Comment on Anon likes trains

Nomad@infosec.pub ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

• drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  France has nearly the same population density as Ohio, and it has the TGV, which covers more than 5 times the land area of Ohio. So where’s the Ohio high speed rail network?

  This is the scale of Japan compared to the US east coast: Image

  So why aren’t there high speed lines that cover that same distance in the US?

  Americans complain about US politicians and US policy on a near constant basis, and yet when comparing the US to other nations its apparently impossible for anyone to have made a stupid or self-serving decision. The US apparently is always operating at the absolute limit of what’s physically possible, and if there’s any deficiency its always because “the US is too big” or “we’re too diverse” (what does that even mean? You can’t have nice things because black people exist?).

  To be clear there are actual answers to the questions I posed above, but its not either of those moronic excuses.

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  • jawa22@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Those lines do exist in the US. They are privatized, shitty, and expensive.

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  • Wanderer@lemm.ee ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    what does that even mean? You can’t have nice things because black people exist?

    It kind of is though.

    Can’t have nice downtown because blacks live their so all the whites go out to the suburbs. End up with shitty inefficient suburb hell and under funded downtown.

    No one wants to use public transport because of a sense of crime so only the lowest income people use it meaning further funding loss.

    Nothing in America is for “the people” paid by the state except highways, oil and pouring water into the desert everything else needs to run a direct profit ignoring externalities.

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• ComfortableRaspberry@feddit.org ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  That statement is a bit too broad for me. You can not only use highspeed rail within Germany but also to reach the countries around it. E.g. Belgium, Netherlands, Austria, (ICE trains) or use the TGV to reach Paris in a reasonable time.

  But with the (illegal) border controls currently it’s insufferable. Will travel through France by train in September and I fear that the border controls will totally derail (haha) our time and travel plans.

  We decided to use the train because the air connections took us longer since we didn’t want to vacate in a city with an airport and don’t live in one either.

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  • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I think parts of the problems of train in the US is that they have a lot of desert in the western part of the country (rocky mountains and such) where public transport just wouldn’t make sense. You don’t have that in Europe.

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    • ComfortableRaspberry@feddit.org ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Why wouldn’t it make sense to cross these areas by train? You don’t need a stop in the desert but before and after sounds sensible to me.

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      • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        crossing it makes sense, yes, but you could also do so by plane, which is much faster

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  • PlexSheep@infosec.pub ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    How are the illegal border controls from outside into Germany on train currently? By car, they didn’t even look us in the eyes when we passed, a complete waste of time.

    The Bundespolizei could do actual work instead of just sort of chilling on the borders and checking people that don’t look German enough (presumingly).

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    • ComfortableRaspberry@feddit.org ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I haven’t crossed border by train since they started to do this again. But when I’m teaching within Germany the trains that come from out of country are usually delayed.

      Afaik the train is sometimes stopped to check the papers of all passengers. I guess these are the cases with the heavy delay. But they also do controls in moving trains which makes it more tolerable but still…

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  • parody@lemmings.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    When you add up all the miles of rail in Europe, how far could you stretch it out over the US?

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    • ComfortableRaspberry@feddit.org ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Here are numbers from 2022 but you still need to do the math

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    • porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Even if you adjusted for population (550 mil vs 330 mil) you could easily at least connect all the major cities in the US, given how many smaller regional lines there are in Europe too

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• fibojoly@sh.itjust.works ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  China is disagreeing, right now. Not disagreeing with your arguments, but they are definitely pushing a lot more than us because the amount of people you can move is ridonkulous compared to planes and cars, their geography seems to be helping and the technology is getting ridiculous (450kph trains, right now).

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• GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Not to shit on your perfectly reasonable parade, but in Germany there is high speed rail through the whole . takes about 6 hours from top to bottom.

  Maybe not a great example there, with that running something like 100 km/h average speed.

  If you bump those numbers up to be competitive with actually high-performing HSR operators, that trip would take 2-3 hours, immediately killing any competitive edge that air travel would have on those segments - 2-3 hours will basically get you to the airport and through security, you’ll have arrived already if you were on a well-performing train by then.

  HSR is the best alternative for any trip up to approximately 800 km, at which point air travel starts beating it out. This is for daytime travel only - trains could be competitive for far longer distances with overnight sleeper service. I’d not be against taking night HSRs going between any points in Europe basically.

  Alas, this would require non-shit politicians, which definitely does not exist

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