tickets are cheaper? if you want to travel the same distance it is far from cheap to travel by train, in Europe at least
Anon likes trains
Submitted 8 hours ago by Early_To_Risa@sh.itjust.works to greentext@sh.itjust.works
https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/a9d04fb7-f156-41c6-8452-037139e64a2a.png
Comments
stebo02@sopuli.xyz 29 minutes ago
NutWrench@lemmy.world 49 minutes ago
The only national passenger train service I know of is Amtrak, which shares its tracks with freight carriers. So the current infrastructure isn’t designed for high-speed rail and freight carriers usually get priority.
Also, The US is really big, so everything isn’t a short train ride away from everything else. If I wanted to visit the Grand Canyon from where I live, it’s over 2,000 miles away. That’s 30 hours of driving just by car.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 8 minutes ago
LilB0kChoy@midwest.social 13 minutes ago
freight carriers usually get priority.
They’re not supposed to. Passenger traffic on Amtrak should be getting priority but the rail lines basically say “fuck it” and do what the want.
altphoto@lemmy.today 16 minutes ago
Can Boeing make a train? Just wondering if I should look out for occasional flying safety exist door while watching trains go by.
carddamom@lemmy.myserv.one 1 hour ago
Because they like TSA fingering their assholes?
echodot@feddit.uk 5 hours ago
Yeah why doesn’t Europe have trains?
Europe definitely doesn’t have trains already.
fibojoly@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
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…
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 minutes ago
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.
whyNotSquirrel@sh.itjust.works 5 hours ago
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
Opisek@lemmy.world 12 minutes ago
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.
Tenkard@lemmy.ml 5 hours ago
They’re building high speed rails connecting major European cities as we speak, we’ll be good
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
I’m from Europe. What’s a train?
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 45 seconds ago
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
PlexSheep@infosec.pub 4 hours ago
My total journey from Berlin home this week was about 50 minutes late, and the connection after the ICE was not pretty.
arrow74@lemm.ee 1 hour ago
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.
Enkrod@feddit.org 4 hours ago
Yeah, but that’s not a rail problem, that’s a Deutsche Bahn problem.
ptu@sopuli.xyz 3 hours ago
I’ve heard flights are sometimes also late or even cancelled
RheumatoidArthritis@mander.xyz 8 hours ago
If high speed rail becomes popular, all that stands between the current freedom and ID-required tickets and fingering by agents is one terrorist attack, staged or not.
mholiv@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
What are you going to do with a hijacked train? The moment you hijack it they’ll just shutdown power. Hostages? Good luck there are like 30 carts on the train all of which have window break tools and emergency door open tools.
Look at Germany or France. High speed trains are everywhere and there is no ID requirement beyond maybe a ticket check if you’re unlucky.
remon@ani.social 4 hours ago
What are you going to do with a hijacked train? The moment you hijack it they’ll just shutdown power. Hostages? Good luck there are like 30 carts on the train all of which have window break tools and emergency door open tools.
Obi@sopuli.xyz 6 hours ago
Only for Eurostar and some other international trains you get some checks when boarding, especially since Brexit.
fibojoly@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
Somebody didn’t watch Christophe Lambert’s The Hunted…
TheBat@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Who said anything about hijacking? Think explosives etc.
leftzero@lemmynsfw.com 4 hours ago
one terrorist attack
Had one in 2004, didn’t result in security theater (though its mishandling did almost certainly result in the ruling party losing the election).
baguettefish@discuss.tchncs.de 3 hours ago
in china there are similar security checks for high speed rail
echodot@feddit.uk 5 hours ago
What do you mean there’s already been terrorist attacks on trains but nobody really cares because it’s a train.
Valmond@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Shhh! It’s an american, he can’t comprehend high speed trains.
They are already wildly popular in diverse regions in europe btw.
remon@ani.social 4 hours ago
We don’t even have that stuff on flights here (at least within Schengen). On my last 4 flights I had to show my ID once and all you have to do is stand in the scanner thing for a second.
RheumatoidArthritis@mander.xyz 2 hours ago
I never had actual cavity search but it varies within Shengen. Germany is the least pleasant, always some problem. Last time they insisted on searching a preschooler.
j4k3@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Has to harm billionaire asset to matter. Killing the rest of us is a game billionaires already enjoy and would applaud the Panem twist of a visiting team
peregrin5@lemm.ee 6 hours ago
The monkey paw grants your wish but all the trains are built by Boeing.
j4k3@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Those are called trolleys because they don’t have doors
elvith@feddit.org 2 hours ago
*pipes, as those do have a few holes
Nomad@infosec.pub 8 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.
Now look at the scale of the US versus Germany and then the density of people living there. High speed rail makes alot of sense where it’s difficult to build (bosnywash) and does not scale well in terms of time spent traveling.
Its better than car, but won’t replace air travel anytime soon. Sadly.
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 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.
jawa22@lemmy.blahaj.zone 29 minutes ago
Those lines do exist in the US. They are privatized, shitty, and expensive.
ComfortableRaspberry@feddit.org 7 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.
PlexSheep@infosec.pub 4 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).
parody@lemmings.world 6 hours ago
When you add up all the miles of rail in Europe, how far could you stretch it out over the US?
fibojoly@sh.itjust.works 3 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).
GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml 4 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
ch00f@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
As someone who boycotted the TSA for like 5 years and only took Amtrak, the tickets are not always cheaper. I mean sure, you can get across the country for like $100.
