I fly because it’s fast, not because I like airplanes. Even the fastest train is way too slow to replace a plane for a long-distance trip. Then for shorter distances cars win out because of how convenient they are. There’s no niche for passenger trains except for commuting into urban areas with no parking.
It doesn’t help that in the USA train tickets seem to cost more than plane tickets. I think I’d still usually fly even if the train was free, so I’m certainly not going to pay extra for a slower method of transportation even if it is a little more comfortable.
I’ve only flown couple of times and I like the way it feels during take off.
I fly because it’s fast, not because I like airplanes.
Guess I’m the opposite.
It depends on what you mean by “shorter distances”.
Going from Amsterdam to Paris by train is about the same time as going by plane, and actually a bit faster if you show up to the flight two hours early as recommend.
Depends what you are thinking of as long distance. NY to LA? Sure. NY to Chicago would be 4-4.5 hours, downtown to downtown, with a proper train (typical French TGV speeds of 330 kmh / 205 mph). Faster than flying when you count the time and cost of getting to the airport etc., and that’s by no means the fastest train. The fastest lines of the Shinkansen and the next generation TGV they’re planning in France are over 1.5 times as fast as that.
Exactly this. People too often compare price and time of “train ride” vs. “flight”, which the flight often wins. You need to compare the full travel, and train travel has a lot less overhead, which means a train travelling 100-200 km/h usually wins on stretches below 500 km.
But 500 km (or rather 310 miles since I’m in the USA) is at the upper end of the distance I’d drive. There isn’t a distance for which a train is better than both flying and driving.
So in most Western European countries I think that limit is actually more like 1000km, or if it includes crossing France even more than that, or if you’re not close to the airport too. Beyond about 7 hours of train, flying starts to be faster and more convenient, most people around here find, but you can get quite far with a train in that time. I appreciate the current situation in the US isn’t the same and it would cost money to upgrade the network, but I think the rest of the world does show that it’s actually worthwhile.
With what I’ve heard about the train infrastructure in the US, that doesn’t surprise me. Personally, I only ever use a car if I’m travelling into the mountains or transporting a lot of luggage. I never drive if I’m travelling between cities with little luggage, if only because it’s much less of a hassle to just hop on a train and get where I’m going.
Parking is cheaper No TSA fingering your asshole Tickets are cheaper Safer travel On the ground Can take the next train if late
These aren’t (completely) true where I live, it’s still more convenient to take a plane or even drive to go to another major city 500-600km away, which is ridiculous specially considering that it’s consistently ranked among the best high speed rail systems in the world.
I really really wish I wasn’t American
That’s a sad statement.
Well, technically, you’re not because no one is. America is dead. Some corporate fraudster (redundant to say that, I know), tricked zuckers into fucking anything at all didn’t matter, broke the machines with the cracker, generated his fraud of success (like every corporation, ever), then threw away half the votes so that those idiots discoverrs could fight with those calling out the cracker instead of realizing that they agree that:
That “person” is NOT the president. Never was, but that’s a whole other corporate sham. When no one stopped them, they’re dismanted the whole gorram gov and Auctioned it out after smuggling anything that mattered to the other place doing the same damn shit pretending we’re any fucking different from his trick.
To be honest, I haven’t seen anyone else mention the real reason: America allowed private companies to buy and own the lands under the rails in the 1800s in order to deal with the massive distances across the US to connect the West and East. 150 years later and just a few companies own almost all the track and rail across America. Almost all private, not public land. Public citizens and communities have very little control over the railways going through their communities. These companies lobby against and make it difficult to introduce new, public rail lines for a multitude of reasons. This is one of very many examples of how corporations abuse law, monopolistic practices, and media to lessen the power of American citizens.
Americans can’t do trains because it requires public infrastructure (rails), which apparently we are allergic to.
It’s literally socialism!
