Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Transportation

European Governments Shrinking Railways in Favour of Road-Building, Report Finds (theguardian.com) 209

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
European governments have "systematically" shrunk their railways and starved them of funding while pouring money into expanding their road network, a report has found. The Guardian: The length of motorways in Europe grew 60% between 1995 and 2020 while railways shrank 6.5%, according to research from the German thinktanks Wuppertal Institute and T3 Transportation. For every $1 governments spent building railways, they spent $1.7 building roads. "This is a political choice," said Lorelei Limousin, a climate campaigner with Greenpeace, which commissioned the report. "We see the consequences today with the climate, but also with people who have been left without an alternative solution to cars."

The report found the EU, Norway, Switzerland and the UK spent $1.6tn between 1995 and 2018 to extend their roads -- but just $0.99tn to extend their rail networks. In the four years that followed (2018-21), the average gap in investment in rail and road decreased from 66% to 34%. During that time, seven countries invested more in rail than roads -- Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Luxembourg and the UK -- while the rest spent more on roads than rail.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

European Governments Shrinking Railways in Favour of Road-Building, Report Finds More

European Governments Shrinking Railways in Favour of Road-Building, Report Finds

Comments Filter:

  • That math ... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Calydor ( 739835 ) on Tuesday September 19, 2023 @12:13PM (#63860432)

    It sounds a bit like the roads are both cheaper to build and maintain, and are of course easier for short- and medium-distance transport of goods. There's a lot of time, effort, and efficiency wasted if you load a truck at the factory, drive to a train station, load a train with the goods, drive 100 miles by train, then unload the train unto a different truck to deliver the goods to the stores.

    • Re:That math ... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sxpert ( 139117 ) on Tuesday September 19, 2023 @12:15PM (#63860446)

      indeed, much easier to set up a train line that arrives directly into the factory at a similar or lower cost than road...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

        How do you figure that?

        Rail costs many times per km/mile what roadway does. There's 250k km of rail in Europe, but 5.2 million km of road... meanwhile, roads in aggregate only cost 1.7x what rail did.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

          And, the crazy thing is... if you were somehow able to eliminate the impact of shipping from roads by eliminating freight, the cost would be many, many times less. EVs aside, passenger vehicle roads have very little cost or upkeep required. It's when you start driving heavy things over them they need to be thicker and reinforced.

    • Here in Denmark we rarely use trains for goods, only passengers. Even though we have a lot of sea and most cities have a small port, we have also stopped using ships. Everything is by truck from a few harbours deep enough to take the big ships. The small ports are rebuild with sea front apartments in many of the cities.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Calydor ( 739835 )

        It's also worth noting that while Denmark gets called out for spending more than average on rail maintenance, the result is a mess of delays, cancellations, and general unreliability for the next multiple years while the railways are being serviced.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jsonn ( 792303 )
      Yes, asphalt road is cheaper to maintain than a train track. At the same time, tracks have a significant higher capacity, so it actually evens out very soon.

      The rest of your argument doesn't work for most of goods transported. The majority of goods are already distributed using a hub system. As such, the effort of loading and unloading goods already happens all the time anyway. Replacing the shipping from one Amazon / FedEx / UPS / whatever hub to the next with rails instead of trucks would cut significa

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

        The most expensive roadways cost roughly what the cheapest railways cost, per length of distance. The most expensive roads are a factor more expensive than typical roads. The least expensive roadway is, likewise, a factor less expensive than expensive high speed commuter rail.

        Rail is often hundreds of times more expensive, for both construction and maintenance, than roadway.

        • You're counting price per unit of distance.

          Now do price per passenger mile traveled.

          It costs significantly more to build rail from A to B, but the rail can carry dramatically more people, or cargo, or what have you.

          It turns out to be cheaper any time you have high utilization, and not when you don't. So obviously it makes sense in some cases and not in others.

          However, cost can not be allowed to be the only factor considered. That is literally destroying our societies.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jsonn ( 792303 )
          Real world numbers for Germany I can easily find from reputable sources:
          Autobahn per kilometer: typically 6-20 million EUR for building, 200kEUR for maintenance
          Railway per kilometer: 1.4-4 million EUR for building, 300kEUR for maintenance

          IMO it's quite reasonable to compare the two as they serve similar purposes. So no, your numbers are off, a lot.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

        You're also missing that the distribution hubs are... distributed. They're not going from point A to point B, they're going from point {a...z} to {a..z}.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jsonn ( 792303 )
          You mean like a railway network? They even had this fancy standardized container system were you can divide a large train into smaller pieces and recombine them if you want to reach separate locations after sharing parts of the way...

    • Railroad tracks are not cheap to maintain, and they can only be used by the trains, they are not at all helpful for general traffic.