Even when I was doing Boston-Baltimore on the Acela, it was routinely slightly cheaper to fly.
entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org 7 hours ago
Amtrak is not cheaper, but trains in other countries are. Because Amtrak, specifically, sucks.
halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
AmTrak is designed to suck. Freight lines own most of the rails, and while they are required to give priority to passenger trains, they avoid this in several ways. Like having the freight trains too long to fit on side rails so the passenger trains are required to stop instead to make way.
ryedaft@sh.itjust.works 5 hours ago
Flying is way cheaper in Europe. Partially because trains are taxed much higher than flying.
iknowitwheniseeit@lemmynsfw.com 6 hours ago
Not always. Flying from Amsterdam to London is cheaper and faster than taking the train. The train is usually sold out because people still prefer it, but…
Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works 6 hours ago
I’m not sure about other countries but one thing Amtrak has over planes is that they’re more disability accessible. Still making improvements on legacy equipment but they’re under the ADA, whereas airlines lobbied themselves out of it, which is why they never bothered to create wheelchair spaces or accessible bathrooms or even seats a normal human can occupy comfortably.
grrgyle@slrpnk.net 1 hour ago
tbf if airlines had to serve people they could not be profitable
ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 8 hours ago
I fly because it’s fast, not because I like airplanes. Even the fastest train is way too slow to replace a plane for a flight across the USA. Then for shorter distances cars win out because of how convenient they are. There’s no niche for trains except commuting into urban areas with no parking.
porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml 5 hours ago
Depends what you are thinking of as long distance. NY to LA? Sure. NY to Chicago would be 4-4.5 hours, downtown to downtown, with a proper train (typical French TGV speeds of 330 kmh / 205 mph). Faster than flying when you count the time and cost of getting to the airport etc.
thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Exactly this. People too often compare price and time of “train ride” vs. “flight”, which the flight often wins. You need to compare the full travel, and train travel has a lot less overhead, which means a train travelling 100-200 km/h usually wins on stretches below 500 km.
iknowitwheniseeit@lemmynsfw.com 6 hours ago
It depends on what you mean by “shorter distances”.
Going from Amsterdam to Paris by train is about the same time as going by plane, and actually a bit faster if you show up to the flight two hours early as recommend.
TheBat@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
I’ve only flown couple of times and I like the way it feels during take off.
remon@ani.social 6 hours ago
I fly because it’s fast, not because I like airplanes.
Guess I’m the opposite.
halvar@lemy.lol 5 hours ago
Something something Hungarian National Railway fucking useless once you go further than a 100 kms from the capital city.
Valmond@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Hungary have repetedly fucked up aid money from the EU by being anti democratic, maybe that’s the reason?
halvar@lemy.lol 5 hours ago
No lol it’s been shit since before we joined the EU, it’s basically like our very own original sin.
Kaboom@reddthat.com 8 hours ago
Cuz of all the issues that come with laying rail lines. Eminent Domain has somehow become even more unpopular as of late. And guess what building rail lines requires?
NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 7 hours ago
Frequently, blowing holes in hills and mountains so you can get that 3% gradient.
Draegur@lemmy.zip 7 hours ago
Are they stupid?
(Yes)Alexstarfire@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Planes are safer. Plus, TSA is the only way I get any sexual contact. I’m not giving that up.
GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml 4 hours ago
Planes are safer.
Americans unironically believe stupid shit like this, hilarious
GrosPapatouf@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Planes are not safer than rail. Definitely not if you fly Boeing.
TheBat@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Ok but you still haven’t said anything about sexual contact 🤔
Tanoh@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Rail and aviation are pretty much on par. Both are far far much safer than road traffic.
menas@lemmy.wtf 3 hours ago
I heard that their is two issue for massive train transportation : -1. Public fund : to make every city more attractive for tourists, kerosene is take free for company. Which lower the price of the ticket -2. Freight : in order to not use massively truck, train freight need to have some span.
lka1988@sh.itjust.works 5 hours ago
A train can’t take me up remote roads 15 miles up a canyon that only a capable 4x4 can reach (this is the point of those roads), then take me out the other end into a small town with a delicious diner and ice cream shop. All while checking out abandoned mines (no I don’t go in) and other history from before my time.
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 hours ago
Wow, cool, ride an airplane directly into an abandoned mineshaft?
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 5 hours ago
Ok, cool. But I don’t think your experience would still be very good if you were joined by an additional trainload of people riding 4x4s right alongside you. It’d be time to pave over that canyon so that the people visiting it can park.
And trains aren’t mutually exclusive with cars. I might take the train to visit my parents a few cities over, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a highway for the moving truck to drive along when I had to get my stuff over to where live now.
No-one is saying no-one should drive a car. Rather, that the right tool for the right job should be used. In the US, cars are used for a lot more than what they’re best at. That you are using them effectively for personal use, is not a reason to also have them used where they aren’t as effective (in this case in comparison to trains, large volume transit of people who are mainly transporting themselves between hubs of human activity).
In Tokyo, Shinjuku train station routes 3.8 million people to where they are going, EVERY, DAY.
Interstate 5 in the US, the busiest in the country, does a pathetic 0.75 million a day. And the cost-effectiveness of trains beats out cars waaay before you hit capacity on such a higway.
Geobloke@lemm.ee 6 hours ago
Yeah, but i can get shit faced at the airport and on the plane, but i do that in a train and people start throwing coins at me
PixelatedSaturn@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Railway is expensive to build.
Bashnagdul@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
And airports on the other hand are free.
ghosthacked@lemmy.wtf 3 hours ago
They pay you to make airports
Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works 9 minutes ago
Meanwhile, right wing parties in Quebec are fighting against a traway project in Quebec city, that the entire country agreed to pay for, for which we have already invested half s billion, build stations, etc. They call it “War on cars”.