Trouble on the Greek railways (WS)
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This is More or Less, your statistical guide to life, the universe and everything.
This shorter edition of the programme was broadcast on the BBC World Service. Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service, your statistical watchdog for the numbers around you in the news and in life. This week, we'll be asking if there's any connection between pay and performance in major corporations. But first, Wesley Stevenson, our very own Greek god, has joined us. What have you got for us this week, Wes?
Well, in recent editions of More or Less, we've tackled a lot of Eurostats, some of the wad of statistics which have emerged with increasing frequency as the Euro crisis has deepened. There's something missing there, Wes.
Hmm?
That's more like it. OK, yes.
Well, yes, I've been looking at the Greek rail system. For such a small network, there's only one main line. 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. 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. It was first made by Stephanos Manos when he was finance minister in Greece way back in 1992. Mr Manos assures me that when he said it at least, it was true.
I knew the number of passengers and I made a very brief estimate of what it would cost to send them from Athens to the north of Greece and I decided that it was quite obvious that it would be cheaper to send them there by taxi than by train. And I still feel that it still holds true. In fact, it might be even worse these days.
It's been hard, impossible actually, to find the figures for 1992 to check this out. But rail experts have told me they think it was probably close to being true in 1992, but a bit of an exaggeration. But Stefanos Manos, the former finance minister, he says it's probably still true today. Yes, and he's not the only one. So we've been trying to look at the numbers for what's happening now. We know that in 2010, the two parts of the Greek railway were together making a loss of around $1.3 billion. From that, we can work out how much was being spent on every kilometre each passenger travelled that year. Now, the Greek Statistical Agency have some useful figures for the number of passenger kilometres travelled each year.
And the latest data are from 2007, when passengers travelled 1.8 billion kilometres. 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. OK, we just need to know now what it costs to travel around by taxi in Greece. Yes, and Greg Moisiadis could tell me that. He's a cab driver, missed a taxi in Thessaloniki.
Hello? Hello?
Oh, hello. Is that Greg?
Yes, Greg speaking.
Can you tell me how much it would be to take a taxi from Thessaloniki to Athens?
It costs 700 euros.
700 euros. And how far is it? Do you know?
It is 520 kilometres and it takes about five hours to get from Thessaloniki to Athens on a motorway.
OK, that's brilliant. Well, thank you very much for that.
Thank you.
So that's $1.55 per kilometre, which, if I recall correctly, is more than twice as much as it costs to send people by train, and so Manos was wrong.
This looks like another convenient story that fits the narrative of Greek waste, but like so many others, it just isn't true.
OK, very good, but there is a bigger picture here, and we might be in danger of missing it. Mr Manos's headline-grabbing statement might have been an exaggeration, but... There was a fundamental truth here, which is the Greek Railway is rather expensive to operate, and it's in a bit of a mess, isn't it?
Yes, I think that's right. And Panos Prevedouros, a professor of transport engineering at the University of Hawaii... Hang on, you've been discussing the Greek Rail Network with a bloke in Hawaii? Well, yes, of course. He's an expert in this sort of thing, and he paints a pretty bleak picture of the Greek Railway.
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