Can’t do public infrastructure, unless it’s roads.
it requires cooperation with the project across all of these counties that the railway runs through. and they’re all corrupt or subject to democracy or whatever
I’ve read articles in the past about high speed trains and/or just new train lines in general would get held up by little towns who didn’t want to lose the commuter traffic since it was the only thing keeping them afloat. There are too many towns that exist literally just to serve motorists and now nobody wants to get rid of them.
They are just very short sighted. Just lobby to have a station and a have commuter stops and people will flock to those “cheaper” areas to live bringing in tons of tax revenue and boosting the local economy.
Okay but the auto industry isnt paying me to want that and big city people are scary.
Yes but that might take a few years, we need to prop up our shitty city now…
And the construction crews wont eat at our shit hole restaurants.
These small towns would still be an hour+ away from large cities, even with European speed high speed rail.
Like for me, the nearest “big town” is about 100 miles from me, which is about a 2hr drive. And, at least from some quick googling, it looks like most commuter rail in France tops out at about 100mph. A train would not bring in more people haha
You’d be suprised how many people commute more than an hour by car. The prospect of having affordable housing with more job opportunities will certainly bring in more people.
France spends ~$15 million/mile for high speed commuter rail. Which means that line would cost $1.5 billion.
I don’t think it’s bringing in that many more people. Even when you amortize it across all of the little cities it would go through
Implying the line would stop at the town and not carry on to the next. Also, how much is being spent on building and maintaining freeways?
Even when you amortize it across all of the little cities
Please read the comment in it’s entirety before responding ❤️
too much, which is why I propose dirt highways with 45mph speed limits. Low initial cost, drivers drive safer, and helps the towing industry grow.
Yeah, while I’m a huge advocate for an American Shinkansen, there’s really 4 zones of America for train speeds. East of the Appalachians its fast and easy and rail already works easy. West of them but east of the Mississippi, you’re gonna need high speed rail, but it’ll be somewhat similar to Europe. Between the Mississippi and the west coast, you’re gonna need high speed rail and quite a bit of patience. And on the west coast, you’ll hit up small cities, but honestly it’d be a great second high speed line after the New York-Chicago
But they could be fucking train stop bucolic paradise exurbs from (bigcity)!
Anybody who is making money off existing transportation is going to be against public transportation. Cab companies lobby against rail everywhere, from city to burbs or airport to downtown. Trucking, for obvious reasons. Passenger rail can carry cargo at night. And of course anybody selling fuel to the mass of cars, the petro industry.
That is so odd… I’ve only ridden Amtrak a few times, but I was amazed at how many stops were just some small town that happened to lie on the rail line.
Most small towns that lie on a major highway and are supported by commuter traffic are only going to support a truck stop and a few fast food restaurants at best. Sure, a true high speed rail line would likely only stop in larger metropolitan areas, so those meager income sources may dwindle. But on the other hand if I were a rail commuter in one of those rural/suburban areas, I’d be much more likely to spend some time doing a bit of shopping or lingering in a restaurant during that transition from the train to my car after work, than if I were just passing through in my car.
Ignoring trains for a minute, there are even examples of towns in America being against new highways for the same reason. Breezewood, Pennsylvania is the town you see in that one meme image of “america”. The state did some weird tax/federal funding loop shenanigans by routing a highway through some little pit stop town and, now that the laws have been relaxed, the county and the businesses don’t care to fix it.
Although laws have been relaxed since then, local businesses, including many traveler services like fast food restaurants, gas stations and motels, have lobbied to keep the gap and not directly connect I-70 to the Turnpike, fearing a loss of business. In order for a bypass to be considered, Breezewood’s own Bedford County must propose it, which is “just not an issue that really appears on the radar for us,” Donald Schwartz, the Bedford County planning director, said in 2017.[1]
If i had a 24/7 high speed line to the big city from fuvkoffnowhere, i might choose to live in fuvkoffnowhere
Tough luck, that’s the free market at work
that is such an absurd and pointless reality
Add some violence, and that’s america!
