I recently went on a holiday using high speed rail in Europe (1100km). Flying was cheaper and faster. Sadly I have feeling of empathy and principles so I went with the train anyway. Wasn’t too bad though just did a lot of reading.
To be honest, I haven’t seen anyone else mention the real reason: America allowed private companies to buy and own the lands under the rails in the 1800s in order to deal with the massive distances across the US to connect the West and East. 150 years later and just a few companies own almost all the track and rail across America. Almost all private, not public land. Public citizens and communities have very little control over the railways going through their communities. These companies lobby against and make it difficult to introduce new, public rail lines for a multitude of reasons. This is one of very many examples of how corporations abuse law, monopolistic practices, and media to lessen the power of American citizens.
That doesn’t even take into account that a lot of rails in the US are owned by Canadian companies.
Rail is hard if it’s from one country to another (I think Europe is the exception)
In my case, I have to take rail from Ankara to Edirne, Edirne to Bucharest, Bucharest to Vienna, and after Vienna I can access anywhere in Europe
The problem is, going from Edirne to Bucharest requires two visas
Even in the EU there are still some difficulties. Like Finland and Estonia are on broad gauge not standard gauge. So their network isn’t connected to the rest of the EU. Spain and French haven’t connected their high speed rail network because of some dispute. So you have to get off at the border take a slow train across the border than walk to another platform to get on the other train.
Also rules says the crew needs to speak the local language of the country the train drives trough and traffic rules vary by country so if the driver doesn’t speak the language or doesn’t know the rules they need to change drivers when a train crosses a border which adds more delays.
Problem is also that there are still many rail networks in Europe that are privately owned.
I’m a huge train and transit advocate and I try to take Amtrak every chance I get. But “tickets are cheaper” does not feel like a blanket statement we can make. Maybe on very specific, usually short legs, like Chicago to Milwaukee. Someone correct me if I’m wrong or there’s more nuance but once a trip goes past 3 or 5+ hour mark, the price seems to skyrocket past airfare.
In Europe when you book ahead of time and are not too specific about the dates you can fly much cheaper. If I want to go from Amsterdam to Barcelona I can get a much much cheaper flight. Why would I go for the option that is slower and more expensive?
I wish trains where cheaper I’d take them more often.
I once heard someone make the argument flying is cheaper because a plane can fly from one airport to almost any other airport. So when you own a plane you can use it in a much more flexible way. A train can only go over a fixed track, yes you can use switches etc. But when you build an airport basically any plane can go there immediately. For trains it doesn’t work like that. Make matters even worse in Europe usually train operators are national and most trains don’t cross borders beyond a few stations.
Oh, that is definitely true in the U.S.
Also, I’ve found that rail travel is inconvenient in the U.S. I can’t confirm, but it seems like the Amtrak only comes through my (Midwest) area once a week, on Wednesdays or something like that. So, if I plan a trip, I need to plan around.
Midwest to the East Coast is so much cheaper and faster by air. I want to travel by rail - and you’d think it should be cheaper - but it’s totally not.
Part of it, I believe, is that Amtrak leases the usage of the rail lines from the shipping companies, so it must adhere to their schedules of shipping freight. The USA spends so much on upgrading its highway system; if they used a fraction of that money towards rail travel we would be set. But certain companies keep lobbying Congress to keep us locked in a model where we are totally reliant on cars and gasoline.
Also true in many cases in Europe.
You can get a flight ticket for under 20€ between Germany and UK (RyanAir), and have to pay tenfold that for a train ticket.
Or a 30€ ticket to Romania per plane. Booking a train to Romania is much more difficult and expensive and also easily over 100€.
I would wish that train tickets are cheaper than plane tickets, but if you cross country borders, booking train tickets becomes expensive and difficult in Europe.
I really really wish I wasn’t American
Well, technically, you’re not because no one is. America is dead. Some corporate fraudster (redundant to say that, I know), tricked zuckers into fucking anything at all didn’t matter, broke the machines with the cracker, generated his fraud of success (like every corporation, ever), then threw away half the votes so that those idiots discoverrs could fight with those calling out the cracker instead of realizing that they agree that:
That “person” is NOT the president. Never was, but that’s a whole other corporate sham. When no one stopped them, they’re dismanted the whole gorram gov and Auctioned it out after smuggling anything that mattered to the other place doing the same damn shit pretending we’re any fucking different from his trick.
