This Country Doesn't Have Domestic Flights
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 ก.ย. 2024
- The Netherlands doesn't have domestic flights, and they don't need them. Let's talk about why.
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The Netherlands? Oh, no, Reece is turning into NotJustBikes 🤣🤣
Honestly I'm here for it lmao
@@samuelitooooo Me too!
i mean theyre both canadian so...
I was honestly confused for a moment when I started watching the video because I assumed it was a NotJustBikes video lol
Unfortunately the Netherlands is a country which is really good at rail
Super-pedantic alert:
Technically KLM operates "domestic" flights to Curacao and Aruba, which are overseas territories of the Netherlands.
Anyway, the sense of the video of course isn't influenced. I am Italian, and I don't get why we need to have Rome-Milan flights, while both cities are linked with pretty efficient high speed trains (3h from one city center to the other) and all airports are connected with trains (Rome Fiumicino and Milan Malpensa) or will soon be connected with metros (Milan Linate) and could then just be used for international flights
Who in their right mind wants to take a train out of the city, to an airport, go through security, sit in the terminal for at least half an hour before departure, take off, fly, land, get out of the airport, take the train into the next city (assuming you didn't check in luggage), versus getting on a train in the city center, sitting on the train, and getting off the train at the city center. For the same duration and same cost (if not less). I just can't fathom this bs.
totally was thinking the same thing Sint Maarten too
@@Pvemaster2 I would hope that most passengers are connecting passengers. You should also remember that flying is much cheaper than high speed rail.
People who need to travel 1000s of kilometers are still going to take flights for now
@@RMTransit if it's referred to the "domestic" flights to the Caribbean, it was a joke! Btw congrats on your videos!
Every hour is the minimum train frequency in the Netherlands outside the night hours. The high frequency lines have departures every 15 minutes. This means you don't have to think about it anymore.
Between amsterdam and utrecht it at rush hour runs every 10 minutes. You missing your train is at that point not even a problem anymore.
NS also has local service every 10 minutes between Houten and Utrecht during peak periods, and Ontario has local service every 10 minutes between Milton and Toronto (pre-pandemic).
What about the DGP Formula 1 races at Zandvoort? Trains from Amsterdam Centraal to Zandvoort will run every 5 minutes (vice versa) on september 3 to 5. Never shown before!
Tests with departures every 10 minutes, so 2 more per hour, are also underway*
If you thought a train every halve hour was already much, on somelines the dutch railways tend to offer a 10 min. service. Which means that you can take a train on that line every 10 min. For us a train every hour is already considered very low frequency, halve an hour is pretty much the accepted standard
Cries in Northern-Netherlands…. (one train per hour)
US airline lobbyist: haha cool story
The B737 is here to stay!!!
Remember those planes from childhood!
We're about to go broke!! Give us millions of free bailout money again!
They don't need lobbyists; they already have the far superior option to your crappy toy trains. That's why busybodies like to drone on about "planning"-code word for forcing people to buy crap they don't want. If trains are such a good option then invest in a company and build it.
@@TheUrbanGaze don't be ridiculous. The government can easily use eminent domain for private projects as long as they prove that it's for the "public good", something that residential and commercial developers know all too well. That's not the issue and never has been. The issue is trains lose money in the US. In fact virtually all public rail systems in the US operate at a loss. Within a city that might be justifiable on other grounds (such as alleviating traffic). Between cities, that's just flushing money down the toilet.
@@Burt1038 I don't think we can know till a major true HSR network gets completed in the US (the accella upgrade, the CA HSR, or the Texas Central Project) to see if there is demand to diminish the quantity of air travel between 2 cities but if we look at other parts of the world, the number of flights have reduced once the frequent and high quality trains were instituted between 2 major metro areas - none were however completely eliminated to the best of my knowledge.
To give an idea about how much frequency matters in the Dutch railway system. Basically every train station in the Netherlands has at least half hourly service in each direction and the train schedule is designed in half hour sections. So if a train departs at :07 it will also depart at :37.
For larger cities, frequencies can be even higher resulting in a viable connection every ten minutes from where I live in Eindhoven to Schiphol, 130km away by car. It basically meant that I would never take the car to the airport because it wasn't faster or convenient at all.
Well I know at least one route where it's hourly namely Stavoren-Sneek, but generally you're correct. And after looking at some more less frequented train lines it might be the only once an hour stretch of the Dutch rail network
I'm dutch and had a holiday in Canada (Toronto, Montreal, Ottowa) with some friends. Before departure, we did put the goal to prevent as much as possible any car-based travel. So we were travelling around using public transport. So yes, we used the VIA train connections between the cities.
Also, going from Toronto to Niagara Falls was done using public transport. Strange enough, people were first saying it was impossible and inefficient. Although the public transport bus only took about 15 minutes longer, meanwhile we had a better view rather only highways.
So yes, we accomplished a 19 day stay in Canada, where we only used twice a taxi. Once from the airport to the hotel, and since the hotel did arrange the shuttle to the airport, that was the second.
I regularly travel between Amsterdam and Enschede - all the way from one of the most eastern cities to one of the most western in the country - and I can count on a train to get me on my way every half hour between 5 in the morning and 9 in the evening
Weren't they planning to go to service for every 10 minutes?
@@khulhucthulhu9952 I believe that would be the Amsterdam-Eindhoven line
@@christafranken9170 omg I cannot read xD
@@khulhucthulhu9952 haha well, to be honest, I also thought he was speaking of Eindhoven, untill I read 'eastern cities' xD
@@khulhucthulhu9952 yep. On the main axis they do. Not sure if Enschede - Schiphol in one of them. Schiphol - Arnhem definitely is.
The Netherlands should just be in charge of all urban planning in the world
Fun fact: The last domestic flights (Amsterdam- Maastricht) in the Netherlands where axed after the 'Utrechtboog' was finished constructing. Amsterdam - Eindhoven was already axed few years earlier since the most important costumer of the flight, Phillips HQ, moved it's HQ from Eindhoven to Amsterdam.
I've seen airlines and ticket booking websites offering combination tickets.
