Blimey, Frenchies

French voters have just confounded both polling and the analysts by electing a somewhat more left-wing Assembly in the latest legislative election.  As in the 2024 UK general election, voters shifted away from the center and somewhat to the right, but due the geographic distribution of the vote, the left-leaning party (actually a coalition of parties) New Popular Front (NFP) made significant gains.  The main loser was the centrist President Emmanuel Macron, the head of Ensemble (ENS) who, in a classic case of being out of touch with the citizens, decided to call a snap election in response to the strong showing by the far-right (and possibly crypto-fascist) National Rally (RN) in European parliamentary elections.  The results from that election (in France) were not good, but EU elections are often venue where voters in various countries make a domestic protest vote, because the connection between EU governance and the average voter in EU countries is weak at best.  Nonetheless, Macron called an unnecessary election in order to basically berate French voters for making a protest vote in response to his unpopular government.  Initially, that looked like a bad idea, as RN led in the polls.  However, the outcome was a significantly different, as NFP won the most seats.

As in the UK, vote efficiency mattered significantly for the results.  French legislative elections are not strictly first-past-the-post (FPTP), but use a more complicated system (naturallement) where a candidate can win in a first round with over 50% of the vote, but a second round is held if there is no winner.  In that case, only candidates receiving 12.5% of the vote in the first round can advance.  The second round, however, is FPTP.  Voters in both France and the UK understand tactical voting, as do the parties, and in both elections the center and the left agreed to withdraw competing candidates in various seats (though it should be noted that Macron was hesitant about doing so, and his party subordinates revolted).  And in both France and the UK, the right-wing vote ended up being distributed inefficiently relative to other groupings in part because of tactical voting.

I've embedded a spreadsheet below that has the gory statistical details, but the summary is this: NFP earned a seat for approximately ever 89,000 votes, whereas RN earned a seat for every 144,000.*  Overall, right-wing parties picked up about 45% of the vote, but received just 36% of the seats.  The left got 30% and 33% respectively, while the center got 24% and 29%.  (<2% went to other assorted parties.)  Macron had previously appointed a minority government (France's governmental system is overly complicated, but that's the gist of what happened) based on the 43% of seats held by his party and his allies.  After this election, however, he will most likely (again, complicated) appoint someone from the left as Prime Minister.

As in the UK, the French should celebrate the outcome of their election, but nobody on the left or center in either state should be complacent for a moment about turning back the rising right-wing forces in their country.  The voters as a whole are moving in the wrong direction.  Macron may have slowed RN's momentum, but as of now there's no indication that will last.  The French center and French left will have to cooperate and prove the French government can work, or RN will make further gains.

* Note that this is the total of first and second round votes.  A more accurate analysis would take just the votes from the winning round, but I suspect the general point - RN had poor efficiency - would remain. 

Cross-Chunnel Comparisons

The High Speed 2 fiasco in the UK has prompted me to update my map of high-speed rail in France.  Obviously the two countries are frequently compared, and here's more in that vein in relation to HSR.

1) Population density is much lower in France than in the UK.  This can be seen by simply inspecting the existing and proposed lines in either country in satellite view, and it is backed by data.  The island of Great Britain is 80,823 sq mi (209,331 sq km) in area and had a population of approximately 64,500,000 in 2021, for an average population density of 798 residents/sq mi (308 residents/sq km).  Continental France is 206,665 sq mi (535,261 sq km) in area and had a population of approximately 65,500,00 in 2022, for a population density of 317 residents/sq mi (122 residents/sq km).  Great Britain is approximately 2.51 times as dense as continental France, and continental France is 39.8% as dense as Great Britain.

2) France is somewhat better at containing urban sprawl than the UK.  This is a qualitative observation on my part, and it isn't uniform across either country.(*)  Areas of France such as the wider region around Lille or the Mediterranean coast from Marseilles to the Italian border are very sprawled out, with little countryside between developed areas except where the geography makes building impossible.  And the UK has compact, relatively contained cities and towns, such as Norwich and Yeovil.  But, overall, I think sprawl is less of a problem in France.

3) The combination of the previous two points means that the French routing strategy of connecting HSR lines with existing urban stations via "off-ramps" to legacy lines works quite well.  The existing approaches to the central stations are fairly direct, and the off-ramps can be built fairly close to the cities.  France generally has avoided building new approaches or stations within existing urban areas.  Lille is the only exception so far.  In contrast, the UK has decided to heavily rebuild existing stations and build new approaches in Birmingham, London (completion uncertain), Manchester (recently canceled), and Leeds (canceled a few years ago).  The prices of those stations has become outrageous and are part of the reason HS2 has been so severely curtailed.

4) France has built a number of stations directly on new LGVs.  Some have been built because there is no classic line near the new HSR line, some because there is only a classic line on one side of a city, and some because the nearest city is too small to serve with off-ramps.  Some stations are connected to the nearest city with legacy rail or a tram system, but others are fundamentally car-oriented, with only limited bus service. Overall, I think the success of these stations is mixed.  A few stations serve an attraction directly, such as the CDG station and the Disneyland station, and these are more successful in terms of passenger counts.  However, the very rural "beetroot" stations are relatively cheap to build, so they may be successful financially.  In the UK, the inline stations at Old Oak Common and Birmingham Interchange are fairly complex and expensive, though they should have high utilization.