The cost of dedicated passenger rail lines is staggering, and the US has a LOT of ground to cover.
As someone from Russia, we have even larger territory, and going by rail is almost twice as cheap as by plane.
High speed rail from Saint Petersburg to Moscow will cost you ~$45, going by plane will set you back ~$75 on the cheapest flight with hand luggage only. Considering the time losses associated with airports, you’ll be at your destination almost as fast for way cheaper, so this option is widely preferred.
Same story with long distance trips - I plan on going for a 1000km trip in July, and train ticket costed me the same $45, while cheapest plane tickets go around $100. It’s also a night train with beds and all, so I have one night accommodation for free while on my way. Depart - have a nice sleep - be on your destination in the morning and have a full day to yourself, fully rested.
If you’re feeling adventurous, you can go all the way from Moscow to Vladivostok by single train for $250. This will take almost a week, but it will get you around half the planet for that money.
Something like 30% of the US lives in the strip between Washington DC and Boston. It’s absolutely achievable for the richest country on Earth to provide high speed rail in that section.
There’s already a lot of passenger rail options in that part of the country. I’ve used it, and it works great.
This post is specifically about using it in place of airlines, which is used for longer-distance travel.
If you want to use it in place of airlines, you need high-speed rail. Something that the US has basically none of
Which goes back to the issue of the difficulty of building high-speed rail across long distances.
Higj-speed rail can’t be built at grade like freight rail. You can’t risk a cow getting through a fence or a crossing signal failure leading to a high-speed train collision.
Yeah no country has ever built a high speed passenger rail network interconnecting cities spread throughout an area comparable to the usa. And it’s absurd to think that it could be done in under 20 years and receive massive popular support and have universally recognised benefits. Guys the cost is too high for the biggest economy on earth and the distance is so far that they could never build a railway across it especially not more than 100 years ago.
(Well to be fair the Chinese did also build the railways across the US so maybe they do have something America doesn’t)
This comment really needs a /sarcasm tag
The ideal is a mix, planes for the long haul, trains for short haul.
Slave labor.
Man if only the US and a massive incarcerated population with which they could use to forcibly work on a rail project, then it would be possible. If only.
Woosh
Huh?
This again? The answer is no one knows. We heard legends about it but the prophecy says line go up!
Americans can’t do trains because it requires public infrastructure (rails), which apparently we are allergic to.
I’ve read articles in the past about high speed trains and/or just new train lines in general would get held up by little towns who didn’t want to lose the commuter traffic since it was the only thing keeping them afloat. There are too many towns that exist literally just to serve motorists and now nobody wants to get rid of them.
Tough luck, that’s the free market at work
Anybody who is making money off existing transportation is going to be against public transportation. Cab companies lobby against rail everywhere, from city to burbs or airport to downtown. Trucking, for obvious reasons. Passenger rail can carry cargo at night. And of course anybody selling fuel to the mass of cars, the petro industry.
They are just very short sighted. Just lobby to have a station and a have commuter stops and people will flock to those “cheaper” areas to live bringing in tons of tax revenue and boosting the local economy.
These small towns would still be an hour+ away from large cities, even with European speed high speed rail.
Like for me, the nearest “big town” is about 100 miles from me, which is about a 2hr drive. And, at least from some quick googling, it looks like most commuter rail in France tops out at about 100mph. A train would not bring in more people haha
Yeah, while I’m a huge advocate for an American Shinkansen, there’s really 4 zones of America for train speeds. East of the Appalachians its fast and easy and rail already works easy. West of them but east of the Mississippi, you’re gonna need high speed rail, but it’ll be somewhat similar to Europe. Between the Mississippi and the west coast, you’re gonna need high speed rail and quite a bit of patience. And on the west coast, you’ll hit up small cities, but honestly it’d be a great second high speed line after the New York-Chicago
You’d be suprised how many people commute more than an hour by car. The prospect of having affordable housing with more job opportunities will certainly bring in more people.
France spends ~$15 million/mile for high speed commuter rail. Which means that line would cost $1.5 billion.
