Foreigners to a country often get a warped idea of what its infrastructure is like. Most infrastructure is used for day-to-day domestic travel, for commuting to work or school, for visits to family and friends, for social gatherings, for business travel within the national internal market. Foreign travelers make use of this infrastructure when they visit, but they use it differently, and can make erroneous assumptions about how locals use it and what it means for transportation in general. This has two policy implications: one concerns American misconceptions about European rail travel; the other concerns pan-European misconceptions about European rail travel, which is almost entirely domestic, based on domestic networks, and planned and debated in the local language and not in English.

The Europe of the tourists

To estimate how foreign tourists may view Europe, we need some information on tourist travel within the bloc. The best I have is lists of the most visited cities in the world, and unfortunately, the only lists I have that go beyond the global top 10 are from before corona. But 2019 should not be too different to first order from the present. Here are international arrivals, from the global top 50:

Notably, there’s almost no intersection with any of the busiest intercity rail links in Europe. The top two are the trunk from Paris on the LGV Sud-Est to the bifurcation between Dijon and Lyon, and the Frankfurt-Mannheim trunk line. Paris is a huge international tourist draw, but nothing on the LGV Sud-Est and its extensions is; the top department outside Ile-de-France in tourism overnight stays is Alpes-Maritimes, a 5.5-6 hour trip from Paris by TGV. Germany has little tourism for its size, especially not in Mannheim – foreigners come to Berlin or Munich, or maybe Frankfurt for business trips. Only two city pairs in Europe with solid high-speed rail links appear in the table above, Milan-Rome and Madrid-Barcelona.

The upshot is that the American tourist who comes here and marvels at the fact that even in Germany the trains are faster and more reliable than in the United States isn’t really experiencing the system as most users do. If they take the TGV, it’s much likelier that they’re taking Eurostar and dealing with its premium prices and probably also with its security theater if they’re going to London rather than Brussels or Amsterdam. They have nothing to do in Lyon or Bordeaux or Strasbourg or Lille, so it’s unlikely they see the workhorse domestic lines. It’s even more unlikely they take the train to the smaller cities with direct TGVs, such as Saint-Etienne, Chambéry, and others that beef up the ridership of the LGV Sud-Est without serving Lyon itself; there were considerable errors made by American analysts in the Obama era about high-speed rail coming from looking only at the million-plus metro areas and not at these secondary ones.

By the same token, the American tourist in question is much likelier to be riding Spanish trains with their brand and price differentiation by speed than to be riding the workhorse regional and intercity trains anywhere in Northern Europe. ICEs charitably average 160 km/h on a handful of lines when they’re on time, which isn’t often, and on key corridors like Berlin-Cologne or Berlin-Frankfurt are closer to 120 km/h. The reason Germany is close to even with France on ridership per capita and well ahead of Italy and Spain is that these trains have decent connections with one another and with slower regional trains, so that people can connect to those secondary cities better. Trips from Berlin to Augsburg with a connection in Munich are not hard to plan, or trips to city cores in the Rhine-Ruhr and other polycentric regions. These are largely invisible to the foreign tourist, who doesn’t have anything to do in a city like Münster.

This also applies to the European tourist, not just the American or Asian or Middle Eastern one. A German who visits France is interested in trains from Germany to Paris, and those are not that good, but will probably not be taking TGVs between Paris and Rennes or Lille. From that, they’ll conclude the TGVs aren’t that useful in general.

The Europe of the typical intercity rail traveler

In contrast with the tourists’ picture of the countries of Europe, the typical intercity rail traveler uses the system in a way that the table above doesn’t really capture. All of the following characteristics are likely:

• They are traveling domestically since cross-border rail within Europe is practically never good.
• They are traveling based on domestic business, leisure, and social networks: if French, they can be going between Paris and anywhere else in France, and very occasionally even between two places outside Ile-de-France; if German, they are likely going between two major cities or maybe between a major and a midsize city.
• They are a regular traveler, which implies good knowledge of the system and its quirks, experience with large complex stations allowing getting between the train and the street within minutes, and probably also some kind of discounted fare card such as the BahnCard 25 in Germany or the half-fare card of Switzerland.
• They have the disposable income to drive, and choose to take the train because of a combination of speed, fares, and convenience rather than because they truly can’t afford a car or because they are ideologically opposed to travel modes with high greenhouse gas emissions.

The upshot is that finicky systems like the TGV and ICE are useful to their current travelers, even if foreigners and people who move in pan-European networks find them unreliable for various reasons. Any kind of EU-wide policy on rail has to acknowledge that SNCF and DB may have problems but are the main providers of solid intercity rail within Europe and are not the enemy, they just focus on city pairs that reflect their domestic travel needs.

And any attempt to learn from Europe and adapt our intercity rail successes has to look beyond what a tourist visiting for a few days would notice. It’s not just the wow effect of speed; Eurostar has that too and its ridership is an embarrassment, with fewer London-Paris trips per day than Paris-Lyon even though metro London is around six times the size of metro Lyon. It’s other details of the network, including how far it reaches into the longer tail of secondary markets.

The secondary markets require especial concern, first because they form a large fraction (likely a majority) of European high-speed rail travel, second because they’re invisible to tourists, and third because they require careful optimization.

One issue is that secondary markets are great for cars, decent for trains, and awful for planes. The TGV owns them at distances where cars take too many hours longer than the train, which helps extend the trains well past the three- to four-hour limit that rail executives quote as the upper bound for competitive train trip time. At shorter range, high-speed rail competes with cars more than with planes, and so the secondary markets lose value.

Another issue is that it’s easy to overdo secondary markets at the expense of compromising speed on the primary ones. This is usually not because of tourists, who almost never ride them, but rather because of domestic travelers who are atypically familiar with and dependent on the system and will use it not just on city pairs like Berlin-Augsburg or Berlin-Münster but also things like Wismar-Jena, on which most people will just drive. In the United States, groups of users of Amtrak trains outside the Northeast Corridor like the Rail Passengers’ Association (RPA, distinct from the New York-area planning organization) routinely make this mistake and overrate the viability of slow night trains. I bring this up here because it is possible to overcorrect from the principle of “don’t rely on tourist reports too much, and do pay attention to the secondary markets” and instead pay too much attention to the secondary markets.