5) Paris is semi-central to the country, whereas London is closer to being at one end of the country.  France needs to build a lot more track-miles to fully connect the country, but as explained above, most of those miles were or will be much cheaper to build.  But the main advantage to being central is that the rest of the country does not connect to the capital through just one link that risks being saturated before demand is completely met.  Each link to Paris can absorb a large number of passengers coming from a smaller number cities.  In the UK, the rest of the country will be funneled through one link.

6) On the purely practical side, France has completed 1,699 miles (2,735 km) of HSR track starting in 1981.  The UK has completed only 70 miles (113 km) starting in 2003.  France simply has vastly more experience at everything related to HSR, including track design and construction, rolling stock design and construction, and operations.

7) Both of my maps are fantasy maps.  However, the French one is much more realistic because my suggestions use the same routing principles as the French have been using for decades, and the resulting alignments have been much cheaper to build than HS2 in the UK.

All of the above raises the question: is there any way for the UK to "catch up" with France?  No, not directly.  The UK will never need to build as many HSR track-miles as France.  Nor will it ever be able to build as cheaply as France given the substantially different human geography of the two countries.  The UK could and should learn a fair amount from France, but the former country should also look to places like Japan, South Korea, and Germany for lessons.   Those countries have population densities of 840, 1,340, and 600 residents/sq mi (326, 516 and 233 residents/sq km) and so have more experience in building around existing populations.  The UK also needs to look inward and try to understand why HS2 turned out to be so expensive.  If the UK adapts, it might be able to catch up with France qualitatively, connecting a large portion of its population via HSR, but the UK will need to change a lot to do so.

(*) The relative sprawl of each country probably has been analyzed quantitatively, but since I am an amateur, I don't feel the need to track the studies down.

Don't Ever Believe the Hype

Elsewhere at some point(s) since the start of the Fukushima Dai-ichi crisis, I have made statements indicating that the nuclear regulatory infrastructure of Japan and France were something this country should emulate.  I was wrong, and very wrong in the case of Japan.  Stoneleigh, one of the semi-pseudonymous proprietors of The Automatic Earth, a doomer-ish economy-oriented blog, has put together an excellent, detailed post on the culture of the Japanese nuclear industry.  It is not flattering.  And, in retrospect, it is not surprising, either.  Japan's yin-yang of cohesiveness and crushing conformity are well know, as are the troubles at the MONJU experimental sodium-cooled fast reactor.  Some of the other incidents I was not aware of, but I nonetheless should have been more cynical about Japan's nuclear industry.

As with Japan, the French nuclear industry doesn't look so wonderful when examined in detail.  Mycle Schneider, an independent consultant on nuclear policy, has authored a report entitled Nuclear Power in France: Beyond the Myth.  In it he details the opaque and undemocratic nature of the nuclear power establishment in France.  Fortunately for France and its neighbors, this has not resulted in a catastrophic accident like Fukushima, perhaps because the flip side of the arrogance of the elites that run the French program is in internal culture of technocratic excellence.  But the lack of clear information does make monitoring the program difficult.  The information deficit also makes an accurate tally of subsidies and costs impossible.  While I disagree with some of Schneider's energy accounting, he does make a good argument that EdF, the monopoly electricity generator, has overbuilt nuclear generating capacity.   This has distorted electricity pricing in France and neighboring countries.

If forced to pick between the two, given the available information, I would definitely choose the French nuclear power program over the Japanese one.  I would also choose the American program over the Japanese.  In a comparison between the American program and the French one, I think I would favor the French one... slightly.  The US is more open than France, but the profit motive drives the numerous operators to a far greater degree than in France, which has led to a number of close calls.  Ominously, the US regulatory structure is looking more and more like the Japanese one, with private companies able to dominate the relevant government agencies.  This is a disturbing development.  Of course, no regulatory framework is perfect, just as no nuclear plant is foolproof.  The technology requires constant vigilance.  The open question in the US is whether the NRC can re-assert itself to make sure safety is put before profit.

Cheese-Eating Railroad Junkies

Way back when, in the dark days of the last administration, before there was any indication that the US might get semi-serious about high-speed rail, I spent some time making a fantasy TGV network map for France. Why? Because.

The excellent base map I used came from Railways Through Europe. Existing Ligne à Grande Vitesse are solid red. Lines that RFF is considering are dashed red. My proposed lines (though I admit that I stole a number of them from LGV2030) are in dashed cyan. The little bits of dashed pink are lignes classiques that I think need to be electrified and/or double-tracked to support trains coming off the LGVs.

The main goal of my plan was to provide fast, direct inter-regional services. So far, the TGV network has been centered on Paris. This makes sense, of course, as the Paris aire urbaine contains about 19% of the country's population. But I think economic development away from the capital would be more vigorous if the TGV network was more of a mesh than a spoke-and-wheel arrangement.

On the Paris area map I added one new color: yellow for a cross-city tunnel linking the Gare Montparnasse with Gare du Nord and Gare de L'Est. As of now, there's no good way to run trains through or around Paris from the southwest to the north and east. Travelers going through Paris in those directions have to cross the city on the subway or otherwise to continue on their journey. Travelers going through Boston face similar difficulties. A tunnel would solve the problem in both cities, though at great expense.

I, For One, Will Welcome Our New French Overlords

According to the Transport Politic, SNCF has submitted proposals for several of the FRA designated HSR corridors. This is an interesting development because the French definitely know a thing or two about high-speed rail. However, even if the inevitable knee-jerk dismissals were surmounted and SNCF won a bid, cultural differences would make the implementation a disaster. Entirely stupid, but that's just the way things are. The French are more likely to win a contract in Canada, which is once again mulling HSR for the Windsor-Québec corridor.