      Four miles east of me the track of an abandoned railroad is still visible even though the rails and ties were salvaged. West of me another rail line was abandoned, I'm amazed they ever dilute that one. It's terminus was Mansfield Washington. If you look on Google earth or even Apple's map in satellite view you can track it backwards to Withrow, then Douglas, down the creek, to

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by rgmoore ( 133276 )

        There used to be a lot of industrial rail that has mostly been replaced by roads and trucks. For instance, my home town used to have a whole network of railroads that were used for short distance transport of crops grown on the local farms, mostly sugar beets being taken to the local sugar factory. They were built in the early 20th Century, when trucks either weren't available yet or weren't a practical way of moving that much stuff. The track stayed in service for a long time because it was already paid

    • It's not really (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday September 19, 2023 @01:08PM (#63860636)
      cars and especially heavy trucks are brutal on roads. Rail way needs way, way less maintenance. You don't normally run a truck to a train. You run another train, then you might use trucks for the "last mile", though if we planned it out without in "help" of auto makers we'd probably be able to do that with light rail. Meanwhile rail doesn't use up millions of tires, put tire particles into our air as smog [washingtonpost.com] and use much, much less energy.

      Roads might be cheaper because of all the externalized costs, but across an entire economy, country and life cycle they're pretty terrible. And that's before we count the health costs from all that tire smog...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by lsllll ( 830002 )
        What you're proposing is just not workable. You cannot have rail going to every city and town in a country, even in Europe. As extensive as Germany's railways [gifex.com] are, they just don't have rail going to every small town. So you'll still have to have roadways connecting all the small towns to a town that has rail going through it. It doesn't make sense to have pockets of road that aren't connected to each other. Even if everyone relied on public transportation, it doesn't pay to have a delivery truck that c

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Calydor ( 739835 )

          Save your breath; Silvergun expects everyone to gather in one single megalopolis where everything you'll ever need is always within walking distance.

    • Re:That math ... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by NoWayNoShapeNoForm ( 7060585 ) on Tuesday September 19, 2023 @01:10PM (#63860642)

      It sounds a bit like the roads are both cheaper to build and maintain, and are of course easier for short- and medium-distance transport of goods. There's a lot of time, effort, and efficiency wasted if you load a truck at the factory, drive to a train station, load a train with the goods, drive 100 miles by train, then unload the train unto a different truck to deliver the goods to the stores.

      In the US large-scale shipping business it is well known that trucks are the most economical form of goods transport when those goods have to travel 400 miles (about 643 km, for our metric readers) or less.

      Consider where the major Western US ports are located - Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oakland, Seattle with smaller ports scattered along the coastline.

      Now ask yourself why goods that need to move Inter-State in the USA are generally placed on trains and not trucks or airlines.

      Cost is a major factor. Distance is another major factor. Sometimes the nature of the goods being moved requires a truck not a train or plane.

      Distance in the USA tends to blow the minds of most Europeans; the US is bigger than they imagine. And once goods are loaded into "train friendly" loads (hopper or tank or whatever cars, or shipping cans) those goods can move almost anywhere in the US rail system.

      Granted, trucks are not as GREEN as trains, but EV technologies could change that. And the EU countries might be willing to accept the cost of developing much better GREEN trucks for their economic region; some current GREEN trucks are more like "wishful thinking".

      As for trains moving goods (like 16,000 tons of feed grain from Mid-USA to California cattle & chicken farms, or 12,000+ tons of imported goods from Long Beach to Chicago), and having visited the major railroad corridor out of Los Angeles to the East many times, I can assure you that trains are the only way to move massive quantities of goods over long distances in an economical manner.

      And the diesel fumes from those locomotives are not as bad as you think; you have to stand on top of them to smell them and exhaust plumes of a properly maintained locomotive are next to nil. That success is thanks to the advent of Tier 4 locomotives slowly replacing older Tiers, but that replacement needs to happen at a faster rate.

      • Only because of externalized costs (Score:5, Insightful)

        by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday September 19, 2023 @03:01PM (#63860946)
        Trucks are economical because Walmart doesn't pay for the roads, the cost of our oil subsidies and wars, healthcare costs from tire smog, parking costs for a truck/car based distribution system, etc, etc.

        All Walmart sees is that they don't need a back room anymore because Trucks let them do JIT.

        That's fine if you're a Walmart CEO and just want money *now* so you can be rich.

        But if you're a city planner or planning on a governor or president/PM these are things you're supposed to consider.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The reason there are more new roads is because when new towns and suburbs are built they put in roads, but not new rail tracks. In the UK there often aren't bus stops either.

        Roads are not great for freight either, as the weight causes them to need a lot more maintenance. Typically the cost of whatever licence they need doesn't fully cover that.

      • Mostly true, but don't forget the inland waterways [wikipedia.org].

  • Looks like they're comparing capital costs of building roads to capital + operating cost of building and maintaining railways.

    The article then goes on to bemoan closing of rail stations. Wow. Way to encourage car usage!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

      Well, how else would you compare it? Until I can park my own private train in my driveway, that's the only apt comparison. Trains are centrally controlled and managed, by the nature of serial track lines.