For example from Utrecht to a destination that has flights from Frankfurt, but not from Schiphol it's way quicker and easier to take the ICE in Utrecht to Frankfurt.
If you use Google Flights it even offers you to book Rail tickets between cities within Europe, despite being a flight search engine.
Interestingly for international travel it places rail ticket offers on the bottom of the list (despite being only about two thirds of the price for a airline ticket). But for domestic on the top of the list.
Frankfurt Airport is another fine example of great rail connections to a major airport, which has not one, but... [dramatic pause] two dedicated train stations for Terminal 1.
@@Eddyspeeder one for regional and local trains and the other for the national ones
Yes, Schiphol rail connectivity is great, so good that I have occasionally traveled there from Germany to get a cheap flight. Note that Utrecht, Amsterdam and Rotterdam are part of the "Randstad", a line of cities which even in the middle of the night have hourly trains running between Rotterdam and Utrecht. Brussels also has a railway station directly under the terminal, another option I liked to use although they have a "tax" for using the railway station to recuperate some of the money spent on building the underground station and connectivity. It is of course still much cheaper than taking a taxi to the city. Germany still has domestic flights but on some relations high speed rail has become competitive, like Munich-Berlin and Lufthansa sells train seats between Cologne and Frankfurt like a domestic flight. There are also bad examples, like Lufthansa does connecting flights between Düsseldorf and Frankfurt even though travel by train is less than 2 hours.
Yeah, I think domestic flights in Germany should be only between Hamburg and Munich, and Berlin to Frankfurt/Munich. Other cities can be covered by train and bus easily. For example, air routes between Frankfurt and Cologne, Cologne to Hannover/Dusseldorf are doesn't make any sense due to the good HSR and autobahns.
The walk after picking up luggage and exiting customs to the train station is considerably longer in Brussels Zaventem than at Schiphol. But at the same time, most of the airport within Security is much quicker to get around compared to Schiphol. Another similarity is that if you're taking the train between Schiphol and Rotterdam, you pay an additional fee for the high speed line that the trains run on - even if the trains aren't high speed (apart from Eurostar and Thalys).
Funnily enough, people from the eastern Netherlands tend to travel to Düsseldorf for cheap flights.
@@kuanysh_sartay not a single domestic flight in Germany would make sense if the DB wasn't underfunded, rejected and incompetent
“The Netherlands, home of TH-cam’s most famous Londoner.”
*Geoff Marshall has entered the chat*
Wrong London.
He calls it Fake London himself.
You don't even need to go all out and build a TGV style network. Look at the example of Portugal with its Alfa-Pendular service. Higher speeds but using much of the same rail infrastructure. If Portugal can afford that, Canada and the US can too.
Entretanto a TAP tinha um ponte area entre Lisboa e o Porto (nem sei descrever o quão estúpida é 😓😓😓)
In the UK, high speed trains can't be run on conventional rail because the curves are too sharp. I don't think if this is the same in Portugal, but it's likely if their conventional network was not built recently.
@@YourLocalGP from wikipedia Its tilting train technology, with a maximum tilt angle of 8°, allows the train to negotiate curves at higher speeds than conventional trains. The combination of the resulting high cornering velocity and the tilting movement of the carriages helps ensure a comfortable ride for the passengers, although the jostle and sway compensating for track irregularities may cause "travel sickness" in those susceptible. The hydraulic tilting system is governed by two gyroscopes in the head cars. The curve is found on the base of the elevation of the external track.
The use of this train did not require particular modifications to the existing rail network, but it is expensive in terms of maintenance of the rolling stock because of the complexity of the tilting system.
Yep. Essentially, that’s what the US has in the form of Acela, it just falls short in places because of older infrastructure (which is being upgraded in many cases)
Ha, "Londoner"
I'd say "Fake Londoner" or "Boring-Londoner" 😂
@@coastaku1954 I think your family then makes it interesting for you. Not its cultural or sport related events/buildings etc.
@@Paprikasoup BTEC Londoner. It’s a British joke but still works
@@coastaku1954 London isn't even second fiddle. Kitchener-Waterloo is also much more regionally significant than London. However London's position as hub between the rail lines toward Sarnia, Detroit/Windsor, Kitchener/Toronto and Brantford/Toronto would make it more significant if those services were more frequent and reliable.
Although I'm not sure on the definition of high speed rail, you might want to look into Uzbekistan's Afrosiyob/Talgo train (e.g. Tashkent to Samarkand). It's not perfect but it's very impressive, especially since many countries in the region have let their Soviet railroads rot
Fun fact: There are ZERO domestic flights between Germany's largest (Berlin, 3.5 million) and second-largest (Hamburg, 2.0 million) cities. The 'ICE' train does the 270 km trip in 90 Mins every 30 mins: so no need.
Yeah but the train tickets are unbelievable expensive. Everybody I know uses Flixbus instead. Maybe the monthly 9 euros ticket will stick after the testing phase who knows
@@muffinfighter3680 9€ ticket doesn't cover ICEs...
Based in The Netherlands. There are some holiday flights that stop at both Groningen and Maastricht airport to pick up passengers before going to their final destination. You can't book a domestic flight though. 🤙🏻
Did you know, Andorra also has no domestic flights, actually it has no flights, there isn't even an airport
Same about Liechtenstein
It's also super duper tiny you could walk from one end of the country to another in an afternoon.
@@ANTSEMUT1 More like 10 hours.
it does have a heliport. If you want to fly try Toulouse and then the bus.
Completely correct: connectivity is king (or queen). I live in the town of Alphen aan den Rijn, about 25 km south of Schiphol, and it doesn't have a direct rail link with Schiphol. However it does have an excellent bus service (every 15 minutes during the day, every 10 minutes during rush hour and every 30 minutes in the evening). It's timed so that's there's nearly always a bus waiting when you leave the airport. The bus has has a dedicated lane for much of the route and it has few stops, so it takes just 40 minutes to get from the Schiphol to the centre of town. And Alphen isn't some big metropole, it's just a regular Dutch town of less than 80000 people.
