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The railway is good for staying relatively close to the railway. But if you want to go out and touch grass as people say you really need a vehicle. Maybe the Green Wave will fix all this in a few years. But they got to be affordable and they’re not at all
Only in car oriented societies. In Austria it is certainly harder to get around with only public transportation if you are not along railway corridors or in metropolitan areas but it is still perfectly feasible to get almost anywhere with train and bus. If you have a Klimaticket it doesn’t even cost anything other than the flat rate of that ticket, which many already have just for commuting alone. (Just for context a Klimaticket for entire Austria, almost all trains and regular bus service included for a full year is 1400 EUR.)
Man, I’d love to be able to get on a train to Tulsa or Springfield, or Kansas City. The problem is that they’d have to lay entirely new rails because the only ones around here are for freight and stay pretty busy all around the clock.
As a Tor user, I will not patronise an anti-Tor establishment.
In light of all of Amtrak’s other problems, they have a looong way to go.
I would be tempted to try train-hopping on freight trains.
It is not only the AmTrack website. The rail line is really bad as well. In summer your train can be stopped because the rails are too hot. The rails expand too much and warp enough to make it unsafe to run the train on.
I think we need a new system from the ground up.
It’s impressive how terrible the amtrak website is. I’ve used amtrak pretty extensively over the years and haven’t been able to login in over a year. I know it’s probably due to some verification code that my tech stack violates but the site certainly doesn’t fail gracefully. I won’t touch the app, of course.
I can still buy tickets, but I need to checkout as a guest and manually enter my rewards number for each transaction. I imagine at some point I’ll need to transact by phone or in person.
What is the bottom right graph and what is the source for it? Looks interesting
car industry would lobby any meaningful change to it.
Spent a couple of weeks in Japan and got to take the shinkansen twice. Of course Tokyo’s subway system was awesome aside from shutting down at midnight but I had no problems getting around in Osaka or Kyoto either. The shinkansen is so dope it’s hard to describe. They provided the best views I got of Fuji on the way down to Osaka and back from Kyoto. I tried to get a picture of a passing train but it was over in a blink. I took a train from San Francisco to Chicago and it took 3 days. The scenery was beautiful but the roomlette was like trying to sleep in the Disneyland Star Tours ride. 3 days proved too long to rely on edibles and sublingual distillate and I ended up with CHS. The southerly route back was awful, nothing but the drabbest of views and I didn’t get a roomlette for the trip back and trying to sleep in economy was very difficult and uncomfortable.
My brother bringing the receipts!
If only people tended to live together in big conglomerations this would be so much easier to solve!
Hilarious! Love it! “one free checked car per passenger” is gold.
To be fair, only one time in my adult life have I flown somewhere and NOT rented a car as soon as I landed.
So you only flew to the Americas?
Or you don’t like cities abroad?
I don’t like cities anywhere. I don’t travel to visit cities, I travel to experience remote areas in different parts of the world. I’ve lived in Europe and used lots trains but the places I enjoy are usually more difficult to get to
I have traveled all over the world and I have never driven a car.
I’m in my 50s (weep), have visited* 60 countries, and lived in 4 of them - and have never driven a car, much less owned one, since the day I passed my test.
People don’t rent a hire car because they need to, they do it because it’s their programmed default.
.* visited == spent at least one night in, not including airports
My friend showed me a map of their snowbird parents’ neighbourhood in AZ and it’s literally an hour walk to the nearest non-house with zero bus service.
Rest of the world can’t comprehend such levels of car-brainedness.
c/fuckcars stans when someone doesn’t have 30,000 people within a square mile of their home:
You use ELR in lower population areas
Look at Russia & China, they’re just as spread out, more so, yet they have an excellent rail network that covers the whole country
A big share of the US population lives along feasible HSR corridors. The reason that this HSR doesn’t exist isn’t because there is no potential for it, but because the country is underdeveloped and honestly struggles to stay afloat infrastructure wise.
It’s normal that people don’t look beyond their tiny horizon. If I was king of the world I would order everyone to live in town and later on the countryside. And in at least 20 different countries of the world during their lifetime. I believe that would completely change how people see each other. Best people generally speaking are those who travel a lot (cultural travel, NOT business).
It’s a complicated problem. Part of it is that Amtrak is so broken that people wonder if it’s even fixable.
I recently went to a concert in another city for my birthday. I looked into what Amtrak options there were, because I get panic attacks in traffic, and they only offer overnight service, with a middle of the night swap from bus to train. It also would have cost $250 round trip for two tickets vs <$100 in gas to drive, and taken 12 hours vs the 7 to drive.
So instead of taking the extra time off work, we wound up driving, and I had multiple panic attacks instead.
Another part of the problem is that the US likes to talk about whether or not people deserve transit options. Like, my local bus only comes by four times a day between 6am and 6pm, but because I live in a low-income area, I apparently don’t even deserve a bench at the bus stop.
We don’t have any buses. Or sidewalks. Or bike lanes. Or trains. Even walking near the road is super dangerous. Tell me more about your limited bus schedule.
the worst part of Amtrak is how often it’s late, making it not only more expensive than driving or flying but also less reliable.
Old story. That happens when so much of the tracks is owned by freight rail, so little proper passenger rail infrastructure exists and laws that would require passenger rails to be given priority being so weakly enforced and largely ignored, never mind that the infrastructure is maintained as freight rail needs it, which is really bad for passenger rail purposes.
it wouldn’t be as much of an issue if Amtrak ran more than once a day in megacities and thrice a week elsewhere
It would be even more of an issue because freight rail would fight the higher track usage of Amtrak even more, making the service even more unreliable. Amtrak needs its own infrastructure and between metropolitan areas there needs to be HSR corridors. This is quite a task even in countries with functioning institutions and capabilities to build infrastructure at a reasonable price. The US isn’t such a country.
I live on a hill in Alaska, am I qualified to be an urban transpotstion person or do you need to live in the denali mountain range?
I thought this was going to annoy me but it was hilarious
Because Americans are highly regarded
America has trains. We use them for freight because it doesn’t care if it sits for a while or takes weeks to cross the country. Much of the US is too spread out for trains to be super useful for passengers. The areas that make sense do have reasonable passenger rail usage, mostly the east coast metropolis and Chicago to nearby cities.
The contiguous United States has a higher population density than Spain, which has a great high speed rail system. Metropolitan France is not much more denser than that as well.
You can’t generalize population density across the entire continent like that. Montana and Wyoming have a wildly different population density than California or New Jersey and they’re all in the contiguous United States. Even just looking at the region east of the Mississippi to between the Mississippi and the Rockies, shows a striking difference in population density.
Also, Spain is like 1/16 the size of the US with mostly a singular population center in the literal center of the country. And, the Paris metropolitan area is comparable to the tri-state NY Metro area and a fraction of the size of the surrounding region from NY to D.C., which itself is a tiny fraction of the area we call the East Coast.
Chicago to nyc is currently a 20 hour train or a two hour flight. High speed rail would be a massive expense to get a best case scenario of maybe 4 hours. The flight just makes more sense for people. Both cities have good rail options for inter city transport, or even out to suburbs.
If you guys ever properly tax your carbon, that 4 hour electric train will sound much better than a 1 or 2 hour flight in jet fuel.
Though this is a problem worldwide, even here in Europe jet fuel isn’t taxed enough.
