from Hacker News

Spain's efficient high-speed trains have transformed people's lives

by mariojv on 10/24/23, 3:08 AM with 33 comments

  • by Innervisio on 10/24/23, 6:18 AM

    A personal note from anecdotes i had this year on Spanish trains.

    I used the company Iryo, which its mother company is Trenitalia. After living in Germany, i was positively baffled by the quality of the trains, the cleanliness, the speed and most even more relevant and what made me jealous: The price.

    A ticket Valencia - Madrid costed 14eur. Which immediately made me wonder about how do they even manage to make money?

    In Germany, the high speed trains have the same quality, but by no means the price. Impossible to see that price for a Deutsche Bahn ticket.

    For visiting other cities in Spain, it’s always cheaper to just pay a flight to Madrid and get a high speed train to somewhere. But this is also benefiting from the geographical position of Madrid into the country.

    Kudos to Spain for this and i wish they can keep low prices with high quality of travel for its citizens.

  • by tbdenney on 10/24/23, 8:48 AM

    Having lived in both Sevilla and Barcelona, the high speed lines (until very recently only operated by RENFE as the AVE service) are really amazing and a great value. Also, RENFE has a media-distancia service that isn't quite high speed rail but still pretty fast and efficient, that serves routes like Barcelona-Valencia in ~3.5 hours.

    I only wish the international high-speed routes in Europe were easier to book and the prices were lower. It's still at least 2-3x the price to take a train from Barcelona-Amsterdam for instance (which I recently did) then to fly. I have no problem with the much longer duration of the train journey but they need to do something to get trains more competitive price-wise with air, perhaps by increasing taxes significantly for short-ish (<2-3 hours?) plane trips when a viable rail alternative exists, and using that to subsidize the train tickets? I don't know what can be done but it's going to be impossible to convince the public to go on a train for longer trips when both driving and flying are way cheaper.

  • by inglor_cz on 10/24/23, 8:52 AM

    To be honest, Spain is almost ideal for high-speed trains. Big conurbations with millions or at least hundreds of thousands people, separated by mostly empty land where few people ever see or hear the trains rushing to and fro.

    This article is from the Guardian and it would be fair to mention that densely packed English countryside is on just another level when it comes to NIMBY obstacles. Any high speed track out of London must either be wholly underground, or cut through hundreds, if not thousands of private gardens, and their owners will be hard to placate. Population density of Southeast England is pretty extreme even for Western Europe.

  • by psd1 on 10/24/23, 12:53 PM

    Spanish politics is based on coalition; when a government is voted out, it generally retains a significant presence in the next government.

    The UK looks like it's about to send the tories to the shadow realm, so they have zero incentive to do any long-term thinking.

    My belief is that Sunak has cancelled this project out of sheer spite, to salt the earth for when the next government restarts it, so that in five years' time they can do their customary blame-it-on-labour bollocks. And they aren't expecting any votes from the north anyway.

    My heart goes out to those who had their homes compulsorily purchased, but if they now buy them back, they will only be purchased again. The obvious winners are developers who sweep in to buy in the expectation that they'll be CPOd at a higher price in a year.

    The Tory party is broke and in need of donations to fight the next election. If any of their donors then buy land back from HS2, I shall be cross.

  • by Agingcoder on 10/24/23, 7:33 AM

    It’s interesting to see that low population density is an advantage here - it’s usually described as a financially obstacle for most infrastructure projects ( telco, etc )

  • by pjmlp on 10/24/23, 7:11 AM

    While Renfe trains are great travel alternative, they only transformed people's lives, for those people that live close enough to the train stations where they stop.

    And if one needs to take their car to one of those stations due to lack of transport alternatives, they end up doing the whole travel by car anyway.

  • by lapinot on 10/24/23, 9:40 PM