361–370 of 457 posts
Being in the east of France, it's a bit sad how misconnected we are with the west of France. (Lyon Bordeaux you'd think can be done in 2 hours, but no it'll take like 6 hours).
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Infamously similar in the UK, even despite being smaller. Particularly East-West travel anywhere much North of London. Many inter-city routes are via London. (I'm not complaining, j'habite à Londres ;))
South West connectivity is fine, you can get from Plymouth to Exeter to Bristol to Birmingham and up to Edinburgh without going anywhere near London.
We also don't really have any of the major cities I meant in that context, Bristol I suppose. How do you get from Bournemouth to Bristol for example - via Dorchester with a station change? How about Southampton to Exeter - via Bristol? It's by no means the worst region, and I claimed the opposite, but it still suffers in the same way (albeit on a smaller scale) really, NW-SE rather than W-E in the North, in both cases its opposing the 'spokes' into London.
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They don't have representation (in the US) and are unable to vote (in US elections) because they aren't US citizens and don't pay (US) taxes. But if you're a US citizen living over there and you made money from sources other than from that territory, you would have to pay US taxes.
Residents of the US territories are US citizens with the exception of American Samoa
So I wouldn't really consider citizens of US territories full US citizens.
So maybe it's more appropriate to say they aren't Americans, but they are US citizens.
But that is all semantics. My main point was the reason they don't have US representation is they don't have US taxation.
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> They don't make sense in the US because the capability isn't there, not because there's no market for it. There really isn't. Freight companies are responsible for maintaining investing in the rail, and if it doesn't make them money, they aren't going to put it there. Heck, a lot of places are single rail (meaning, no two way traffic at the same time), because it doesn't really make sense to dump more money into an…
Again, you're conflating things. There is a market for low latency rail freight. The rail companies find that it's better to keep the rail as is and invest the profits somewhere else. That doesn't mean that the market doesn't exist. The correct approach is for low latency rail freight to operate on passenger rail systems which already have the necessary speeds and flexibilities. This is structurally unfeasible in the…
And actually, sharing tracks between passenger and freight service is something that they don't really do in Europe. Because they share tracks, American passenger trains have to build at a weight on part with freight trains. Most lines in Europe separate out passenger and freight service lines so they can run lighter trains for passenger service.
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It also shows an effect that the focus on high speed rail brings: rural areas are often very badly connected. Here in France they've even kept shutting down regional lines. That creates the train equivalent of "fly-over states": areas that you see from the train while going through, but that it would be impractical to go to .
Except "flyover" states are not just rural areas. There are tons of big cities in non-coastal areas of the US. I don't think people who use the term are maliciously doing it, but it does diminish the lives of millions of people as unimportant and inconsequential compared to the "important" areas on the coasts
Not just, no. But, looking at population density by states, you've got roughly:
(1) the coastal states way at the top (except Alaska, Oregon, and Maine), (2) non-coastal Mississippi River states, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Arizona, and Vermont in the middle (3) Everything else.
They are very different environments for things like passenger transport economics.
> There are tons of big cities in non-coastal areas of the US.
Define “big city”? There are three (out of 24 in the US) metropolitan areas with a population over 2.5 million where the principal city is located in a state without ocean, Gulf of Mexico, or Great Lakes coast; 0 out of 9 of your cutoff is 5 million.
Top contenders:
- Paris, Gare de Lyon (doesn't seem to include going to Gare du Nord and going to London in this?)
- Brussels — can go as far as Newcastle or Avignon
- Random ones in the center of Germany which cover all of Germany
Five hours, I assume, is the maximum amount of time an average person can enjoy sitting in a train. With overnight trains making a comeback, there are much more possibilities. I recently enjoyed falling asleep in Central Europe and waking up over the Alps near the sea. Trains are amazing.
It’s more comfortable to be on a train than a flight and people are happy taking ten hour plus flights no problem.
To be clear, I find it absurd that airplane companies are still allowed to sell tickets without pricing in externalities for trips with good and high-speed train connections like Paris–Madrid. However, for actually going somewhere far away there just isn't really another choice but to take that plane. Your only other choice is to never go there at all, or take out weeks of travel for a ship or something. It's still too cheap, at least those that go regularly can also afford for Climeworks to undo their environmental pollution, so I hate to be defending air travel here, but 10h flights are a different ball game than 10h train rides.
Which city can you reach the most area in 5 hours? Top contenders: - Paris, Gare de Lyon (doesn't seem to include going to Gare du Nord and going to London in this?) - Brussels — can go as far as Newcastle or Avignon - Random ones in the center of Germany which cover all of Germany