Twelve police were wounded on Saturday (17 June) in clashes with demonstrators in France’s Savoie department where a protest against a high speed rail project in the Alps turned violent, authorities said.
Twelve police were wounded on Saturday (17 June) in clashes with demonstrators in France’s Savoie department where a protest against a high speed rail project in the Alps turned violent, authorities said.
Yeah, I posted another response. Something is definitely up with the instance, but that’s to be expected given the situation.
Slightly annoying but not a huge problem at the end of the day, I’m sure it’ll get fixed.
Lemme try and recall what I responded.
It’s not just a high speed rail between two small random cities. It connects the two biggest countries in all of Europe, and not only that but it acts as a bridge that unites and will unite a high speed rail coming from western to eastern Europe, or rather south-western and south-eastern.
Take a look at the map of high speed rail, where else would you connect Italy and France better than here? There’s no other better suited place for it. This is the bridge that connects Spain, France through Italy to Austria, Slovenia, Czechia, Hungary, Romania and the rest of the Balkans.
I don’t know about your political views but I personally hold this to be a very large priority for the continent. We can’t fight against climate change and reduce our reliance on planes, trucks and cars without high speed train infrastructure.
This past here was the most interesting though because I went and search for how many Romanians travel by train just out of curiosity. And what do you know, 19.6% of Romanians “choose” to go by train, while 74.5 “prefer” to go by car, basically the same numbers as in the Lyon-Turin case.
And I hear the exact same arguments against upgrading our train infrastructure: nobody uses it, there’s no demand.
Who in their right mind would choose to pay more, suffer in sweaty, nasty conditions and then take much longer when you can have a more comfortable, faster and often cheaper ride via car or a bus?
Let’s take a more concrete example: Romanian tourists going to Greece. That’s our favorite destination, we’re basically Greece’s no.1 tourists, it’s a love-love situation.
By train: 30 hours to get there
By car on the other hand its only 14 hours, less than half
The fact that you’ll rarely find Romanians taking the train to Greece does not mean and cannot mean that there’s no demand for it, that is simply illogical and not how humans work. The demand is simply seen in the number of cars on the road.
And that’s explicitly the reason why I compared it to the demand for a bike or a bus lane, because you don’t see the demand in the number of people using bikes when there’s no bike lanes or the number of people using shitty, awful bus services, instead you see in the number of people who use cars to do pretty much everything.
The reason is simple: they have no other sensible, reasonable choice.
Build it and they will come.
Same thing happened with our trams. Our old trams were awful, noisy, slow and smelly. Not popular at all. None of them were crowded, there was “no demand” to get the way more expensive, fancy, good looking ones. Yet when they did buy them, they instantly became a favorite for people.