Europe on Fast Track to the Future

[marmar]

from the WSJ:




By WILLIAM LYONS


London—Guillaume Pépy has a secret. The chairman and chief executive of Europe's largest high-speed train operator, likes to fly. "It's true," he chuckles. "I'm very fond of aircraft, so you could say I missed my ideal career completely."

Not that Mr. Pépy, who has run France's national state-owned railway company, Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer, or SNCF, for the past three years, gets to fly much these days. One of the last times he went on an airplane was to take a flight from London City airport to Charles de Gaulle in Paris. It was, he says, a fact-finding mission to check the level of service. Shaking his head he smiles: "I wasn't impressed."

It's been 23 years since he joined SNCF as an énarque, a graduate of the prestigious École nationale d'administration, a postgraduate training house for senior civil servants, but few would forgive him a career change now. The past two years have seen a slew of issues cross his desk from complaints about service and overcrowding on regional routes in France, through disputes with the work force over pension reform and a diktat from France's President Nicolas Sarkozy to all major industries in state hands to increase capital expenditure. This amid a period of falling revenue and having to make a very public apology for the role SNCF played in transporting Jews during the Holocaust.

All of this has been played out against a backdrop of one of the most radical changes to European railways in a generation: the opening up of cross-border rail transport to competition, a measure that pits SNCF against Germany's largest rail operator, Deutsche Bahn, for dominance of Europe's high-speed rail traffic. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703597804576194443663299746.html

[Lydia Leftcoast]

1. Not only Europe but also

China, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand (Thailand!) are investing in high-speed rail and mass transit. Of course, Japan is expanding its groundbreaking Shinkansen system as well. (Fortunately, the current expansion is in Kyushu, far from the area affected by the earthquake and tsunami.)

Since I haven't been able to travel recently, I've been reading travel books for fun, and the major cities in these countries and others have state-of-the-art mass transit as well. Yup, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Taipei, Seoul, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, most of the large cities of Japan (Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Nagoya, Sapporo,Yokohama, Kobe, and others) and even some of the cities in India have light rail and/or subway systems.