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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.)
I guess it’s covered by 5., but the real, actual reason we can’t have trains is the civil engineering firms can’t extract infinite money from a completed railway.
Also, have you considered how any public works project that runs longer than a single term of the elected official who gets it approved, is letting the next guy get all the credit for it? That’s much worse than having functional mass transit.
Have you looked at railway maps?
There’s a huge sprawling rainwater network across America… It’s just only used by freight cause the bastards that own it decided passengers are unprofitable
Assuming rail autocorrected to rainwater, agreed. There are interesting parallels between rail in the 1800s and the life cycle of the internet - successful network technology explodes in utility and popularity, then is cannibalized and constricted
California seems to be good at infinite money extraction for rail that never finishes.
The conservatives that filed the many, many lawsuits that delayed construction over and over again are the same people complaining about how long it’s taking to be completed. They caused the delays and are the most vocal about the delays. It makes no sense.
https://theauthoritarians.org/
This book explains it. But it’s really frustrating.
I guess it’s covered by 5., but the real, actual reason we can’t have trains is the civil engineering firms can’t extract infinite money from a completed railway.
Actually, they kinda can. Railroad tracks need upkeep just like roads do. Maybe not to the same degree and maybe the costs work out differently but they do need to be maintained. So there’s plenty of opportunity to grift the hell out of a railroad buildout.
I was assuming the repair would be done by a different firm, but that’s fair. It probably ends the cost-plus contract that the construction firm had, at a minimum.
In seriousness the problem seems to be the contract doesn’t incentivize the correct behavior, but I would love to hear from someone with actual knowledge on the topic.
Also, maybe there are too many opportunities to kill projects via zoning ordinances, and its inarguable that oil, auto, and other industries actively combat these projects.
Have you SEEN what the UK is doing? HS2 is at around 700 million/mile (about 900 million USD) now, you can absolutely extract infinite money from a rail line without even finishing it.
That’s what I meant, every big project I know of in the US spends money continuously with no prospect of being finished
It is the entire English speaking world that lost the ability to built passenger rail without it costing multiple times of what it costs in other developed countries.
Who cares of trains are profitable?
That’s the joke — Americans will complain that trains aren’t profitable while ignoring that roads and airports aren’t profitable either. Sometimes it’s stupidity and sometimes it’s a bad faith argument.
Ah, my bad. I thought the graph was showing that they do make money. Now that the full image loads after pressing it, I can see it’s about highways.
If NYC and LA were the only cities, trains would be amazing. Just one HSR sleeper line straight across the empty desert, trains leaving every 5 minutes to meet demand.
With the amount of passengers and the lack of stops along the way, a state-of-the-art 500-600 km/h maglev like the L0 series shinkansen would be able to bring the travel time down to 6-8 hours while being a lot cheaper, more comfortable, more spacious, and with much better access to the city.
My god, it could even be worth trying to build a hyperloop.
Oh man the Shinkansen is amazing. 2 or so hours instead of 9+ by bus to get somewhere while drinking beer or sake and eating is amazing. And you can take a dump lol
Nothing stopping you from taking a dump on a bus either, some people do that already
Your fellow passengers might not approve, but that’s another matter entirely.
hyperloop
Hyperloop are a scam
Yes, so it’s a testament to how ridiculously ideal for public transit this fictional scenario is that in this fiction, hyperloop might be a worthy investment.
One of the reasons hyperloop was a scam is that they never really tried. There were some very public-facing stunts, like the design competitions, but they didn’t do the SpaceX thing of throwing a couple billion dollars worth of government subsidies at failing prototypes until they started working.
Another reason is that high-speed rail makes a lot more sense when you have regular stops like a real-world HSR line would. Accelerating and decelerating take distance, so the faster you go the longer you need to go between stops for a top speed to matter.
And another reason is that high-speed rail didn’t exist yet, and this was presented as a better alternative. If you already have the best open-air HSR money can buy, the next logical step is to stop having it be open-air.
Though, saying that, an atmospheric pressure pneumatic tube where the surrounding air is brought up to the same speed as the maglev train would probably make a lot more sense than a vacuum tube.
For context, a flight is already 6.5 hours and cost 350-400. To have comparable speed it would only take building two complete mag level rails.
I was told that part of the reason is that railways are rented and mostly used for freight.
I’m going off of memory here, but what I heard was that passenger rail was never really as profitable as freight, so the government basically had to force all the rail companies to keep doing passenger trains. The massive subsidization of car transit made it hard for them to compete. Amtrak was basically created as a way to take the responsibility for doing passenger rail away from the rail companies, in exchange for guaranteed priority usage of the rails.
The priority of passenger trains is unenforced, so they have to wait for slow freight trains all the time. Additionally, the math on speed is different for freight vs passenger rail. A freight train getting somewhere an hour faster doesnt matter nearly as much as a passenger train getting somewhere an hour faster, so improvements to facilitate faster trains falls on amtrak.
Amtrak does own some rails, e.g., the northeast corridor, which is nice and profitable. It’s also worth noting that the “unprofitable” lines are still vastly vastly vastly more profitable than roads.
That’s basically correct. Passenger rail was a highly regulated industry, and it was always more profitable to transport freight over the same lines. Eventually, the private passenger rail companies were basically all losing money, and filed for permission to discontinue passenger service (in the previous regulatory framework, companies needed government permission to make any changes to service), so that Congress basically created Amtrak to take over the prior passenger lines. As it stands, though, Amtrak needs to lease/license access to tracks it doesn’t own, so it’s hard to increase speeds or service, as the track owners would need to give permission for the upgrades to the track or the effect on timetables. That’s even true of the Northeast Corridor, where Amtrak owns most of the track, but some segments are owned by freight rail companiex CSX and Norfolk Southern.
Not to mention railroad companies found loop holes to force priority to freight by making trains longer than rails inbetween side stops.
The US is third on the list of countries in freight volume per year, so yes there’s a lot of freight trains.
Fits more with c/fuck cars, but solid meme and welcome here
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.
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.
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.
Because Americans are highly regarded
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
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.
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.
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c/fuckcars stans when someone doesn’t have 30,000 people within a square mile of their home:
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).
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
Americans should stop train train-haters.
Hilarious! Love it! “one free checked car per passenger” is gold.
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I have traveled all over the world and I have never driven a car.
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I bet you’re American. I know you have terminal car brain. It’s a great shame, over here public transit has always been so good that I genuinely never felt the need to get a car. I save so much money, save on the environment, don’t have to breathe carcinogenic exhaust fumes in traffic and in garages on my commute, can spend the time working or watching shit on my phone…
It should be a no brainer but I know the US has been going through a rough patch for… checks watch… a few centuries.
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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.
That’s insane. But just imagine how rich they are on all the taxes they don’t pay! Probably jet setting all over the world…
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Yeah for sure. Thing is I save so much on not owning a car that whenever I need it, I can easily just book a cab.
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So you only flew to the Americas?
Or you don’t like cities abroad?
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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.