Very nice and fun video. But I think many ppl don't realize how small the Netherlands is. That country is only about 200km from north to south. Compare that to Toronto to Ottawa which is 350km apart. In Dutch terms, that distance is from Amsterdam to Frankfurt (also around 350km apart). The Amsterdam-Frankfurt route is incredibly popular, seeing numerous flights per day.
Also, the example of travelling to Rotterdam from Schipol airport would be the Toronto equivalent of travelling to Newmarket from Pearson airport (both around 45km). Yes, our urban sprawl is just that intense. So intense that the area of the Greater Golden Horseshoe is 75% of the area of the entirety of the Netherlands.
200km North to South but much further on other axis'
@@coastaku1954 Haha, based opinion. But I don't believe there are any public flights within the GTA (Buttonville is a general aviation airport so no public flights). But our urban sprawl is so big, that it's almost the size of a European country. So if u think about it, a domestic flight in the Netherlands is equivalent to a flight within the GTA (distance-wise).
@@RMTransit I just looked it up, actually, it's around 300km North to South, and 250km East to West. Also another random fact, Greater Los Angeles is more than 2x bigger than the entire Netherlands. And they both have very similar populations (around 18 million). The Netherlands is proof that you can still create a very liveable country in very little space with effective urban planning.
@@coastaku1954 I guess you're correct, but they do operate mostly as an air tourism and business jet company. It isn't something your everyday citizen would use to get around..
@@RMTransit Actually east to west is about 110km, north to south, all the way to the extended part of the country is 330 km (and believe me no-one takes a train from Groningen to Maastricht). That is shorter than toronto - ottawa, or toronto- montreal.
we did have domestic flights between Amsterdam-Maastricht and Amsterdam-Groningen for much of the 20th century. No comprehensive domestic high speed rail to replace it as of yet, but the railways are making an effort with the new high-speed intercity trains which will take over all major routes. once that's implemented the next logical step will be to raise line speeds and improve timetables.
as a dutch guy, why would you even need domestic flights in such a small country? are there domestic flights in belgium or estonia?
Often there are these really short flights for specific destinations to provide a transfer. To make a hypothetical example, this would be like Tokyo-Groningen via Schiphol with a Schiphol-Groningen flight, or New York-Maastricht via Schiphol with a Schiphol-Maastricht flight. This sounds completely mesjogge to us, but a lot of countries have this kind of "service". Even France still has this, you can book a flight from Rennes to wherever with Air France, and it'll send you on a flight from Rennes to CDG and then onward, where Rennes is like 2hrs away by train.
The only reason why you dont have domestic flights is because of your rail network and because Schiphol is located kind of centrally. In Denmark we have multiple domestic flights. Our railroads are not as efficient, and Copenhagen Airport is almost as far east as you can go in Denmark.
There are domestic flights in Estonia, but these are to some islands.
If there were an intercity rail connection to Toronto Pearson airport, we wouldn't need flights to places like London, Kitchener or Windsor, since it would be easier for people from those cities to get to the airport without flying.
Currently the only rail service to the airport is 4 trains per hour to downtown Toronto (currently 2 trains per hour due to the pandemic).
@@OntarioTrafficMan 4 trains per hour is ok for an airport.
Your problem is your railwork network in general. A lot of airports in Europe has only short distance rail, which is often a dedicated airport service. Most rail passengers will be willing to take a short journey to a central station before hopping on another train.
VIA HFR has entered the chat XD and in all seriousness, HFR is just begging to be expanded into a true network: there are so many cities in Southern Ontario that ought to be added to the network - London as you mentioned, Hamilton, Kitchener, Guelph, Windsor, Branford and Sarnia could all get branches of HFR and provide opportunities for these communities and much better intercity Transportation!
Just need to put back all the track we've spent the last 7 decades ripping up 😭
An underrated side effect of GO's Kitchener Line expansion project is that it will provide hourly rail service to Pearson airport from Kitchener and Guelph, via a new station at Hwy 27 where passengers can transfer to the UP Express.
There's a good chance VIA will also stop at that station, thereby providing a fairly convenient connection to London if they upgrade the line between Kitchener and London which is currently horrendously slow.
@@OntarioTrafficMan really hope this is the start of a railvolutuon
@@AjSmit1 There are projects proposed and under construction which could absolutely create a railvolution, but we the public need to support them politically so they don't get cancelled or watered down.
I'm talking mostly about Via HFR and GO Expansion.
@@OntarioTrafficMan Grand Trunk Revival when
1:16, finally someone who understands that no, Commercial hyperloops will not be here any time soon
There won't be a hyperloop between cities that would eliminate long-haul air travel in my lifetime. I mean I hope I'm proven wrong but I just don't see it happening.
@@Pvemaster2 especially not through the Atlantic Ocean and yet millions of people think that the commercial hyperloops will be coming to big cities within 20 years
@@n1thmusic229 They won't come *EVER*. The infrastructure costs are just too great. The big lie of hyperloop isn't that it's physically possible, it's how it drastically understates the costs. There's a reason nobody's made a vactrain despite the idea having been around for over a century.
I love how Elon Musk uses his ego to push difficult technologies -- they often fall short of what he proposed but by aiming high, companies like SpaceX and Tesla have innovated. In this case though there's simply a fundamental flaw in the concept. The closest similar fundamental flaw in Musk's goals I can think of is wanting to land humans propulsively -- it's technically possible but it's a bad idea (in this case for safety reasons) or suborbital transportation in general (technically possible *right now* but even with full reusability the costs would be insane).
It makes sense when you realize that loop/hyperloop isn't borne out of real transit goals -- it comes from wanting to avoid being in a vehicle with strangers. This is totally understandable since Musk grew up in South Africa, where riding transit exposes you to a level of crime that would terrify people from Detroit. (Still, the Gautrain shows that you can do good, safe transit even in South Africa).
@@NozomuYume yeah in 1900 we said space travel will never come, let the future happen eventually we will see a small hyperloop like DC-New York or London-Birmingham
That's one good thing about the new BER Airport. The train station is right beneath Terminal 1 with 2 S-Bahn lines, each every 20 mins, a couple of regional lines and one Intercity Line to Rostock and Dresden. Bus stop directly at the exit of the terminal, Intercity bus station with a ton of domestic and international destinations about 2 mins walking distance. That's a good airport station.
