Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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I want trains so people can have cross country road trips on the weekend and not have to stay in their small hometown for the rest of their lives
I lived in Connecticut. I used to live in a city outside the capital, with transport available all the time. Then I moved to the sticks, 50 miles away. Same state, just the most rural part.
In a group I did, they showed a woman being a success story from the program. In the video, she was using our bus systems in rhe cities. 4/5 people chirped up and aggreed, "hey we don't have busses in Connecticut this video is fake". I was like, no yeah, we have busses, just not here.
So many people I met in that area, are born, live, work, retire, and die, without ever stepping foot out of their county.
It's sad.
to be fair, public transit doesn't cover even close to the majority of any non-east coast state
It's not sad. It's called right to self-determination, and it means that people are free to live a boring life.
somebody never leaving the place where they were born is not evidence for or against self-determination.
If anything it's evidence there is absence of social mobility and opportunity in those areas.
No you're right, it's not sad a person doesn't get to travel. I myself have never left New England, but I've been all over it. What's sad is they don't know other cultures or way of life, then become fearful of them, then hateful, and dismissive.
It's a pathway to ignorance of you aren't a learning seeking person. Those people in rhe class didn't know our state had public transport, and actively thought it was fake, the video no longer resonated with them, as it didn't represent them. That's whats sad.
If you have access and the ability to do something and choose not to, that's self-determination. If you don't have the choice then it isn't.
yeah, fair.
No, sorry, only cities can have trains, because traditional wisdom™©®¹ says the physics of trains literally stop working outside cities.
If you tried to do something like that, youvwoukd risk damaging the fundamental laws of reality! Imagine if, like, the weak force or gravity or the ability for oxygen to form ionic bonds just got suddenly 30% weaker. You train people are such blind mad zealots, that you would risk this.
¹a Chrysler brand!
This is even funnier to me because where I'm from, trains in cities aren't really a big thing, but trains BETWEEN cities very much are.
This map is outdated as the Lelle-Pärnu route isn't currently serviced, and missing some stops, but this is our railway map:
Tartu has 2 stations as far as I know, Tallinn has multiple, the other places the train stops are all small enough that only one station exists. Entire point of it is to get people into and out of the cities. In the cities we have buses and (only in Tallinn) trams, used to also have trolleys. But only the capital, Tallinn, is a place where you would take a train from one station to another within the city itself.
Most of these places are villages and small towns. The population of Puka is like 500. Orava is around 200.
Now we just need the Tartu-Viljandi-Pärnu route and maybe a Narva-Tartu route, as both would be used by a lot of students (Tartu is a university city), but unfortunately geography doesn't favour my idea, there's protected wetlands between Pärnu and Viljandi as well as between Tartu and Viljandi
This is one place where a difference is scale. In the US we always complain about the lack of trains and that is certainly a problem.
However several major cities have commuter rail lines that may be analogous. Google tells me the area served by my city’s commuter rail isn’t much smaller - the longest line runs about 60 miles and has dozens of stops in many smaller towns (nothing like you’re describing though). We even have lines running to nearby small cities. However the system is designed for commuting to the major city and is limited outside that use.
The comparison here in the us is that most cities still don’t have commuter rail system (but that is changing!) and we only have 2 practical intercity lines covering a tiny portion of our country
That's just not reasonably possible in the U.S. If I wanted to go Orlando to Detroit on a train that averaged 100mph without stopping it would take 12-13 hours, not including the trips to and from the train stations boarding etc. To California you'd have to throw another 1,000 miles on to that, so an extra 10 hours. 26-44 hours of travel on a weekend trip sounds horrible. If I were going for a week, sure.
150mph is pretty slow for a decent cross country high speed rail service. For example the Chinese HSR hits Max speeds of 240mph with the single longest bit of track covering just over 1800 miles so not only is it possible its already been done.
OP means It’s impossible for Americans because we’re just so dumb.
Emotionally dumb. Self gimped in ever way. It's all quite performative of us to collectively fail to accomplish anything as a nation.
So leave Saturday morning say 8, take a train at 9, get there around 9pm, get to your hotel by 10pm go to bed by 11pm get up at 6. Go have your breakfast meeting, leave for the train station around 8 to leave by 9am to get back by 9pm to get home, get ready for bed and go to work in the morning.
That is not a weekend trip to me. That's a sitting in transportation for an entire weekend and not doing much of anything.
Sounds about the same as flying. Took 12 hrs to get from Cleveland OH to Venice FL. Took a redeye to Chicago, had a layover then took a flight from there to Sarasota FL. Left around 2AM and got in around 2PM.
Airplanes travel faster, but the whole system moves slower. Can't say whether a train system would be better though...
Update: for shits and giggles, I looked at getting a ticket to Chicago on our rail system. The fastest route was 10HRs and it involves driving to Indianapolis and taking the shortest direct train from there. To put that in comparison, my drive to Chicago is ~5.5hrs. Greyhound Bus gets me there in 9 hrs.
So no, it's not even close. That's how bad the rail network is here. If you want to get somewhere, you need almost 3x the time to drive, you'd still need to drive for hours, and the cheapest ticket is 55 bucks one way.
