You should try to overlay this with a map of the population density.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Due to trains getting faster or the gov cutting them?
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.
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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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/