I don’t think it’s bringing in that many more people. Even when you amortize it across all of the little cities it would go through
Implying the line would stop at the town and not carry on to the next. Also, how much is being spent on building and maintaining freeways?
too much, which is why I propose dirt highways with 45mph speed limits. Low initial cost, drivers drive safer, and helps the towing industry grow.
Even when you amortize it across all of the little cities
Please read the comment in it’s entirety before responding ❤️
Okay but the auto industry isnt paying me to want that and big city people are scary.
Yes but that might take a few years, we need to prop up our shitty city now…
And the construction crews wont eat at our shit hole restaurants.
That is so odd… I’ve only ridden Amtrak a few times, but I was amazed at how many stops were just some small town that happened to lie on the rail line.
Most small towns that lie on a major highway and are supported by commuter traffic are only going to support a truck stop and a few fast food restaurants at best. Sure, a true high speed rail line would likely only stop in larger metropolitan areas, so those meager income sources may dwindle. But on the other hand if I were a rail commuter in one of those rural/suburban areas, I’d be much more likely to spend some time doing a bit of shopping or lingering in a restaurant during that transition from the train to my car after work, than if I were just passing through in my car.
If i had a 24/7 high speed line to the big city from fuvkoffnowhere, i might choose to live in fuvkoffnowhere
that is such an absurd and pointless reality
Add some violence, and that’s america!
But they could be fucking train stop bucolic paradise exurbs from (bigcity)!
It’s literally socialism!
it requires cooperation with the project across all of these counties that the railway runs through. and they’re all corrupt or subject to democracy or whatever
Americans can’t do high speed rail because we have aircraft, automobile, and petroleum industries who don’t want us to.
ah, the free market
Exactly!
In the words of someone who decided to not stop 9/11:
You dont fuck with billion dollar corporations.
Honestly I think it’s just sticker shock. I would say that as soon as we get some people would be more willing to get more, but no, because people are hesitant to expand existing rail. MARTA please expand, I beg you. Oh great spirits of public transit, I pray that you soften the NIMBYs’ hearts.
It’s so upsetting that every small town in my state has an old historic train stop but none of them are actually passenger train stops anymore. Once you see it you can’t unsee it. I am 15 minutes from my town’s historic train stop which is a steak house now. My parents are about the same distance from theirs, probably even closer, but it’s a museum or something. Can I just take a walk to the train, ride down, and see them? Nope. Gotta deal with the hellscape that is metro Atlanta traffic.
soften nimby hearts
They can soften the nimbys’ hearts, but ill take them cooked to charcoal if that’s what it takes.
Glorious coal for scenic steam locomotives. It’s a win-win
Still cleaner than even the cleanest electric car, just by physics.
In theory, you could make a carbon-neutral coal-burning steam locomotive. You would need to make synthetic coal out of atmospherically-captured CO2. But in theory it would be possible…
Nope. Thermodynamics.
You’d just be making batteries at that point
And the making wouldn’t be free
Is there any parody porn about TSA? I want to masturbate to it. As long as it’s not too noncon (like TSA in real life), I don’t really care about the details (I’m ok with any gender, large insertions/fisting, etc.).
Is there any parody porn about [a thing]?
Yes. The answer is always yes.
TSA exists, therefore…
Cheaper? come to the UK, where flying can be less expensive than rail
You guys pay to get railed in UK?
woah i wouldn’t pay for that
A rail system is expensive, but the alternatives are even more expensive. The roads cost more to maintain and fuck do i know how planes keep getting cheaper. Maybe no tax and city funding?
Yeah why doesn’t Europe have trains?
Europe definitely doesn’t have trains already.
Still too much plane for local journeys
And is France train are not cheaper than planes or buses… Which is stupid, they should start to properly taxe Airlines
They’re building high speed rails connecting major European cities as we speak, we’ll be good
Do you happen to use Dvorak?
Sorry for the random question out of this air, but the in/is typo is something that happens a lot to me while being nearly impossible on “standard” keyboard layouts.
We do. Not as much as we used to because privatisation is a plague upon mankind, also we have very diverse geography which makes developing new lines prohibitively expensive, even more so when you’re a private company. Add to that a lack of political backing and yeah, it’s all rather turgid, even if there are some extremely recent talks concerning transeuropean night trains and such.
Those are going to be for our nice flat and speedy routes no doubt, but hey, it’s an effort in the right direction.