I’m not sure about other countries but one thing Amtrak has over planes is that they’re more disability accessible. Still making improvements on legacy equipment but they’re under the ADA, whereas airlines lobbied themselves out of it, which is why they never bothered to create wheelchair spaces or accessible bathrooms or even seats a normal human can occupy comfortably.
tbf if airlines had to serve people they could not be profitable
Not my problem.
you say that but could you say that to an A class shareholder on the verge of tears over not being able to retire at 50 they might even have to work
Ha!
I would, and look them in the eyes the whole time while smiling.
Honestly I think it’s just sticker shock. I would say that as soon as we get some people would be more willing to get more, but no, because people are hesitant to expand existing rail. MARTA please expand, I beg you. Oh great spirits of public transit, I pray that you soften the NIMBYs’ hearts.
It’s so upsetting that every small town in my state has an old historic train stop but none of them are actually passenger train stops anymore. Once you see it you can’t unsee it. I am 15 minutes from my town’s historic train stop which is a steak house now. My parents are about the same distance from theirs, probably even closer, but it’s a museum or something. Can I just take a walk to the train, ride down, and see them? Nope. Gotta deal with the hellscape that is metro Atlanta traffic.
soften nimby hearts
They can soften the nimbys’ hearts, but ill take them cooked to charcoal if that’s what it takes.
Glorious coal for scenic steam locomotives. It’s a win-win
Still cleaner than even the cleanest electric car, just by physics.
In theory, you could make a carbon-neutral coal-burning steam locomotive. You would need to make synthetic coal out of atmospherically-captured CO2. But in theory it would be possible…
Nope. Thermodynamics.
You’d just be making batteries at that point
And the making wouldn’t be free
Copilot’s deep think says it would take a 2K passenger train to be more environmentally friendly than 2K electric cars, given a coal-steam train and electric cars recharged by a coal fired power plant.
But that’s irrelevant, electric cars lose the coolness factor against steam trains. Choo-choo electric drivers!
copilot’s deepthink says
I cannot express the depth of disappointment i feel here.
Suffice to say that this is not an answer, and if you think it is; you’re going to get a lot of people hurt very badly someday. I sincerely hope you are never responsible for so much as brunch.
Well I don’t know anyone who works in either designing mass transportation nor makes environmental impact analysis, so no one could give me an accurate guess, hence why I specified that I asked.
I cannot express the depth of disappointment i feel here.
I even let it ‘think’ some extra time, come on
I sincerely hope you are never responsible for so much as brunch
I’ll make it my goal to ensure I’m supervising every single brunch you’re going to for the rest of our lives
There are rough numbers to be foubd, math to be done. Not enough for real work, but enough for guessing a rough course, or knowing when it’s close.
based.
Yeah i got used to TSA sexually assulting me just to get to the to my plane
And you’d miss it, right?
No turbulence while taking a piss or shit
Train bathrooms seem specifically designed to discourage using the bathroom while riding a train.
Also I had a laptop die from the constant vibrations destroying the hard disk drive.
Also I had a laptop die from the constant vibrations destroying the hard disk drive.
Well, that’s pretty much an issue of the past now.
It was last year.
This seems highly unlikely. Modern HDDs are extremely resilient.
But I don’t know the details of your situation, obviously, and it’s not impossible.What, like the head crashed by sheer coincidence, after eight hours of rattling?
I would be more surprised that you yourself would withstand vibrations extreme enough to kill a hard drive, for 8 hours at that.
… I hope you keep good backups, if you think it takes a hammer-blow to kill a hard drive. The heads float half a dick-hair above spinning metal. They’re good at pulling away when it seems like they might get bumped together - but all it takes is one miss.
And at least the laptops I had with spinning drives had vibration dampening.
Ok, but it’s rather specific case if you were still using a laptop with an HDD last year.
There are still a few use cases… mainly price. A 4TB 2.5" HDD can be had for less than a bottom-of-the-barrel 2TB NVME.
But I would definitely hesitate to bring spinning drives on a bumpy ride.
Spinning drives have a no place in a laptop. In a desktop at home, sure.
Absolutely no reason to put one in a new laptop.
But not all computers are new.