Train stations that serve trains once per hour are considered to be a bare minimal operation schedule. The train station in the town I currently live has a schedule of 14 trains per hour at noon, probably more during rush hour.
Omg make a video about station schiphol, I personally love the fact that the train station gets way more traffic than the airport itself
The station will be under construction from 2022 until 2026. There will be wider platforms and more tracks. Also the passenger routing will change. At busy times people are cluttered near the escalators and the platform entries needed to be closed off until people spread more along the platforms. Also the busstation will be moved and expanded. The new train station platforms all get escalators to the new busstation. And there is a (early stage) plan of a metro line extension from Amsterdam Zuid station to Schiphol Airport. 500 million euros are put aside for these plans, minus the metro extension.
I think a good way to do this is after a city is well connected to the second. (Say London - Toronto) Then you and a surcharge to the flight. The money would go to transit programs and trains would look like a better option due to higher prices of the flight. While I would like to see no short flights this could be a nice middle ground to help train ridership grow and help with a small bit of funding.
I really enjoy your videos Reece - I think you're probably TH-cam's wisest, practical and clearly well educated commentators on public transport. You don't fall into the trap that a lot of lesser learned commentators do by saying high speed rail needs to connect even cities of ten thousand inhabitants and and cost should never be a factor in determining routes and modes of transport. I remember once a North American posted a map of Australia's passenger rail network (posted into that Transit Orientated Memes and Teens page) saying "if Australia can have a network that big and well serviced, why can't we?" then another North American noted that huge, vast swathes of the middle and north-west of the continent don't have rail lines. He really didn't seem to grasp that barely anyone lives there as it's literal desert with only small towns. And I really mean, barely anyone is there so rail out there is pointless. But because he loves trains so much, he thought it was sacrilege to not connect every city, town, and hamlet in the nation up to the national network. You actually employ common sense Reece and that's why I really love and appreciate your channel. Plus you've paid a lot of attention to my country (Australia) and you know us Aussies think of Canadians as family who just really love cold weather. Hopefully once we can all travel again, you can come back to Aus and explore all the new train lines that have opened. And if you ever need help making an episode on Perth, just ask me and I can go out, take photos, take video and provide material for you to use. Perth would actually be a really great city to cover as the city essentially worked out how to retrofit sprawling suburbia with good quality public transport. You even see it get mentioned even in university text books. Anyway, thanks for your great videos Reece, and just let me know if you need a hand with making a Perth episode.
I'd love to see a Perth episode. More episodes on other Australian cities too.
I flew to Schipol several times, and I have to say that its railway station is awesome, with a central square full of shops places to get coffee an enormous window to see the Sun (in the rare days when the Sun shines on the Netherlands) and connections to every place in the Netherlands, but also Belgium, Germany and Northern France... awesome, awesome place.
The network of rail destinations available from Amsterdam Central is exceptional.
Nice video. We have at least one slightly similar case in Australia. Even though it's a massive country, the distance between the capital (Canberra) and Sydney is only around 275km. There are literally only 3 trains per day, and the service takes around 5 hours. So basically nobody takes the train. Meanwhile, there are around 25 flights per day making the same trip. The flight is so short that the plane pretty much starts descending to land as soon as it reaches cruising altitude. I think we'll be stuck with domestic flights for most trips in Australia for a long time, but Canberra to Sydney could be entirely replaced with a decent train service for a fairly modest investment.
Fwiw we have international rail in Europe - you can take the same train from Amsterdam to London so there’s not necessarily value in prioritising an air-rail link
Also domestic flights on NA scale are equivalent to international-in-Europe flights so these would serve as a better analog
Also to add: the train station of schiphol is directly underneath terminal 1, meaning that from most cities you can take the train straight to the airport instead of having to travel to another airport on the outskirts of a town, you can just take the train from your city center and only need to take the stairs or elevator to arrive at the terminal. ANd the amount of departures can go up to 50 trains per hour during rush hours.
Trains from minor towns to major cities are actually even more frequent, usually between two and four trains an hour. Trains between towns are usually about once an hour!
The dutch railway system is indeed awesome. Delft to Schiphol has been one of my favorite route by train!
Here in Germany we have flights beetween Frankfurt and Stuttgart, the flight time is only 20min with Lufthansa, and on the same route, runs a Deutsche Bahn ICE in 70min.
Fun fact: Some of the trains have a LH Flight Number, but some people loves to fly this short route, because the say it's better the make the security check at Stuttgart Airport and then in FRA the can go direct to the gate for a long haul flight or a european flight. And the Airport and the Airline says, when we stop this route, the people flys to another hub from STR for example IST with Turkish or KLM to AMS, BA to LHR. That is the real problem....
Just realized how spoiled I am as a Dutch person. ^^
Measure the distance between Dutch cities (as the crow flies) - it's a real struggle to travel more than 50 miles. It's less than 150 miles from Amsterdam to the national border.
Distances in North America are larger. New York to Boston is roughly 200 miles, New York to Washington is a similar distance. Ontario to Toronto is in the same league. Door to door time is roughly the same on plane as ground (leave the house ... arrive at ultimate destination) for the Boston - Washington major cities corridor. The biggest hurdle is local ground transportation, which has its own frequency issues.
🤔💭 well of course not! Schiphol airport is cute tho. Im against domestic short haul flights too 🙌
We used to have short haul domestic flights between Amsterdam (Schiphol), Eindhoven (Welschap), Groningen (Eelde), Enschede (Twente), Maastricht (Beek) en Rotterdam (Zestienhoven)) by a subsidiary of KLM, called NLM, and later KLM Cityhopper.
But that was before Amsterdam Schiphol got a good railroad connection.
