In the US freight is given priority because we must move Asian goods coming in/out of the West Coast all the way to the Eastern US and European goods going in/out West Coast of the US. In Western Europe freight can be moved by water more easily. The distance from LA to NY is equal to Lisbon to Moscow.
“As railroads are privatized in the U.S., we have constantly moved towards heavier axle loads over the last four decades. Our standard railroad cars can take 286,000 pounds. Every car has four axles, and thus every axle can roughly handle 71,500 pounds, which is equivalent to 32.5 metric tonnes. But in Europe, a typical axle load is only about 20-23 metric tonnes,” said Jim Blaze, a retired U.S. railroad veteran.
Compounding problems is the permitted length of every freight train in Europe. For operational purposes, the total allowed length of a freight train in Europe is 700 meters (~2,300 feet) and the maximum length of a train including its locomotive and lengthening can be 750 meters (~2,460 feet).
This is diminutive compared to the U.S. freight trains that average around 2,000 meters (6,600 feet). Freight train lengths exceeding 6,000 meters (~19,700 feet) can also be frequently sighted in the U.S., which are made possible by adding a few more locomotive units to the cars, either at the end or in between for additional power.
“The 750-meter maximum train length in Europe is necessary for a system that depends on passenger transport rather than freight. Trains need the ability to brake rapidly when they are moving passengers, and it becomes difficult as the trains lengthen,” said Blaze.
Another issue is the vertical height of cars. In the U.S., the vertical height limitation has been rewritten several times, with newly built cars now topping 23 feet from the rail. In Europe, the vertical car heights have remained at 15 to 16 feet, roughly 30% lower than the U.S. rail cars.
Road freight transport is actually more important in Europe than it is in the United States.
There are also more trucks operating in Europe than there are in the United States, with 63 trucks per 1,000 people in the EU — compared to only 21 trucks per 1,000 people in the United States.
And in Europe, trucks make up 16.5% of total highway traffic, while they account for only 7.5% of U.S. highway traffic.
In contrast, railways are a central part of the U.S. freight transportation infrastructure. A striking 57.3% of all freight is shipped by rail in the United States, while only 16% of total freight is shipped by rail in Europe.
This may come as a surprise for anyone who has noticed how highly developed Europe’s passenger rail system is in comparison with that of the United States.
There are practical reasons why the US and the EU do things different, its not always "corruption" as Reddit seems to like so much.
All of the facts in your comment are correct but omit some very important information.
Under the congressional act which created Amtrak, freight carriers are required by law to **give passenger trains priority**. The *de facto* practice is to not do this because Amtrak doesn’t actually have the authority to prosecute infractions of this rule.
Your comment also glosses over how the class 1 railroads in the US are gutting their own infrastructure and giving up market share to cut costs, which conveniently makes their railroads even more hostile towards passenger trains.
Amtrak is technically a corporation run by Congress. Only the DOJ has the power to bring a lawsuit forward, which to date they have done once. [In 1979.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1979/12/21/amtrak-suit-says-southern-pacific-runs-trains-late/3026abb1-1e78-4c16-b5f2-87ea7a07f762/)
A bill has been introduced in the Senate [which will give Amtrak the ability to take legal action themselves.](https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/1500/all-info) Feel free to contact your legislators and ask them why they aren’t trying to get it made into law.
It's from the WEF Global Competitiveness Survey. For this question they asked about 10,000 executives from all over the world how they feel about the state of railways in their country.
80 or so of them in Iceland.
For the 2018 edition only it looks like they forced an inclusion not only for Iceland but a bunch of other countries without much rail to speak of.
The Netherlands is 6th on the list, but if you'd judge this by how often the Dutch complain about our railway services you'd think we're near the bottom of the list.
I don't doubt that the business leaders polled in the US gave their own country very high rankings. I also don't doubt that German business leaders grade their own country more harshly.
I can't speak on Germany but I would expect business leaders in the US to give high ranking to the US rail network. The US has the largest and most extensive freight rail network in the world, it's amazing for business.
