I recognize this scheme because it's already implemented in Switzerland. Trains are not high-speed but rail links have been optimized to multiples of 30 minutes. At hubs, trains arrive just before minute 0 or 30 and leave after the clock has ticked over. At major centres, trains depart on a 30 minute cycle in all directions.
Arriving at a hub you know you'll catch your connection to the next hub without even consulting a schedule. Feeder trains are also synced up so you get little layover in general. If you're sitting at a hub station, it's easy to tell time by the ebb and flow of passengers.
Now what they should do is just run everything 50 percent faster at high speed to get the cycles down to 20 minutes. Have everybody walk 50% faster at hubs too. What could go wrong?
The clock-face scheduling system is really neat and convenient for many people, but sometimes really tight. A bus in Papiermühle (near Bern) leaves 1 (one) minute after arrival of the train. This works because the bus is waiting at the train platform.
But sometimes you would like to buy something at the railway station or there are older people or families with small children or you need to find out where to walk to first. Then you are out of luck. Mostly you just wait 30 minutes for the next train, but there are lines with one hour cadence and very rarely with two-hour cadence.
I haven't found it tight in my Gemeinde, which also has a bus home that departs 1 minute after the train arrives. I view it as liberating: instead of trying to rush in a grocery store I get an excuse to fill the time and shop slower, text the wife if I need to pick anything else up, socialize with locals in the store, etc.
My former boss is quite the train/energy expert, and he expained that this schedule is costly; you have high peak energy demands, as many trains accelerate roughly at the same time. Infrastructure needs to be able to cope with that.
AIUI from that article, clock-face scheduling is just scheduling with consistent intervals of a unit fraction of one hour (or possibly a multiple of one hour) so that trains always arrive and depart at the same number of minutes past the hour. This is what that article calls integrated scheduling.
In general, the tighter your headways get, the less likely you can maintain such a strict operation.
In fact, past a certain point it becomes pointless; if trains come every, say, ten minutes, then average wait time is five minutes and no one waits more than ten minutes, and holding a train will mostly just cause cascading delays.
Let's say your starting point is 60km/h. 50% increase in speed is 90km/h. You now travel the original 30km that before took half an hour in 20 minutes.
What’s important is that you need to do this to average speed, not top speed, and increasing average speed especially on old, curvy lines is not nontrivial.
For those who don't know Denmark, the title is really overselling the reality here.
Denmark is tiny. You can cross the entire country by car in 5 hours and it only takes that long because water seerpates the major island and peninsula.
The largest city in denmark has a population of 600k. The entire population of Denmark is less than New York.
Arguably there are no big cities in Denmark at all. Looking for lists of populations of "big cities" across the world I can't even find one that includes Copenhagen to make a comparison of just how far down the list it is.
In any case this is all just silly nonsense. The reason people don't prefer the train vs. almost every other mode of transportation is because its extremely expensive. Making it faster isn't going to solve the root problem. But of cause just like everything else in government, the main aim of the future is to build up huge infrastructure projects with individual companies who stand to gain billions... and just so happen to have some senior exec positions open for the politicians running the sham.
If they'd taken the money they would have spent on this large project and instead just lowered fares, that would be an overall much better reality, but then no individual company is making billions and there's no promise of that sweet executive position.
> The reason people don't prefer the train vs. almost every other mode of transportation is because its extremely expensive. Making it faster isn't going to solve the root problem.
Many companies choose the faster transportation method over the cheaper one for business trips. Fast train connections to Hamburg, Germany or Stockholm, Sweden could make Copenhagen a more attractive city for business implementation. It isn't only about personal travel.
It often results in the opposite, with business travel indirectly subsidising personal travel. Charging inflated prices for business travel (whether it's for travelling in a higher class or booking with short notice) makes it easier for operators to provide lower cost offerings to fill the bulk of their seats for those who book in advance – most often tourists.
It is a matter of perspective, but I think the more accurate view is that personal travel is what keeps the trains (or the planes) running and business travel makes the profit. You need the "bulk" for flexibility, frequency and maintenance. That is why there are plenty of low cost airlines, but almost no business class only ones.
Differential pricing in itself becomes problem when it comes to something were the value is partly external. Countries that want to maximize utility will have to reconcile with the idea that some of the value won't be captured by the train company. Most countries don't charge different rates for roads, but try to make the best roads and then collect taxes.
You can, because you just have to make them fast enough to be competitive. Really fast train will probably never be widespread because they require to much infrastructure. A train going 5 times the speed of a car requires a lot of very expensive track per hour of travel. That is why the Chinese maglev only travels ~1 minute at top speed. But going 2 to 3 times the speed of a car is competitive as the tracks are cheaper and airplanes are expensive (both in cost and time) to stop. It all of course depends on local factors, but from 2 times the speed of a car trains start taking a lot of passengers from airplanes.
(There is also other benefits, like that trains don't generally go away. There are many places in Europe that are relatively hard or expensive to fly to).
> But of cause just like everything else in government, the main aim of the future is to build up huge infrastructure projects... If they'd taken the money they would have spent on this large project and instead just lowered fares
Exactly. Why did they ever bothered building highways, ports and airports. That's just silly nonsense. They should have just taken the money and lowered the horse feed prices.
Shaving 20minutes off of a trip that takes more than an hour is not comparable to going from horses to cars. Current routes and travel times are perfectly fine when you ask the consumers, they just want it affordable. No one wants to take the train when flying costs almost the same.
>No one wants to take the train when flying costs almost the same.
Sure they do if it's more pleasant. In the US, the train on the Northeast Corridor takes maybe a bit longer depending upon the specifics than flying and costs in the same ballpark (depending on whether Acela or regular coach, parking, etc.) And it's at capacity at peak times.
When you're not talking big money in the scheme of things, many will take whatever mode of transportation is most convenient and comfortable--especially for business travel.
If you really are very price sensitive, you're probably taking Megabus or something similar.
Doesn't seem fine to me. Denmark has some of the highest taxes on cars, high taxes in general, is overall expensive and increasingly has dysfunctional politics and uncompetitive infrastructure [0]. Part of the benefit of being a small country is that you can exercise a greater degree of control. With a suitably high tax rate you can lower the barrier to entry to increase participation and make the most out of your population. It if of course up to each country to select their model, but I don't see the endgame of Denmark not upgrading their infrastructure. That isn't something they can win at. Even the US arguably can't anymore.
I personally am willing to pay up to a 200% premium to take the train versus flying if the length of the overall trip isn't more than 2x the length of an overall air trip (including security, getting to the airport, waiting in lines, waiting for baggage, late takeoffs, getting suck in holding patterns, extra security scans, etc).
A fast train is always a healthier and more pleasant experience than an airplane. Hint: trains have windows.
Disclosure: I'm a private pilot and have lifetime status on two major carriers. I still hate air travel.
I really wish the train network was working better Europe-wide. Maybe there should be a EU train company that integrates the national ones. The network should be able to substitute as many flights as possible.
Right now, even buying tickets or just getting information can be hard, and let's not start with all the local discount cards that you need to use to make it worthwhile.
You can find most information on seat61. Many countries just don't have very good infrastructure. It is often either slow in its own right or you have to transfer between trains, or even different operators. I think it is more of a "hard" than a "soft" problem.
While lower fares, which would necessitate subsidies for the Danish railways, are definitely needed, the railway infrastructure in Denmark does need an overhaul. It was the wrong decision not to electrify the tracks back in the 1990s, this could have allowed Denmark to buy off-the-shelf electric locomotives.
It's a new government, and I am hopeful that they actual intend to deliver some real improvements to the infrastructure. Considering where I am planing to move in the foreseeable future, I will need it. That being said, even as it is now, I would still prefer the train over car.
You're right that it needs to be cheaper, but they also need to make it much faster. Denmark is shaped like an L, in terms of there the tracks need to go to connect Jutland and the islands. So there's no shortcut from the largest city in Northern Jutland to Copenhagen (and honestly that mostly where you want to go).
Right now you can't take a morning train from Aalborg and be in Copenhagen for a morning meeting, you can drive, or fly and it's cheaper. By train you need to leave the day before... It's 400km and you can't get a morning train for a meeting at 9:00AM.
One hour between the largest cities isn't close to being fast enough. 30 minutes between them isn't fast enough.
Most of the country is barely serviced by train at all, so maybe a better idea would be to move local, shorter distance journeys from the roads to trains, or even just busses. I can't use public transport, I would spend 1 hour and 45 minutes getting to work... It's a 25 minute drive, in rush hour.
> In any case this is all just silly nonsense. The reason people don't prefer the train vs. almost every other mode of transportation is because its extremely expensive. Making it faster isn't going to solve the root problem.
Citation please. This strike me as being very NA centric.
I've been on trains in 6 different countries. (n=1 etc.) They all are either very expensive (compared to buses, in some cases even compared to planes). Often they are subsidied on top.
>The reason people don't prefer the train vs. almost every other mode of transportation is because its extremely expensive.
