In 2023, Belgium spent 101€ per capita on railways infrastructure compared to 115€ in Germany, 174€ in the Netherlands and 477€ in Switzerland.

13 comments

1. Wish we spent more on rail so the public transport was actually worth using and i could ditch my car.

   101 per capita is NOTHING.

2. I wish we’d have numbers regarding price per km or something like that. It’s not about investment per citizen, it’s about how effective do we manage the rails we have.

   All this says is that there is indeed room for more money. Not that it would solve our problems.

   Swiss is also naturally more expensive, they have a lot of tunnels and bridges and difficult railroad tracks. 

3. I really wonder how this is calculated. The subsidies to SNCB/NMBS + those to Infrabel are already much higher than 101€/inhabitant (somewhere between 250 and 300€/inhabitant). Also what about metro & tram, do those count in those statistics too (in theory they do as they are running on railways, but maybe this is limited to trains)?

   It’s probable that we are subsidizing salaries more and infrastructure less. Or that a lot of subsidies aren’t directed directly to infrastructure but just to public transport in general.

4. Our government spends more per capita than most other governments. If you complain that it doesn’t spend enough in one domain, you should also accept that it should spend less is domains where it spends much more than other countries. We can’t keep raising taxes in this country.

5. People in Germany and the Netherlands are getting scammed.

6. I wonder how that compares to road infrastructure.

7. How much do we spend on wages/pensions per capita? That makes more sense.

8. Maar in het regeerakkoord zetten dat we naar een Zwitsers model gaan, is dat niet genoeg om hetzelfde resultaat te creëren? /s

9. And how much of this went to crazy train stations?

10. Have you taken the train in Switzerland? It’s … expensive. Be careful what you wish for.

11. Raar raar raar.
    Dus we geven minder uit aan infrastructuur dan Nederland, Nederland spendeerd 70% meer dan ons en toch geven we in totaal quasi evenveel in subsidies aan onze nationale spoorwegen.

    Dus ze geven 70% meer uit aan infrastructuur, maar in totaal quasi gelijk.

    Waar zou het grote verschil zitten?

12. Besides the regular budget, there is a forfait of 1 billion and seperate funding for projects that never get finished such as the regional express network.

13. very hard to compare. Our railway network is way denser then for example France, so we have more railway per square kilometer, as such we should pay way more as well (since we also have more trains per square kilometer). This is really comparing apples and oranges.

    this map shows the reality:

    [https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=File:M1_Density_of_the_railway_networks,_2023_v2.png](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=File:M1_Density_of_the_railway_networks,_2023_v2.png)

    Norway for example: has less then 10% our railway density but pay way more. France less then half. spain 30%. the dutch pay almost twice as much for less density.

    So if you take this into account you have to increase funding to NMBS drastically and only proves that compared to other European countries our railways are heavily underfunded.

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