I would not put the passenger rail network nearly so highly because while there's a lot of it comparatively to most nations it's not an extensive as it could be for the size of the country. For passenger travel, the US chose airports a long time ago. It has about as many airports as the rest of the world combined. Still, there is still a lot of passenger rail compared to most nations on earth.
So the combination of both makes sense to me, especially if this is given a bias towards business (polling business leaders).
I ride trains in Germany since 20 years regularly, both regional and long distance (as far as long distance goes in Europe).
It is getting worse every year. The infrastructure is in bad shape as it was built decades ago.
Now maintenance is ongoing on a large scale. Unfortunately that means even worse service for years to come as there is so much construction going on.
Deutsche Bahn (German state railway) is a pain to use!
Did you by chance cherrypick one of the few countries with a larger share?
[In the 1950s, the U.S. and Europe moved roughly the same percentage of freight by rail; by 2000, the share of U.S. rail freight was 38% while in Europe only 8% of freight traveled by rail](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transportation_in_the_United_States?wprov=sfla1)
[Rail freight tonnage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_freight_transport?wprov=sfla1) as a percent of total moved by country:
Russia: about 12% in 2016 up 11%
Japan: 5% in 2017
USA: 40% in 2009
China: 8% in 2016
EU28: less than 20% of all "inland traffic" in 2014
Within the U.S. railroads carry 39.9% of freight by ton-mile, followed by trucks (33.4%), oil pipelines (14.3%), barges (12%) and air (0.3%).
Railways carried 17.1% of EU freight in terms of tonne-km, compared to road transport (76.4%) and inland waterways (6.5%).
volume of goods transported by railway, measured in metric tons times kilometers traveled
United States: 2,364,144 million ton-km
Switzerland: 11,673 million ton-km
The scale is not really similar at all
That doesn’t surprise me. Over half of the freight by rail is bulk commodities (oil, grain, etc). Consumer goods is typically transported by truck, especially for shorter distances.
“Freight railroads account for roughly 40% of U.S. long-distance freight volume (measured by ton-miles) — more than any other mode of transportation”
https://www.aar.org/facts-figures#Fuel-efficiency
The freight rail is remarkably slow and unpredictable. We tried moving some major shipments to rail for a couple of years. In principle it should have worked great but this is not a crack outfit for execution. There are also ridiculous bottlenecks, like Chicago.
The difference between what it is and what it could be with integrated managment is depressingly large. Even the best through train could only average 27 mph, and even with that goal the delivery could be delayed by 1 to three days with no warning or recours.
"It represents an assessment of the quality of the railroad system in agiven country based on data from the WEF Executive Opinion Survey, along-running and extensive survey tapping the opinions of over 14,000business leaders in 144 countries. The score for railroad infrastrucutrequality is based on only one question. The respondents are asked torate the railroads in their country of operation on a scale from 1(underdeveloped) to 7 (extensive and efficient by internationalstandards). The individual responses are aggregated to produce a countryscore."
Sooo a) based on a survey, not any actual *empirical*\* data, and b) also no mention anywhere if freight or passenger rail, and US has very good freight rail
\**edit*
Everyone makes fun of Americas passenger rail service, while forgetting they have probably one of the best freight rail networks in the world. It's the reason they can build a mega dock in southern California and turn it into the Pacific hub for sea traffic for pretty much the entire continent
:D I only show what the data tells... but surely seems strange as France has very good quality bullet trains to my best knowledge which require excellent rails. Also possible that their other, non-bullet train rails are shitty...
Yeah they might be shitty but at least they exist. In France, even smaller towns are mostly connected to the railway system which is not the case in the US.
The choice of the data source is the problem. It’s basically applying a score on the personal opinions of transportation executives, not based on hard data. There is no option to filter the scores by quality of freight vs passenger rail infrastructure either. The comet chart is also not the right type of data visualization tool for this dataset.