This. Same for many other countries in Europe. Which borders on criminal from an environmental point of view, because the rail network is built & maintained with public money.
Also, it's not unusual for Europe to get to a place faster by car than by train - like, the whole of Germany.
> Also, it's not unusual for Europe to get to a place faster by car than by train - like, the whole of Germany.
That's due to the inflexibility of the train network, I guess. It's fast & easy to get from Hamburg's main station to Berlin's, but if your starting point is 45 minutes from Hamburg's and your goal isn't at Berlin central station, the car is likely just as fast. And that only gets worse if you're traveling to some small town where you need to switch trains.
I've lived in Aarhus and I was quite surprised how small part of Denmark's rail network is electrified, it’s only 642 km of 2560 km (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Denmark), so almost all long-distance trains run on diesel which is quite remarkable in a country that otherwise has a very green view on the environment.
Most of the long-distance trains are of model IC4, the delivery of these trains took ages and one of the missing trains was found in Libya, Italy’s former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi had given it as a gift to the Libyan dictator Muammar Gadaffi (http://cphpost.dk/news/international/ic4-train-a-gift-from-b...).
The success of the IC3 from the 1980s lead politicians in the 1990s to decide not to electrify the tracks, but instead count on diesel, and so the IC4 project was initiated. It was a bad decision then, particularly because the IC4 project was vastly different than the IC3 project. So one could not count on it having the same success.
It's a worse decision in retrospect. Fortunately, though, both the former and the current government agree that the tracks need to be electrified along all major routes, and that we should purchase electric locomotives that are already rolling in other European countries.
There were also articles warning that the IC4 debacle (it has a massive page in the Danish wikipedia, the "IC4 saga") could lead to the bancrupcy of the Danish State Railways, DSB. So yeah, it has been an astounding failure.
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I always found the dutch railway system remarkable. It just works, you can easily just live one city away and work in another. Not having to drag around a car with you can be extremely nice.
And you can pay for ALL public transit in the WHOLE COUNTRY with one card. Meanwhile in the U.S. we struggle to do that even in one city - I'm looking at you, New York!
(Yes I have a MetroCard, which already has the worst form factor among all transit cards in the world, and why I can't pay for LIRR, Metro-North or NJ Transit with it is beyond me)
At least NYC is finally fixing that with Omny. Full rollout won't be for a few years but it'll support the entire regional transit system like Clipper in the Bay Area does.
It’s also worth noting that it will support standard NFC payments, so you don’t even need a separate card; standard contactless cards or mobile pay will do.
Not just travel, with that one card you can use the bike storage facilities, rent a bike, get a cab, rent a car, pay for parking and get access to lounges.
Why not simply accept contact-less payment from mobile phones via something like NFC? And use the stupid metro-only cards as a backup? Speaking from a US perspective...
That would make the most sense but you'd probably have to set up your own payment network as the major ones charge 30 cents per transaction which makes it uneconomical for small fares.
And you can check in and out in exactly one machine in one station, Malmö C. But not at any of the other stations that might be convenient like Hyllie or especially Trianglen.
I concur, and I'm Dutch. The Dutch have a habit of complaining about the trains here, not realizing how it's, well, better than nearly anywhere else. Look at a railway map of the country, the complexity is more akin to that of a big city's metro network than that of most countries. There's trains everywhere and they go all the time. And then people have the audacity to complain if they have a 20 minute delay once in a while.
I do think it's ridiculous, however, than driving somewhere by car is cheaper than going the same distance by train once you're 2+ people in the car. I don't understand it. How can't trains be more economical? Is it just that the roads are more expensive to build and maintain than the tax we pay for it (via fuel taxes and road taxes and the likes).
I'm not Dutch, but moved here around 18 months ago and the rail system is one of my favourite things. City to city is one thing, but many many small villages are linked by slower trains. Sometimes I've caught trains to small villages to do an NS walk and it reminds me a lot of Japan.
The fact that I can consider moving to Rotterdam or Den Haag and continue working at my job in Amsterdam is really something.
EDIT: sometimes traveling by car is cheaper even with _one_ person in the car, if you don't have the 40% discount. I guess that's the biggest downside.
> I do think it's ridiculous, however, than driving somewhere by car is cheaper than going the same distance by train once you're 2+ people in the car.
A prerequisite for this is often already owning the car and not incorporating the ownership costs into the cost analysis, I think. (Which does in practice means it's cheaper for practically everyone. That said, I think for many people hiring a car when needed and using public transport most of the time would actually be the cheaper option. For some value of "many".)
I was just there and it was amazing! Especially the OV-fiets, which are bicycles that you can rent at train stations. You bike to your local station, take a train somewhere, and then for €3.85 you can have a bike for 24 hours, wherever you are. And of course it's so easy to get around thanks to the great bicycle infrastructure. It makes so much sense that, after experiencing it, you just can't figure out how everywhere else went so wrong.
But it's only possible at the very high urbanisation/population density of the Netherlands, which in turn is only possible with very strict zoning - and more importantly, strong popular support for it. It's just not politically feasible (i.e., wanted by the people) elsewhere.
> you just can't figure out how everywhere else went so wrong
My thoughts exactly. After having lived there for a short while, it's just mind blowing how well this works, and yet nobody else seems to be doing it (with some exceptions like Denmark or certain German cities etc.).
It really is underappreciated. (Well, the OV-fiets is nearly universally revered, but people just love complaining about the trains. It's far from perfect, but it's really pretty great, for many routes even compared to travelling by car.)
Whenever a lot of people somewhere complain about the trains that at least suggests the rail network is good enough that a lot of people use it enough to care.
The issue is passenger rail in the Netherlands is heavily optimized for Randstad commuters. People in turn (if they can afford it) optimize their lives around the (major) train stations. Having lived there and in a major French city, I'd choose the French city everyday. France has much faster (and cheaper!) long distance services, and the agglomerations generally more metro/lightrail (which the Netherlands has very little).
The Dutch per capita also outspend the rest of the world on roads, because that's what the other half of the country uses. I live for instance 35km from my work in Amsterdam: public transport is just under two hours and by car 25minutes, up to an hour in heavy traffic.
Well, there are six intercity trains per direction each hour to Amsterdam Central, four to Amsterdam South (will be upped to six in a few years), and up to four commuting services. So you could even say there’s a train every 4.3 minutes.
To be fair, the Netherlands is tiny: Amsterdam to Rotterdam is only 60 km (~37 mi) apart. There are plenty of Americans who live that far away from their work city and commute in by car.
Sparsity isn't an issue, the are plenty of people in boswash. The issue is sprawl and suburbanization. Pre-WW2 US was much better for trains, despite having fewer people in the same overall area - just better concentrated.
Which itself is also not really the issue, but for the last 20+ years or so, is just a symptom of US cities being openly hostile against most people (whether due to high costs, monopolized land, lack of housing, lack of reasonable transportation infrastructure, lack of education infrastructure, etc).
I just checked https://www.ns.nl/en (e.g. enter Amsterdam > Utrecht) and I am stunned by how beautiful and, at the same time, detailed the information is presented. They show punctuality statistics and even the type of rolling stock (including a graphic).
If you look closely at the graphic you can see where the first and second class compartments are situated. The number of passenger cars is also important as you can use the signs on the platform to predict where the train will come to a stop.
I sadly fear for this lofty ambition.
The purchase of IC4 trains from Italy has to be one of Europe's worst (or at least barely told) transport procurement debacles.
The 83 trains were the wrong size for Danish tracks and took 13 years to get passengers on some half-working versions, while most never worked at all and others went missing only to turn up in other countries:
http://cphpost.dk/news/some-danish-trains-falling-to-pieces-...
Typical politician-think..
Thing is, people in major cities rarely need to travel to other major cities, and people outside major cities most often need to travel to the closest major city.. (dane, works in nearest major city, 30 km drive from home)
A country of about 5.5 million people. About half all live near one particular city.
2.7 million people have a job.
Most of those live near the place they work. Tourists aren't going to these places
No indication that the inter city links are operating anywhere near capacity, or there is a real need to do this. Are politicians tired of having to go back and forth from the capital to their region perhaps?
There is a lot of traffic between Copenhagen and Aarhus in particular, and from most of the major cities to Copenhagen Airport.
A good proportion of that traffic is by car, and by reducing train travel times, it becomes more desirable to take the train and leave the car at home.
Precisely, the money would be better spend on more bus routes. If you really want trains, then build more local networks, busses would be cheaper and more flexible though.
Buses get stuck in traffic, unless you invest in dedicated bus lanes, and even then they inevitably have to interface with regular road traffic (and traffic jams) at some points.
Trains are faster, safer, more spacious, more comfortable and much less affected by congestion.
Instead of being able to travel from Aarhus to Copenhagen in one hour, I would much rather prefer that I didnt have to WAIT for one hour everytime I have to catch a connecting train at Bramming station...
Has anyone else noticed the correlation between public policy that favors walking/public transport over cars, and unaffordably high costs of living?
ducks
Edit: My pet theory is it effectively decreases the available housing supply by reducing the number of locations that people can practically commute from.
