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Traveller
Wendover Productions
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Comments by "Traveller" (@traveller23e) on "Wendover Productions" channel.

This video misses out on one very important fact: Trains, fundamentally, are not like planes. Yes, they are both modes of transport. Yes, it's good when both are cheap. But the difference is that planes are not mass transit systems like trains are. The number of people who commute by plane is negligible, and the mode of transit in general is very badly suited for that task. Trains however are mass transit, or at least can be. Although long distance trains can be compared to flying, regional trains cannot, and here's where my worry is: typically, the most profitable part of the railway system is the high-speed service. It's not clear from the video and I don't know from elsewhere what the pricing looks like for companies to operate on the rail infrastructure, but for the most part it won't make sense for companies to operate the regional trains that are really the important ones when it comes to public benefit and environmental impact. In Italy we've already begun to see this. Over the last few years Trenitalia has been announcing all sorts of great high-speed routes at a fairly low price (e.g. Milano to Paris), but at the same time they've been quietly deemphasizing regional trains. Italo has been operating as a competitor to Milano, and that's great, but most of the country has no competitor to bring the price down on regional trips. Those are held down I believe through government funding, however in many places lines are closed or service so bad as to be unusable. Additionally, the more the government thinks of trains as a commercial sector rather than a public service to be funded and directed for the good of the people, the worse off I think we'll be. That's the kind of thinking that got Britain its privatized network, and we saw where that got them. Actually, that's a good point- How come Britain's privatization mess not make it into this video? It would seem like a prime example of what happens if you rush towards deregulation on a public service. Additionally, as others have pointed out, privatizing and then allowing companies to swoop in and make their for-profit booking sites to take advantage of the confusion is a terrible solution to the problem. At present, if I need to take a train from Italy to Austria, I have a grand total of two booking sites to look at. If I need to get to Germany, make that three. Rather than making it a healthy half-dozen and then capitalizing on the resulting mess, why don't we, and I know this is gunna come across as a huge breakthrough of an idea, just make a site and app for booking trains across the EU, funded as a service by the EU? I know you mentioned countries don't like publishing their schedules, but if that's an insurmountable issue your proposed app won't have the timetables for ex-national/quasi-still-national operators anyway. It really doesn't make much sense to me as an argument for nationalisation. All in all, it really doesn't strike me as one of your better videos, I'm afraid. It feels like you got convinced it was a good thing and then were bound and determined to prove that point. Honestly I think this is a step backwards from a sustainable future where anyone can take the train to where they need to go, but let's be honest if our government is anything to judge by they're well and truly sold on the idea that electric cars are the future. It really makes me sick.
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@neeljavia2965 True, but the civilian risk is what worries me.
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@Davebsuk Seriously though, electric cars are fine for certain niche applications, but are not sustainable in the slightest as transportation for the masses. I.e. most people should not be allowed to drive going forward.
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@Davebsuk The thing is, at present the vast majority of people in western nations live in cities (I'm not sure about global statistics, but I believe this goes for most other places as well) , and any decent city shouldn't require residents to have cars. Heck, a good city should discourage car use to improve the living standards in the city. If you don't need all that noise, confusion, and danger, might as well get rid of it. A lot of pedestrians, dozens of bikes, and a bus (or better yet, tram) passing every couple minutes is way nicer to live in than hundreds of vehicles to navigate around, which when not in use either end up parked on the street or in dedicated parking lots (meaning you have to dedicate a ridiculous amount of terrain for for storing rolling cages for moving people as inefficiently as possible). There are definitely places (every American suburb, I'm looking at you) where this isn't really feasible at present in large part because they've intentionally designed their city to make them a heaven for cars and no one else, and I really wish in places like those they'd invest in infill and mixed zoning to make their cities more livable in the absence of a car. In a way they've made things as difficult as possible for themselves when it comes to transitioning to be sustainable.
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@extragoogleaccount6061 if the requirement is "higher", most of them can. The freight rail industry has decided not to compete with trucks for anything other than stuff that is neither urgent or value-dense, and they have continuously put off maintenance and reduced double track to single track as well as lowering speeds in order to cut costs (this sounds rather ill-advised, and that's because it is). So if they improved the systems on those lines they could certainly increase the speeds somewhat, even if they weren't necessarily suitable for real high-speed rail.
