491–500 of 607 posts
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Moving people by train in the US makes about as much sense as delivering pizzas by barge.
Because the US is soooooo exceptional, right? And yet the moment you provide actual proper train connections the lines are successful and profitable (see e.g. Northeast Corridor.
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Where I live in the Netherlands the train quite literally stops in front of my door, as in my building that is ~50 meters from the train station where I can take a train every 10 minutes (15 on weekends) to any other city in the country, and even outside the country to Germany or France. I'm even planning a Eurotrip by train this summer with some mates, I'd say the distances here are comparable to get from NL to PL f…
A self-driving car can stop 2 meters outside your house on an arbitrary schedule. That's going to be the competition with trains in the very near future. Not sure what you mean by the last bit - the US already has that highway system, and the local roads serving the last mile, because that last mile infrastructure already has to exist to get from public transit to your house. China doesn't have the exact same problem…
No it can't, because cars aren't allowed on the streets around my house, with the exception of emergency vehicles and logistical vehicles like moving or delivery vans. The closest spot where a taxi could stop to drop me off is a lot further than where the bus or trains are. The closest parking space is actually a good 200-300m away from my door, reserved for residents so also always full, whereas I have a bus stop literally in front of my door and a train station 20 steps from it. I can also rent a bicycle 24/7 from the train station if all other modes of transport fail me (and I didn't have access to my bike for whatever reason).
Same in the center of the city, you cannot get to many places by car. A deliberate choice, for example when we dug out the hideous polluting highway and replaced it with a canal instead (which funnily enough was a canal in the first place before they made it into a highway). Utrecht is a perfect example of gov't realizing a mistake it made with car-centric design, doubling back and correcting it in a way that increases the QoL of every single resident of Utrecht.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/14/utrecht-restor...
This isn't even to say that the Netherlands is some kind of dystopia for drivers, if anything drivers here tend to be happier since they don't need to contend with a bunch of other people on the road, and more than half the country drives anyways.
> Not sure what you mean by the last bit - the US already has that highway system, and the local roads serving the last mile, because that last mile infrastructure already has to exist to get from public transit to your house.
My point was that building out the highway system was a deliberate policy choice made in lieu of a strong passenger rail/public transport network. Had they focused on making passenger rail more viable, then we'd be talking about the opposite world here, where building highly space-inefficient and expensive highways would be a ludicrous proposition.
> China doesn't have the exact same problem because so much of the country lives in dense wall-to-wall housing, which sucks no matter how you spin it if you like having any kind of space to yourself.
We're talking about cross-country lines here, if anything it's even more absurd that the Chinese can have such a strong rail network when the majority of the country has no use for the lines serving the far-west of the country where there aren't that many people. Whether the cities are shit to live in or not is a separate discussion altogether.
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Ah yes. The entirely hypothetical situation that doesn't exist anywhere in the world
Those places are comfortable with subpar transit conditions. There's nothing actually individually desirable about taking the train compared to having a private car take you directly between points A and B, people just seem to shy away from admitting that in favor of pro-social signaling in support of public transit.
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Ah yes. The entirely hypothetical situation that doesn't exist anywhere in the world
Those places are comfortable with subpar transit conditions. There's nothing actually individually desirable about taking the train compared to having a private car take you directly between points A and B, people just seem to shy away from admitting that in favor of pro-social signaling in support of public transit.
I wonder if there are psychological studies on why Americans en masse cannot even perceive the idea of there being other transportation options than cars and (to a lesser extent) planes. Even though in the rare cases when someone manages to provide a well-planned alternative Americans do use it, see Northeast Corridor (2200 trains a day, 15 million passengers a year, 14% of intercity traffic, replacing most air travel between some of the cities).
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Note: it's both funny and sad reading about the state of anything in the US that keeps pretending it's not a third-world country.
For example, Empire Corridor, passenger rail corridor in New York State running between Penn Station in New York and Niagara Falls: "In the 1890s, the Empire State Express between New York City and Buffalo was about 1 hour faster than Amtrak's service in 2013." (Wikipedia)
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> What happens next? A bus? Light rail? Uber/Lyft/taxi? A friend who has time to show up? Renting a car? What's our next move? (Lots of destinations don't have much for local public transport.) You're saying all this as if this exact scenario isn't solved in plenty of places across the world? You take the bus or tram or metro or cycle or just walk if it's close enough. If the city is actually built with public transp…
> If the US bothered to build out the infrastructure, you could go anywhere you wanted to go via public transport as well. Public transit != mass transit. There's no reason that self-driving vehicle fleets can't be municipally subsidized and provide a dramatically better private experience than any mass transit anywhere in the world, and we already have the infrastructure for it.
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Because the US is soooooo exceptional, right? And yet the moment you provide actual proper train connections the lines are successful and profitable (see e.g. Northeast Corridor.
Is that profitability calculated before or after billions in federal funding?
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I mean I wasn't making any rhetorical argument. That part of the comment was just me musing.
Muse this - train is a tool, just like a car, bus, bike, plane, drone or rollerblades. Repeating "trains" in every transport context is unproductive. Each mode of transport requires certain density. Most US cities just don't have it. It's that simple.
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Didn't know that Japanese trains (or European trains) go to the door of your house
Exactly, why would the US want to copy that?
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How does Waymo get subsidies? If I ride in Waymo, does that mean I get subsidies?
Yes. Roads are subsidized; the true cost of building and maintaining roads comes from general funds, not just from vehicle registrations and gas taxes (which of course Waymo doesn’t pay, being righteously electric). So you pay Waymo, they pay a few hundred dollars a year per car in registration, and you benefit from billions of dollars a year in highway funds from both state and federal sources.
Waymo and I pay a lot in state and federal taxes. Shouldn't that work out that we're paying for a shared resource we use even if the proportional accounting is not exact?
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> by simple virtue of being a car State and local governments spend a truly obscene amount of money building and repairing roads, and set aside a nauseating amount of publicly owned land to serve as roads, street parking, and parking lots. Those of us who don't frequently drive get some benefit from the roads, sure, because of the efficiencies of shops needing deliveries and whatnot, but not anything close to proport…
Road wear and tear increases as the fourth power of axle load. Are you counting the spending on bus stops, bus parking, dedicated bus lanes, and more on the other side of the ledger?