People flock to places that are great to live, and those that have many services readily available in the walking distance are usually greater than those that don't.
But I am European living near the big city's center without car, so I am biased.
"In US 100 years is old - in Europe 100km is far."
> My pet theory is it effectively decreases the available housing supply by reducing the number of locations that people can practically commute from.
Also consider the Downs–Thomson paradox: the equilibrium speed of car traffic on a road network is determined by the average door-to-door speed of equivalent journeys taken by public transport. It is a paradox in that improvements in the road network will not reduce traffic congestion. Improvements in the road network can make congestion worse if the improvements make public transport more inconvenient or if it shifts investment, causing disinvestment in the public transport system.
According to Downs, the link between average speeds on public transport and private transport applies only "to regions in which the vast majority of peak-hour commuting is done on rapid transit systems with separate rights of way. Central London is an example, since in 2001 around 85 percent of all morning peak-period commuters into that area used public transit (including 77 percent on separate rights of way) and only 11 percent used private cars. When peak-hour travel equilibrium has been reached between the subway system and the major commuting roads, then the travel time required for any given trip is roughly equal on both modes."[citation needed]
----
So in general, it's entirely unclear whether this effect applies in most scenarios on the road network. In my area of NYC, a poster child for arguments about this effect and why we should never build anything due to "induced demand", it is vastly faster to drive across any borough other than Manhattan rather than taking public transit at all times except certain corridors at the absolute peak of rush hour.
This is a symptom of low road demand for Queens-Brooklyn transit which in turn is because of the relative size of both boroughs, their lower population density and most importantly because there isn't a subway line that truly cuts across the two boroughs.
If there were a proper subway line, running say from LGA, through Jackson Heights, Ridgewood and then cutting east through Brooklyn to JFK there's no way a driver could go faster on Grand Central Parkway anywhere near peak times.
Those are comparing metro areas to cities, though. The DC one, for example, includes exurban areas and literal farmland in its definition of the DC metro area (which comes from the Census). This is the kind of stuff it includes: https://maps.app.goo.gl/kbfrPLDvBaUn7tzo8
I don't think it's quite a fair comparison to compare that vs. Hong Kong or Singapore, especially when the London exurbs are called out separately.
I'd guess that NYC is in the same ballpark of unaffordability and congestion as London, but the deeper suburbs / exurbs of NYC are cheaper than their British equivalents.
I'd also wager that DC proper is cheaper than both NYC and London, both via absolute terms and income relative terms.
>Those are comparing metro areas to cities, though. The DC one, for example, includes exurban areas and literal farmland in its definition of the DC metro area
So if anything average commute should be longer because of all the people dragging their butts inside/out of the beltway every morning/evening.
1. Does that actually mean median 'house' price, or does it mean median 'home' price?
2. Is that price to buy, or rent, or what?
So, I think there's a few factors here. One is that recent booming usually leads to higher home prices, as the amount of building going on usually trails the number of jobs and income increases. It catches up eventually, but not until the boom stops.
The other is that it's true that sprawling out can decrease home prices. However, that tends to also increase transportation prices, since you're further out now. Americans spend a LOT on transportation because of the car dependency. Quick googling and math indicate annual household transportation spending of 9.7k for the US, 6.3k for Germany, 5k for Japan.
I guess you could compare it between cities but as Mark Twain demonstrated in A Connecticut yankee in King Arthur's court that would be extremely silly.
What cities are these? Most of the large southern cities I'm aware have terrible traffic. Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Austin, Tampa, Nashville--they all score terribly for traffic.
The only reason they don't rank at the very top is because they are in fairly low population density areas.
If you’re talking in the US: no high-cost city has had long term public policy that favors walking/public transport over driving, to my knowledge. Even in Manhattan, cars are given free parking in numerous places, despite a single parking space being worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
If you’re thinking of San Francisco: how has public transit grown in the past 20 years? What new lines have been built? Sure, the cost of living has gone up, but has the total area well serviced by public transit increased? That indicates to me SF does not favor public transit as policy.
It's well known in SF that public transit is worse now than it ever has been. In particular, the trains and buses are slower than ever. It's been a long-term, multi-decade trend, but more recently ride sharing significantly increased the amount of traffic, disrupting SF's mostly surface public transit.
It makes sense, because in SF it was really parking that made public transport more attractive than driving... it was always faster to get somewhere driving than public transport, but once you got where you were going parking was impossible. This meant the slower public transport was a better option.
Ride sharing services give you the speed of driving without having to park, so lots of people will use them until they cause enough congestion to make them as slow as public transport.
Third street LRV doesn't really improve the situation. It was added in anticipation of and simultaneous to the redevelopment of the Mission Bay area. I don't live in that part of the city, but as far as I know folks living in the southeast took the express buses downtown as it jumps on the freeway for most of the way; they probably mostly still do because the LRV is ridiculously slow. I can walk from downtown to AT&T Park almost as fast as the LRV can get there, and the LRV is either underground or has the right-of-way most of the way there. I haven't taken it past Mission Bay into, say, Bayview, but it's still slow getting anywhere in Mission Bay as it loses right-of-way.
The central subway LRV is mostly for tourists, and while the third street and central subway lines were, together, partly intended to help shuttle people from the SE to Chinatown, as of now the Chinese community still oppose it. Everybody knows why they oppose (it just can't be said aloud[1]), but personal convenience usually trumps anti-social community sentiments. Once it opens I guess we'll see. If opposition quickly goes away then that would suggest it's more convenient than the existing heavily trafficked express buses, but somehow I doubt that will happen.
What would be a meaningful addition to the network is if they finally extended the E-Embarcadero (sister to the F line that opened in 2016) to the Marina, using the Fort Mason tunnel. But crime in Fisherman's Wharf is way up, so I suspect it's being quietly stalled by Marina activists.
In any event, LRVs suck, the F- and E-lines notwithstanding. They're slower than buses and 10x as expensive, in SF and most every other American city.[2] Oppose LRVs! All they do is give public transit a bad name. It's right-of-way or no way, but preferably grade separated.
[1] It's the same reason the North Beach and Fisherman's Wharf communities successfully stopped its extension past Chinatown.
[2] I think the only LRV I've been on outside the U.S. is Vienna, but it was mostly historic. Somehow it seems historic routes see less competing traffic, perhaps because they were built in a time and place that doesn't permit much car traffic to begin with. I've been on BRTs in Guadalajara and Quito--if you can't grade separate but can acquire a right-of-way, LRVs seem like a waste of money. They're even a worse waste of money if they don't get unimpeded right-of-way.
Re: [1] District 3 is usually more progressive than some others. So that’s weird.
Re: [2] I think LRVs work when they complement a subway/commuter rail ala U-bahn, S-bahn. But I think your observation is right, they’re often in settings where they don’t need to be fast. (Serving an inner core).
Progressives seem no less conservative when problems are at their doorstep. And never underestimate the depth of racist--specifically, anti-black--sentiments in the U.S. or most places in the world, for that matter.
It's hard to dispute their fears. Considering the profile of crime in SF, especially property crime, they're warranted. This is more true today than when they killed the extension.
Of course, the proper response is to address the underlying problems; to stop the self-perpetuating cycle. But that's intractable in the short-term. Alternatively, the city could just beef up crime enforcement so that we can all enjoy better transit, which is itself a small (tiny) step in dealing with the deeper problems. But we're too busy enabling street addicts and pandering to extremist progressive fear mongers (e.g. anti-vaping, etc). It's difficult to blame anyone for not trusting the city to maintain law & order.
There are a few that are selling out to developers while using this very idea as an excuse. Santa Monica, CA, being a prime example.
Santa Monica's kangaroo council (ruled illegal by state law, but wasting millions more taxpayer dollars in a futile appeal), has started deleting parking requirements from building codes. This is a massive giveaway to developers and a long-term theft from taxpayers, which will destroy the standard of living in neighborhoods around these developments. The public excuse is that this will somehow cause public transportation to magically appear, or promote walking or biking. BWAHAHAHA! Yes, when I buy groceries for my family, BIKING is a totally viable option.
Leave it to corrupt U.S. politicians to take foreign ideas and use them as cover for taxpayer rip-offs.
I live in Montreal with city run metro, train, and bus networks. It’s currently building out a light rail network that should start to be operational in 2022.
The cost of living seems reasonable to me, especially compared to other North American cities.
I pay ~$1000 for an 800 sq ft apartment that is 30 minutes by public transport from the downtown area. My monthly transport pass costs $80. All prices are CAD.
Doesn’t seem so high to me. Our roads are a mess of construction, but that’s another story.
Unfortunately that new Light Rail Line, being a suburban mini-metro with virtually all new stations along highways, will not create more walkable, human-scale neighborhoods with great transit connections to downtown. That's because you won't have those neighborhoods where they'll build the stations.
