In numbers: Europe's high-speed trains

CNN ^ | June 22, 2012

[KevinDavis]

So what????

[AFreeBird]

I loved the Top Gear episode where Jeremy raced in an Austin Martin DB9 against James and Richard using public transport, including HS rail, from Surrey England to Monte Carlo. 900 miles.

The car won.

[epluribus_2]

Trains are nice in Chicago and DC but would be dumb where I live. Question to twenty something,urban,recently graduated
libs who could care less about freedom of personal transportation - what will you do when you have three kids, you need to leave work Right Now with one sick,one needing to go to soccer, and you are out of groceries and need to bring three bags home with you? Hmm. If that stretches your mind too much this one is simpler. What will you do when (not if) the bad guys or the “authorities” need to shut down you public transit system for an unspecified length of time? Not questions in your world - yet.

[epluribus_2]

Trains are nice in Chicago and DC but would be dumb where I live. Question to twenty something,urban,recently graduated
libs who could care less about freedom of personal transportation - what will you do when you have three kids, you need to leave work Right Now with one sick,one needing to go to soccer, and you are out of groceries and need to bring three bags home with you? Hmm. If that stretches your mind too much this one is simpler. What will you do when (not if) the bad guys or the “authorities” need to shut down you public transit system for an unspecified length of time? Not questions in your world - yet.

[epluribus_2]

Sorry for phone double post post...

[babble-on]

I think geographically small countries with ethnically homogenous populations and a high degree of population density are a lot more likely to make these sorts of investments than large, widely spread, diverse countries.

I love high-speed rail, and in the abstract I wish it were available here, but it’s pretty easy to understand why it ain’t.

[stocksthatgoup]

The National Transit Database provides costs and passenger miles for transit. As I explained in a previous post, the data are not terribly easy to read, as operating costs, capital costs, fare, and passenger miles are all in separate files. So I’ve gathered them all into one spreadsheet for you.

According to cells Q1371 through S1378 of this spreadsheet, average capital and operating costs per passenger mile are:

Mode Capital Operating
Bus 0.14 0.78
Trolley bus 0.48 1.13
Light rail 1.46 0.57
Heavy rail 0.24 0.36
Commuter rail 0.26 0.39
Demand response 0.25 3.09
Other 0.31 0.45
Total/Average 0.25 0.59
It is appropriate to point out that the capital costs in any given year are not attributable to the passenger miles carried in that year but should be spread out over roughly 30 years worth of passenger miles. On the other hand, in the long run agencies will need to sustain a continuous investment in capital costs, so the costs for some modes such as buses are probably pretty close to the long-run costs per passenger mile.

In the above table, the costs for trolley buses and light rail are a little high, reflecting heavy investments currently being made in those two modes, but the rest are probably about right. Since light rail and trolley buses are a relatively small portion of total transit travel, the overall average of 25 cents a passenger mile is also roughly correct.

So transit costs 84 cents per passenger mile, nearly four times the cost of driving. Transit fares average 20.4 cents per passenger mile (interesting how the transit industry keeps fares close to the actual cost of driving), so the subsidies are nearly 64 cents per mile.

[babble-on]

those capital costs can makes sense, in circumstances where the existing road and air transport systems have hit growth constraints that cannot be overcome by just building more of the same. Getting into Paris or London you can’t just say, oh, the traffic is bad, let’s add 20 more lanes to the peripherique or the M3.

In the US with the exception of the Northeast corridor, we’re just not at those limits, yet.

Also in Europe, the fact is that almost everyone benefits from these investments to some extent. That is not paralleled in the US. Federal subsidies from taxpayers in the southeast for high speed rail in California is just not going to happen.

[Moltke]

I loved the Top Gear episode where Jeremy raced in an Austin Martin DB9 against James and Richard using public transport, including HS rail, from Surrey England to Monte Carlo. 900 miles. The car won.

While hugely entertaining, the Top Gear challenges are pretty much 100% scripted. Ever notice how they always reach the destination within moments of each other?...And of course the car wins! (Did it ever lose a challenge? Can't remember if it did. Nor would I want it to ;-))

[AFreeBird]

Actually the footage is edited to make it seem closer. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it aint In the race I mentioned, the car actually beat the train trip by close to an hour.

In other races, the car lost twice. Once to a bicycle, and once to on off shore racing boat.

[Moltke]

I’ll have to watch that car vs. train race again (if I can find it on one of my many storage HDDs ;-)). But didn’t they make the train guys walk from the studio to a bus stop, wait for a bus to go to the train station, etc. etc.? I believe they make some serious calculations beforehand and then set it up to end as close as possible. No matter. It’s supposed to be entertainment, and entertaining it is.

[AFreeBird]

Well, if you frame it in the context of the Eco-mentalists, we’re supposed to abandon our cars and use mass transit. So it wasn’t only a race between train and auto, but the entire mass transit system.

I’ll still take the car. Especially if it’s an A/M-DB9 :-))

BTW: Netflix has 17 seasons of TG available for streaming. FWIW

[Winniesboy]

The difficulty in calculating those sorts of comparison over here (in Britain) is that the costs of the permanent infrastructure (road or rail) are accounted for in totally different ways. Broadly speaking, government expenditure on roads is treated as capital investment, whereas government expenditure on rail is treated as subsidy. Extracting the figures in order to make level-playing-field comparisons is extremely difficult.

[Moltke]

Thanks for the Netflix suggestion - I have a reliable, uh, alternative source. And all TG episodes are on some HDDs somewhere around here ;-).

I'm an all-out-car-guy myself, and will always take the car over public transport, with one or two exceptions. Never got into DB9 territory, price-wise, but pretty close performance-wise (928 GTS).