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.
Why do demonstrators agains the high speed rail?
https://lessoulevementsdelaterre.org/blog/programme-de-la-saison-5
In this case there is already an existing railway line which is only used at 20% of its capacity. With this project you will end up sparing 1h25 on a Paris-Milan. Also they would be supposed to pay taxes so the government can destroy their mountain. It’s nonsense, it’s not answering a demand, it’s trying to create his own demand.
How I see it is that some people still don’t understand, (or don’t care) that we need to spare resource, not spend more. The french are fed up and are not afraid to show it.
This bit is slightly confusing and weird, tbh. How do you actually expect to have a demand for high speed trains that are said to shorten 2hrs between Lyon and Turin?
Like, do you expect to have 100% capacity of the old, slow track? You would do that just to show that there’s a huge demand for a faster track or would you tell that train track to fuck right off and instead use cars/trucks/etc on the road?
Look on Google maps. From Lyon to Turin a car trip takes you there in 3h50m, while a train trip takes you there in 4h56m. Who in their right mind would chose the train?
And I’ve heard a very similar rhetoric here in my country as well.
First it was against bike lines, because like you said “there was no demand”. And that was factually true. You could walk days around the city without seeing a bike, there were no people on bikes. And that was the main argument against bike lines, that it is a waste of money, that nobody uses a bike, there’s no demand.
And of course, people were looking for the demand in the wrong place. The demand was on the road in the form of massive traffic jams, everybody and their mother used the car. Now that they built the bike lines it is literally impossible to go outside and not see bikes, they’re all over the place. Build it and they will come.
And now they’re arguing the same thing against building high speed train tracks in our country: there’s no demand! Of fucking course there’s no bloody demand. Taking the train is expensive, its shitty, its filthy and it takes much longer than if you’d go with a bus or a car. Of course everybody is using the road instead of the train tracks. Why would people suffer needlessly just to show the government that there’s no demand? Absolute nonsense.
This whole project was started 30 years ago. We have way different priorities now for these 30 billions euro and workforce.
We are not talking about a bike lane which “is here or is not here”, we are talking about a track at 20% usage for 30 years. If the industry was asking for more railway then the usage would be at least 70%. Now it’s 20%, the demand is fulfilled.
They are trying to put more people on the train. But the priority is not to transport people to other countries. If it was a project to renovate inner lines I would say why not, but transporting people across countries by digging the longest tunnel in Europe? No. It’s ubertourism all over again.
The explanation is in the last line:
The industrial are trying to use public funding to guarantee their own business for decades.
It’s a false equivalence. What is the demand to move from Paris to Turin? Tell me, and tell me it’s worth spending 30 billions of € of public money and decades of workforce to dig the largest tunnel in Europe. We have other priorities now.
You cannot compare it to a bike lane or a bus lane.
Didn’t I answer to your comment here? I swear I remember writing a long-ass comment, I’ve no idea why its not showing up.
Did you receive a reply, btw?
I see this:
btw I think I also lost a post in a different thread a few hours ago.
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.
Rarely you have big projects without people protesting it and French people do love protesting.
But still, there are a series of arguments that they have against it, like for example that the cost of the project is too high and its not justified, that it is better to upgrade existent infrastructure, a danger of environmental disasters, also health concerns due hypothesize presence of uranium and asbestos where the tunnel is bored (studies haven’t found none).
Thanks for clarification!