And that's often the problem with public transit that is built nowadays in North America (if any is built at all..) -- it's often built to outer low-density suburbs, along or on highways, with giant park'n'rides instead of neighborhoods at stations.
And that's why walkable neighborhoods with good transit connections are so rare and thus so expensive.
Subways are expensive and displacing buildings to build grade level rail is a problem for many people. Sharing right of way with freeways makes some sense.
Some of the L lines in Chicago are above ground, when they are, they generally use the median area of a major highway (south 90/94 and 290 to the west). There is some at grade stretches on the north side of the city/near suburbs.
I think all of the suburban commuter (Metra, which is an entirely different system & agency) use freight lines, with stations typically near the town/village/city center. Problem with the shared lines is that freight (because they own the line) generally has priority. Freight train breaks down? Youre stuck for hours. 1.5 mile coal train coming through at the switch? You're stuck until it passes.
Granted, when I had to commute into the Loop in Chicago, the hour total of using Metra was far more convenient, less frustrating and cheaper than driving. It was a hour door to door for me, 15 mins to get to the station, 5 minutes of waiting, 25 mins on the train and about a 15 min walk to the office.
Now I both live and work in the West suburbs. Usually a 15 minute drive into work, about 25 home.
There are other other options besides tunnels and elevated along highways - for example using rail ROWs. Also, if you build Urban metros instead of suburban ones, the tunnel costs are often worthwhile.
Hey, off-topic question. My father built the fare collection system for the Montreal metro in the early '80s. Do you still have the awful system they built that gave you two paper tickets (one for proof, one for transfer)?
The fair collection has been revamped. It could be better, but I've also seen worse.
Single Ticket Fares
Single tickets are printed on a piece of thick cardstock. They are both used for a proof and transfer. Validation is electronic by inserting it into a machine on a bus or at a terminal of up to 2 hours. The machine prints the times it was used on the ticket.
Multiday tickets are printed on some thin plastic-like paper with an NFC chip inside. They are tapped on terminals and in busses and get no physical markings of when they were used, but are validated 100% digitally with some central system. They are also good for the same type of transfer.
Monthly/Yearly passes are a thick plastic credit-card-like card. They have an NFC chip and work similarly to the multiday tickets.
I do think that there's a correlation, but I don't think it's done out of malice. I believe it's not due to walking/public transportation directly, but because housing and office density doesn't go up enough to counteract people moving in to take advantage of the public transportation.
Yes, it's population density. In denser urban areas walking and transit become more practical and driving and dedicating space to parking become less so. Those areas are also more desirable to live in (or they wouldn't have the population to begin with) and that tends to drive up prices.
Developing countries tend to have extremely low cost of public transport. Yet cost of living, such as quality free cost heathcare for terminal or chronic medical needs, such as heart disease or cancer or diabetes are non-existant or minimal to the point there's an ideal but no implementation of the policy. And private medical insurance capped at a $CURRENCY limit, should that be exceeded then lights out on insurance, no 'promise to care' in those private insurance contracts.
No I haven’t seen that correlation. It is a question of culture and what is normal where.
If you had a typical danish city in the US the dynamic would be totally different than in Denmark, where nearly every city has a decent standard when it comes to public transport.
I can’t judge whether your corellation holds true for the US, but certainly not for the parts of Europe I lived in.
That's such a vague statement. The cost of living is way higher than Mexico City, Cairo, Mumbai or New Delhi. I know they don't have the same kind of public transport, but it just seems absurd to me to call the cost of living "low" when it is more than double of other candidates.
Obviously its going to depend on the context of your country/city/culture, but i'd point out that your theory of reduced housing supply is a bit counter-intuitive given that these tend to be the areas with the higher density of housing, ceteris paribus.
I think its much more straight forward in that car ownership is actually quite expensive, in both time, infrastructure, and money, density creates opportunities of scale, and employment is a net attraction.
Successful areas that favour walking/public transport over cars tend to have more jobs, higher wages, are net attractors, and people are able to substitute away the expense of other things to live there because of the economies of scale: thus their demand functions, budgets and competition to live there are quite high and people compete strongly for them.
Those areas that are dense and attractive start to increase demand for pedestrian/public transport over cars organically as well, so it sort of feeds back on itself to some degree.
There's also a bit of survivorship bias, if that's the right phrase. An area that is attempted to be designed for pedestrian/public-transport, but which doesn't thrive tends to become a ghetto/ghost-town, because there's neither demand/people there, and its not an attractor, and people will find driving there hard/pointless. These areas will either be abandoned or be primed for redevelopment: and if the later works, it will push up values/demand...
Denmark is so small that traveling one hour in any direction is likely to either put you in the ocean, or in another country. Or maybe put you through the ocean and then into another country.
"It takes four hours and 21 minutes by train from Copenhagen to the northern city of Aalborg, a distance of 258 miles"
Was it really necessary to try to make a clever comment based on the headline alone? Did that advance the discussion and make us all smarter, better people in some way?
It takes four hours because they are on different Islands that aren't near each other or connected well. You are insinuating that it is just a slow train.
There isn't much you can do other than spend tens of billions building a bridge or tunnel. Cars often get the ferry to make that journey.
A train has to travel in the opposite direction, across several islands and then back up. 4 hours is pretty good considering that. Even then there is so little demand for this journey it is infrequent.
Actually, it seems to only take 2h:50min by train Copenhagen to Aarhus[0], while by car it takes 3 hours with the ferry from Sjællands Odde to Aarhus[1].
> There isn't much you can do other than spend tens of billions building a bridge or tunnel. Cars often get the ferry to make that journey.
There is a precedent for taking a train on the ferry [0]. Sure, a tunnel is preferable and it would've been constructed but the German authorities were dragging their feet for years[1].
Gothenburg to Stockholm is longer and takes 3 hours by train, and that is with a train from 1990. That is of course the prime route in Sweden, but it still isn't fast.
My point was that Denmark is a very small country, and the solutions used there might be interesting for certain small cases, but may be difficult to generalize for larger cases.
I lived in Brussels, Belgium for almost eight years, and they have many of the same issues with regards to scale.
Unfortunately that is mostly the ocean. It takes around 3 hours to get through Denmark between Sweden and Germany. You could probably double that if you wanted to traverse Denmark. Three decades between the Øresund Bridge and the Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link is a bit ridiculous to be honest. Maybe the countries can't support more, but I don't think one should expect to do well going that pace.
I recognize this scheme because it's already implemented in Switzerland. Trains are not high-speed but rail links have been optimized to multiples of 30 minutes. At hubs, trains arrive just before minute 0 or 30 and leave after the clock has ticked over. At major centres, trains depart on a 30 minute cycle in all directions.
Arriving at a hub you know you'll catch your connection to the next hub without even consulting a schedule. Feeder trains are also synced up so you get little layover in general. If you're sitting at a hub station, it's easy to tell time by the ebb and flow of passengers.
Now what they should do is just run everything 50 percent faster at high speed to get the cycles down to 20 minutes. Have everybody walk 50% faster at hubs too. What could go wrong?
The clock-face scheduling system is really neat and convenient for many people, but sometimes really tight. A bus in Papiermühle (near Bern) leaves 1 (one) minute after arrival of the train. This works because the bus is waiting at the train platform.
But sometimes you would like to buy something at the railway station or there are older people or families with small children or you need to find out where to walk to first. Then you are out of luck. Mostly you just wait 30 minutes for the next train, but there are lines with one hour cadence and very rarely with two-hour cadence.
I haven't found it tight in my Gemeinde, which also has a bus home that departs 1 minute after the train arrives. I view it as liberating: instead of trying to rush in a grocery store I get an excuse to fill the time and shop slower, text the wife if I need to pick anything else up, socialize with locals in the store, etc.
Yep, the schedule is optimized for the common case.
Known as "clock-face scheduling". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clock-face_scheduling
My former boss is quite the train/energy expert, and he expained that this schedule is costly; you have high peak energy demands, as many trains accelerate roughly at the same time. Infrastructure needs to be able to cope with that.
AIUI from that article, clock-face scheduling is just scheduling with consistent intervals of a unit fraction of one hour (or possibly a multiple of one hour) so that trains always arrive and depart at the same number of minutes past the hour. This is what that article calls integrated scheduling.
Clockface scheduling is for one line, integrated schedule is for multiple lines.
In general, the tighter your headways get, the less likely you can maintain such a strict operation.
In fact, past a certain point it becomes pointless; if trains come every, say, ten minutes, then average wait time is five minutes and no one waits more than ten minutes, and holding a train will mostly just cause cascading delays.
> Now what they should do is just run everything 50 percent faster at high speed to get the cycles down to 20 minutes.
I'm not sure the math works out that way.
Let's say your starting point is 60km/h. 50% increase in speed is 90km/h. You now travel the original 30km that before took half an hour in 20 minutes.
What’s important is that you need to do this to average speed, not top speed, and increasing average speed especially on old, curvy lines is not nontrivial.
Indeed it's not even not impossible.
