[PRCo] Re: patservicecuts__2007.01.23-changed to 2/1/07

Mon Feb 5 11:06:41 EST 2007

What's the population density of Germany vs. U.S., Fred?  What part of 
Germany compares to spread out nature of our mid-west?

>From: Fred Schneider <fwschneider at comcast.net>
>Reply-To: pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org
>To: pittsburgh-railways at dementia.org
>Subject: [PRCo] Re: pat__service__cuts__2007.01.23-changed to 2/1/07
>Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2007 21:19:03 -0500
>
>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
> >>
> >>
> >
>
>
>

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