Comment on Why is us rail travel so expensive?
stumu415@lemmy.zip 5 days ago
I truly don’t understand the railway network in the US. Living in China now and the high-speed railway is amazing here. It takes 4 hours from the center of Shanghai to the center of Beijing and next year will be cut to under 3 hours. And nothing to do with but the US is a big country. China actually has a larger landmass than the US and I can go from one side of the country to the other by high-speed train. It’s cheaper, more comfortable than by plane. They even have high-speed sleeper trains now for these long journeys. Japan, South Korea, Europe, UK, and even African countries like Morocco have proper high-speed rail. The lack of investment in infrastructure in the US puts it decades behind the rest of the world. I guess to money for infrastructure goes to worthy causes like invading Venezuela and Iran.
HiTekRedNek@lemmy.world 4 days ago
In China, your populations are mainly confined to a few large, major cities. With farms and farming communities nearby those same cities.
I live in an unincorporated area about 30 miles outside of the nearest city, which has a population of about 250k people: Mobile, AL
It’s about 150 miles in the other direction to a fairly large city, named New Orleans, LA.
Thing is, there’s not any real “country side” between those cities. It’s all houses and neighborhoods. All of it. It’s not quite heavy enough population density to be a city, but still higher than farmland.
That said there is a passenger train service that runs from New Orleans to Mobile, with two trains, one leaves New Orleans and the other Leaves Mobile at pretty much the same time. 2 engines, 4 cars on the Mobile-based train, and 2 engines 3 cars on the New Orleans based train.
Thing is, they each have multiple stops along the way, too.
It’s a 4 hour ride in the train from end to end, and another 4 hour ride back. Each train ends up where they started at the end of the day.
So to use that train, I must drive 30miles into town, find parking, leave my car there for 8 to 10 hours, and spend maybe an hour or two in New Orleans,
Or, I could just drive for 2 hours, and spend however long I want to, in New Orleans, and not have a set schedule.
There’s absolutely not enough demand for more than the two trains in either direction for that to make any sort of sense, either.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Ok but high speed rail isn’t for connecting you to New Orleans, it’s more for connecting New Orleans to Chicago.
We’re unlikely to wind up as train connected as Japan, but let’s look at the shinkansen. It goes between major population centers and sometimes stops at decent sized cities on the way. When I had to go to a smaller town in Japan I took high speed rail from Tokyo to the nearest major city, then I took their local rail to a town, then another line to the place I was going.
For comparison this is the equivalent of flying into New York from Europe, taking high speed rail to Chicago, taking an Illinois rail network to Peoria, then taking it again to say Lincoln. Northeastern states have the rail network to do that last mile stuff. But even just having the ability to drive into your nearest city and take a high speed rail to a city your friends live in or that you want to vacation or do business in would be huge. That’s why the main proposals for high speed rail are to connect New York to Chicago or San Diego to Seattle. The latter would make it convenient to go from any major city on the west coast to any other one, even if you have to take BART or a bus or whatever first and last mile transit you need to get there