For those who don't know Denmark, the title is really overselling the reality here. Denmark is tiny. You can cross the entire country by car in 5 hours and it only takes that long because water seerpates the major island and peninsula. The largest city in denmark has a population of 600k. The entire population of Denmark is less than New York.
Arguably there are no big cities in Denmark at all. Looking for lists of populations of "big cities" across the world I can't even find one that includes Copenhagen to make a comparison of just how far down the list it is.
In any case this is all just silly nonsense. The reason people don't prefer the train vs. almost every other mode of transportation is because its extremely expensive. Making it faster isn't going to solve the root problem. But of cause just like everything else in government, the main aim of the future is to build up huge infrastructure projects with individual companies who stand to gain billions... and just so happen to have some senior exec positions open for the politicians running the sham.
If they'd taken the money they would have spent on this large project and instead just lowered fares, that would be an overall much better reality, but then no individual company is making billions and there's no promise of that sweet executive position.
> The reason people don't prefer the train vs. almost every other mode of transportation is because its extremely expensive. Making it faster isn't going to solve the root problem.
Many companies choose the faster transportation method over the cheaper one for business trips. Fast train connections to Hamburg, Germany or Stockholm, Sweden could make Copenhagen a more attractive city for business implementation. It isn't only about personal travel.
Valid point, but wonder if business-sponsored travel results in inflated price for other types of travel?
It often results in the opposite, with business travel indirectly subsidising personal travel. Charging inflated prices for business travel (whether it's for travelling in a higher class or booking with short notice) makes it easier for operators to provide lower cost offerings to fill the bulk of their seats for those who book in advance – most often tourists.
It is a matter of perspective, but I think the more accurate view is that personal travel is what keeps the trains (or the planes) running and business travel makes the profit. You need the "bulk" for flexibility, frequency and maintenance. That is why there are plenty of low cost airlines, but almost no business class only ones.
Differential pricing in itself becomes problem when it comes to something were the value is partly external. Countries that want to maximize utility will have to reconcile with the idea that some of the value won't be captured by the train company. Most countries don't charge different rates for roads, but try to make the best roads and then collect taxes.
But it's still much much faster to fly. Right now flying is cheaper and faster, you can't make the trains fast enough.
You can, because you just have to make them fast enough to be competitive. Really fast train will probably never be widespread because they require to much infrastructure. A train going 5 times the speed of a car requires a lot of very expensive track per hour of travel. That is why the Chinese maglev only travels ~1 minute at top speed. But going 2 to 3 times the speed of a car is competitive as the tracks are cheaper and airplanes are expensive (both in cost and time) to stop. It all of course depends on local factors, but from 2 times the speed of a car trains start taking a lot of passengers from airplanes.
(There is also other benefits, like that trains don't generally go away. There are many places in Europe that are relatively hard or expensive to fly to).
> But of cause just like everything else in government, the main aim of the future is to build up huge infrastructure projects... If they'd taken the money they would have spent on this large project and instead just lowered fares
Exactly. Why did they ever bothered building highways, ports and airports. That's just silly nonsense. They should have just taken the money and lowered the horse feed prices.
Shaving 20minutes off of a trip that takes more than an hour is not comparable to going from horses to cars. Current routes and travel times are perfectly fine when you ask the consumers, they just want it affordable. No one wants to take the train when flying costs almost the same.
>No one wants to take the train when flying costs almost the same.
Sure they do if it's more pleasant. In the US, the train on the Northeast Corridor takes maybe a bit longer depending upon the specifics than flying and costs in the same ballpark (depending on whether Acela or regular coach, parking, etc.) And it's at capacity at peak times.
When you're not talking big money in the scheme of things, many will take whatever mode of transportation is most convenient and comfortable--especially for business travel.
If you really are very price sensitive, you're probably taking Megabus or something similar.
Doesn't seem fine to me. Denmark has some of the highest taxes on cars, high taxes in general, is overall expensive and increasingly has dysfunctional politics and uncompetitive infrastructure [0]. Part of the benefit of being a small country is that you can exercise a greater degree of control. With a suitably high tax rate you can lower the barrier to entry to increase participation and make the most out of your population. It if of course up to each country to select their model, but I don't see the endgame of Denmark not upgrading their infrastructure. That isn't something they can win at. Even the US arguably can't anymore.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Europe#/med...
I personally am willing to pay up to a 200% premium to take the train versus flying if the length of the overall trip isn't more than 2x the length of an overall air trip (including security, getting to the airport, waiting in lines, waiting for baggage, late takeoffs, getting suck in holding patterns, extra security scans, etc).
A fast train is always a healthier and more pleasant experience than an airplane. Hint: trains have windows.
Disclosure: I'm a private pilot and have lifetime status on two major carriers. I still hate air travel.
I really wish the train network was working better Europe-wide. Maybe there should be a EU train company that integrates the national ones. The network should be able to substitute as many flights as possible.
Right now, even buying tickets or just getting information can be hard, and let's not start with all the local discount cards that you need to use to make it worthwhile.
You can find most information on seat61. Many countries just don't have very good infrastructure. It is often either slow in its own right or you have to transfer between trains, or even different operators. I think it is more of a "hard" than a "soft" problem.
You can always check out Interrail[0], I know multiple people (travelers) using it to get around Europe.
[0]: https://www.interrail.eu
While lower fares, which would necessitate subsidies for the Danish railways, are definitely needed, the railway infrastructure in Denmark does need an overhaul. It was the wrong decision not to electrify the tracks back in the 1990s, this could have allowed Denmark to buy off-the-shelf electric locomotives.
It's a new government, and I am hopeful that they actual intend to deliver some real improvements to the infrastructure. Considering where I am planing to move in the foreseeable future, I will need it. That being said, even as it is now, I would still prefer the train over car.
You're right that it needs to be cheaper, but they also need to make it much faster. Denmark is shaped like an L, in terms of there the tracks need to go to connect Jutland and the islands. So there's no shortcut from the largest city in Northern Jutland to Copenhagen (and honestly that mostly where you want to go).
Right now you can't take a morning train from Aalborg and be in Copenhagen for a morning meeting, you can drive, or fly and it's cheaper. By train you need to leave the day before... It's 400km and you can't get a morning train for a meeting at 9:00AM.
One hour between the largest cities isn't close to being fast enough. 30 minutes between them isn't fast enough.
Most of the country is barely serviced by train at all, so maybe a better idea would be to move local, shorter distance journeys from the roads to trains, or even just busses. I can't use public transport, I would spend 1 hour and 45 minutes getting to work... It's a 25 minute drive, in rush hour.
> In any case this is all just silly nonsense. The reason people don't prefer the train vs. almost every other mode of transportation is because its extremely expensive. Making it faster isn't going to solve the root problem.
Citation please. This strike me as being very NA centric.
I, for one, have a car for this exact reason. Trains are unreliable, slow and pricey in Denmark. Well, maybe not unreliable, but they're not reliable.
I've been on trains in 6 different countries. (n=1 etc.) They all are either very expensive (compared to buses, in some cases even compared to planes). Often they are subsidied on top.
Trains are quite expensive in Europe, especially in comparison to much lower European incomes.
>The reason people don't prefer the train vs. almost every other mode of transportation is because its extremely expensive.
This. Same for many other countries in Europe. Which borders on criminal from an environmental point of view, because the rail network is built & maintained with public money.
Also, it's not unusual for Europe to get to a place faster by car than by train - like, the whole of Germany.
> Also, it's not unusual for Europe to get to a place faster by car than by train - like, the whole of Germany.
That's due to the inflexibility of the train network, I guess. It's fast & easy to get from Hamburg's main station to Berlin's, but if your starting point is 45 minutes from Hamburg's and your goal isn't at Berlin central station, the car is likely just as fast. And that only gets worse if you're traveling to some small town where you need to switch trains.
Eh? There are plenty of HSR routes that are faster by train than by car in Germany. Munich to Berlin, for example.
And people are actually using the train over the airplane:https. Eurowings doesn't fly from Berlin to Nürnberg because so many people go by train: http://m.focus.de/finanzen/news/unternehmen/nach-streichung-...
I've lived in Aarhus and I was quite surprised how small part of Denmark's rail network is electrified, it’s only 642 km of 2560 km (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Denmark), so almost all long-distance trains run on diesel which is quite remarkable in a country that otherwise has a very green view on the environment.
Most of the long-distance trains are of model IC4, the delivery of these trains took ages and one of the missing trains was found in Libya, Italy’s former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi had given it as a gift to the Libyan dictator Muammar Gadaffi (http://cphpost.dk/news/international/ic4-train-a-gift-from-b...).
The success of the IC3 from the 1980s lead politicians in the 1990s to decide not to electrify the tracks, but instead count on diesel, and so the IC4 project was initiated. It was a bad decision then, particularly because the IC4 project was vastly different than the IC3 project. So one could not count on it having the same success.
It's a worse decision in retrospect. Fortunately, though, both the former and the current government agree that the tracks need to be electrified along all major routes, and that we should purchase electric locomotives that are already rolling in other European countries.
