In Europe, trains are full, and more are on the way

The problem is that (like in many areas) our collective subjective memory of things lags behind reality, sometimes by decades.

Things get enshrined deep in culture (not only films, but day to day jokes and mechanical repetition of cultural self-flagellation).

I'm living in Italy for almost 20y now, coming from Switzerland. I came here in part because I wanted the experience of a more chaotic place, coming from the extreme order in Switzerland I found confining and suffocating.

Central Italy in the 2000s was a good mixture of chaos and infrastructure that worked ok in order to have a civilized life. Roads had potholes but they did exist, it's wasn't Madagascar level bad.

Yet italians complained and complained and kept saying that they were backward country and looked up at Germany or the Netherlands or whatnot.

Over the years everything got incrementally improved. Roundabouts got built, green grass inside roundabouts got actually cut, parking spaces started to be delimited and you no longer had to park your car in the mud alongside a road (but now you had to pay for parking in more places) ...

And also trains got better! Objectively better. And more expensive. They were incredibly dirt cheap 20 years ago, now they are not too expensive but it's an entirely different ballpark.

20 years ago my average experience from Pisa to Florence was to suffocate for 50 minutes because somebody let a puddle of vomit uncleaned in the train and there was no physical space to go to escape that because the train was so packed.

Now trains are much cleaner, more frequent, bigger, faster, ...

Occasionally you get stuck in a tunnel for a couple of hours because something breaks but hey it only happen to me once in the last 10 years and it happened 10 times the decade before, so improvement!!

Yet, locals still think nothing improved. Yesterday I had a conversation with Italians who thought they were the country with the worst infrastructure. The thing is, most people here live in an imaginary world.

Even when they do travel abroad, they don't update their beliefs about that stuff. It's a bit like identity politics. They watch TV journalism shows that show how well executed (cherry picked) public systems in other countries work, and bask in self-flagellation. While the other identity group declares how Italians are the best in the world and that nothing approaches their virtues etc. these two camps (I struggle identifying them as left and right anymore) affect each other and make their position even stronger.

Trains aren't really about the region's size. They are about the region's population density and the volume of travel demand between somewhat close urban centers (max 600/800km).

> Flying always comes with security hassle.

Nowadays trains also come with security hassles. For example, Spain's RENFE enforces security checks, complete with baggage scanning and metal detectors, to board high-speed lines.

The key difference is where train stations are located vs where airports are located. Due to historical reasons, nowadays most european cities have train stations essentially in their city centers, whereas airports tend to be >50km out of the city. This means that the door-to-door travel time for any flight must include a >50km trip to the outskirts of a city for then to way out the mandatory 60 to 90 minute boarding process.

I'm rather skeptic of this take. Railway operators provide services by reserving track sections and train stations in specific time windows which take into account travel speed and scheduling. Rail track capacity is typically reserved for periods of over a year. If german trains run on time in Germany and swiss trains run on time in Switzerland, then it sounds like germany's trains being delayed when entering swiss lines is an impedance problem caused by the way the swiss infrastructure manager is handling german trains.