  • My hometown had its railway removed just as it was expanding with new houses back in the 1960s. Still waiting for a new railway to replace it.

  • I suspect that, for the UK, (which somehow appears in both lists above) most of the rail spending is on HS2, which may never go into service and, even if the southern part does go into service, it's not clear that the northern part will.

  • We welcome our European friends into the twentieth century with open arms!
  • "A German newspaper reports that public transport users reported nearly 45,000 crimes on trains and at stations last year (2015). The 25 percent increase follows a similar rise the previous year." Huge rise in thefts on German trains [dw.com]

  • why "since 1995"? (Score:3)

    by magzteel ( 5013587 ) on Tuesday September 19, 2023 @01:32PM (#63860728)

    I'm always skeptical of a report like this that says "since 1995 they did something". Maybe there is a reason they picked that year.
    Maybe for the previous 50 years roads were underfunded and needed repairs and expansions had been delayed until they reached a critical point.

    As for the closed lines, the report says for most of them they don't know why. For the ones they could get information on, they were closed because people had moved away and they were not being utilized.

    Things change. Maintaining tracks and running trains with no riders is just a waste of money.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by w42w42 ( 538630 )
      It always makes me wonder as well, i.e. what inflection point occurred just prior or after that they didn't mention. I think the addition of new member states to the EU has probably had a large effect on that statistic. I would not be surprised if former eastern bloc countries required more work on their roads than rail systems to bring them to parity with the west (or not!).

    • I'm always skeptical of a report like this that says "since 1995 they did something".

      Why? It's not like going back further will have any impact on the reality of the current trajectory. They looked at a nice round quarter of a century. If we looked at just the last 10 years the conclusion is the same. If you look at the last 5 years the conclusion is the same. We're interested in the current trajectory, and how long we've been on it. There's no benefit to looking back further unless... are you suggesting we keep looking back until the we reach some preconceived conclusion you are trying to

  • Can you look at raw spending and actually think they are shrinking one to expend the other?

    Maybe maintaining rail is cheaper so the expense level is just lower. Maybe they are cutting routes that no longer make sense.

    What is the basis of comparison. France, for instance, invested heavily from the 60s to mid 90s. For instance, the Paris-London train opened in 1994. If the basis for comparison is the year of a massive investment, then the numbers will look upside down.

    What about road investment. If there wer

  • Look, unlike most of the USA, Europe's rail infrastructure is still mostly intact. They don't need to build out more _conventional_ rail.

    But high-speed rail of over 200 km/h speed, that may be a different story. I believe that in many European countries, construction has started or in late planning stages. I believe SNCF has already budgeted money to expand TGV lines, especially in southern France.

  • Is the European railroad pickpocketing situation getting that bad these days?

  • The state of motorways in Europe in 1995 was horrible compared to now, also bear in mind in 1995 half of Europe was just starting to recover from an impoverished, corrupt communist system that did a shit job at public infrastructure development. I agree the state of rail isn't great and needs fixing (maybe with more money), but I think the bigger problem than quantity of rail tracks is lack of coordination between countries on rail, and horribly inefficient state-owned rail companies that are defending thei
  • For me, that's the key word.
    It's been a simple capitalistic, neo-liberal recipe :

    - cut funding, push employees out, "forget" pay raises
    - say "oh, look, it's not doing well, we must save money"
    - rince-repeat

    Apply to education, transportation (trains, buses) ...
    Since they did it sooner than us in England, they now realize how dumb it was. And, last I heard, they are thinking of nationalizing back trains companies
    Ah, and healthcare: in France, many ER had to close, because of a lack of personnel, nobo

  • Even from TFA summary, without looking at the absolute kilometers of railway and roadway, it's pretty clearly obvious that roads are far more economical than railway.

    Railway: centralized, linear, and expensive.

    Roads: cheaper, by a lot.

    Looking quickly at the total number of roads and rail in Europe (based on what ChatGPT says) -

    Rail - 250,000 km
    Roads - 5,200,000 km

    Just a slight difference of scale there.

    So by the numbers: roads are funded at a much lower rate than rail, in all actuality, if you're looking at

  • In the USA the federal government realized the need to get people places quickly in case of another war. Like so much of the things we have today there was a big change in our roads because of World War Two.

    Europe has been living in the Cold War like we have been in the USA. Many of the things done to fight the Cold War were things started out of lessons learned from World War Two. A train and the track it runs on is a big investment, and therefore a big target for any opposing force. Large roads, bridg

  • It works if done sustainably. (Score:3)

    by Eunomion ( 8640039 ) on Tuesday September 19, 2023 @04:43PM (#63861250)
    Road networks are more direct and far more flexible to changing economics. Rail looks good on paper, but it imposes rigid patterns far into the future. It's politically a lot easier to redirect a road that no longer serves than to tear out a rail line.

Slashdot Top Deals

To thine own self be true. (If not that, at least make some money.)

Close