There were also articles warning that the IC4 debacle (it has a massive page in the Danish wikipedia, the "IC4 saga") could lead to the bancrupcy of the Danish State Railways, DSB. So yeah, it has been an astounding failure.
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I always found the dutch railway system remarkable. It just works, you can easily just live one city away and work in another. Not having to drag around a car with you can be extremely nice.
And you can pay for ALL public transit in the WHOLE COUNTRY with one card. Meanwhile in the U.S. we struggle to do that even in one city - I'm looking at you, New York!
(Yes I have a MetroCard, which already has the worst form factor among all transit cards in the world, and why I can't pay for LIRR, Metro-North or NJ Transit with it is beyond me)
At least NYC is finally fixing that with Omny. Full rollout won't be for a few years but it'll support the entire regional transit system like Clipper in the Bay Area does.
https://omny.info/
It’s also worth noting that it will support standard NFC payments, so you don’t even need a separate card; standard contactless cards or mobile pay will do.
Not just travel, with that one card you can use the bike storage facilities, rent a bike, get a cab, rent a car, pay for parking and get access to lounges.
Why not simply accept contact-less payment from mobile phones via something like NFC? And use the stupid metro-only cards as a backup? Speaking from a US perspective...
That would make the most sense but you'd probably have to set up your own payment network as the major ones charge 30 cents per transaction which makes it uneconomical for small fares.
If a lot of metro's already use their own contactless systems, I don't see why they couldn't release an app that does the same thing.
Go figure, the MTA in NYC is doing just that:
https://new.mta.info/system_modernization/omny
For what it's worth, the standard travelcard in Denmark also supports this (Rejsekort).
You can also travel to Malmö in Sweden using it.
And you can check in and out in exactly one machine in one station, Malmö C. But not at any of the other stations that might be convenient like Hyllie or especially Trianglen.
I concur, and I'm Dutch. The Dutch have a habit of complaining about the trains here, not realizing how it's, well, better than nearly anywhere else. Look at a railway map of the country, the complexity is more akin to that of a big city's metro network than that of most countries. There's trains everywhere and they go all the time. And then people have the audacity to complain if they have a 20 minute delay once in a while.
I do think it's ridiculous, however, than driving somewhere by car is cheaper than going the same distance by train once you're 2+ people in the car. I don't understand it. How can't trains be more economical? Is it just that the roads are more expensive to build and maintain than the tax we pay for it (via fuel taxes and road taxes and the likes).
I'm not Dutch, but moved here around 18 months ago and the rail system is one of my favourite things. City to city is one thing, but many many small villages are linked by slower trains. Sometimes I've caught trains to small villages to do an NS walk and it reminds me a lot of Japan.
The fact that I can consider moving to Rotterdam or Den Haag and continue working at my job in Amsterdam is really something.
EDIT: sometimes traveling by car is cheaper even with _one_ person in the car, if you don't have the 40% discount. I guess that's the biggest downside.
> I do think it's ridiculous, however, than driving somewhere by car is cheaper than going the same distance by train once you're 2+ people in the car.
A prerequisite for this is often already owning the car and not incorporating the ownership costs into the cost analysis, I think. (Which does in practice means it's cheaper for practically everyone. That said, I think for many people hiring a car when needed and using public transport most of the time would actually be the cheaper option. For some value of "many".)
I was just there and it was amazing! Especially the OV-fiets, which are bicycles that you can rent at train stations. You bike to your local station, take a train somewhere, and then for €3.85 you can have a bike for 24 hours, wherever you are. And of course it's so easy to get around thanks to the great bicycle infrastructure. It makes so much sense that, after experiencing it, you just can't figure out how everywhere else went so wrong.
But it's only possible at the very high urbanisation/population density of the Netherlands, which in turn is only possible with very strict zoning - and more importantly, strong popular support for it. It's just not politically feasible (i.e., wanted by the people) elsewhere.
> you just can't figure out how everywhere else went so wrong
My thoughts exactly. After having lived there for a short while, it's just mind blowing how well this works, and yet nobody else seems to be doing it (with some exceptions like Denmark or certain German cities etc.).
It really is underappreciated. (Well, the OV-fiets is nearly universally revered, but people just love complaining about the trains. It's far from perfect, but it's really pretty great, for many routes even compared to travelling by car.)
Whenever a lot of people somewhere complain about the trains that at least suggests the rail network is good enough that a lot of people use it enough to care.
The issue is passenger rail in the Netherlands is heavily optimized for Randstad commuters. People in turn (if they can afford it) optimize their lives around the (major) train stations. Having lived there and in a major French city, I'd choose the French city everyday. France has much faster (and cheaper!) long distance services, and the agglomerations generally more metro/lightrail (which the Netherlands has very little).
The Dutch per capita also outspend the rest of the world on roads, because that's what the other half of the country uses. I live for instance 35km from my work in Amsterdam: public transport is just under two hours and by car 25minutes, up to an hour in heavy traffic.
Nowadays between Amsterdam and Utrecht, there are trains every 10 minutes.
Well, there are six intercity trains per direction each hour to Amsterdam Central, four to Amsterdam South (will be upped to six in a few years), and up to four commuting services. So you could even say there’s a train every 4.3 minutes.
Actually this holds all they way down to Eindhoven, which is pretty damn cool.
To be fair, the Netherlands is tiny: Amsterdam to Rotterdam is only 60 km (~37 mi) apart. There are plenty of Americans who live that far away from their work city and commute in by car.
That's not the Netherlands being tiny. It's the US being ridiculously huge and sparsely populated.
Sparsity isn't an issue, the are plenty of people in boswash. The issue is sprawl and suburbanization. Pre-WW2 US was much better for trains, despite having fewer people in the same overall area - just better concentrated.
> The issue is sprawl and suburbanization
Which itself is also not really the issue, but for the last 20+ years or so, is just a symptom of US cities being openly hostile against most people (whether due to high costs, monopolized land, lack of housing, lack of reasonable transportation infrastructure, lack of education infrastructure, etc).
I just checked https://www.ns.nl/en (e.g. enter Amsterdam > Utrecht) and I am stunned by how beautiful and, at the same time, detailed the information is presented. They show punctuality statistics and even the type of rolling stock (including a graphic).
If you look closely at the graphic you can see where the first and second class compartments are situated. The number of passenger cars is also important as you can use the signs on the platform to predict where the train will come to a stop.
I sadly fear for this lofty ambition. The purchase of IC4 trains from Italy has to be one of Europe's worst (or at least barely told) transport procurement debacles. The 83 trains were the wrong size for Danish tracks and took 13 years to get passengers on some half-working versions, while most never worked at all and others went missing only to turn up in other countries: http://cphpost.dk/news/some-danish-trains-falling-to-pieces-...
Typical politician-think.. Thing is, people in major cities rarely need to travel to other major cities, and people outside major cities most often need to travel to the closest major city.. (dane, works in nearest major city, 30 km drive from home)
Yea. Sounds like pointless grand standing.
A country of about 5.5 million people. About half all live near one particular city.
2.7 million people have a job.
Most of those live near the place they work. Tourists aren't going to these places
No indication that the inter city links are operating anywhere near capacity, or there is a real need to do this. Are politicians tired of having to go back and forth from the capital to their region perhaps?
There is a lot of traffic between Copenhagen and Aarhus in particular, and from most of the major cities to Copenhagen Airport.
A good proportion of that traffic is by car, and by reducing train travel times, it becomes more desirable to take the train and leave the car at home.
Precisely, the money would be better spend on more bus routes. If you really want trains, then build more local networks, busses would be cheaper and more flexible though.
Buses get stuck in traffic, unless you invest in dedicated bus lanes, and even then they inevitably have to interface with regular road traffic (and traffic jams) at some points.
Trains are faster, safer, more spacious, more comfortable and much less affected by congestion.
Instead of being able to travel from Aarhus to Copenhagen in one hour, I would much rather prefer that I didnt have to WAIT for one hour everytime I have to catch a connecting train at Bramming station...
I think Switzerland's train/railroad system is much more impressive although sometimes it seems a lot of money is spent on it.
Has anyone else noticed the correlation between public policy that favors walking/public transport over cars, and unaffordably high costs of living?
ducks
Edit: My pet theory is it effectively decreases the available housing supply by reducing the number of locations that people can practically commute from.
People flock to places that are great to live, and those that have many services readily available in the walking distance are usually greater than those that don't.
But I am European living near the big city's center without car, so I am biased.
"In US 100 years is old - in Europe 100km is far."
> My pet theory is it effectively decreases the available housing supply by reducing the number of locations that people can practically commute from.
Also consider the Downs–Thomson paradox: the equilibrium speed of car traffic on a road network is determined by the average door-to-door speed of equivalent journeys taken by public transport. It is a paradox in that improvements in the road network will not reduce traffic congestion. Improvements in the road network can make congestion worse if the improvements make public transport more inconvenient or if it shifts investment, causing disinvestment in the public transport system.
Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox
Then why are there popular cities that aren't congested? (And coincidentally have lower costs of living)
From the linked Wikipedia page.
Restrictions on validity
According to Downs, the link between average speeds on public transport and private transport applies only "to regions in which the vast majority of peak-hour commuting is done on rapid transit systems with separate rights of way. Central London is an example, since in 2001 around 85 percent of all morning peak-period commuters into that area used public transit (including 77 percent on separate rights of way) and only 11 percent used private cars. When peak-hour travel equilibrium has been reached between the subway system and the major commuting roads, then the travel time required for any given trip is roughly equal on both modes."[citation needed]
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So in general, it's entirely unclear whether this effect applies in most scenarios on the road network. In my area of NYC, a poster child for arguments about this effect and why we should never build anything due to "induced demand", it is vastly faster to drive across any borough other than Manhattan rather than taking public transit at all times except certain corridors at the absolute peak of rush hour.
This is a symptom of low road demand for Queens-Brooklyn transit which in turn is because of the relative size of both boroughs, their lower population density and most importantly because there isn't a subway line that truly cuts across the two boroughs.
If there were a proper subway line, running say from LGA, through Jackson Heights, Ridgewood and then cutting east through Brooklyn to JFK there's no way a driver could go faster on Grand Central Parkway anywhere near peak times.
Such as? All of the populous US cities have terrible congestion and high cost of living.
The ones that aren't congested and have lower costs are smaller.
Unless you mean something else by "popular."
Wrong in both counts. The largest US cities are among the cheapest large cities in the developed world: https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4758/38890153315_bb29ac1b6c_b.....
Commutes are also shorter. Average commutes in London is 74 minutes (round trip): https://www.thekingsferry.co.uk/industry-news/article/commut.... Houston and Dallas are 20-25 minutes less: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/.... DC is the second worst in the US, and still about 10 minutes shorter than London: https://wtop.com/traffic/2017/04/dc-area-has-2nd-longest-ave...
Those are comparing metro areas to cities, though. The DC one, for example, includes exurban areas and literal farmland in its definition of the DC metro area (which comes from the Census). This is the kind of stuff it includes: https://maps.app.goo.gl/kbfrPLDvBaUn7tzo8
I don't think it's quite a fair comparison to compare that vs. Hong Kong or Singapore, especially when the London exurbs are called out separately.
I'd guess that NYC is in the same ballpark of unaffordability and congestion as London, but the deeper suburbs / exurbs of NYC are cheaper than their British equivalents.
I'd also wager that DC proper is cheaper than both NYC and London, both via absolute terms and income relative terms.
>Those are comparing metro areas to cities, though. The DC one, for example, includes exurban areas and literal farmland in its definition of the DC metro area
So if anything average commute should be longer because of all the people dragging their butts inside/out of the beltway every morning/evening.
Possibly, but keep in mind not everyone living in suburbs or exurbs has their job in the city.
"Median house price"
1. Does that actually mean median 'house' price, or does it mean median 'home' price?
2. Is that price to buy, or rent, or what?
So, I think there's a few factors here. One is that recent booming usually leads to higher home prices, as the amount of building going on usually trails the number of jobs and income increases. It catches up eventually, but not until the boom stops.
The other is that it's true that sprawling out can decrease home prices. However, that tends to also increase transportation prices, since you're further out now. Americans spend a LOT on transportation because of the car dependency. Quick googling and math indicate annual household transportation spending of 9.7k for the US, 6.3k for Germany, 5k for Japan.
That's cheapest compared to median income, which is a valid thing to measure but probably not what GP meant.
And also it's only comparing very large cities in ~8 selected countries (no Paris or Rhine–Ruhr, for example).
(Source of your data, 2019 edition since I couldn't find 2017: http://www.demographia.com/dhi.pdf)
How else do you define “high cost of living” except relative to median incomes?
I guess you could compare it between cities but as Mark Twain demonstrated in A Connecticut yankee in King Arthur's court that would be extremely silly.
Look at many of the large/fast growing/cheap cities throughout Texas and the southeastern US that have comparatively light congestion for their size.
What cities are these? Most of the large southern cities I'm aware have terrible traffic. Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Austin, Tampa, Nashville--they all score terribly for traffic.
The only reason they don't rank at the very top is because they are in fairly low population density areas.
Terrible relative to where? Austin has an average commute of 25 min. Stockholm is 34 minutes: https://www.thelocal.se/20120528/41090. London is 37 minutes each way: https://www.businessleader.co.uk/how-long-is-the-daily-work-....
Other US cities. According to this article Austin is the 14th most congested city in the US.
http://www.businessinsider.com/us-cities-with-most-traffic-2...
If you’re talking in the US: no high-cost city has had long term public policy that favors walking/public transport over driving, to my knowledge. Even in Manhattan, cars are given free parking in numerous places, despite a single parking space being worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
If you’re thinking of San Francisco: how has public transit grown in the past 20 years? What new lines have been built? Sure, the cost of living has gone up, but has the total area well serviced by public transit increased? That indicates to me SF does not favor public transit as policy.
It's well known in SF that public transit is worse now than it ever has been. In particular, the trains and buses are slower than ever. It's been a long-term, multi-decade trend, but more recently ride sharing significantly increased the amount of traffic, disrupting SF's mostly surface public transit.
It makes sense, because in SF it was really parking that made public transport more attractive than driving... it was always faster to get somewhere driving than public transport, but once you got where you were going parking was impossible. This meant the slower public transport was a better option.
Ride sharing services give you the speed of driving without having to park, so lots of people will use them until they cause enough congestion to make them as slow as public transport.
I was curious whether this was true, so went looking for studies. Here’s a pretty good recent one which concluded that ride-sharing increased congestion in SF: https://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/05/20190509-tnc.html
The third street LRV has been added and the central subway LRV line is being added. The F line was added too, though mostly for tourists.
Third street LRV doesn't really improve the situation. It was added in anticipation of and simultaneous to the redevelopment of the Mission Bay area. I don't live in that part of the city, but as far as I know folks living in the southeast took the express buses downtown as it jumps on the freeway for most of the way; they probably mostly still do because the LRV is ridiculously slow. I can walk from downtown to AT&T Park almost as fast as the LRV can get there, and the LRV is either underground or has the right-of-way most of the way there. I haven't taken it past Mission Bay into, say, Bayview, but it's still slow getting anywhere in Mission Bay as it loses right-of-way.
The central subway LRV is mostly for tourists, and while the third street and central subway lines were, together, partly intended to help shuttle people from the SE to Chinatown, as of now the Chinese community still oppose it. Everybody knows why they oppose (it just can't be said aloud[1]), but personal convenience usually trumps anti-social community sentiments. Once it opens I guess we'll see. If opposition quickly goes away then that would suggest it's more convenient than the existing heavily trafficked express buses, but somehow I doubt that will happen.
What would be a meaningful addition to the network is if they finally extended the E-Embarcadero (sister to the F line that opened in 2016) to the Marina, using the Fort Mason tunnel. But crime in Fisherman's Wharf is way up, so I suspect it's being quietly stalled by Marina activists.
In any event, LRVs suck, the F- and E-lines notwithstanding. They're slower than buses and 10x as expensive, in SF and most every other American city.[2] Oppose LRVs! All they do is give public transit a bad name. It's right-of-way or no way, but preferably grade separated.
[1] It's the same reason the North Beach and Fisherman's Wharf communities successfully stopped its extension past Chinatown.
[2] I think the only LRV I've been on outside the U.S. is Vienna, but it was mostly historic. Somehow it seems historic routes see less competing traffic, perhaps because they were built in a time and place that doesn't permit much car traffic to begin with. I've been on BRTs in Guadalajara and Quito--if you can't grade separate but can acquire a right-of-way, LRVs seem like a waste of money. They're even a worse waste of money if they don't get unimpeded right-of-way.
Both light rail and bus are fine when given their own lanes so they can run quickly and frequently.
The killer is sharing lanes and traffic lights with single people driving cars, or even worse with double-parked Uber taxis.
Re: [1] District 3 is usually more progressive than some others. So that’s weird.
Re: [2] I think LRVs work when they complement a subway/commuter rail ala U-bahn, S-bahn. But I think your observation is right, they’re often in settings where they don’t need to be fast. (Serving an inner core).
Progressives seem no less conservative when problems are at their doorstep. And never underestimate the depth of racist--specifically, anti-black--sentiments in the U.S. or most places in the world, for that matter.
It's hard to dispute their fears. Considering the profile of crime in SF, especially property crime, they're warranted. This is more true today than when they killed the extension.
Of course, the proper response is to address the underlying problems; to stop the self-perpetuating cycle. But that's intractable in the short-term. Alternatively, the city could just beef up crime enforcement so that we can all enjoy better transit, which is itself a small (tiny) step in dealing with the deeper problems. But we're too busy enabling street addicts and pandering to extremist progressive fear mongers (e.g. anti-vaping, etc). It's difficult to blame anyone for not trusting the city to maintain law & order.
