Comment by germandiago
14 hours ago
The main problem comes from under maintenance. I am spanish, we have known this for years.
15 or 20 years ago when I took the train it worked well.
Now there are more trains and they increased the traffic like by 70% if I am not wrong and the budget for railway infrastructure by only 17% and it seems to not scale well enough, for whatever reason I do not know all the details.
There are a lot of railway tracks that are not in good state so speed must be lowered. There are incideents and delays routinely, all the time.
This did not happen until like 10 years ago and it has gotten worse and worse since then, not only in high speed trains.
The roads is a mess also: 52% of infrastructure for roads has bad or very bad defects in it.
The thing is that we have a record in government incomings and the services, ALL of them (healthcare, roads, infrastructure...) slowly collapsing.Part of the money is not going to the right places. I think that nearly 40% of the budget goes for retired people. We have 9.5 million pensionists in Spain.
We have to change that system and rationalize government spending and welfare or eventually everything will collapse.
I’m very wary of finger-pointing like your comment that ultimately serves to advocate for cutting quality of life for citizens.
Roughly 31% of Japan’s budget goes to social security. They don’t have problems keeping their high speed trains safe.
Cutting pensions won’t make trains safe.
I will also point out that on its own without further context, a high percentage of government spending going toward something doesn’t make that spending irresponsible or misappropriated. In the United States, a very high percentage of federal taxes are spent on Medicare and Social Security. But it should come as no sirprise that a very large percentage of federal income tax revenue is directly appropriated to pay for those things.
Pension expenditure in Spain is out of proportion from any point of view, though. I'll provide links to some graphs because I think they give more information than my words could:
https://elequidistante.github.io/graficos-jongonzlz/pensione...
https://elequidistante.github.io/graficos-jongonzlz/pensione...
https://elequidistante.github.io/graficos-jongonzlz/pensione...
And maybe this is the most illustrative:
https://i.redd.it/uwvgxycxhjeg1.jpeg
So yes, the reason why we are underinvesting in pretty much everything is basically pensions. GDP is up, tax collection is up, debt to GDP is sligthly decreasing... but pension expenses keep growing at a fast pace so there's less and less money for everything else. And I say this with both of my parents earning the maximum pension, so I don't have an axe to grind, but it's just reality.
It's a trend that is pretty much inevitable for a country where birth rates have been dropping starkly for decades, so that less people generating the taxable income that pays for those pensions enters the workforce, than those who leave it.
At the same time, medical advances make it so that retirees live longer than before: https://relojpublico.es/poblacion/esperanza-de-vida
If someone has solutions that would not cause widespread riots, I'm sure most goverments of countries in a similar situation would be all ears.
Spain will solve the problem by buying train tickets for all the pensioners.
I am not suggesting cutting down pensions. My own parents are pensionists... so that you get an idea.
I am giving an objective explanation in all honesty: Spain needs a pensions reform probably at some point bc it is 40% of the expenses in the yearly budget, with a deficit and a demographic deficit. This will explode.
If it can be taken from elsewhere, better.
But you know how much are pensions in Spain and know our pension system in detail (it is literally a Poncy system...)? They are often higher than people working!
Whether we like it or not, we need to reform or collapse in the future. I wish it could be taken from elsewhere, but 40% is a lot...
There is a lot of useless expenses in public work in our "federal system" (comunidades autónomas).
I'm not sure this article really points at government debt or spending as being immediately obviously relevant to this accident. Of course, it's probably too early to say, and that again makes me question why we are talking about pensions.
I agree that good reforms that involve realistic budgets and high levels of accountability are very good things. However, I encourage a lot of caution and skepticism around ideologies that inevitably lead to cuts to benefits.
The USA's pension system replaces a lower percentage of the average wage than Spain's system, and its universal healthcare for pensioners has higher exposure to out of pocket costs. Despite this, the debt to GDP ratio in the USA is higher than Spain, and there is a grand total of one government-operated high speed rail line which is barely high speed despite being 5x more populous.
That's why I encourage caution: cutting pensions won't necessarily lead you to better outcomes, it might just leave you to cut pensions with no improvement in other areas.
I know you are not suggesting cutting pensions directly but what I'm saying is that these types of comments contribute to people "voting against their own interests" so to speak.
We're financing pensions with debt, that's why it's a problem.
You will notice that 31 is less than 40
Japan is a terrible comparison here because their rail network is privatized. They're also paying their pensions with debt, and their economy is really stagnant and not a shining example of a country doing well with a pension burden that high.