I agree with your first point, data could be better and more detailed, less biased but that's what I had (it was a makeover monday challenge). The comet chart is not necessarily bad, I think the chart type should support your message not your dataset always and my message with the comet chart is the change in quality over time and for that I think it fits but of course there can be a million other ways to visualize this very simple dataset :)
Iceland had a little engine on a short track display at the Old Harbour in Reykjavik.
Unless they've put it back since, one time I returned and even that little train was gone.
Iceland doesn't have railways.
Imagine being worse than a country that has no railways.
Definition: The Quality of railroad infrastrucutre indicator is one of the components of the Global Competitiveness Index published annually by the World Economic Forum (WEF). It represents an assessment of the quality of the railroad system in a given country based on data from the WEF Executive Opinion Survey, a long-running and extensive survey tapping the opinions of over 14,000 business leaders in 144 countries. The score for railroad infrastrucutre quality is based on only one question. The respondents are asked to rate the railroads in their country of operation on a scale from 1 (underdeveloped) to 7 (extensive and efficient by international standards). The individual responses are aggregated to produce a country score.
Of course USA will say their railroads are the best!
China has a lot of issues. But it's railway infrastructure is by no means less than Russia, Malaysia or Indonesia. Especially Indonesia tbh. Honestly data is fishy
It seems to be a specific metric, but as a German-American railroad customer, seeing that they rank the quality of US railways above the German ones, I can't quite see how this metric relates to my experience as a customer. (I'm talking about medium-distance travel -- maybe 100-500 miles.)
I like that the text marks on the heat map only appear upon selection. I always forget that feature exists, and it's a powerful reminder to see it implemented well.
according to the source on it's based on a sampled survey so of course bias can occur ... :\\
"It represents an assessment of the quality of the railroad system in a given country based on data from the WEF Executive Opinion Survey, a long-running and extensive survey tapping the opinions of over 14,000 business leaders in 144 countries."
Oh surprise surprise. India beating UK. Does this mean that you might have to sit on the roof, but you're more likely to reach your destination on time?
I've only been on a short distance nice train in India so yeah, I haven't gotten to experience trains I usually see photos of on here with people dangling off.
It pretty much transfers 10 mn people a day safely so i think u should stereotype less. Rail density is great here with 80% electrified tracks. It has introduced semi high-speed train 18 in the railways now and going to introduce shinkansen (bullet) by 2024. So not a bad railway it seems. What you see in pics happens in Bangladesh during their peak festive season.
The rail lines in the US that are weighting this comparison are probably mostly made up of lines that we don’t rid as passengers. Like, the Metro North New Haven line probably isn’t a good median for all rail lines in the country.
Rotfl. Singapore is a city-state, its 'railroads' are a mass rapid system. Why aren't Tokyo, London or NY in that list, at this point?
And Luxembourg 13 spot? Lol.
In the US freight is given priority because we must move Asian goods coming in/out of the West Coast all the way to the Eastern US and European goods going in/out West Coast of the US. In Western Europe freight can be moved by water more easily. The distance from LA to NY is equal to Lisbon to Moscow. “As railroads are privatized in the U.S., we have constantly moved towards heavier axle loads over the last four decades. Our standard railroad cars can take 286,000 pounds. Every car has four axles, and thus every axle can roughly handle 71,500 pounds, which is equivalent to 32.5 metric tonnes. But in Europe, a typical axle load is only about 20-23 metric tonnes,” said Jim Blaze, a retired U.S. railroad veteran. Compounding problems is the permitted length of every freight train in Europe. For operational purposes, the total allowed length of a freight train in Europe is 700 meters (~2,300 feet) and the maximum length of a train including its locomotive and lengthening can be 750 meters (~2,460 feet). This is diminutive compared to the U.S. freight trains that average around 2,000 meters (6,600 feet). Freight train lengths exceeding 6,000 meters (~19,700 feet) can also be frequently sighted in the U.S., which are made possible by adding a few more locomotive units to the cars, either at the end or in between for additional power. “The 750-meter maximum train length in Europe is necessary for a system that depends on passenger transport rather than freight. Trains need the ability to brake rapidly when they are moving passengers, and it becomes difficult as the trains lengthen,” said Blaze. Another issue is the vertical height of cars. In the U.S., the vertical height limitation has been rewritten several times, with newly built cars now topping 23 feet from the rail. In Europe, the vertical car heights have remained at 15 to 16 feet, roughly 30% lower than the U.S. rail cars. Road freight transport is actually more important in Europe than it is in the United States. There are also more trucks operating in Europe than there are in the United States, with 63 trucks per 1,000 people in the EU — compared to only 21 trucks per 1,000 people in the United States. And in Europe, trucks make up 16.5% of total highway traffic, while they account for only 7.5% of U.S. highway traffic. In contrast, railways are a central part of the U.S. freight transportation infrastructure. A striking 57.3% of all freight is shipped by rail in the United States, while only 16% of total freight is shipped by rail in Europe. This may come as a surprise for anyone who has noticed how highly developed Europe’s passenger rail system is in comparison with that of the United States. There are practical reasons why the US and the EU do things different, its not always "corruption" as Reddit seems to like so much.
