
Which also makes money from various other sources, and which also provides numerous radio and Internet services at home in some cases to people who don't need a TV licence, thus demonstrating how silly it is that the government funding element of the Beeb's income wasn't switched to general taxation long ago...
If people who drink beer also need disproportionate amounts of expensive attention from say the police service or hospitals or courts, it seems fair enough that beer drinkers should make some sort of contribution accordingly. However, even that is a shaky argument unless it applies to most/all beer drinkers and not just a minority who don't drink responsibly.
Beyond that, as long as drinking beer is legal, I see little ethical basis for taxing someone who drinks beer more than someone who does not. Why should you contribute more to the cost of something completely unrelated like running schools or buying aircraft carriers than I do, just because your preferred evening drink comes in a pint glass and mine does not?
The question isn't whether it's fair for motorists to contribute to general revenue, it's whether it's fair to say that motorists are being subsidised.
As long as you ignore the fact the UK is not keeping up with the full costs of maintaining there roads as well as the value of all that land and all the past construction costs then it looks good. Because, maintaining an all that aging infrastructure is not that expensive but building it was. Don't forget £11.911 billion (56%) was capital expenditure when you might think most roads and bridges you want built have already been built.
Edit: By not keeping up with infrastructure I mean the average age of there infrastructure is increasing which is not really a bad thing as replacing things early wastes cash but depredation is a real cost.
As for keeping up with maintenance, well, that's just criminal while overcharging motorists £25b a year, no?
As for the initial cost, that's harder to figure out, but this (dodgy looking, admittedly) website[1] suggests that a mile of motorway costs £24m to construct. That means that the motorists are "paying off" the roads at a rate of about 1000 miles a year. There are 7500 miles of motorwayways and A roads[2], but motorists have been paying more in taxes than has been spent directly, although not at the current rate, for 30 years, and with no sign of slowing down.
Rail is environmentally efficient over low occupancy car travel. It's not very economically efficient, in part because the infrastructure is bigger, more expensive and more complicated, in part because politicians force train operators to operate a comprehensive schedule, not just when it's economically viable.
in part because politicians force train operators to operate a comprehensive schedule, not just when it's economically viable.
I assume that's because the fewer trains there are over the course of a day (or weekend), the harder it is for people to use the train as a substitute for personal transportation and the less likely people will rely on the trains in general.
Yeah, in theory, and possible also in some practices, but you also end up with an impenetrable mesh of cross-subsidies that raise the cost of some routes that might be economical in their own regard to subsidise other links but not enough to make them solid alternatives. And then suddenly you have to compete with low-cost airlines and bus services that don't have this subsidy complexity and are much more agile - recipe for disaster.
It's more _energy_ efficient, but also much more expensive to maintain. Partly because it's held to more serious safety standards, and partly because it's so much harder to route around difficulties. Signalling is a major maintenance money sink: a distributed safety system that must be completely reliable.
(Parking is rarely heavily taxed and often "free" - where were you thinking of?)
Perhaps I should have been clearer about the parking.
Here in the UK, particularly in London parking is often non-free. In some areas, councils have adopted policies of not granting planning permission for workplace car parking spaces, or making planning permission conditional on there being a certain charge, in order to increase the costs of driving. I agree that this is not technically a direct tax, but it is an example of government intervention to increase the costs of driving.
Fighting against parking is more complicated than that. Parking moves buildings further apart, making them more difficult to service with transit/pedestrian/bike services. Urban services require dense construction, and parking lots are the opposite of density.
If the policy was that single-level outdoor carparks were denied while underground and multistorey car parking was allowed (or less discouraged) I'd agree with you. But it's my understanding that is not the case.
Most road are paid for with taxes and no additional fee from the drivers is necessary? (while train operators need to pay the fee for using the rails).
It would make more sense to create new roads, but limit their use to coaches and HGVs. This would reduce congestion on existing roads, and provide more point-to-point capacity. Trains are great if you want to travel between places on a fast main-line but most journeys are more complicated than that.
