[PRCo] Re: pat__service__cuts__2007.01.23-changed to 2/1/07

[Fred Schneider]

My experience in Europe, Herb, and that is only as a visitor with  
about three and a half years there out of the last fifty, is that  
automobile ownership is just about as strong as it is here at least  
in western Europe.   In some western European countries there are  
more cars per capital, such as Switzerland, than there are in the  
United States.    That is different is that children usually are not  
permitted to drive automobiles at 16.  They are instead allowed to be  
licensed to drive motor scooters or small displacement cycles first.   
Automobiles usually came later at 18 or 19 or 20.    The other  
principal difference was that, owing to the compact nature of Europe,  
people drove fewer miles per year than they do in the United States  
and they are likely to use public transportation to get to work than  
they are in the United States.

The most recent figures I heard for Germany, for instance, were that  
something on the other of 30 percent of their population used transit  
for the journey to work and 10 percent used bicycles or walked and  
roughly 60 percent used cars (I may have that wrong ... I think the  
total of transit and walking and bicycles was 30 percent).   The  
remaining 60 or 70 percent used automobiles.   In this country 1  
percent used public transit and 99 percent uses private  
automobiles.   For off peak travel, the numbers are not a whole lot  
different.   They love their cars as much as we do.   These numbers  
came from Christof Grimm, an acquaintance of mine who is the general  
manager of the Oberbayern Region (Upper Bavaria) of Deutschebahn  
(German Rail).   If you wish to pump him for more detailed  
information, write to me off line for his e-mail address.   Christof  
is not only a transit manager but also a railfan and very much an  
American railfan.   [I've seen him many times on visits to Europe and  
last saw him when he brought his wife here on their honeymoon this  
summer.  He is enough of an American railfan that he came all the way  
here just to look at steeple cabs on the Iowa Terminal!]

The really significant difference is that cannot go as far as we  
do.   We have one huge country that stretches for more than 3,000  
miles from coast to coast.   You can plop the pointer of a compass in  
central London, pull out the pencil for the distance from New York to  
Chicago, and draw a circle around Europe and it will include all of  
the British Isles, most of France, Germany, Switzerland and down into  
Northern Italy.   We typically put 15,000 miles a year on a car.    
Fred Schneider drives about 30,000 a year.   The average German  
drives about 7,000 miles a year because he doesn't have as far to go.

A city the size of Lancaster Pennsylvania would have 50,000 people in  
it in the states.  The same area would have 100,000 inhabitants in  
Germany.   A city the size of Pittsburgh (which had 650,000 people at  
its peak) would have 1.2 million people if it were a German city.    
West Germany before unification was the size of Illinois and Indiana  
put together and it had a population of 60 million people.   The  
whole country unified today has 80 million.   I think our most  
populous state is probably California with about 25 million.

The line below shows that 37 million Germans (46 percent of the  
nation) live in the 300 largest cities.   It's a interesting URL  
because you can page through a lot of other countries ... France ...  
United Kingdom ... India (35 cities of 1 million or more people) even  
the U. S.   The curious thing about Germany is how many people live  
in cities.  half the country is in major cities.   And some areas are  
just clusters of cities ... The Rhein-Ruhr river basin (I'm using the  
German spelling of the first river) includes the cities of Köln  
(Cologne), Essen (after which Monessen was named), Dortmund,  
Duisburg, Buchum, Gelsenkirchen, Wuppertal and Bonn ... the total  
population in those cities is just under 4 million people.   Berlin  
has 3.4 million.   Hamburg has 1.7 million.   München (Munich) has  
1.2 million.   The three cities of Mannheim, Ludwigshaften and  
Heidelberg have over a half million plus the villages, suburbs and  
other cities around them.   I think you can readily see that many  
people don't have to go far to visit friends, to shop, to work or  
whatever so that the automobile, while just as important as it is to  
us, doesn't run up the same miles.

But if you get on any of the Autobahnen on a Friday afternoon.    
You'll be lucky to do 30 km/hr.    Saturday afternoons in  
metropolitan areas are no picnic either.    In order to prevent total  
chaos, German schools alternate summer vacations but they used to  
have a one or two week period when they all shut down so that, if you  
had kids in more than one school you take a vacation.   Believe me,  
you didn't want to be out on the highways that week either.     
Traffic would simply be inching along.   Ed Lybarger understand's  
what I'm saying.

One of the people I've used as an information source is Frits van  
Dam.   There were some articles in Headlights magazine under name  
when Jack May was the editor.   I also published some of his pictures  
when I was the editor.   Frits lives in an eastern suburb of the  
Hague in Holland.   He is now retired.   His job was setting fares  
for all the Dutch transit properties.   When I first met the man ...  
and that's been more thirty years ... he said then that much of  
Holland's rural bus system was maintained only for the elderly and  
the children.


http://www.citymayors.com/gratis/german_topcities.html

On Feb 4, 2007, at 8:15 PM, Herb Brannon wrote:

> I was always under the asumption that any system in Europe was  
> fully funded and provided most of the transportation, inasmuch as  
> automobiles are more expensive to operate than in the U.S. Or are  
> things just as mismanaged there as here?
> Herb Brannon
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Boris Cefer <westinghouse at iol.cz>
> To: pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org
> Sent: Saturday, February 3, 2007 4:30:59 PM
> Subject: [PRCo] Re: pat__service__cuts__2007.01.23-changed to 2/1/07
>
>
> Not in U.S. cities only!!!
>
> B
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Herb Brannon" <hrbran at sbcglobal.net>
> To: <pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org>
> Sent: Saturday, February 03, 2007 10:21 PM
> Subject: [PRCo] Re: pat__service__cuts__2007.01.23-changed to 2/1/07
>
>
>>>
>> Public transit upper management, in many U.S. cities, are really  
>> "full of
> themselves" these days.
>> Herb Brannon
>>
>>
>