Spain’s sleek new high-speed trains have stolen hundreds of thousands of passengers from airlines over the last year, slashing carbon emissions and marking a radical change in the way Spaniards travel.
Passenger numbers on fuel-guzzling domestic flights fell 20% in the year to November as commuters and tourists swapped cramped airline seats for the space and convenience of the train, according to figures released yesterday.
High-speed rail travel – boosted by the opening of a line that slashed the journey time from Madrid to Barcelona to 2 hours 35 minutes in February – grew 28% over the same period. About 400,000 travellers shunned airports and opted for the 220mph AVE trains.
Last year’s drop in air travel, which was also helped by new high-speed lines from Madrid to Valladolid, Segovia and Malaga, marks the beginning of what experts say is a revolution in Spanish travel habits.
In a country where big cities are often more than 500km (300 miles) apart, air travel has ruled supreme for more than 10 years. A year ago aircraft carried 72% of the 4.8 million long-distance passengers who travelled by air or rail. The figure is now down to 60%.
“The numbers will be equal within two years,” said Josep Valls, a professor at the ESADE business school in Barcelona.
Two routes, from Barcelona to Malaga and Seville, opened last week. Lines are also being built to link Madrid with Valencia, Alicante, the Basque country and Galicia. The government has promised to lay 10,000km of high-speed track by 2020 to ensure that 90% of Spaniards live within 30 miles of a station. The prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, boasts it will be Europe’s most extensive high-speed network.
The high-speed train network is also helping Spain control carbon emissions.Straight tracks and few stops mean AVE trains use 19% less energy than conventional trains. Alberto García, of the Spanish Railways Foundation, has calculated that a passenger on the Madrid-Barcelona line accounts for one-sixth of the carbon emissions of an aeroplane passenger.
High-speed rail tickets are often cheaper. The lowest one-way price on the 410-mile Barcelona-Madrid route this month is €44 (£40). Rail operator Renfe says 99% of trains on the route arrive on time.
That sort of efficiency was sorely missed at Madrid’s Barajas airport at the weekend. Tens of thousands of passengers suffered delays of up to 30 hours because of snow, a work-to-rule by Iberia pilots and a lack of air traffic controllers.
Zapatero, who has put infrastructure projects at the heart of an anti-recession surge in public spending, plans to invest €108bn (£96bn) in the high-speed rail network until 2020.
*This article was written by Giles Tremlett and shared with EcoWorldly by The Guardian as part of the Guardian Environment Network
Image credit: Terry Wha via Flickr, under a Creative Commons license.
Very interesting, would love to see something like this here in the U.S. – my work often requires that I fly from place to place, and no matter how many times I do it, its always an unpleasant experience.
Great, hope the california High Speed Train will have the same effect.
http://www.stichtingmilieunet.nl/andersbekekenblog/?p=6190
Hi – you load your article with some very strong phrases such as ‘fuel guzzling domestic flights’ et seq, but nowhere do you quantify or substantiate these claims.
Can you please advise the passenger miles per gallon achieved by these trains assuming, say, a 50% load factor, so we can truly match them against the efficiency of planes (which, by the way, is exactly what?).
Tks
A 220-mph train?! That’s incredible! But would the high speed mean that the train is more likely to de-rail if there is a kink in the track? And if the train does de-rail, the results would be that much more disastrous. I’m sure train travel would still be statistically pretty safe.
220mph trains are really the stuff of legends. Kinda like the TGV, which the Spanish train is based on? I think its speed record is high 300s, which is not drag-racing fast but adequate. Also, have you looked on the accident record for the TGV?
BTW, Bombardier is trying to bring to the US a slower version of the TGV under a different name… possibly to hide its French origins.
The train will perhaps attract more people in coming years but I don’t think that more people will travel on trains then planes. At the maximum, 50% will travel on train, that is the maximum.