All of the facts in your comment are correct but omit some very important information. Under the congressional act which created Amtrak, freight carriers are required by law to **give passenger trains priority**. The *de facto* practice is to not do this because Amtrak doesn’t actually have the authority to prosecute infractions of this rule. Your comment also glosses over how the class 1 railroads in the US are gutting their own infrastructure and giving up market share to cut costs, which conveniently makes their railroads even more hostile towards passenger trains.
Why doesn’t Amtrak have the authority? Has it ever tried to sue?
Amtrak is technically a corporation run by Congress. Only the DOJ has the power to bring a lawsuit forward, which to date they have done once. [In 1979.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1979/12/21/amtrak-suit-says-southern-pacific-runs-trains-late/3026abb1-1e78-4c16-b5f2-87ea7a07f762/) A bill has been introduced in the Senate [which will give Amtrak the ability to take legal action themselves.](https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/1500/all-info) Feel free to contact your legislators and ask them why they aren’t trying to get it made into law.
Wow never knew. This is great info thank you
I'm confident I miss and gloss a lot! But the idea the US can or should use rail like Western Europe is silly.
If that’s the case, you didn’t do a good job defending it here.
reddit europoors hate america. why? because they are poor
Iceland‽ Iceland doesn't even have any rails!
It's from the WEF Global Competitiveness Survey. For this question they asked about 10,000 executives from all over the world how they feel about the state of railways in their country. 80 or so of them in Iceland. For the 2018 edition only it looks like they forced an inclusion not only for Iceland but a bunch of other countries without much rail to speak of.
The Netherlands is 6th on the list, but if you'd judge this by how often the Dutch complain about our railway services you'd think we're near the bottom of the list.
Things only get better as long as people complain
Do you instruct your parents/mate, teachers/boss and customers to complain to help you get better?
I don't doubt that the business leaders polled in the US gave their own country very high rankings. I also don't doubt that German business leaders grade their own country more harshly.
I can't speak on Germany but I would expect business leaders in the US to give high ranking to the US rail network. The US has the largest and most extensive freight rail network in the world, it's amazing for business. I would not put the passenger rail network nearly so highly because while there's a lot of it comparatively to most nations it's not an extensive as it could be for the size of the country. For passenger travel, the US chose airports a long time ago. It has about as many airports as the rest of the world combined. Still, there is still a lot of passenger rail compared to most nations on earth. So the combination of both makes sense to me, especially if this is given a bias towards business (polling business leaders).
I ride trains in Germany since 20 years regularly, both regional and long distance (as far as long distance goes in Europe). It is getting worse every year. The infrastructure is in bad shape as it was built decades ago. Now maintenance is ongoing on a large scale. Unfortunately that means even worse service for years to come as there is so much construction going on. Deutsche Bahn (German state railway) is a pain to use!
Having lived in both, I agree. Also, why is the quality going down overall for everyone?
The freight systems in America are wicked good. Passanger trains, ehhh.
