Greenpeace proves roads are better than trains

We must say we didn’t expect Greenpeace, of all people, to make this proof. But they have done.

European governments have “systematically” shrunk their railways and starved them of funding while pouring money into expanding their road network, a report has found.

The length of motorways in Europe grew 60% between 1995 and 2020 while railways shrank 6.5%, according to research from the German thinktanks Wuppertal Institute and T3 Transportation. For every €1 governments spent building railways, they spent €1.6 building roads.

Well, OK, we’re happy to take their word for that.

The fun part is when we get to Figure 3.1 on page 14 of the actual report. Which tells us that 80,000 km (measured by Mk I Eyeball method) of motorways provides 5000 billion passenger km of travel while 230,000 km of rail lines provides 500 billion passenger km. They don’t spell out these numbers - not that we can see - so you’ll have to put up with our estimations off the chart.

Clearly, road vastly outperforms rail in gaining what is actually desired from either system - the ability of a person to travel some number of passenger km. Recall, the aim of any economic system or subset of one is the output to be gained from it.

Given this vast outperformance of roads as against rail it’s possible to therefore conclude that governments vastly overspend upon rail infrastructure. We seem to gain 25 passenger km from every km of road as against 1 from every 1 km of rail. Investing only 60% more in roads is thus so much of a waste of money that it becomes a dereliction of duty to be spending upon rail.

We’re not sure that we would go entirely that far but it is the correct conclusion to draw from the information as presented by Greenpeace.

As with their earlier insistence that airplanes were 30 times better than trains.

Given their known predelictions we do think that we should accept this evidence too. As Greenpeace says, ‘planes for long distance, cars for the rest and stop wasting money on rail. After all, given their predelictions if it was possible to come to a different conclusion then they would, wouldn’t they?