While that is true, I don't know if that's really impressive for a country the size of the Netherlands. It is small and dense, the opposite of Canada. The only longer distance is Maastricht-Groningen which is just too irrelevant considering the size of these cities. A large part of the population just lives in the Randstad metropolitan area, and it is just normal to have a good rail network in places like the Netherlands (I am from Germany, we have a few domestic flights but not like Berlin Hamburg which is still long in comparison to most distances in the Netherlands)
NL is similar in size of West Virginia. No commercial city to city flights there either.
As much time as it takes to get to an airport, go through security, find your departure terminal, wait for your plane to arrive, wait for other passengers to offload, wait for the cleaning crew to clean the plane, and finally board your plane, it probably ends being almost the same amount of time as traveling on high speed rail, if we had that option...😒
There are flights between Amsterdam and Brussels. While different countries, the distance is ~200km with excellent rail links.
Are there? Wow, hadn't known.
Either way, i can't imagine anyone using those flights. Getting to Schiphol and boarding your flight alone would take a long while. Meanwhile, there's a direct train connection between Amsterdam central and Brussels that takes less than 2 hours.
I imagine it would take a lot longer by plane than by train or even by car.
Meanwhile KLM still operates multiple 45 min flights a day to Brussels for some people (would guess transfers) but there is also a good high speed rail connection literaly between those airports and the cities but no, we still want to fly...
In Czech republic, we don't have any domestic flights too
My wife and I just got back from Amsterdam. The rail service was great. We were able to visit other cities on day trips via trains and use the trams to get around Amsterdam itself. The shorter distances are of course a big part of that, but what they do nationally could apply regionally in North America as you explain. What's lacking is the sociopolitical will to make that happen. As an aside, NS train drivers are very friendly to rail fans. I had several invitations to tour cabs and even get my picture taken in the driver's seat.
The Windsor-Quebec City corridor makes so much sense to be connected by good quality HSR. I hope the upcoming VIA project can be upgraded in the near future.
I think that rail and aviation should be used in a way where both help each other. I'm not sure how to word this correctly, but both are effective and safe. Sort of like how Boeing already uses trains to transport aircraft parts, but with passenger trains. Find a way to connect both rail and air to give more options.
I think a major theme of this video was climate change and green house gas emissions. There isn't a clear solution to air travel without fossil fuels. Air travel is expected to become 25% of global green house gas emissions by 2050 at our current rate. We need to invest in greener technologies now so that in 2050 air travel isn't expanding so quickly, and there is demand for expansion of green electric rail networks.
@@PSNDonutDude that being said there are a lot of places where rail isn't even possible.
that being said we should cut down on any non international flights.
@@thebravegallade731 its theoretically possible to make an electric plane, the main problem is the energy density of batteries is very low compared to fossil fuels so you would have to have short haul and slow planes. This could work in a nation like the Netherlands except the Netherlands is a good place to build rail, so having crappy electric planes is a worse option. I think nations that have lots of islands like Denmark or Estonia could use a slow short haul electric plane.
The main problem for planes is that currently the only way to make a metal tube fly any sort of distance is to burn copious amounts of dino juice (Kerosene), and we don't have many could alternatives. (Theoretically you could use hydrogen + oxygen from electrolysis but those are highly explosive, and cryogenic fuels that would cause all sorts of issues to implement)
Also, the Netherlands is a far smaller country than the Provinces in Canada. In fact, the Netherlands can easily fit inside of State of Texas in the U.S.
Multiple times in fact. But nonetheless there are lessons to be learned for Northern America. The example of flights vs trains between Toronto and London Ontario is striking. NL is this small that only Amsterdam-Maastricht is similar but the public transport service provided to this destination is far greater than what I hear for Toronto-London
@@babo2303 In fact, you can catch a train from Amsterdam Centraal to Maastricht every 15 minutes. Long term plans of the NS are to have a 10 minute service between the 9 largest cities in NL in 2040
You’re not correct, we are bigger than the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island. All other Canadian provinces are (much) bigger. But none of the provinces have more citizens than The Netherlands. Only Ontario comes close, with almost 15 million people, NL has 17.5 million. Although we can fit in each of the forty two biggest states of America easily, we are still bigger than the individual states of Vermont, Delaware, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Maryland. And there are only four states (NY, CA, FL and TX) that have more citizens than The Netherlands. We are not that small after all.
I'm living in Berlin (Germany), and wanted to get to Tanzania in June/July. We picked a flight from Schipol (AMS) - the only one on Sunday starts there at 10. Unfortunately there is no way to get there in time from Berlin, if you don't want to either already spend the night in the Netherlands, or change trains 5 times during the night. So we had to take the short-haul flight from BER to AMS instead.
(For the way back, we could have used the train, but for some strange reason BER→AMS → ZNZ + DAR→AMS→BER is a lot cheaper than just BER→AMS → ZNZ + DAR→AMS.)
What's missing here are the night trains through Germany.
The CTA in Chicago IL, they have their Blue Line subway that goes from the O'Hare airport to the city center. It runs every 10-15 minutes.
Which I think it's pretty good.
Is every 10-15 minutes even that good? For a city that size I'd expect about twice the service frequency. Or do only some blue line trains go to the airport?
@@2712animefreak for me, yes. That is fantastic.
@@2712animefreak where I live, we don't have transit that runs every 10 min.
Chicago has direct rail connections to two airports. Frequency is acceptable on both.
In Australia the only popular flight that is short enough to be completely displaced by High Speed Rail is Sydney - Canberra. Sydney-Melbourne and Sydney-Brisbane would be a very attractive option, but completely replacing flights would be a stretch.
Glad you mentioned Brazil!
Anyway, I discovered your channel just last month and I'm pretty much enjoying. Cheers!
In the US, it seems like the argument against increasing train frequency is always that ridership will be low and the trains will just run empty anyway, with more environmental impact than whatever they replace. So there's this sort of death spiral in which the low frequency keeps the demand low. But it's assuming that it's politically impossible to do anything different. Eliminating or disincentivizing any air travel in the US would get *violent* opposition--the only thing that would piss people off more would be trying to get rid of cars.
Privatizing the publicly funded interstate highway system would be a good start towards exposing the true cost of transit options.