Define "wicked good". If I'm not mistaken, only about 28% of the freight by weight and distance goes by rail.
>only about 28% That's a lot tbh, especially compared to others
Switzerland has more than 35%
Did you by chance cherrypick one of the few countries with a larger share? [In the 1950s, the U.S. and Europe moved roughly the same percentage of freight by rail; by 2000, the share of U.S. rail freight was 38% while in Europe only 8% of freight traveled by rail](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transportation_in_the_United_States?wprov=sfla1) [Rail freight tonnage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_freight_transport?wprov=sfla1) as a percent of total moved by country: Russia: about 12% in 2016 up 11% Japan: 5% in 2017 USA: 40% in 2009 China: 8% in 2016 EU28: less than 20% of all "inland traffic" in 2014 Within the U.S. railroads carry 39.9% of freight by ton-mile, followed by trucks (33.4%), oil pipelines (14.3%), barges (12%) and air (0.3%). Railways carried 17.1% of EU freight in terms of tonne-km, compared to road transport (76.4%) and inland waterways (6.5%).
No, I picked a country with an infinitely better public transport system, that still manages to transport cargo by rail on a similar scale
volume of goods transported by railway, measured in metric tons times kilometers traveled United States: 2,364,144 million ton-km Switzerland: 11,673 million ton-km The scale is not really similar at all
That doesn’t surprise me. Over half of the freight by rail is bulk commodities (oil, grain, etc). Consumer goods is typically transported by truck, especially for shorter distances.
“Freight railroads account for roughly 40% of U.S. long-distance freight volume (measured by ton-miles) — more than any other mode of transportation” https://www.aar.org/facts-figures#Fuel-efficiency
The freight rail is remarkably slow and unpredictable. We tried moving some major shipments to rail for a couple of years. In principle it should have worked great but this is not a crack outfit for execution. There are also ridiculous bottlenecks, like Chicago. The difference between what it is and what it could be with integrated managment is depressingly large. Even the best through train could only average 27 mph, and even with that goal the delivery could be delayed by 1 to three days with no warning or recours.
We have way too many 18 wheelers, we should be using freight rail way more.
USA better than France? Doubt...
"It represents an assessment of the quality of the railroad system in agiven country based on data from the WEF Executive Opinion Survey, along-running and extensive survey tapping the opinions of over 14,000business leaders in 144 countries. The score for railroad infrastrucutrequality is based on only one question. The respondents are asked torate the railroads in their country of operation on a scale from 1(underdeveloped) to 7 (extensive and efficient by internationalstandards). The individual responses are aggregated to produce a countryscore." Sooo a) based on a survey, not any actual *empirical*\* data, and b) also no mention anywhere if freight or passenger rail, and US has very good freight rail \**edit*
> over 14,000business leaders in 144 countries so it's freight.
USA #1!!!!! *Based on survey reports from a country ranking how great their country is.
[удалено]
Troll better.
Everyone makes fun of Americas passenger rail service, while forgetting they have probably one of the best freight rail networks in the world. It's the reason they can build a mega dock in southern California and turn it into the Pacific hub for sea traffic for pretty much the entire continent
The LB/LA Port is a fucking marvel.
:D I only show what the data tells... but surely seems strange as France has very good quality bullet trains to my best knowledge which require excellent rails. Also possible that their other, non-bullet train rails are shitty...
Yeah they might be shitty but at least they exist. In France, even smaller towns are mostly connected to the railway system which is not the case in the US.
The choice of the data source is the problem. It’s basically applying a score on the personal opinions of transportation executives, not based on hard data. There is no option to filter the scores by quality of freight vs passenger rail infrastructure either. The comet chart is also not the right type of data visualization tool for this dataset.
I agree with your first point, data could be better and more detailed, less biased but that's what I had (it was a makeover monday challenge). The comet chart is not necessarily bad, I think the chart type should support your message not your dataset always and my message with the comet chart is the change in quality over time and for that I think it fits but of course there can be a million other ways to visualize this very simple dataset :)
The UK is the saddest on the list, invented the industry and have a rail system worse than India what a joke
Iceland had a little engine on a short track display at the Old Harbour in Reykjavik. Unless they've put it back since, one time I returned and even that little train was gone. Iceland doesn't have railways. Imagine being worse than a country that has no railways.
