It’s not an argument against trains. Trains are great. I’m just saying trains are difficult to expand. EU is trying to promote trains recently but you simply can’t expand the infrastructure that fast. And doing it too fast is dangerous as we’ve seen recently in Spain. If you have a good service that’s great for you. For many people it’s not that simple and it’s not just about political will. It will take a lot of time to change it.
All major infrastructure programs take a lot of time. Rail isn’t really harder or slower to build than highways, given an equally strong political will.
The Viennes main S-Bahn corridor is being expanded for example within 4 years. Highway expansion is not much faster and in many cases impossible without rebuilding everything.
What is your point again? What makes railways so much harder to build or expand compared to highways?
I already said it. Highway expansions around me happen with couple of detours or some close lanes. Railway expansions require complete cancellation of services. I remember when Poland was renovating their trains they signed a deal for new Pendolino trains that didn’t have the ability to lean on tight turns. This limits their top speed to 160km/h if I remember correctly. Increasing speed would require changing all the trains. In Spain some trains have to be build for specific lines because tunnels there have different size. There are many incompatible system which mean that choosing one or another locks you in for decades (I think BART has this issue). You really don’t have those issues with cars.
Highway expansions usually leads to serious capacity reduction and therefore to more traffic jams and increased drive times. The difference to transit is really not that large. Transit lines will (in well run countries) always have replacement services. Possibly with some extra travel time but enough capacity.
Train control on upgraded or new corridors is done with ETCS and if it isn’t we are back to political will of doing it properly. Operation speed is of course determined by infrastructure but that is also the case for highways. Going beyond those specifications is also hard to impossible on highways.
It’s not an argument against trains. Trains are great. I’m just saying trains are difficult to expand. EU is trying to promote trains recently but you simply can’t expand the infrastructure that fast. And doing it too fast is dangerous as we’ve seen recently in Spain. If you have a good service that’s great for you. For many people it’s not that simple and it’s not just about political will. It will take a lot of time to change it.
All major infrastructure programs take a lot of time. Rail isn’t really harder or slower to build than highways, given an equally strong political will.
I said “expand”, not “build”. Do you know what the difference is?
The Viennes main S-Bahn corridor is being expanded for example within 4 years. Highway expansion is not much faster and in many cases impossible without rebuilding everything.
What is your point again? What makes railways so much harder to build or expand compared to highways?
I already said it. Highway expansions around me happen with couple of detours or some close lanes. Railway expansions require complete cancellation of services. I remember when Poland was renovating their trains they signed a deal for new Pendolino trains that didn’t have the ability to lean on tight turns. This limits their top speed to 160km/h if I remember correctly. Increasing speed would require changing all the trains. In Spain some trains have to be build for specific lines because tunnels there have different size. There are many incompatible system which mean that choosing one or another locks you in for decades (I think BART has this issue). You really don’t have those issues with cars.
Highway expansions usually leads to serious capacity reduction and therefore to more traffic jams and increased drive times. The difference to transit is really not that large. Transit lines will (in well run countries) always have replacement services. Possibly with some extra travel time but enough capacity.
Train control on upgraded or new corridors is done with ETCS and if it isn’t we are back to political will of doing it properly. Operation speed is of course determined by infrastructure but that is also the case for highways. Going beyond those specifications is also hard to impossible on highways.