Starline – a pale blueprint: Eye-catching rendering, weak content

The last few weeks, there’s a map circling around the internet that shows some colourful lines connecting the main cities of Europe. The source is ‘Starline’, a so-called ‘Blueprint for a high-speed future of Europe’ issued by the think-tank 21st Europe (https://21st-europe.com/blueprints/starline).

The future imagined by ‘Starline’ has quite some similarities to the vision expressed by metropa for many years. The chosen visualisation style could even be considered ‘copied’ from the original metropa map, though the network presented by ‘Starline’ is so incomplete and inconsistent that it isn’t worth a serious comparison with the metropa map. It’s not a network map, it really is just 5 colourful lines on the background map of Europe.

Apart from the very weak network presentation, there are several other topics in the blueprint document that show the immaturity and vagueness of the ‘viable framework’ that was presumably based upon ‘expert insights’. The main ones are presented below, structured as statements quoted from the blueprint document with an substantiated reaction.

Statement N°1: „Starline expands the TEN-T network (…)“

Reaction: The Starline maps contains significantly less lines than the TEN-T core network for rail. The only line sections contained on the Starline map that is not included in the TEN-T core network are Zagreb - Athens, Bucharest - Kyiv and Warsaw - Kyiv, as they traverse countries that are currently not EU member states.

Statement N°2: „At these speeds, Helsinki to Berlin takes just over five hours, turning what was once a full-day journey into an simple transition."

Reaction: This sentence is not based on any reality. The shortest possible straight-line distance between Berlin and Helsinki via Warsaw, Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn is 1500 km. Even with a train top speed of 400 km/h, it is almost impossible to reach a average straight line speed of over 250 km/h, more realistic is 200 km/h. So, even with fully completed high-speed infrastructure between Berlin and Helsinki (including an undersea tunnel twice as long as the Channel tunnel), a travel time between 6 and 7,5 hours is already very ambitious. 

Statement N°3:  „Instead of retrofitting the past, it proposes a network of new stations, built just outside major cities to integrate seamlessly with existing transport systems (…)"

Reaction: This undermines the single strongest advantage that the rail mode has in comparison to air travel. It actually connects origin and destination, as trains run from city centre to city centre. If Starline hubs will be located outside of cities, like airports, travelling by Starline train becomes more like travelling by air, while the travel speed can still hardly ever be directly competitive with air.

Statement N°4: „By placing these stations just outside city centres, they remain highly accessible while avoiding the immense disruption that expanding central stations would create.“

Reaction: It is not clear how to interpret 'just outside' in reality. As most Starline hubs will be located in metropolitan areas with 1 or several million inhabitants, there is no free space available within 10 km from the city centre, which would bring the Starline hub almost as far out as some airports. Closer to the city centre will bring almost the same amount of disruption as expanding the central station, without bringing the advantage of actually being in the centre of the metropolis.

In conclusion, we at metropa support any other initiative that generates public attention and increases support for a future in which all corners and places on the European continent will be interconnected by a seamless system, fast and accessible of railway lines and this holds also for Starline. But presenting undeniably weak and contestable content as an ‘expert insight’ on the topic might do it more harm than good. We still think that especially with utopian ideas for a better future, we must be very careful and precise. Otherwise, we might lose the people’s interest we need for their support.

Thus, we invited the 21st Europe team to discuss and to cooperate.

Unfortunately, they didn’t answer.

Nico Huurman, metropa