In the Netherlands, it's pretty common to go to the airport to travel somewhere... and then use the Schiphol train station
Utrecht (40 km from Amsterdam) kind of distances are already reached by Metro/Light railway in a large city like NYC (LIRR for example). Rotterdam is 80km. from Schipol? Boston is over 300 km. from JFK. In terms of building High Speed railways, if HS2 is any indication it is about USD650 million (no kidding!) per km. or USD 195 Billion for that line you are talking about (it will cost even more knowing the US). Just do the numbers.
I really just don't get it why is it THAT expensive. There are so many unused ROWs in the US that can be utilized for HSR. Or you know, they can just replicate Japan and build above existing ROWs.
The Dutch railway network wasn't built just yesterday. France has been building on the TGV network since 1966. In England a passenger train did the 400 mile run from London to Edinburgh with an average speed of 52.4 mph in 1888! 1920s US used to have extensive rail and tram networks for passengers. Except for very few cases, the US CHOSE to discard all travel options in favour of the car. And now it can't even pay the upkeep for the amount of infrastructure the car requires.
@@ianhomerpura8937 High speed rail require straight tracks. To build straigth tracks you need to level the ground or to build tunnels and bridges. You may need to demolish houses, as the track cant go around them. Then you need to lay the actual track and you also need trains.
@@magnuskongskov3532 Still no excuse for it costing so much. There's something about English-speaking countries that makes infrastructure cost stupid amounts. The Chuo Shinkansen *maglev* is being built for less than $400m/km on mostly new RoW (tunnels mostly).
@@magnuskongskov3532 That is nothing compared to what America did for the car. So it’ll be a small investment compared to the car and a huge investment in the environment.
The Netherlands does have domestic flights though. For example, there are regular flights between Schiphol and Sint Maarten. :)
I would think flights are feasible on long haul routes (1000 miles). Long distance min. 200 mph trains at medium distance (500-1000 miles), express buses (up to 500 miles), personal automobiles (up to 200 miles), intercity rail (100 miles), mass rapid transit (30 miles), commuter buses (10 miles), bicycle (1 mile) and walking (0.25 mile).
Love the examples you used, I actually came from Utrecht, flown into Toronto and had to go down to Sarnia for a family situation, multiple times
Coming from The Netherlands, I took the train to Schiphol, then got onto the plane.
Since it was time sensitive, I had to resort to getting on a plane or renting a car, while I would've preferred to take the train since this is what I am used to.
But VIA only runs twice a day there, so that wasn't an option.
I flew out with 9 people on a 20 person plane....
And drove across the 401.... which to be honest is horrendous in it's own special way.
Don´t forget services like Flixbus and Blablabus which also stops at Schiphol Airport. When going from Amsterdam to Luxembourg I often make use of either the Flixbus, Blablacar or the train. Never use a flight as it is too expensive and too poluting.
The queue at Amsterdam is longer from the train from the south of the Netherlands to the top
The Netherlands is not the only country without any domestic flights. Belgium also has zero domestic flights, and for the same reason as the Netherlands. We also have quite good high speed train connections, as we have the Thalys doing Paris to Brussels, branching off to either Amsterdam or Dusseldorf and beyond, we have some french TGV services, and we have the ICE service from Brussels to Frankfurt. The one rail link where imo there should be a high speed rail is between Brussels and Luxembourg, as it is a three hour train ride. There are plans to reduce the trip time to 2 hours, but a real high speed rail would allow for better connections within the Benelux region
What about the flight from Bonaire to Amsterdam? Both are in the country of the Netherlands
Actually, the Netherlands are currently investigating connecting the country's 2nd largest airport Eindhoven Airport (in all fairness, it only serves 6 million passengers per year at the moment but is still growing) with Amsterdam, Rotterdam and the Northern city of Groningen by domestic flights, once electric flying really takes off (pun intended). 🙂
By the way, I agree that many domestic flights in the USA and Canada could be cancelled or strongly reduced if there was a decent high speed rail network. I think it's definitely worth considering.
They did in fact try to make domestic flights a thing in the Netherlands. KLM Cityhopper was a service that did domestic flights but it didn't really get many customers as it was more expensive and not much shorter than the same journey by train or car. I think it's discontinued now, especially with the move to ban all flights shorter than 2 hours iirc.
Trains go at least twice an hour in the Netherlands and once every ten minutes on the busier lines.
As you likely know better than I do, we will never have European quality intercity train service as long as the tracks are owned by the freight companies. As such they will always have priority.
I don't actually agree!
Chaining towns and cities together is what rail does best. Point to point services don't really work with rail as there's almost never enough passengers to justify the cost, only between the biggest cities is it feasible. With a plane, you don't need nearly as many people to make a once or twice daily puddle jumper viable.
I think its also the difference between a local airport, and a massive airport. some airports are gigantic (e.g. schiphol) and huge engineering tasks, but many local airports can be much much smaller, and a tiny engineering task. It can be difficult though, as getting the rights to a 50 meter wide strip of land that is also 400KM long can be very very difficult, even if that total land disruption is less than building a 10km2 airfield, that only has to focus in one area.
The Netherlands is also really small, but the rail network suffers in the north East were there are no large cities, and while it is really easy to get from city to city, and then get around inside those cities, if you want to leave the city, you end up being stuck with a bus. Though The Netherlands is also one giant grid based city, so a lot of bus lines are on very very straight roads.
Personally I think a lot of cities need to fix transport within them before looking at transport connecting them.
@@rjc0234 I assume you mean 4 km not 400!
...anymore. My Dad, a pastor, was flown from Maastricht to Schiphol (Ansterdam Airport, which technically isn't in Amsterdam) to lead a funeral in the 1980s., and in the late 90s I've used KLM.XL from Twente Airport to get to London with a stopover at Schiphol - again a domestic flight. Different times!
Rail from Schiphol to Amsterdam Centraal is seamless. You almost don’t realize it’s an airport. I stayed about 35 km outside of Amsterdam in Hilversum and getting to/from was pretty easy. Not to mention Hilversum to Schiphol. Cheers
Nice video Reece!
Sadly, to go from Knoxville, TN to Atlanta, GA you have to drive or take a flight which takes about 30 min long.
