Wesley Stevenson
speaker
1,470 appearances
54 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2010
last heard May 2015
Wesley Stevenson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
For such a small network, there's only one main line.
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The Greek railways do seem to crop up a lot in the story of how the Greek nation came to be in its current predicament.
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There's one particular claim which I want to examine, that the Greek railways are so expensive to run, it would be cheaper to send the passengers by taxi.
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It was first made by Stephanos Manos when he was finance minister in Greece way back in 1992.
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Mr Manos assures me that when he said it at least, it was true.
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It's been hard, impossible actually, to find the figures for 1992 to check this out.
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But rail experts have told me they think it was probably close to being true in 1992, but a bit of an exaggeration.
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But Stefanos Manos, the former finance minister, he says it's probably still true today.
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Yes, and he's not the only one.
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So we've been trying to look at the numbers for what's happening now.
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We know that in 2010, the two parts of the Greek railway were together making a loss of around $1.3 billion.
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From that, we can work out how much was being spent on every kilometre each passenger travelled that year.
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Now, the Greek Statistical Agency have some useful figures for the number of passenger kilometres travelled each year.
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And the latest data are from 2007, when passengers travelled 1.8 billion kilometres.
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Now, if we assume that's roughly the same for 2010, that means it's costing the Greek railways 75 US cents for every kilometre each of its passengers travelled, which is quite a lot.
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OK, we just need to know now what it costs to travel around by taxi in Greece.
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Yes, and Greg Moisiadis could tell me that.
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He's a cab driver, missed a taxi in Thessaloniki.
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Oh, hello.
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Is that Greg?
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Showing 1121–1140 of 1,470 · page 57 of 74
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