The train subsidies differs greatly by region. For "my" rail company, the fees were flowing in the other direction over the last year - Southern paid an average 0.6p per passenger mile.
For my part at least, my travel card is a bargain compared to what owning and operating a card would have cost me.
The only people who get to play are the ones the government lets use the track. Even if they would let you play you need a lot of money up front.
Effectively closed market, high cost of entry, the gov demands money from them for the privilege so has an incentive to not bring prices down.... And if you choose not to use it the gov gets you again on fuel tax.
I suspect whatever the underlying economics were it would be expensive. It's essentially a monopoly with a, from an end user standpoint, perverse incentive structure.
I would imagine economics of scale plays a significant part. If there was a lot more people travelling by rail, it would be cheaper- increased capacity implied
I was getting an off-peak train from near London into central London. The train is often packed, with people left standing, and I can only imagine it's even busier at peak times.
Many train lines are at or near maximum capacity and need more investment, if you believe the claims used to justify regular above-inflation rail fare increases.
If economies of scale make them profitable, they should be making money hand over fist.
I'm not convinced economies of scale are the problem.
Sure, but the best-guess calculation is that it's going to be worth that £50 billion in terms of economic return for the country (even if not all of that is realized as revenue for the government/train operator). But night trains can't be justified even with that kind of logic, only on some kind of social "it's good for people to be able to travel even if it's not economically reasonable" grounds.
Most trains in the UK, and to my knowledge all high speed trains, are electrified, and your link states that electrified services are not subject to this duty.
Not even all the main lines in the UK are electrified, and there's still a large stock of 1970s diesel "High Speed Trains" (yes, that's the actual model name) in operation on main lines.
The main lines:
- Cross Country Route: partially electrified;
- East Coast Main Line: fully electrified (but a number of services continue north of it, which is not electrified);
- Great Eastern Main Line: fully electrified;
- Great Western Main Line: partially electrified (for the first 11 of 120 miles);
- High Speed 1: fully electrified;
- Midland Main Line: partially electrified (again, only for a relatively short distance near the London end);
- West Coast Main Line: fully electrified.
That's 3 out of 7 main lines that are only partially electrified. If we get off the main lines (and quite a number of smaller lines still have frequent services, all diesel!).
Are night trains relevant? No-one builds a railway to run night trains, but once you have the route built for the daytime services, running an extra train at night on an otherwise-empty track must be very low cost business.
Some UK train franchises even lay on so-called 'ghost trains' [1], services that are on useless routes and useless timetables, simply so that they can make up the numbers to hit their service agreements (and so not lose their franchises). This strongly implies that the cost of rolling an extra train along the tracks is relatively small.
> No-one builds a railway to run night trains, but once you have the route built for the daytime services, running an extra train at night on an otherwise-empty track must be very low cost business.
The operators find them unprofitable (at least in the UK). AIUI they can be very disruptive to track maintenance (particularly given modern safety regulations[1]); they also require paying staff, keeping stations open during the night, leasing nonstandard carriages that can't be used for anything during the day (which in turn means either dedicated locomotives or careful scheduling and shunting, something that modern railways try to eliminate as much as possible). Certainly the sleeper train to Scotland is heavily subsidized and I believe the one to Cornwall is as well (less confident of that though). With Eurostar, AIUI the government even bought and fitted out sleeping carriages in the early days of the channel tunnel, before they turned the whole thing over to a private company to operate - which then concluded that night services would be uneconomic, and sold the carriages off cheaply to Canada.
The ghost trains you link to are more about a legal obligation; even if they cost the relevant companies a lot of money to run, they don't have any alternative. (And honestly an off-peak daytime service, when the trains are already out and the staff already on shift, isn't really comparable).
[1] Which are not unreasonable IMO - people have been killed by e.g. a train on the track next to the one they were working on.
