The French railway network has shrunk over the years
The French railway network has shrunk over the years
43 comments
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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.
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No, no and not really. You can check with carto.tchoo.net it shows electrification and max speeds.
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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.
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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. :(
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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on the other hand the population as a whole has skyrocketed though, and a big part of why people move into cities is because rural areas lose amenities like good public transport.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You should try to overlay this with a map of the population density.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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Due to trains getting faster or the gov cutting them?
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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.
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Dut to individual cars becoming the norm
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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/
43 comments
if you want to see the change in rail networks over time across the world, check out https://openrailwaymap.app/