upton-on-line
28th June 2001
In this edition
…which is mercifully short, upton-on-line reflects on France’s glossiest
new toy, the recently inaugurated TGV service to Marseilles,
some broader mobility issues and fresh torments for Premier Lionel
Jospin.
Something to celebrate
France is a country obsessed with how it compares with America. The
comparisons are normally a mixture of envy, disdain and rationalisation
as to why the country the French love to hate manages to be bigger,
better, slicker and schmoozier. (The comparison with New Zealand attitudes
towards Australia is not altogether missing: Aucklanders justifying
why they don’t live in Sydney, analysts explaining why New Zealand businesses
don’t measure up to their trans-Tasman equals, policy wonks explaining
why, despite superior policies, Oz economic performance outstrips ours…)
But in one respect the French have no doubts about their superiority
– le Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV). The TGV (the abbreviation
has become a noun in its own right as attested to in dictionaries) is
a symbol of French technical prowess. It goes very fast indeed (routinely
at over 300 km/h, record speed over 500 km/h) and is loaded with the
sort of electronic gidgitry that is normally associated with aircraft.
If you’re interested in the vital details, visit www.sncf.fr
where you will pick up the gee-whiz flavour that (justifiably) surrounds
the TGV.
It also looks good. While the aesthetics of French car design are,
to put it kindly, eccentric, the people who designed the trains must
have gone to a different polytechnic. The TGV is incredibly stylish
and futuristic. It also gives a silky ride in real comfort. There’s
only one weak point – the food. Somehow, railway catering the world
around seems blighted by the conception that it must be fairly indigestible
– probably to keep the queues in the bar down. The TGV food isn’t much
different – but at least the journeys are quick enough to avoid the
need to buy anything.
Opening up le Midi
The TGV has been around for a while. But up until now it has been limited
to only bits of the network that radiate (as does everything else in
France) out from Paris. Upgrading the lines and signalling to accommodate
the high speeds is a massively expensive business and many TGV trips
suddenly slow down when the quality of the lines reverts to mid-twentieth
century. Going to Geneva, for instance, means covering two thirds of
the distance in about and hour and a half and then grinding slowly through
the Jura mountains for the same length of time to complete the journey.
The same thing happens on the way to London. The Eurostar rushes to
Dover then crawls through the Kent countryside at a snail’s pace to
match the neat town-and-country-planned-to paralysis Kentish countryside.
The big deal this June has been the opening of high speed lines to
Marseilles. For the first time, high speed trains in France are starting
to look like a network that link a fair percentage of the big cities
including the three biggest – Paris, Lyons and Marseilles. The Mediterranean
is now just three and a half hours from Paris. And in terms of time
that’s genuinely competitive with air travel.
While the actual time in the air is much shorter, that’s not the appropriate
comparison. Because as everyone knows, getting to and from airports
is a nightmare and Paris is as bad as anywhere. Allow up to an hour’s
travel from central Paris to the airport, then time spent messing around
checking in and more time at the other end not to mention delays on
the ground or in the air as traffic controllers take over from published
timetables. Even where the times aren’t too different, there’s more
uninterrupted time from the centre of one city to another which means
people can work (or sleep) undisturbed.
But is it financially competitive?
Who knows? The French, like everyone else in the world, have played
ducks and drakes with the financing of their transport infrastructure.
While SNCF which runs the trains can make the TGV apparently break even,
the huge capital costs of its development have been funded by taxpayers
over the years. And the enormous capital costs of expanding the network
are on the books of a different state-owned entity that in theory owns
the lines.
Upton-on-line has not had the fortitude to explore the none-too-transparent
explanations offered in the French media (requiring as it would, a new
raft of specialised vocabulary that he is not anxious to acquire). But
it would surprise no-one to learn that when it comes to leading edge
projects like this one owned by a government that can sheet losses home
to taxpayers, there’s unlikely to be anything very robust about its
profitability.
But then what is?