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@etbadaboum High-speed lines in many countries are built without any level crossings to prevent this issue. But again, that's actual high-speed (above 200 km/h)
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I just wish they weren't exporting that passion.
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@mlc4495 Yeah, or better yet have an EU office that coordinates the international services as well as providing a central booking service.
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@@greenie3419 Though at what cost? As pointed out in the video, the for profit company will only do the parts immediately profitable, not the parts that are needed. And a for-profit company will always take a cut.
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 @miguelpereira934 Although honestly road vehicle traffic should be greatly limited by the same logic, which I for one would not be at all opposed to.
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@loganleroy8622 By that same argument the US should also only have toll roads. There's a reason we don't use that system; communists will say it's because it's a terrible system that penalizes people with less money, capitalists will say it's because facilitating movement improves the economy. Either way I've never heard much argument for making people pay per trip made on a road, so it doesn't really make that much sense as an argument for privatised rail either. At some point everyone needs that slow train to get from the larger city to the small town where our grandmother's niece's friend's uncle lives, and if we were only willing to run it if the people who used it paid for it, it would cost the earth for a low-quality journey. Hence no one would take it. It's also worth noting that without the unprofitable last-mile transit there tends to be a lot less traffic into the larger high-speed transit, a fact that private companies tend to ignore (or maybe it's the tragedy of the commons and they hope someone else will cover the unprofitable trips).
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They're not great when it comes to connecting to stations, and it makes the views worse from the train. Additionally, it is likely louder for the people on the train, and the safety aspects of having a lot of cars in close proximity to a rail line have to be considered. That said, if we took a few lanes of highway and turned them into train tracks I'd be all for it
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It's long been a huge blindspot in American infrastructure planning, and sadly they have yet to make sense of it. Yet ironically they have no problem paying lots of money for roads everywhere to be built and maintained.
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I'm not sure maglev is the answer here. As train speeds go up, so does inefficiency, in addition to which the infrastructure requirements of maglev makes it incompatible with anything else. There's sort of a sweet spot for speeds here. Addtionally, one of the limitations of HSR is it can only get you between major cities, by ts very nature. If you need to travel anywhere else, you need a good intercity or local network to get you there. If they were to step up their game with just normal overnight trains, I think it would go a long way. Who cares if it's slower to travel between two cities if you are asleep for most of it? Especially if they could arrange for good meal service included, I think it could go a long way.
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@JMM33RanMA If only they'd impressed him with their railway system, the world could be a much better place :(
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That's why a lot of countries have strict limits regarding political advertising
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@rubiconnn IP legislation as a whole is just so fucked up...
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@gabrielalbeldaochoa8234 There's a line that passes by a city I used to live in that was built way back (not sure by whom). until 2015 or so the line was run by a corporation heavily regulated by the government, and it was ok. I would have preferred it to have been run by the national rail company, but it was fine and it got people from one end of the line to the other at an affordable cost. Well, then that company got bought by a major transit corporation from way up north. That corporation kept running the trains a couple years, but then because they couldn't be bothered to carry out the necessary routine maintenance the line fell out of disrepair and after a derailment they had to close most of it "for maintenance". Half a decade on, no work has been done at all and the estimated price tag has gone way up (if I remember rightly about tenfold) from where it would have been had they just done their job. Around a year ago I visited my old local station just to see, and there were plants all over the tracks, including a tree right between the rails of platform 1. And the real kicker? The local government has finally realized this sucks, so they're planning to take the line back and get it back running with some other company specifically created. Except the funding to repair the line is all coming from various levels of government. No penalty to the corporation that let it all go to ruin, despite the fact that they're quite successful thanks to other ventures and could probably do with a little squeeze now and again.
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@Bryce_Fl They do need transit at least to the nearest cities of the next size up though. People need to go places to run errands or visit relatives even if it's only once in a while. And if that means running an EMU up the track nearly empty every hour from 6 to 21 that would be a perfectly decent service for such a town at a relatively low cost. Regional trains are very cheap compared to high-speed, and that would mean fewer trips in an automobile for people who have access to one, and more mobility for people who don't.