Jeez not sure why that was so rough Today's flights
Like why would anyone take that third flight with the stop? Just show up slightly later for cheaper... "I left 8 hours later and got their 20 mins later". Airlines are crazy sometimes
The airlines are just showing your all the options. There's a plane going to Denver and a plane leaving from Denver to your destination. The system is not doing anything to determine if that's a good idea or not, it's just showing you there are connected dots there. It's not a planned itinerary that someone decided on.
Pre-covid, and peak season would be my guess. It was January 2020 that we went.
I usually like the demeaning flights if I have to fly, so I shoot for Spirit. And I try to keep to just a backpack if I can, a tiny suitcase I can carry on instead if I need dress clothes.
Last time I flew Nashville to Orlando I threw a couple items in a grocery bag and went with that. All my toiletries are usually in a small zip up bag.
Spirit is terrible, but when it's $44 for the flight why not. I'm already going to get sexually harassed by TSA, I'm not really fretting the attendant running in circles wondering where the pilot is at.
Cross country doesn’t have to be coast to coast.
They said average speed. Those max speeds are only reachable along certain parts of the track, sometimes straight up unachievable between some stops. Mostly they travel well below their max speeds. I would not be surprised if the average speed is not that far from 150 for most of the lines they service, though I don't have any numbers on hand.
High speed rail. Japan's is 200mph.
Musk's hyper loop was a scam but various others tests were 288 mph. Could go higher.
Japan is smaller than California, with several times the population density.
Reframe your thoughts as: taxpayers per mile of track. Then begin to understand.
Japan finds solutions, America finds excuses.
You have enough taxpayers to build 26 lane highways in California, but you're telling me you don't have enough money to build a 2 lane HSR?
Sorry, I'm not American. Looking at it from the outside. There are a lot of things America can do better.
But from a purely math perspective, it's a good metric to explain why Japan has what it has.
They have it because they spent more money on rail and less on highways compared to the US. They chose the better infrastructure.
If you tax billionaires more you can pay for the high speed rail
Or healthcare. Or whatever else. Yes.
But you've already lost the war against the capital class and are left dreaming.
Sure thing bub
It's not like everyone in the country needs to ride it daily. The US has plenty of people. You connect population centers. And if you can build on flat land rather than Japan's mountains, you're on easy mode. Really you're the one that needs to reframe things.
It's what the people want. There's been several times where high speed rail in Florida was put on a public ballot, and overwhelmingly got voted for. And then the government came back and said, "wha...we didn't think you'd want this? We don't have the money." The last I was involved in explored high speed from Miami through Orlando and the I-4 corridor to Tampa. Huge potential. "We're a poor state, can't do it." FU FL
Japan still runs trains to areas where there's 1 village every 15-20 miles. Single track, that splits at the odd unmanned platform so people can board and trains can pass each other, and they have a train like every 10-15 minutes.
The USSR didn't even bother with the platforms sometimes, just had a guy driving a locomotive by a bunch of villages every few hours, stopping any time he saw a farmer who had to take some cows to market or whatever.
Roads are expensive to build and maintain, cars are expensive to build and maintain. Every trip taken on a train or bike instead of a car saves the tax payers money.
Asian high speed rail says otherwise. Check out chinas glow up from 2008 to 2022
I don't think they literally meant journeys from one end of the country to the other, but rather travelling distances of 100-500 km. Maybe even up to 1000 km would be preferable by rail, especially with night trains.
I do agree that if you for some reason specifically want to travel from Orlando to Detroit, plane is by far the superior option. But Orlando to Miami? Or Orlando to Atlanta? High speed rail would be perfect.
The train from to Miami has been quoted and attempted over and over since I was about 7 growing up in the greater Orlando area. 28 years later and it's still in talks. They tried to connect Tampa to Daytona through Orlando. (All they needed to do was follow I4 as the road already goes there.). This is as far as that has gotten: (15 years on that alone)
Yeah, and the problem isn't the trains, it's the politics, and ultimately the voters.
The train would make things better, and we could build it, but the will to do so isn't there.
That's not how it works. HSR could be used to alleviate traffic in dense urban regions, without actual cross-country interconnectedness.
So-Cal, Nor-Cal AND something connecting the two with a couple of stops in between.
Salt Lake area.
Houston - Forth-Worth-Dallas - Austin triangle.
Florida.
Urban areas connecting the Great Lakes.
I won't address the East Coast specifically, as it's quite evident that it'd have needed something around the same time Japan, Europe or China made strides.
Just to do a quick jump over the border, various governments have been attempting to build a HSR in the Windsor - Quebec City corridor for decades, but the political will is simply not there, and we still have the worlds widest and highest traffic highway that costs a fortune to maintain instead (along with the catastrophe that is the 407ETR).
Meanwhile as the latest example, Italy built up a new HSR system by 2015, in an area that is comparable in size and density to Florida. It has a monthly pass system that even allows you to take your bike on every route. It's also a national corporation. How come transit in NA is not allowed to be national, except when it comes to funding roads from tax payer money?
The “cross country in a weekend” is a bit of an exaggeration but Detroit to Chicago, Detroit to Minneapolis, Detroit to New York City should be perfectly reasonable for a weekend trip if trains went at a reasonable high speed.
There’s zero reason for train to be slower than automobile.