But yeah, things are not gonna get better fast as long as we are cursed with privatisation. What a shit show to see our glorious TGV reduced to a shell of its former self.
Meanwhile I just got an article yesterday that Wuhan is now connected to the super high speed network and the first 450kph train now connects it to Shanghai. Last time I was there the train was already TGV levels of speed and much more modern, and only a year later they are leaving us on the fucking dust…
China sees investment in mass transit as a loss leader. It costs more to put in than it generates in fairs, but the boost to connected economic zones pays back the cost several times over.
The US sees investment in mass transit as a detriment to the airline, automotive, and fossil fuel industries. It would shrink the economy in three places where the nation has tried to goose growth for the last 60 years.
For real. If those idiot neighbours would stop fucking around, we get trains from Wuhan to Bordeaux in about a week. It’s a real game changer.
What if we told them they could keep killing each other, just on the train, and then we’d make a murder mystery about it?
I never really understand why historically trains were so rare in the US. They had loads of trains at one point left over from the industrial Revolution and then they seemed to decide to get rid of them all. Even Beaching didn’t shut down that many lines
Oil and auto industry were literally buying tram tracks to dismantle them and make the roads only for cars. For the curious:
How The Auto Industry Carjacked The American Dream
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=oOttvpjJvAo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOttvpjJvAoRail lines were converted to highways. They weren’t simply removed and abandoned, they were cannibalized to clear space for more lanes
Yeah, we have trains at home… (greece)
I’m from Europe. What’s a train?
If you’re on a long tube that travels quickly on the ground from one city to another, and everyone is talking in Spanish, you’re in a train.
If you’re in a long tube that travels quickly on the air from one city to another, and everyone is talking English, you’re on a plane
My total journey from Berlin home this week was about 50 minutes late, and the connection after the ICE was not pretty.
Yeah, but that’s not a rail problem, that’s a Deutsche Bahn problem.
In Romania, CFR makes DB look like the most competent shining lights of progress by comparison.
Track that hasn’t been properly maintained since the fall of communism (and we keep lowering max speeds because of it). Rolling stock consisting of hand-me-downs. Constant engine breakdowns.
And the worst part? Due to political shenanigans finding inventive new ways to siphon money out of the company, it’s still managed to find a way to go bankrupt again, meaning another government bailout.
Yes, not just DB too, but the local transit agencies too. Its a wonder that it all works so well DESPITE decades of mismanagement and austerity.
Apparently Germany’s problem is that they run all the high-speed trains on the normal lines which means all of the normal trains have to work around them. Obviously you can’t have a normal train in front of a high-speed train so if the high-speed train is delayed by even a small amount it has a knock-on effect where a bunch of local service trains have to sit around waiting for the line to clear.
Everyone else runs high-speed rail on their own tracks. So everyone gets to do what they want and not affect anybody else.
The French do it better than the Germans, which is just not an acceptable state of affairs.
I’ve heard flights are sometimes also late or even cancelled
50 minutes isn’t that bad tbh. I dont remember the last time I flew that there wasn’t a delay. Hell even the whole arriving 2 hours before ,finding parking, going through security is all so much more of a hassle.
I’d much rather walk 5 minutes to the local subway head to the hauptbahnhof and wait 50 extra minutes for my train. I can at least go get a reasonably priced coffee while I wait.
It was bad enough. Schlimmer geht immer.
Also, comparing flights and trains doesn’t really work, I think. The getting into the plane time alone makes it too different.
Yeah i got used to TSA sexually assulting me just to get to the to my plane
And you’d miss it, right?
Meanwhile, right wing parties in Quebec are fighting against a tramway project in Quebec city, that the entire country agreed to pay for, for which we have already invested half a billion, build stations, etc. They call it “War on cars”.
Where do I enlist?
Honest fuck this.
So you love driving and more people on the road will get off the road and take the train. It means you can drive even more! Why wouldn’t you want that.
Because the joy of driving isnt getting there fast or the union of man and machine or anything like that.
It’s fucking up other people’s shit.
Because they don’t give a shit about driving? They care a lot more about their family members that own car dealerships, or are involved with the petrochemical industry.
Or they saw that American rightwing grifters talk like this so they are cargo culting the fuck out?
The US has been fighting for years to put a high speed rail in between DC and New York. Every right-wing neighborhood in between is throwing signs out stop the maglev.