I don’t know why that makes them a bad comparison, anyone can follow what Japan did with its train system.
> They don’t have problems keeping their high speed trains safe
Their trains are safe, but they also have 2X the national suicide rate as Spain, which amounts to about 17000 more deaths per year. I'd attribute a big chunk of that to their work culture treating people like machines, whereas Spain's work culture tends to lean towards treating people like humans.
That isn't an excuse for railway mishaps, of course, but I'm just trying to de-romanticize Japan as some kind of magical perfect place. It's not. They might have gotten their railways right, but they have massive safety issues around mental health.
> Spain's work culture tends to lean towards treating people like humans
You clearly have not worked for the average Spanish employer.
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Not every city needed an airport, nor every roundabout needed to be decorated with sculptures. Everything that is needed for every place, like software for health care or judiciary, should be contracted at the national level, not 17 times at the regional one.
And pretty sure that if some stopped pocketing 3% of public contracts, or whatever amount is now, competition among companies would be better and money would achieve more.
Not saying maintenance isn't a problem, it probably is. It's a problem everywhere in Europe. Have you seen train service in England, Germany or Sweden? Absolutely terrible, compared to just two decades ago.
But under-maintenance causes trains to stand still and be late. It does not cause them to crash.
Crashes are caused by running at speeds higher than the (under-maintained) rail can support, or (against all rules and every regulation) no cap on speed when the signalling system is down.
The latter can not be solved with more money and resources. It is a culture problem. Rules can not routinely be disregarded for arbitrary reasons, especially not when they are completely in line with common sense.
The rumor is that staff is being pushed to restore service as fast as possible after a problem is "solved". EU push for green transport and privatization means lines were opened to competition, increasing the number of trains compared to some decades ago when only one operator used them with less trains than it does now. IIRC currently the lines have two operators (3 in some places?), meaning that traffic more than doubled. Those in power do not want the service to have more delays. And instead of updating and maintaining the infrastructure, Adif stresses it even more, both in the technical and personal fronts. Thus the accidents. But nobody at the top resigns, blame low level scapegoats instead.
The Iryo train was stopped and unable to restart, because it's safety system did not allow that until the signalling issue was corrected. The AVE was commanded to move again like normal (200 Km/h or more). When the Iryo reported to be stuck, all the trains in the line should have been notified to stop once more, or go at line-of-sight speeds (40 Km/h). Both options are bad for delays. Current news is that five minutes after the Iryo call, the AVE rammed its back at 160-200 Km/h.
CEO of Iryo company complained 3 weeks ago about LZB being problematic, their trains taking a long time to recover connection. Safe but old, he said. It should have been replaced by ERTMS by 2024-2026.
> When the Iryo reported to be stuck, all the trains in the line should have been notified to stop once more
That would have meant that the dispatcher would have been aware that they already ordered a collision before. If a train stops no accident will happen, unless it could have happened regardless. Yes, such a decision would have prevented the accident or lessened it's impact, but the absence of it has not caused it. The error was already done before.
Over here in Finland our road infrastructure sucks too, and pensioners take lion's share of all the resources. Yet our trains aren't crashing. There's something wrong with systems and safety culture in your railroads. Bad maintenance doesn't cause trains to crash into each other if proper procedures are followed.
Still I agree, pension systems in most EU countries are unsustainable.
Deterioration started long before that, according to my sources it started on 2008, but yeah, last 5 years or so it has gone worse. The budget for it has been increasing year by year. It seems that the main problem is not just lack of maintenance but that there's more traffic and new construction.
Pensions is 13%PIB which is on the European median.
The problem is demographic. Also take into account that retired people have paid for their retirement.
Your rhetoric is not what I'd like to be promoted as the first answer entering. Just reading the title of the news I knew what kind of messages I'd see promoted.
>Also take into account that retired people have paid for their retirement.
No, they have not. It's a pyramid scheme. Whatever they put into the system when they worked probably doesn't even cover 5 years of retirement.
It's a bit more complicated than that. It can be argued that if there is a clear link between contributions and pensions, promised pensions based on past contributions are private property, with the usual protections. I don't know the situation in Spain, but Finland at least has made that choice.
If you choose that (or if your legal system determines that), you need to be proactive with keeping the pension system in balance. While you can change what you promise in exchange for future contributions, substantial changes to what you have already promised can easily require constitutional amendments.
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In Spain, half a million more people depend on money they get from the government than work in the private sector: https://theobjective.com/economia/macroeconomia/2024-09-16/a...
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