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@Bryce_Fl I spent my teen years in a town of roughly 15.000 including the outlying farms and villages. After high school I had to move to the big city, in large part because they'd closed our railway line a few years prior so what had been just under an hour in a DMU to get to the nearest large(r) cities became a somewhat longer bus trip, with a schedule that required leaving the large city before dinnertime in order to get back the same night. Thus it became nearly impossible to go out with my friends many of whom were in uni in one of those larger cities. The reason they closed the line had to do with ever-increasing privatisation. They got rid of the regional transit provider (that had been reasonably good) and sold all the routes to a bus company from up north somewhere. Well, the bus company didn't think the line really needed to be maintained so after a while and a derailment they lowered the speed limit on the line to just 50 km/h. Shortly after that they closed the line completely "for maintenance" and proceeded to do absolutely nothing for years. These days the bus "substitute" doesn't even stop at the station, a fact that I learned the hard way at one point. Instead it stops at the highway interchange more than a kilometer away and poorly connected to the town itself. Now repair work has started to get the line up again, but it all needs to be replaced; the first step was to cut down the trees and other vegetation that had grown on the tracks in the meantime. But now the maintenance is being paid by the region; as far as I know the bus company got to keep their profits without having to pay any of the costs they should have. Meanwhile they are continuing to make money in the region as all the regional bus transport was turned over to them at the same time as the rail. And what's more, due to the time and additional wear and tear since the company should have done the original maintenance work the cost of the work needing to be done now is an order of magnitude (no exaggeration) larger than what it would have been. By the way, in you experience where do people living in rural areas go to shop? Because afaik stores tend to be found in towns or cities.
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Problem is that the tracks will still belong to brightline's owners.
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@DiegoMonroyF I agree that the goal should be to give people transport, but I don't agree that roads comprise transport. What roads are, fundamentally, is a place for people who have otherwise obtained a means of transportation to use it, thus putting the burden of acquiring transportation squarely on the individual whilst also using a lot of public money to do so. If I have to own, borrow, or otherwise arrange for a vehicle the government has clearly not provided a full transit solution. That said, if I could hop on a bus or cable car rather than a train, it would be perfectly alright. For a lot of use cases though trains are better, and they have a way of forming a central part of public transportation networks between their reliability, efficiency, and extremely high capacity. As far as your argument for deregulating in order to force quality to rise, I have to agree that yes that does normally work, assuming that previously the service was just kinda left to its own devices in a government-aided monopoly. This assumption sadly is often correct, but the solution I'd far rather see is for the public service to actually be controlled by the government with parameters like ridership and percentage of population served as goals, not money. As for the last one, I don't think the government should be playing the "game" of economics when it comes to public transit, it should be doing its job. If there's someone (government or private) who's "winning", that means they're making boatloads (trainloads?) of money off of either the government or the populace directly, on the basis of a public _service_. There should not be a game to be played, there should be a legally guaranteed way for people to get from point a to point b, at an affordable price.
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@cpMetis That's because railroads in the US don't try to compete with trucks for unknown reasons (railroads have a huge natural advantage over long distances...)
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I live in europe, but here too Ryanair's baggage fees make it cheaper for me to take the train 11-12 hours each way rather than flying when I visit my parents. I don't mind too much because that particular train connection is quite comfortable, but it does make for a long trip so I typically don't do it for less than a week.
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@landlubbber Maybe, but losses go down way easier if it's a "this year is going badly, but next year we'll do great!" thing versus a "we have to spend years at a loss, but two CEOs down the line you'll be making money". But when it comes to properly run transit (properly as defined by good for people) it's not a question of when the downturns come but rather where. Corporations all the time shut down or outsource the parts of their business that don't make money, it's among the most common business practices. Unfortunately, a properly-designed rail system will have routes that run at a huge loss. For an example of what happens when you try to get rid of those routes, see the Beeching cuts.
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Other than the iberian penninsula and Britain, I believe the main issues are train control systems and line voltage. But the thing is, both of these can be solved with a fifteen-minute or half-hour stop to change locomotives. Sure, it's not fantastic, but certainly not something that should prevent international routes from being travelled. There is the minor hiccup of EMUs being really in fashion right now though, and very few companies investing in regular carriages...huh.
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@d.b.cooper1 "many european countries" Which ones? I live in Italy, and it's just getting worse and worse...the government got tired of actually providing a service so now they let the publicly owned company operating the trains do whatever they want/is most profitable. Regional lines constantly closing, but for some reason they're operating high-speed trains in France and Spain and are expanding into other countries as well. Germany is even worse than ours, as seen by the number of delays and strikes due to low pay (fun fact: the swiss rail company decided last year to stop waiting for German trains when they're late because they're late so often and to such a great extent). Spain has fantastic high-speed routes, but mostly it's private companies operating them. Not sure how their regional routes are. Maybe in Poland or something the situation is better?
