221–230 of 309 posts
In heaven the cooks are Italian, the lovers are French, the mechanics are German, the police are British, and it's all organized by the Swiss. (In hell the cooks are British, the mechanics are French, the lovers are Swiss, the police are German, and it's all organized by the Italians.)
Hard but entirely relatable. Deutsche bahn is horrible, privatizing it in the 90s was one of many failures of that movement and was leading to crumbling infrastructure, an insurmountable hardware and technical debt and now to the most complex train system probably in the world. Hopefully some people learn from it - privatizing critical infrastructure like this is doomed to fail. You get the bad from a public company…
Japan did it in 1987 and the shinkanzen is still well known for its on time percentage. And they don't cheat either with an x minute grace period. On time means the minute on the timetable. So it's certainly possible.
The largest shareholders for all the privatized rails in Japan are a mixture of Mitsubishi Group, Mitsui Group and Mizuhou Group.
Western anti-trust doesn't allow that level of consolidation - everything is basically owned by a handful of Keiretsu.
I highly recommend reading "Corporate Financing and Governance in Japan" by Takeo Hoshi and Anil Kashyap to learn about this [0].
[0] - https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262582483/corporate-financing-a...
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Have you actually tasted their food or just looked at pictures of it on the internet.
Anyone complaining about British food has never eaten Dutch "cuisine". After having lived in both countries I'll always defend the Brits when it comes to food.
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Have you actually tasted their food or just looked at pictures of it on the internet.
The best part of British food is that we're incredibly good at adopting all of the worlds cuisines' as our own. I remember being at the Belgian GP and literally you could have chips with various shaped sausage and one pizza place hiding at the back. At the British GP you could eat some variant (admittedly, probably not the best variant) of pretty much every cuisine you could imagine. Even in our supermarkets if you w…
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Across the whole country it's absolutely true. There are car only distances for a lot of stuff.
Does the US not have an extensive network of Greyhound busses, similar to our FlixBus system? Or is that just something I saw in the movies? (I'm not American)
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The correct comparison in this case is probably Amtrak, which has much lower on time rates.
In practice it does feel like basically every single Amtrak is delayed after just a few stops, so I would be shocked if the situation is worse in Germany. However to put some numbers on it, here are Amtrak's own stats: https://www.bts.gov/content/amtrak-time-performance-trends-a... . In the flagship northeast corridor (that's Boston - NYC - Philadelphia - DC) the "on-time" percentage is around 80%, where on-time is w…
This is so foreign to my American perspective - our public transport is more like, "maybe it'll be on time, probably not, you'll have no way of knowing, also screw you"
Caltrain routinely has delays due to accidents involving grade crossings. Despite spending decades and hundreds of millions of dollars, they still haven't managed to fully grade separate the line. [2]
Fun fact, Canada's Turbotrain was one of the earliest examples of high speed rail in the world in the 1960s and was even faster than the Shinkansen at the time. However, it hit a truck only one hour into its debut run. This is often cited as the main reason why there's no high speed rail in Canada despite the density and proximity of Toronto and Montreal being ideal for such a line. [3]
[0] https://www.wptv.com/news/region-s-palm-beach-county/delray-...
[1] https://wsvn.com/news/local/broward/brightline-train-hits-ca...