Its not so bad. A lot of the lower density route just got replaced by bus. And bus are fine in my experience, and that was in bumbfuck nowhere where train made little sense anyway.
Well, I’d prefer to have trains rather than buses. Trains are more efficient (once built) and ecological than buses, and they go faster and aren’t affected by traffic.
where train made little sense anyway.
Why did it make little sense? It was built in a time where there was demand. Then it was removed because people did not use it as much anymore, but I doubt it was because of buses, it was mostly cars.
That is in all likelihood a product of urbanisation. As people move from the countryside into the cities it’s no longer practical to operate the smaller stations.
Yep a lot of the countryside outside of touristic hotspots are kinda dead in France. You can see that they used to support a much more vibrant community but now it’s just shut down stores and closed shutters with the occasional remaining locals or implants that were looking for cheap properties. And as others have said replacement by bus lines that are better suited to the low usage.
Well, I’d wager today’s rails are all electrified, and double-tracked, and mostly built for high-speed trains, while in the 1930’s you had single-tracked, curvy tracks mostly capable of connecting one village to the next. I’m no expert, but for short travels and low throughput, a bus is probably the better option than a train.
No, no and not really. You can check with carto.tchoo.net it shows electrification and max speeds.
It really is wild how many competing electrification systems exist in Europe. Even just in France there are multiple. Thanks for a cool site to obsess over.
If there already is rail infrastructure, it is unlikely that you are improving anything by demolishing it and replacing it with a bus. Whether it would make sense to build all those railway lines nowadays is a different question, but demolishing them where they already existed was in no way an improvement. Buses never have any real advantage over taking one’s own car on the same route. Trains can have an advantage because they are more comfortable and can bypass traffic jams.
The map would look quite similar in many other European countries too. The widespread adoption of cars killed the demand for many of those railway lines. :(
I’m not sure if you’ve really thought this one through. Railway maintenance is expensive, and operating stations and switches requires personnel as well. In low-traffic areas you could get away with one single bus line, meaning you only need to maintain that one bus and pay the driver’s salary.
I like the idea that bus just magically floats to the destination as if roads are any cheaper to maintain than railway.
And I suppose you assume that cars will just float magically if you build a railroad?
Am french, can confirm they do that here
Roads are used for a lot more traffic than rails.
So if you break it down by traveler, it’s much cheaper and more flexible.
Do they ? You state that roads are carrying more traffic than rails as obvious but I am not certain it’s true.
I’m not sure what would be the best metric so I decided to compare the number of passagers on the most used road in France with the most used rail line, that are both in Paris.
The most used road is the Autoroute urbaine Nord with 200 000 vehicles per day.
The most used rail line is the RER A with 1 400 000 daily passengers, 7 times more.
This is called survivor bias.
If you remove every train line except the RER A, would you say that trains are always less expensive than every roads? That would be the logical conclusion 🤣
You have to look at the lines that disappeared, to see that they likely had very few users and the costs were therefore much higher.
Its not one bus for any sort of remotely regular service, and even if it was its not one driver either, unless you don’t run the service one or more days a week or while they are on holiday or while the bus is out of action for repairs or servicing.
I am not going to pretend that a bus isn’t cheaper, because it is, but its not massively cheaper than an existing railway service in good repair.
Part of the problem when the UK went through the same changes was that the local branch lines had 4 people working each train, and that train might service less than 50 people during a quiet day. Sure, a bus can have 1 person working it, but so can a train. Stations also used to be heavily maned, it was ridiculous.
Rather than fixing the issue we moved to Motorways, minster in charge of it owned a company building them, funny that and buses that were cancelled for the same lack of demand.
Public transport (which includes buses) is either expected to be a cost to the tax payer or its not practical long term. The only other alternative offered to rural areas is the car, totally shit idea for mass transport.
Every route that is still profitable has been enshitified to such a degree its now extremely expensive and unpleasant to use.
It takes money and (probably more importantly) personnel to operate a rail line. Think regular inspections and repairs of tracks and stations, cutting of trees, operating switches, controlling traffic, regularly updating schedules (so the trains actually make sense in the greater scheme of things), actually driving the trains, cleaning and maintaining them, and replacing them.
Again, I’m no expert, but I hold the belief that even a fancy bus line is orders of magnitude cheaper than a train line where demand isn’t high.
Buses never have any real advantage over taking one’s own car on the same route. Trains can have an advantage because they are more comfortable and can bypass traffic jams.
Buses allow you to do different things en route, just like trains. And they aren’t necessarily less comfortable than trains. Your argument about traffic jams is moot. There are no traffic jams between small towns.
Wouldn’t railway be the perfect mode of transport to automate though?
Probably more so than cars, but I don’t see that coming anytime soon.
The driver isn’t the large cost.
Operating a bus line also costs money. Bus drivers don’t work for free either, nor do buses just grow on trees. So many of those costs also exist for bus lines. In fact due to buses having less capacity than trains, you need more staff to transport the same number of people by bus than by train.
Trains are more comfortable than all road traffic because road traffic always uses bumpy roads that degrade comfort, rail traffic always glides on smooth metal rails.
We have a similiar situation for a lot of smaller rail connections. And nobody demolished anything, they are still there, just unmaintained and nit operational. Neglect is much cheaper than directed action.
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Just to add some info: in France many (no idea of how many, but I have anecdotally seen many) train lines have been repurposed to bike tracks, with a speed up in the recent years.
this is true for my area, though I do wish the train was still in service. I have no way of getting to the main rail hub in my area except by driving, or taking the bus. and the bus sucks donkey dicks around here.
You should try to overlay this with a map of the population density.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts in the UK, which by their very nature disproportionately affected rural and marginalised communities that had little other public transportation.
is there a map with the served stations because in some cases it looks like you still can go to the same place but you have connections instead of direct lines ? But still kind of sad, not getting better currently, mostly because of the costs, a plane can be way cheaper than train… I don’t understand why they don’t increase taxes of aeroplane transports
The basic problem is that airplane fuel (kerosene) is untaxed due to an international treaty dating back decades. It’s very hard to change international treaties, especially when a politically powerful industry has a stake in them not changing.
I knew it was untaxed, but didn’t know it was an international treaty…
But what would be the consequences of not respecting that treaty, I guess there would be more than a little genocide of something
Because the ones who decide the taxes travel exclusively by plane.
it’s not like they are paying for it, but I guess they get paid to be this way
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Due to trains getting faster or the gov cutting them?
Cutting them. The govt has nearly only focused on high speed inter city trains. Some regional commuter ones.
All the trains that served rural people have pretty much died and been replaced by the car.
Dut to individual cars becoming the norm
Probably also due to new bus lines replacing smaller train lines and/or driving passengers to/from the remaining bigger train stations of the lines instead. I guess bus service had lower maintenance and operational costs while being more flexible than a small train or tram.
Do you have actual numbers that support that for the French bus service replacing their rail? As when that was mooted when Beeching did the same rail cuts to the UK railway lines, the buses for small and unpopular branch lines lasted a year or so before they were also cancelled or massively scaled back
No, no numbers, but I have heard and read that that’s the history of the smaller railways in other European countries around that time.
For some reason the post doesn’t load for me, here is a direct linek to the reddit post via a redlib frontend: https://eu.safereddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1msm7ub/the_french_railway_network_has_shrunk_over_the/