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@nathanball99 Yes. High-speed trains with just a few stops, plus regional trains with lots of stops.
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@StrategyMapping That argument applies to hardware as well as software..."if the farmer unscrews anything they might cause a problem!". It's also not really applicable since from the video what farmers don't have access to isn't just the source code, it's the diagnostic software as well. As for your question "Would you want access to manipulate your software on your phone, accidentally deleting a particular line of code, and in result your phone is now faulty." if my livelyhood depended on that software and I knew how to fix it, absolutely.
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@ohesten are there such viable alternatives? I don't know anything about the industry but so many have become monopolised.
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@MonkeyJedi99 Whilst agreeing with the sentiment I have to say I always balk at the argument "I paid for it, and thus I own it." with regards to software. That's just not how ownership works, it's like saying you own a car because you paid Hertz Rental 350€ for it. So much software comes with a license that clearly says "this software is licensed not sold"...even if you pay an enormous sum to get your hands on some random piece of GPL3 software in some ways you still won't completely own it, for example you won't be able to copyright it (MIT license yields a more grey area here). Software ownership is very closely linked to its copyright. In my opinion this is a big problem, specifically engineered to stop people from fixing bugs in programs they use. if I had my way software would be required to come with the source code...this also makes sense from an IP perspective as the source is what is copyrighted and it's not like people sell you books and then say "but you're not allowed to read it, btw we definitely did not in the slightest way copy and paste from The Lord of the Rings :D".
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As I see it, it's the government admitting a major shortcoming. They're essentially saying "We can't be bothered to work out the solutions to these problems, so we'll just let anyone who can handle it all for us. They'll cost everyone a lot more, but who cares as long as we don't have to deal with it! And competition will help keep the price down." This last one always gets me because 1) in most schemes for safety reasons the government ends up paying for the expensive parts of the infrastructure, 2) corporations have no interest in providing the unprofitable parts of the public "service", and 3) corporations are fantastic at price-fixing and will always add a certain amount of additional cost in order to make its shareholders happy. If the government just did its job properly, the need for this profit wouldn't be present.
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Huh. Almost as if public transit and walkable cities were important.
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@TeensierPython If you don't trust the government to run the dams themselves, how can you trust it to regulate dam operators?
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@Darth-marmite It's not a level playing field, but I really hate the level playing field argument because it's used in a context in which capitalism reigns supreme, with the assumption that whoever makes the best product for cheapest deserves to win. Why then is it unacceptable for a democratically-selected government to choose to spend its citizens' money on making domestically-produced widgets sell better overseas? The fact that those politicians are worried enough about it to make a fuss is already a sign that they don't really believe in letting free markets do their thing.
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People keep pinging me in a nearby thread (argument, really), and so I've seen this comment over and over again. Thinking about it more, there could still be some incompatibilities. If you think about the issues europe's forever struggled with for cross-boarder train routes, there could still be discrepancies of loading gauge, train protection system, electrification voltage (is brightline even electrified at all yet? In the video it looked like no), and perhaps even coupler design (not sure if the janney coupler is suitable for high-speed trains, they might end up needing to use the Scharfenberg coupler or something instead).
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@heinzketchup4558 lol I worked on software designed for dealers to diagnose issues and activate features on a fairly expensive brand of car, and absolutely. They take it seriously too, it's not just "our program has the ability to turn that feature on", it's "that feature will not turn on unless the secret encryption key is successfully downloaded from our servers and written to the computer chip in the car, and to make it available on the servers you have to go to our web portal and pay the activation fee". There's just no getting around that.
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@Davebsuk pretty sure the top-secret climate predictions only they can get their hands on read something along the lines of "You're probably not going to be in office two years from now, and you'll likely be dead within the next fifteen, so the climate's just fine...there's nothing to worry about, sir."
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@Davebsuk lol probably the terms t*p-$ecret and cl!mate combined...for all of google's work into really advanced ai tech and such they really have the crudest of filters on the YouTube comments section.
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@Lazarus That could be good, but only assuming the state owned trains don't slack off on all the important lines than normally run at a loss. Also, I'd point out that it does kinda suck for the government (and thus taxpayers) if the private company isn't in some way paying to both support line maintenance and the aforementioned unprofitable services.