While I agree that true high-speed rail in the Toronto-Ottawa-Montréal corridor should be a priority, it is unfair to compare the Netherlands to Canada. Population density in the Netherlands is many multiples higher than in Canada. Also, Windsor-Québec corridor is about four times the size of the Netherlands.
This is a good hypothetical and I think simply putting in the true costs of the flight through a carbon tax would show which options are most efficient.
This is a classic circle-type situation, at least in North America: As long as flights continue to dominate the market, rail operators have no incentive to offer competitive trains, as they would be too costly. Maybe fix that by either adding taxes to flights / providing tax relieves to trains or just ban specific flights outright.
It should be noted though that passenger kilometers are also important to consider. especially around the environmental concerns
An other great example is how Air France stopped flying from Brussels to Paris and now just leases seats on the Thalys. They have a gate in Brussel South station so you do all the checks and hassle there, take a train and "transfer" from a train to a plane immediately. So your plane ticket could be Brussels South/Casablanca as if you flew from the station.
Of course this only works because Paris Charles The Gaulle airport also have a station underneath it like Schiphol.
As a dutchman when talking to americans, I usually explain that out train system is more comparable to a north american metro network, but then nation wide.
I live in Breda, a more southern city in the Netherlands, with 180.000 inhabitants. I can literally take a train that goes to Amsterdam, passing Rotterdam and Schiphol and it takes me an hour. It's just so convenient. I can also easily travel to Antwerp, Brussels and Paris.
The country is just under 42,000 sq km. That makes it 1/3 the size of NY state or a bit bigger than Maryland. How many flights are there inside Maryland or West Virginia (50% bigger than The Netherlands)? Small countries like Denmark and Belgium don't have domestic flights - because they're so small.
I always think Zürich has a very good airport rail link. You get off the train (which can come direct from almost any major city in the country) and take one escalator, and you're in the bag drop area.
The main issue with high speed rail in the United States or Canada (versus, say, The Netherlands or France) is population density, or the lack thereof. Both US and Canada are very spread out. I would say the only part of the either that really has the population density to support high speed rail already has it, IE the Northeast Corridor.
There are many individual parts with the density for it though, and those tracks are not being built or are not built properly (like the SF-LA rail line)
The problem with rail in the US is that the population of the US is concentrated in two or three large cities in each state, with vast tracts of rural farmland between them.
As a train buff I love trains, but trains just aren't practical in that situation.
That's why the US is so car-centric for local travel (except in the cities where many people use the subway and don't even own cars), and planes for domestic travel between cities.
There are a few places in the US where regional trains make sense: the "northeast corridor" between New York and DC, and between San Francisco and Los Angeles, and a couple other megalopolises. But that's it.
Having large tracts of emptiness is actually great for HSR. Look at France, Spain, China and Japan.
Actually, having the population in a handful of large cities per state, with large tracts of empty land between them, makes those cities perfect for having high speed rail connections between each other. Take Georgia for example: Savannah, Macon, Augusta, Columbus, Albany, and Atlanta would be great rail corridors. These could then continue into cities in neighboring states, such as Birmingham in Alabama, Greenville/Spartanburg in South Carolina, Columbia in South Carolina, Charlotte in North Carolina, Jacksonville in Florida, or Tallahassee in Florida, as a few examples.
One other point: parking at Schiphol airport is so expensive that you must really hate the train or live very remote to not take the train.
Toronto - Montreal - is 2/3 further - than the length of the Netherlands. It does not mean - that rail would not work - at that distance - especially given that core to core - would be not that different.
I've done London to Amsterdam both by plane (LCY) and Eurostar, and while it doesn't make a lot of difference in either time or money, the experience is totally different.Train travel is much more relaxing than flying. Having less airporty stuff going on before and after the trip is very welcome indeed.
Part of the issue is cooperation over competition. Right now, rail competes with air. Much like code-shared flights among different airlines, I think we'd need to have code-share rail... in addition to reliable rail connections that have stops at airports... and it's that LAST part, the connection to rail at airports will be the clincher. Yes, Paris CDG has an excellent connection to rail, but many (MOST) airports do not.
Look at a country like Japan and the problems that they've faced getting high speed rail to Tokyo Narita. If you want to get to Shizuoka, for example, you have to transfer at Narita, and then at Tokyo Station to get on a train. If you are flying into Tokyo - Haneda and wanting to go to Sendai... it's the same thing.
Airports aren't usually built close to where people live and work, and railways are usually built where people live and work.
Countries building greenfield high speed rail SHOULD consider building stubs to airports that connect to their HSR, but except in a handful of cases, the connections usually aren't very good.
Some of the problems of trains in North America:
1) The passenger trains use mostly railroads owned by the cargo companies, which makes passenger service unreliable.
2) Trains are handled like air planes, where you have to arrive in advance, get your ticket checked, before you are even allowed onto the platform.
3) North America has destroyed their historic city centres, and with that the prime locations for rail stations to be effective and efficient. When you leave a train station, you should have a lot of options within walking distance.
There is also the factor of time related to getting to the airport, checking bags, passing through security, heading to the gate, and waiting for boarding to take into account in addition to the time spent in the air
There are still tons of short flights between Amsterdam and Brussels which is just as bad.
in the Netherlands you dont need to travel far and on elevated surfaces. i live in a town(Spakenburg) and the nearest city(Amersfoort) is 12km away and the provincial capital(Utrecht) is 50km away and Amersfoort has a railway connection to bigger cities and other provinces like Zwolle(Overrijsel) and Amsterdam(Noord - Holland) directly
the trains are very nice especially the VIRM(Verlengd Inter Regio Materieel/Lengthened Inter Region Rollingstock) and ICM(InterCity Materieel/InterCity Rollingstock) aka Koploper, i have not traveled with the SNG(Sprinter Nieuwe Generatie/Sprinter New Generation) but from what i heard it is nice
btw you should make a vid about the NS(Nederlands Spoorwegen/Dutch Rail)
Of course The Netherlands doesn't have domestic air routes. It's too small to justify it.
