Romance of the Rails by Randal O'Toole

Romance of the Rails by Randal O'Toole

Author:Randal O'Toole
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cato Institute
Published: 2018-07-31T16:00:00+00:00


FRANCE: ONE PROFITABLE TRAIN

The Turin-Lyon route is currently served by French trains operating at conventional speeds. France is often credited with having the first high-speed trains in Europe, but it opened its first Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV, meaning very fast train) route between Paris and Lyon in 1981, four years after Italy opened the Florence–Rome route. Since then, France has opened several more routes, and by July 2017 had more than 1,640 miles of high-speed lines, with another 400 miles under construction.

Travelers can now ride the 470 miles between Paris and Marseille in just three hours, for an average speed of 157 miles per hour. While planes can make the same trip in 75 minutes, airfares are considerably higher than rail fares, and Paris’ airports are not as conveniently located as the train stations for many residents and workers in France’s dense cities. Unlike the shinkansen, the TGV operates on the same gauge of tracks as conventional French trains, so passengers from Paris to Turin can go from Paris to Lyon at high speeds and from Lyon to Turin at conventional speeds without a change in trains.

France’s high-speed lines carried nearly 50 billion passenger miles in 2015, more than those of any other European nation. Yet the 320-mile Tōkaidō shinkansen alone carries as many passenger miles per year as all of the high-speed trains in France. Unlike Italy, whose rail system lost market share of passenger travel despite building high-speed rail, the share of passenger miles by French trains grew from 9.3 percent in 1990 to 9.9 percent in 2015. But all of that growth was at the expense of a decline in bus travel; the automobile’s share of travel remained constant at 84.8 percent.18

The French government says the original line from Paris to Lyon earned enough operating profits to repay its construction costs by 1992. Later lines did not, however, and by 2013, France’s rail programs had accumulated debts of well over $50 billion, most of which was due to construction of TGV lines. In 1991, the government transferred €5.7 billion (nearly $10 billion in today’s dollars) worth of debt from Société national des chemins de fer français (SNCF, meaning National Society of French Railways), which operates the trains, to a separate agency. After that debt had increased to €8.0 billion ($8.4 billion), the government absorbed it into the national debt in 2007.

SNCF’s debt was still very large, so the government transferred the job of managing the tracks to a separate company, the Réseau Ferré de France (RFF, or the French Rail Network), which also absorbed most of the debt. SNCF continued to operate the trains and paid RFF for use of the tracks. By 2013, RFF’s debt was €33.7 billion ($36.4 billion in 2015 dollars), about half of which was from building high-speed rail lines and the other half from the cost of maintaining existing lines that weren’t covered by SNCF payments. SNCF had a debt of €7.



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