Sure. But even my ~8 year old laptop has an M.2 drive. I haven’t seen a spinning disk in anything I’ve considered buying in the last ~10 years.
Yeah, but i can get shit faced at the airport and on the plane, but i do that in a train and people start throwing coins at me
More evidence Britain’s the best country in the world.
Drinking on the train to go somewhere sporting, night out. Is a time honoured tradition. Wouldn’t change that for all the Trumps in the world.
Seems like a win-win to me
As someone who boycotted the TSA for like 5 years and only took Amtrak, the tickets are not always cheaper. I mean sure, you can get across the country for like $100.
Even when I was doing Boston-Baltimore on the Acela, it was routinely slightly cheaper to fly.
Amtrak on the east coast is decent, it’s offensively bad on the west coast and most places in the middle of the country.
Amtrak is not cheaper, but trains in other countries are. Because Amtrak, specifically, sucks.
AmTrak is designed to suck. Freight lines own most of the rails, and while they are required to give priority to passenger trains, they avoid this in several ways. Like having the freight trains too long to fit on side rails so the passenger trains are required to stop instead to make way.
Flying is way cheaper in Europe. Partially because trains are taxed much higher than flying.
Not always. Flying from Amsterdam to London is cheaper and faster than taking the train. The train is usually sold out because people still prefer it, but…
tickets are cheaper? if you want to travel the same distance it is far from cheap to travel by train, in Europe at least
Traveling by ICE in Europe was fucking awesome. 300kph and like $10 euro to go basically anywhere…well 15 years ago it was that cheap. Dunno about now. And I say this as a gear head.
It really depends, if you take a direct line between 2 cities it is easy and cheap but the more times you have to switch trains the more expensive it gets (+ also a lot more problems when a train is delayed).
Such infrastructure should be completely & unlimitedly free for private use.
When Germany did (twice? Forgot the details :/) the experiment with the unlimited EU monthly tickets for 7€ or whatever people were really glad, everyone could travel & see more. And they still talk about that.
The “unlimited” ticket for 9€ (then 49€, now it’s 58€, “conserveratives” hate it so who knows what it’ll be next year) is limited to regional and local transit. No long distance IC/ICE trains with some exceptions where an IC is operating as part of a regional connection.
My prediction is that (barring a heavy left shift in politics, i.e. a linke grüne spd government or similar) it will keep getting more expensive until it becomes useless enough that cancelling it is no longer political suicide.
It’s honestly insane to me that it seemingly wasn’t a huge topic in the election (at least I didn’t hear much about it), millions use it and many more benefit indirectly as it lead to better offers for local transport ticket subscriptions.
Thx for the info & insight!
Same in the US, and they’re slow. Going halfway across the country (i.e. anywhere interesting) takes ~24 hours, and the cheapest seats (not a room) cost about the same as a regular flight, more if you consider budget airlines. And that’s if there’s a train going where you want to go without ridiculous transfers.
Ameribro here, I can almost guarantee that your airlines are running at a loss as part of a long term EEE strategy to monopolize long distance travel. Once they’ve got the market cornered, your tickets are going to get A LOT more expensive like ours are. Oh, and they’ll start demanding subsidies from your governments to keep from going tits up because they accidentally the whole thing to their shareholders. Don’t fucking fall for it.
try travelling between countries. eurorail is generally 2-3x times more expensive than cheapest airline. Trains have so much capacity and yet even within countries ticket prices are around £20-30 per two hours of travel. Should be much cheaper, governments should give train lines more incentives than airlines but I feel like that is probably the opposite.
yeah it’s outrageous how governments spend millions on airports and then claim that trains are too expensive
Trains not planes is a much more reasonable and practical way to get people behind building more railways than planes not cars. We can talk planes not cars once some of the initial infrastructure is in place, but I think focusing on replacing something people hate (flying) rather than replacing something they like (driving) is probably a good place to start.
The monkey paw grants your wish but all the trains are built by Boeing.
Those are called trolleys because they don’t have doors
*pipes, as those do have a few holes