If The Netherlands were a U.S. State, it would rank 42nd of 51 -- between West Virginia and Maryland. For the same reason you can't get a flight from AMS to anywhere else in The Netherlands, you can't get a flight from BWI to anywhere else in Maryland. You can just drive to the airport, or take the MARC train.
That doesn't mean that short and medium-haul flights are going away either. You can still get a flight (or a train) from AMS to FRA which is roughly the same distance between New York and Boston.
It's still a useful comparison. You can fly from Perth to Bunbury, Sydney to Canberra, Brisbane to Bundaberg and way more in those areas. These routes would easily fit within the Netherlands and would be worth serving with decent rail. Some of them have rail but it's garbage. You can fly between Auckland and towns on the same tiny island. This is what he means by Toronto - Ottawa. It's 350km. Netherlands is 650km across. These flights would exist in the Netherlands if they didn't have good rail.
As I mentioned in another comment, NL used to have an airline that only had domestic flights for the first years of its existence: NLM Cityhopper. In fact, domestic flights continued into the 2000s, I believe the last one was in 2008
3 departures per hour is more than my towns NJ Transit line on your average day
Minor detail at 3:02: we don't have 3 train departures an hour on minor cities. It's either 2 or 4. So one every half hour or one every 15 minutes. Exception being the "ten minutes train" from Eindhoven via Den Bosch and Utrecht to Amsterdam. I'm considering only IC or Express trains because in the context it is about medium to long distance trips.
Besides infrequent trains, cost is high on the Toronto airport rail
On our train routes we now have a frequency every 10 minutes
Trains are also very fast in comparison. So the train from Amsterdam to Paris takes about 3 hours while a flight is just under a hour. Now it seems that a flight is faster right? No, of course not. You have to go to the airport, check in luggage if you have a big suitcase, go through security, boarding usually takes 30 minutes and at your destination you will need to do pretty much the same assuming you need to be somewhere in the city center. With the train that starts and stops right in the heart of both cities you can skip all that. You just show up 5 minutes before your train leaves, get in and get out again at the destination and your right there where you need to be. Just a short metro ride to your hotel or whatever and done. Not to mention that in the train you get a business class style seat for less than an economy seat in a plane. I'd never even consider taking a plane to Paris, there is just no reason to. And Paris is just one city but the same applies to every city in The Netherlands itself, cities in Belgium like Antwerp and Brussels. Cities in Germany like Cologne or Frankfurt and so on. There is even an overnight sleeper service all the way to Vienna. Leave in the evening at 7:30 pm and arrive fresh in the morning at 9 am, saving you a night in a hotel for example. And it's only about 100 euro because trains are just so efficient.
You can't ban domestic flights tomorrow...but you have to start the process of banning domestic flights tomorrow.
It has to be a real one-way process, involving construction of good quality high speed rail options, with the capacity to send many more people by rail than you can currently send by aircraft. And, because you also want to create modal shift from road to rail, it also has to be able to take a large number of motorists, plus some new people who think the railway is cool, without becoming chugged up and turning into something where you have to book weeks in advance.
Railway does not need to be run for profit, but it is also important to ban domestic flights, as soon as trial running is over and the railway is operating normally, to push people who normally take domestic flights onto the railways, for the first time.
And every single program to build a high speed rail link and ban domestic flights should be part of a national strategy, with the workers finishing one rail link (or finishing their part of one rail link) and immediately moving onto a different rail link.
Ideally, with Canada sharing a long land border with the United States of America, there should be international efforts made to not just ban domestic flights in Canada but also to ban flights from Canada to US cities that are very close to the Canadian border. The USA might not agree to ban flights from their end, but if the Canadian city bans flights from their end, you can force visitors from the USA to come to your border cities by high speed rail links.
If you look at how Eurostar worked, where the French built their high speed rail link to the Eurotunnel, despite the UK failing to build HS1 until much later, you can see that there would still be partial benefits from Canada bypassing an old mainline from Canada to the USA with high speed rail on their end. And, if Canada passes laws to ban flights that can be completed in less than 4 hours by rail, and you can turn a 5 hour train journey from a Canadian city to a US city into a 3 hour journey, that means that Canada can force the issue and clean up both Canadian air and US air close to Canada.
I think you are younger than me Reece, so you will probably get to see more of this transformation than I do. But I look forward to seeing as much high speed rail and as much reduction in domestic flights as possible in my lifetime.
WESTERN EUROPE HAS BEEN BUILDING THE ULTIMATE HIGH SPEED RAIL NETWORK FOR OVER OVER 50 YEARS! POLITICS GETS IN THE WAY FROM MAKING ANY PROGRESS FOR SHOVEL READY PROJECTS IN THE UNITED STATES!
Sounds like my dream country.
Reviewing the Dutch national Airport, you should take in account the following facts. Schiphol Airport has six runways, is the third largest airport of Europe, bus has only one terminal building. That is a bold choice, eliminating all transport of people changing flights. It is also a risky choice; when trouble arise, there is no ‘Terminal 2’ to reroute airplanes or passengers. The airport was totally redesigned in the 1967-70 period, the railway station opened in 1978.
The number of time slots available for landing or departure is limited, and it is national policy to discourage short haul flights, including flights to Berlin, Brussels, London and Paris. Not only are the no domestic flights, the night services of national railway company, only started in 1986 ! Simply because one could reach every corner of the nation, and travel back in a single day. In the present 24/7 society, limited night services are available.
The Dutch are world leading in water management and (sea) water defense systems. They create land were more space is needed and brought engineering on a whole new level. Space is very valuable in the Netherlands, for that reason you will not find many ruins or derelict buildings in Holland. To understand the mindset of the Dutch, please note that there are on average 508.2 persons living in a square km (compared with the US: 36.2 persons / km2; Canada: only 4.2 /km2). This is why a huge public transport network is needed and thriving.
I live a bit south of Brussels in Belgium and my dad used to go to his office next to Schipol for the week. He tried both the Thaly and the plane. The Thalys was usually as fast and more confortable, but sadly it wasn't reliable enough, so he eventually turned to fly into Amsterdam, which I found really sad