Recently I have heard something very interesting from an acquaintance. It was a nice sunny day, we had a BBQ and were chatting, "solving the world problems", sharing experiences of life in Croatia and Denmark and discussing problems that both societies face. As we touched on traffic issues in Zagreb, I mentioned that for me the biggest surprise was how good Danish railways are.
When I moved here and Luci and me decided that we are going to live in Roskilde, I immediately started thinking that I will have to find some work in Roskilde. My statement surprised Luci and she asked me why do I think that. And I said because of commuting. How should I commute every day from Roskilde to Copenhagen when the two cities are 40 km away without a car?" By train ofc., she added, we have good railways. I was very sceptical about that considering that I come from Croatia.
Commuting on a daily basis by train&bike in Croatia would be mission impossible. First of all the round trip would last too long in order for it to be a feasible commuting option and putting the bike on the train would be madness. It just couldn't be done because Croatian railways are horrible and the service isn't very user friendly.
Train ride between two cities 60km away lasts for over an hour and the trains are not going often enough in order for it to be feasible for commuting. But the real train ride horror story is the train ride between Zagreb and Split. These two cities are a bit over 300 km apart and it takes the train 9 hours! Fortunately for me, I didn't have a lot of first hand experience with Croatian railway but there was one that put things into perspective. I was traveling from Zagreb to Brno by train. It was a looong ride in general but the part in Croatia was a neverending story. For those first or last 50 km it felt like the train was crawling at the speed of a bicycle. It was just so slow! But when it entered Slovenia, it started flying.
With having this knowledge and experience with Croatian railways, it is no wonder that I was a bit sceptical of the train rides when I moved to Denmark. But then I tried it and boy was I in for a surprise.
First and most important thing is how fast the trains are. It takes a train from Roskilde to Copenhagen between 19 and 25 minutes, depending how many stops they make. There is no way you can make that trip with a car in that time. If the roads are empty it will take you approximately 45 minutes. So the car is a better option only if you are going somewhere that is far away from the railway. Secondly, there is a train going every 10 minutes, so I don't even need to think, what train am I going for. I just go out of the apartment and if the train went in front of my nose, next one will come within 10 minutes.
The usage of trains is very friendly. It is simplest to have a rejsekort with which you just check in and check out on the stations. And you can have everything with you on the train: bike, baby stroller, dog, a lot of luggage. Every train has at least one compartment for people with bikes, baby strollers and dogs. And nobody is bitching about it. In Croatia it was always a struggle to get the bike on the train but I need to admit that my knowledge about that is a bit outdated.
Danish railway system is incredibly reliable. In a more then a year and a half that I have been living here and commuting to work every day trains didn't run 1 time and that was because someone commited suicide so they had to close down the traffic. On 2 other occasions trains were running slower. 3 times in a year and a half! That is impressive.
It is indeed a very interesting correlation, one that I could never figure out my self, but when I started to think about it it makes a lot of sense. A society, that is far from perfect, but that runs like a well oiled machine with full employment and by some measurements with the happiest population in the world has a railway system that is user friendly, fast and reliable.
On the other hand we have a society that is barely lubricated and stutters all the time, having a hard time getting away from its past, that is heavily depopulating has a railway system that hasn't been updated since the 19th century (metaphorically speaking), that is user unfriendly, slow and unreliable. How does all that compare to China or Japan where the trains are running over 300 km/h? It makes me wonder....
No comments:
Post a Comment