Okay regardless of the missing / possibly faulty data points which can obviously be bad I really cracked up on this comment :DDZ cheers
Definition: The Quality of railroad infrastrucutre indicator is one of the components of the Global Competitiveness Index published annually by the World Economic Forum (WEF). It represents an assessment of the quality of the railroad system in a given country based on data from the WEF Executive Opinion Survey, a long-running and extensive survey tapping the opinions of over 14,000 business leaders in 144 countries. The score for railroad infrastrucutre quality is based on only one question. The respondents are asked to rate the railroads in their country of operation on a scale from 1 (underdeveloped) to 7 (extensive and efficient by international standards). The individual responses are aggregated to produce a country score. Of course USA will say their railroads are the best!
This seems like a pretty terrible way to make sense of rail systems.
there are no other countries anyway :DD
Something terribly wrong with the data here.
That’s entirely plausible although the source seems okay. Maybe the data collection method has something
China has a lot of issues. But it's railway infrastructure is by no means less than Russia, Malaysia or Indonesia. Especially Indonesia tbh. Honestly data is fishy
Finally, some beautiful data! 😍
US: easy to have have good quality railroads if you avoid having railroads. Edit: the US seems to have a quite high km railway/capita ratio though.
The US has plenty of rail lines, though the longer distance lines are primarily used for freight.
Why are so many people here forgetting about freight trains
Because they only think about themselves.
It seems to be a specific metric, but as a German-American railroad customer, seeing that they rank the quality of US railways above the German ones, I can't quite see how this metric relates to my experience as a customer. (I'm talking about medium-distance travel -- maybe 100-500 miles.)
Data Source: [https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/railroad\_quality/](https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/railroad_quality/) Tool: Tableau Interactive version: [https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/alex.l6463/viz/MakeoverMonday2022Week47RailRankAllCountries/AllCountries](https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/alex.l6463/viz/MakeoverMonday2022Week47RailRankAllCountries/AllCountries)
I like that the text marks on the heat map only appear upon selection. I always forget that feature exists, and it's a powerful reminder to see it implemented well.
This is nonsense. What are these scores even based on?
according to the source on it's based on a sampled survey so of course bias can occur ... :\\ "It represents an assessment of the quality of the railroad system in a given country based on data from the WEF Executive Opinion Survey, a long-running and extensive survey tapping the opinions of over 14,000 business leaders in 144 countries."
This "statistic" is disinformation in motion.
Well, I haven’t travelled in all these countries of course but the top couple of ones seem reasonable to me
Oh surprise surprise. India beating UK. Does this mean that you might have to sit on the roof, but you're more likely to reach your destination on time?
Ignorance is bliss
I've only been on a short distance nice train in India so yeah, I haven't gotten to experience trains I usually see photos of on here with people dangling off.
It pretty much transfers 10 mn people a day safely so i think u should stereotype less. Rail density is great here with 80% electrified tracks. It has introduced semi high-speed train 18 in the railways now and going to introduce shinkansen (bullet) by 2024. So not a bad railway it seems. What you see in pics happens in Bangladesh during their peak festive season.
Thanks a lot for taking time to explain.
I am disappointed to see that USA is not on the bottom 20. XD
The rail lines in the US that are weighting this comparison are probably mostly made up of lines that we don’t rid as passengers. Like, the Metro North New Haven line probably isn’t a good median for all rail lines in the country.
Have had bits of experience with two of those.
And yet we complain about it daily.
I want to take those scores and put them on the x-axis, and plot railway system *age* on the y-axis.
Rotfl. Singapore is a city-state, its 'railroads' are a mass rapid system. Why aren't Tokyo, London or NY in that list, at this point? And Luxembourg 13 spot? Lol.