It would be easy to dismiss the TGV as being a bit like the Russian
or American space programmes – exotic hi-tech marvels that can only
make it into this world on the back of long-suffering taxpayers. That’s
true but it’s part of a more complex truth that afflicts mobility systems
worldwide. It’s impossible to escape subsidies and distortions that,
for social and political reasons, have shaped the technologies currently
available.
Some reasons are just egregiously interventionist – like the Europeans
subsidising Airbus so that they could compete globally with Boeing.
(But then, how much did Boeing owe to research and development ultimately
funded by America’s defence budgets?)
Other reasons for subsidised or distorted mobility systems have social
welfare justifications: that if everyone had to pay the full cost of
transport systems, large numbers of low-income earners would be excluded.
Most countries in the world run their roading systems on this basis.
And up until now, the difficulty of charging for access to roads has
kept them this way. But new electronic means of charging very precisely
have put the option on the table (remember the fuss about road charging
in NZ)?
On this front the French are remarkably commercial. Most of the motorway
network is covered by tolls (quite stiff ones) that mean there’s more
of a level playing field between road and rail. Perhaps it’s no surprise
that rail looks more viable vis à vis road than it appears to
in the US where passenger traffic is insignificant (less than one percent
of inter-city trips).
A bottomless swamp?
Looking at the quagmire of justifications that have been advanced for
subsidising, managing and owning different elements of transportation
systems in different ways, it is tempting to think that anything approaching
a rational system is unachievable. Upton-on-line’s attention was drawn
recently to a World Bank review of urban transport systems in which
the point was made (which applies to transport in general) that all
of them seem to be characterised by the following:
- Unco-ordinated decision-making by transport operators and infra-structure
providers as a result of regulatory/ownership barriers;
- Different transport modes (road, rail etc) that interact with one
another and impact on one another being separated (again by regulatory/ownership
barriers);
- The prices people pay to use transport bearing little relationship
to the price of providing the infrastructure.
As the World Bank concluded, the combined effect of these structural
and pricing problems results in excess demand alongside inadequate finance
to provide infrastructure. If that sounds like the Hamilton-Auckland
motorway that remains a series of lines on planners’ maps, it is. (It
also sounds a bit like public health systems…)
Will it ever get sorted?
Judging by the intense politics that surrounds every aspect of transport
systems (from planning objections to noise, air pollution and destruction
of amenity through to fuel taxes and licensing fees) it would be a fair
bet to predict that this will be the last bastion to succumb to liberal
economic theory.
And even if it did, there’s no knowing how the various transport modes
would unwind in relation to one another because there are a raft of
environmental externalities waiting in the wings that are unlikely to
be left in the too-hard-basket forever. Seeking to limit them (through
regulations or taxes) is likely to set off another round of inter-modal
adjustments. Tackling greenhouse gas emissions is likely to cause the
biggest waves.
Transportation accounts for 28% of worldwide CO2
emissions and that share is growing. (In many countries, including New
Zealand, it is the fastest growing source of emissions). Transportation
systems are overwhelmingly based on fossil fuels. 96% of all energy
used in transport is derived from petroleum. And consumption is expected
to double over the next 30 years. Despite significant improvements in
efficiency in all modes, the sheer increase in volume of goods and people
moved swamps the gains – hence emissions rise inexorably.
Where does the TGV stack up in all of this
One of the attractions of the TGV (entirely unforeseen at the time
of its development) is that it’s a good deal friendlier on the emissions
front than its principal competitor, air travel. Air travel today is
the fastest growing sector of the transport industry. It currently account
for around 10% of all transport emissions of CO2.
But that understates the impact of aviation on global warming because
burning fossil fuels 10 kms up has a far larger impact than burning
them on the ground. (That’s principally because of the contribution
aircraft emissions make to cloud formation).
So if anyone ever got serious about taxing fuels on the basis of their
global warming potential, aviation would be particularly hard hit. France’s
TGV, on the other hand, doesn’t emit anything directly since it’s electric.
More interestingly still from a climate change point of view, neither
do most of the power stations that generate the electricity since in
addition to hydro power France generates a majority of its electricity
from – you guessed – nuclear sources.