It's not about making up the numbers, but because closing a line is an expensive and lengthy affair due to the amount of consultation that is required under the Transport Act 1962
Does the UK have dedicated passenger train tracks?
In the US, most train tracks (in my experience, at least) are used for both freight and passengers (and frequently owned by the freight companies, who shaft the passenger trains to keep the freight running on schedule, but that's another rant). The freight trains could easily be crowding out the night passenger trains.
The UK network prioritises passengers over freight in almost all circumstances. Much of the freight is "bulk" that can tolerate delay quite happily.
You don't see a lot of freight going past while waiting on a passenger platform or at a level crossing. There are some freight-only lines mostly for coal to power stations.
Worth pointing out that £14.4b of that is earmarked as contingency. Actual 'budget' is more like £35b. And I believe (but would have to check) that includes spending money on new trains, which we're going to do anyway.
But all of these figures are funny money, and usually subject to variation by at least a factor of 2 if you ask the critics, at least some of whom have valid points to make. The reality is that we don't know what a project like this is really going to cost, economically or otherwise, until we're at least a significant part of the way through implementing it.
Whether that actually matters is a different question, because the realistic alternative isn't that nothing will happen instead and taxpayers will suddenly get a £1,000+ windfall, it's that a broadly similar amount of government funding will be used for other purposes. Many of the interesting questions in this debate are qualitative ones about which general areas should be funding priorities and what the overall national infrastructure strategy should be. And many of the interesting questions that are quantitative are about opportunity costs as much as what will/would be spent on one massive project.
usually these projects are pandering to donors and expected donors. There have been numerous reports that many high speed rail lines only serve to allow the very well off to live where they want with access to other places they need.
The build out costs are not the same as funding day to day operations. Usually subsidizing implies the fare is lowered because of government spending.
Like any big project, I'm sure some of the money is going to well-connected people, and the route is partially influenced by politics. That's not the subsidy bit.
The real subsidy is that once the line is complete, the rail franchise will be sold off, allowing a company to run a rail service on the line. This is in effect a subsidy, since it's letting a company run a rail service without having to foot the bill for the construction. Sure, it's a form of rent, but the risks associated with the line construction have been swallowed by government money.
Plus, the UK government(s) have an absymal record for selling franchises below their 'true cost' (see the original rail privitisations, where franchises were bought and then sold-on shortly later at vastly inflated prices). Only an eternal optimist could happily assume they'll get it right this time!
Finally, consider that these big rail projects are never initiated by private business. Few enterprises willingly stump up the cash to construct a big railway line just so it can run trains on it later. They only do so when government invests the cash. This surely implies that the government-backed schemes must be of benefit to the railway companies => there's the subsidy.
Cheaper and easier transport will always increase demand; either you're for cheap transport or against it, and if you're for it you accept that it will be used by commuters living further away from the cities they work in. Making the rail networks cheaper, as the author seems to advocate, would only increase this effect. Or is the argument that leisure travellers care more about cost and commuters care more about journey time? Maybe, but the rail network would be completely unsustainable without commuter traffic.
And as someone who travelled by EuroCity, they weren't the land of milk and honey this author portrays; they were (and still are, in Eastern Europe) frequently several hours late, leading to missed connections. I do think there are cases for some international trains to be scheduled more sensibly (Italy's high-speed trains that then sit for 30 minutes in each station on the way up are ludicrous; Eurostar has sped up by several minutes over the last few years by eliminating less popular stops), but at some point you simply can't match the speed advantage of true high-speed rail.
The specific route complained about here is a dogleg for connectivity reasons; what you're not seeing on his map is the line from Calais (and thence from Britain) coming down to meet it at Lille. There are winners and losers in any routing decision (basically the high speed lines her are a tree centered on Lille, so rather than two distinct lines from Paris to Brussels and Calais there's one line that branches. Longer than a direct train, but it avoids building two distinct lines), but as a Brit I'm profoundly grateful for this one, which makes day trips to Paris or Brussels plausible in a way they simply weren't before.