Railway tunnels have always been expensive infrastructure. Not only do they cross natural obstacles, such as mountains, but they also provide a means of crossing the city and serving the inner city. There are currently debates about whether such infrastructure should be built, while some people think that urban transport could suffice.
Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart, Madrid or London. What these five cities have in common is that they are building or duplicating an existing railway tunnel. These major underground infrastructure projects obviously come at a price and raise questions about the appropriateness of such expenditure. This debate also relates to the question of whether it is not more useful to build light rail on the surface rather than an underground metro. But in order to understand the arguments of all sides, we have to look at what lies behind them.
Intermodality has often been an politician’s dream but rarely a traveller’s dream. Switching from one mode of transport to another requires good synchronisation, which is completely out of the passenger’s hands, since he does not « control » himself the journey from start to finish but must relies on several operators.
There are three major disadvantages to transhipments [transfering]:
- the obligation to get a local ticket in addition to that of the train;
- in theory, juggling several transport modes in the city should be a piece of cake, but experience has shown that disruptions in one can wipe out all the benefits of using public transport in others;
- anyone who has experienced crossing Paris or London with large suitcases to get from one station to another does not generally speak of a good experience.
It has already been widely proven that the number of transhipments are main factors affecting the choice of mode of transport.