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@MrMarinus18 Yes, and also the induced demand actually improves service since it encourages whoever's running the system to run more, either (if a public service) because it's clear people use it and would appreciate that, or because (if private) you can make more money if you run your trains with enough capacity to spare that people actually want to get on.
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@nailil5722 It wasn't just Italo, the italian government has done a fair amount of encouraging Trenitalia to function like a regular publicly traded company. I.e. to fuck over anyone who actually needs decent transit rather than pricy high-speed trains. Though there was that case on the news a few months back of the napolitana who takes the Frecciarossa up north somewhere every day because it's cheaper than renting a flat near her work place.
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@kkon5ti I used to think that the UK did a terrible job with their privatisation, but honestly the more I learn about it the more I realise they did about as well as could possibly have been expected, and certainly way better than a lot of governments have in recent years with all kinds of privatisations. Sure, it's still a mess and everything's being done by the lowest bidder which can't even make enough money to stay afloat, but at least it's highly regulated. Meanwhile in my country one project after another gets basically given to a company which profits when times are good and gets money from the government when times are bad. One of my more recent pet peeves is that the large train stations have been handed over to a company with no interest in providing rail service; instead they've turned the stations into shopping malls with ticket barriers to keep homeless people off the platforms. They divide those barriers into meaningless groups termed "gates", which should shed a light onto their inspiration. Last time I was in the most important central stations, I needed to go to the loo with half an hour to spare before my train left. I remembered there being a pay toilet a short ways up platform 24, but when I went there it was gone. there were signs to the toilet, but it took many rounds of dashing back and forth on two different levels and asking for directions before I finally found what appeared to be the only restroom in the station, in the very back of a cramped food court. It was saddening to note that on the way to the food court was a hall with desks belonging to car rental companies. Now if that's not an admission of failure, I don't know what is.
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@appa609 Planes are not on the same scale. 737NGs range from 149-220 passengers, whereas a Trenitalia Jazz trainset (chosen because it's frequently used for local as well as intercity services) ranges from 347 to 511 passengers. On the upper end of things, an A380 can carry up to 868 passengers (per the EASA), whereas the Rock trainset (always trenitalia) has a maximum of 729 seats (plus a number of standing room spaces I couldn't quickly find online). From the standpoint of the endpoints, in 2018 the Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson airport had 43 million passengers pass through it in 2018, meanwhile in 2019 the Roma Termini station handled 179 million passengers. From a more practical standpoint though, if you're flying it's generally not a commute, it's a more substantial trip. When you're in a train, it could be either. There's a whole other argument to be made, though (completely independent of the above argument): When transatlantic flights were deregulated, that wasn't a process of privatisation, that was a process of removing ensured monopolies. Had the routes been government-run on the basis of which flights people relied on, the impact may have been quite different. What worries me more than having multiple train companies is having train companies that don't have to provide the public service. We may already have reached that point though; I can only hope we backtrack before it's too late.
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Although German policy over the last 30 years has not done their railways too many favours. It's likely telling that I ordered an item online the other day, and based on the shipping company's info it looks like it went from the Netherlands to northern Italy by truck, where it was then transferred to a train to be taken farther south. I went with bog-standard "I'm in no hurry" shipping, so there must be economic reasons they did not stick it on a train all the way in the Netherlands.
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@poisonpotato1 Most railway by what measure? Size being land area?
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Problem: The company is private and for-profit, so instead of doing that last step they'll give the upper management and owners an extra fat paycheck and retire rich and happy as the country moves on in their car-centric modern utopia.
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@landlubbber provides affordable access to every city or town over 10.000 people to the extent terrain allows. Or just stop building roads and see where people complain. And by "affordable" I mean "cheap enough that a pensioner can regularly travel to the next city over". I'd say 5 or 6 euros for a fast regional train journey of about an hour or two is about right, but relative to living wages there that might be ten dollars. I don't know what kind of pension you guys have.
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@The_king567 which? I have too many comments in this thread lol
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@Pruikhoofd That's definitely true, although high-speed international travel is only part of the equation. Intercity trains, at least in my country, are way more affordable and therefor often a better choice for the casual traveller.
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Normally it would collect taxes. Here it agreed not to, hence indirectly partially funding it. It's genuinely strange to read a comment that implies that taxation is government intervention lol
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