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.

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.

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.

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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