So it’s out of the frying pan and into the radioactive waste dump (so
to speak) if you’re looking to absolve any environmental scruples about
a jaunt to the Riviera. It’s a rather delicious twist to the hopelessly
tangled public policy muddle that applies to transport here and everywhere.
Meanwhile, the French go on their way without too many scruples. Passenger
congestion at the Gare de Lyon (with its potted palm trees hinting at
the allure of the south) feels about as claustrophobic as the périphérique
orbital motorway does coming back into Paris on a Sunday afternoon.
Not that the French are scared of dealing to that problem either – they’ve
just started on the construction of double-decker underground motorways
to get under the bottlenecks there! But no-one here has quite developed
a nuclear-powered Citroen yet. So there will still be an authentically
French contribution to global warming for some time to come. Which must
be a point of honour for a country that can’t stand being out-done by
les américains.
Les piétons strike back
Just in case you thought the French love affair with motorised transport
was total, upton-on-line can report that city hall in Paris is in league
with counter-revolutionary forces. Every Sunday, between 9.00 and 17.00,
the river-side quais are closed to traffic and made available
to the roller-blading guerillas and mountain-bike militias that, during
the week, conduct hit-and-run attacks through the grid-locked traffic
and tourist-ridden summer pavements. Even more startling, the police
don roller blades and, aided by patrol cars with lights flashing, lead
thousand (literally thousands) of roller-bladers and cyclists
through the streets of Paris while late Sunday traffic is forced to
sit and swelter while the horde passes by.
In a city of such surpassing beauty, it has the quality of a spirited
counter-attack against the vehicles that have invaded and degraded so
much public space. Small wonder that upton-on-line has joined the barricades
and donned roller-blades himself. The pavement asphalt in Paris is divine
but the cobbles a little less so…
Fresh encounters with the truth
Just when the left was feeling particularly smug about a 2002 presidential
election contest between a constitutionally immune but judicially pursued
Jacques Chirac and its own Mr Clean, Lionel Jospin, Le
Monde has gone and spoilt it all by checking again whether all those
rumours about the Prime Minister being a former ‘Trot’ were true. They
were!
M. Jospin has, apparently, been bugged by rumours for some years that
he was a Trotskyist. These he has until recently denied, claiming that
people were confusing him with his brother. Cornered by definitive proof,
M Jospin lamely countered by saying that he thought it was nobody else’s
business. And in some respects you could argue that in the cloud cuckoo
land of French leftist politics this would be a badge of honour. That’s
exactly what the communist press countered with: yawn, so what, why
didn’t he admit it earlier.
Well the reason might have something to with the fact that this wasn’t
an innocent sort of first year pol-sci reverie of the sort that Jane
Kelsey’s annual catch sink into. He was, apparently, associated
with "entry-ism", the charming technique whereby true believers
were sent off to infiltrate the more mainstream Socialist Party taking
only a cut lunch, a few inspirational pamphlets and the phone number
of someone in the mother party they could ring once a month for counselling
and ideological confession.
The extent of this heinous subterfuge is not entirely clear to upton-on-line
whose command of French does not extend to the various papers of the
extreme left that still exist in this citadel of thwarted political
romanticism. But as they say, where there’s smoke there’s fire and M
Chirac knows a towering political inferno when he sees one. He and M
Jospin played out their co-habitation with exquisite good manners at
the recent EU summit in Gothenburg, but back at home the gloves are
off. M Jospin went so far as to volunteer that he thought being tardy
with the truth about his political past was to be preferred to being
tardy appearing before examining judges!
All of which indicates a good old knock-down-drag-out presidential
campaign. But on one point, upton-on-line must make an unreserved apology
and correction. Early last year he breezily opined that Helen Clark’s
government was easily the most left wing to be elected in the western
world since the first Mitterand administration back in 1981. That was
clearly wrong. As Jospin moves now to win admiration for being unmasked
as a real lefty from way back in the face of an increasingly
fractious governing coalition, there can be no doubt that France remains
the home of true millennial radicals. New Zealand’s governing team is
a hot bed of conservative prudence in comparison!
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