There are a few that are selling out to developers while using this very idea as an excuse. Santa Monica, CA, being a prime example.
Santa Monica's kangaroo council (ruled illegal by state law, but wasting millions more taxpayer dollars in a futile appeal), has started deleting parking requirements from building codes. This is a massive giveaway to developers and a long-term theft from taxpayers, which will destroy the standard of living in neighborhoods around these developments. The public excuse is that this will somehow cause public transportation to magically appear, or promote walking or biking. BWAHAHAHA! Yes, when I buy groceries for my family, BIKING is a totally viable option.
Leave it to corrupt U.S. politicians to take foreign ideas and use them as cover for taxpayer rip-offs.
I live in Montreal with city run metro, train, and bus networks. It’s currently building out a light rail network that should start to be operational in 2022.
The cost of living seems reasonable to me, especially compared to other North American cities.
I pay ~$1000 for an 800 sq ft apartment that is 30 minutes by public transport from the downtown area. My monthly transport pass costs $80. All prices are CAD.
Doesn’t seem so high to me. Our roads are a mess of construction, but that’s another story.
Unfortunately that new Light Rail Line, being a suburban mini-metro with virtually all new stations along highways, will not create more walkable, human-scale neighborhoods with great transit connections to downtown. That's because you won't have those neighborhoods where they'll build the stations.
And that's often the problem with public transit that is built nowadays in North America (if any is built at all..) -- it's often built to outer low-density suburbs, along or on highways, with giant park'n'rides instead of neighborhoods at stations.
And that's why walkable neighborhoods with good transit connections are so rare and thus so expensive.
Subways are expensive and displacing buildings to build grade level rail is a problem for many people. Sharing right of way with freeways makes some sense.
Some of the L lines in Chicago are above ground, when they are, they generally use the median area of a major highway (south 90/94 and 290 to the west). There is some at grade stretches on the north side of the city/near suburbs.
I think all of the suburban commuter (Metra, which is an entirely different system & agency) use freight lines, with stations typically near the town/village/city center. Problem with the shared lines is that freight (because they own the line) generally has priority. Freight train breaks down? Youre stuck for hours. 1.5 mile coal train coming through at the switch? You're stuck until it passes.
Granted, when I had to commute into the Loop in Chicago, the hour total of using Metra was far more convenient, less frustrating and cheaper than driving. It was a hour door to door for me, 15 mins to get to the station, 5 minutes of waiting, 25 mins on the train and about a 15 min walk to the office.
Now I both live and work in the West suburbs. Usually a 15 minute drive into work, about 25 home.
Where does Metra share track with freight trains? I took the Northwestern, as my dad did, and there are NO freight trains on it.
Also, MOST of the L is above ground. The Loop, the Howard, and Ravenswood lines being prime examples.
There are other other options besides tunnels and elevated along highways - for example using rail ROWs. Also, if you build Urban metros instead of suburban ones, the tunnel costs are often worthwhile.
Yeah, Montreal is super affordable by pretty much any metric.
Montreal is mentioned here, as one style of adding "enough" supply: https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-...
Indeed supply is the critical factor in housing affordability.
Hey, off-topic question. My father built the fare collection system for the Montreal metro in the early '80s. Do you still have the awful system they built that gave you two paper tickets (one for proof, one for transfer)?
The fair collection has been revamped. It could be better, but I've also seen worse.
Single Ticket Fares
Single tickets are printed on a piece of thick cardstock. They are both used for a proof and transfer. Validation is electronic by inserting it into a machine on a bus or at a terminal of up to 2 hours. The machine prints the times it was used on the ticket.
Multiday tickets are printed on some thin plastic-like paper with an NFC chip inside. They are tapped on terminals and in busses and get no physical markings of when they were used, but are validated 100% digitally with some central system. They are also good for the same type of transfer.
Monthly/Yearly passes are a thick plastic credit-card-like card. They have an NFC chip and work similarly to the multiday tickets.
I do think that there's a correlation, but I don't think it's done out of malice. I believe it's not due to walking/public transportation directly, but because housing and office density doesn't go up enough to counteract people moving in to take advantage of the public transportation.
Yes, it's population density. In denser urban areas walking and transit become more practical and driving and dedicating space to parking become less so. Those areas are also more desirable to live in (or they wouldn't have the population to begin with) and that tends to drive up prices.
Source: half-assed guess
Absolutely.
Developing countries tend to have extremely low cost of public transport. Yet cost of living, such as quality free cost heathcare for terminal or chronic medical needs, such as heart disease or cancer or diabetes are non-existant or minimal to the point there's an ideal but no implementation of the policy. And private medical insurance capped at a $CURRENCY limit, should that be exceeded then lights out on insurance, no 'promise to care' in those private insurance contracts.
I certainly notice the correlation.
No I haven’t seen that correlation. It is a question of culture and what is normal where.
If you had a typical danish city in the US the dynamic would be totally different than in Denmark, where nearly every city has a decent standard when it comes to public transport.
I can’t judge whether your corellation holds true for the US, but certainly not for the parts of Europe I lived in.
Compared to other megacities, Tokyo has a low cost of living, and has a huge and effective public transport system.
That's such a vague statement. The cost of living is way higher than Mexico City, Cairo, Mumbai or New Delhi. I know they don't have the same kind of public transport, but it just seems absurd to me to call the cost of living "low" when it is more than double of other candidates.
Hmm, I'm not sure comparing Tokyo to megacities of less developed countries is fair either since they will usually have a lower cost of living.
Denmark for someone earning a Danish salary is very very affordable...
Obviously its going to depend on the context of your country/city/culture, but i'd point out that your theory of reduced housing supply is a bit counter-intuitive given that these tend to be the areas with the higher density of housing, ceteris paribus.
I think its much more straight forward in that car ownership is actually quite expensive, in both time, infrastructure, and money, density creates opportunities of scale, and employment is a net attraction.
Successful areas that favour walking/public transport over cars tend to have more jobs, higher wages, are net attractors, and people are able to substitute away the expense of other things to live there because of the economies of scale: thus their demand functions, budgets and competition to live there are quite high and people compete strongly for them.
Those areas that are dense and attractive start to increase demand for pedestrian/public transport over cars organically as well, so it sort of feeds back on itself to some degree.
There's also a bit of survivorship bias, if that's the right phrase. An area that is attempted to be designed for pedestrian/public-transport, but which doesn't thrive tends to become a ghetto/ghost-town, because there's neither demand/people there, and its not an attractor, and people will find driving there hard/pointless. These areas will either be abandoned or be primed for redevelopment: and if the later works, it will push up values/demand...
What is "it" in that statement?
You also failed to assert what your correlation is.
Have you heard of the San Francisco Bay Area?
Denmark is so small that traveling one hour in any direction is likely to either put you in the ocean, or in another country. Or maybe put you through the ocean and then into another country.
"It takes four hours and 21 minutes by train from Copenhagen to the northern city of Aalborg, a distance of 258 miles"
Was it really necessary to try to make a clever comment based on the headline alone? Did that advance the discussion and make us all smarter, better people in some way?
It takes four hours because they are on different Islands that aren't near each other or connected well. You are insinuating that it is just a slow train.
There isn't much you can do other than spend tens of billions building a bridge or tunnel. Cars often get the ferry to make that journey.
A train has to travel in the opposite direction, across several islands and then back up. 4 hours is pretty good considering that. Even then there is so little demand for this journey it is infrequent.
https://goo.gl/maps/SZeteqJRc1ng49go8
Actually, it seems to only take 2h:50min by train Copenhagen to Aarhus[0], while by car it takes 3 hours with the ferry from Sjællands Odde to Aarhus[1].
[0]https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Copenhagen/Aarhus,+Denmark/@...
[1]https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Copenhagen/Aarhus,+Denmark/@...
> There isn't much you can do other than spend tens of billions building a bridge or tunnel. Cars often get the ferry to make that journey.
There is a precedent for taking a train on the ferry [0]. Sure, a tunnel is preferable and it would've been constructed but the German authorities were dragging their feet for years[1].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogelfluglinie
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fehmarn_Belt_Fixed_Link
Gothenburg to Stockholm is longer and takes 3 hours by train, and that is with a train from 1990. That is of course the prime route in Sweden, but it still isn't fast.
My point was that Denmark is a very small country, and the solutions used there might be interesting for certain small cases, but may be difficult to generalize for larger cases.
I lived in Brussels, Belgium for almost eight years, and they have many of the same issues with regards to scale.
Brussels has international high speed trains to London, Paris, Amsterdam, Cologne.
It's hard to actually drive straight in any direction unless you have a tank but if you could that is probably pretty accurate.
Unfortunately that is mostly the ocean. It takes around 3 hours to get through Denmark between Sweden and Germany. You could probably double that if you wanted to traverse Denmark. Three decades between the Øresund Bridge and the Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link is a bit ridiculous to be honest. Maybe the countries can't support more, but I don't think one should expect to do well going that pace.
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