Comment on Too bad we can't have good public transportation
mriswith@lemmy.world 1 day agoIt’s exaggerated and massively undestated depending on location.
There are several metro areas in the US with over 1 million people that has zero metro/subway or light rail, some of them don’t even have a passenger train connections or stations, or at most it stops by once or twice a day. Places like Columbus Ohio that has literally zero rail passenger rail for over 2m people in the metro area. If you want to take the train from there to NYC you’ll have to spend a couple of hours on a bus to a different city first. And it’s not like they never had it, they razed the train station in the 70s.
Other places that lack light rail or metro and have 1m+ people in the metro area: Tampa, San Antonia, Indianapolis, Oklahoma, Memphis, Richmond, Louisville, Rochester, etc. with many of them having a very bad outside passenger train connections. There are also a bunch of others that almost slipped by or did stay off the list over technicalities like having a single tram line going up and down main street or similar. Places like Orlando, Cincinatti, etc.
Bytemeister@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I recently planned out a trip to Chicago using trains. The fastest and most cost efficient route was to drive 3 hrs to Indianapolis and then take a 3 hr train to Chicago from there. Literally, the passenger rail network in the US is so bad that the fastest and cheapest way to travel by train is to do it as little as possible.
AA5B@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Id argue the northeast corridor is effectively the only place we have intercity rail.
While there are other routes, it’s mainly just keeping the lights on. How can rail be useful at 1-2 trips/day, travelling at glacial speeds? We shouldn’t even count it. If we ever start funding rail seriously, we’ll save a crap load of money where Amtrak kept the right of way sort of in use but that’s the only benefit.
The 2022 infrastructure bill would have made a huge difference increasing several routes to “sort of useful”, but even then a decent rail system would be a century out