As a Tor user, I will not patronise an anti-Tor establishment.
In light of all of Amtrak’s other problems, they have a looong way to go.
I would be tempted to try train-hopping on freight trains.
It’s impressive how terrible the amtrak website is. I’ve used amtrak pretty extensively over the years and haven’t been able to login in over a year. I know it’s probably due to some verification code that my tech stack violates but the site certainly doesn’t fail gracefully. I won’t touch the app, of course.
I can still buy tickets, but I need to checkout as a guest and manually enter my rewards number for each transaction. I imagine at some point I’ll need to transact by phone or in person.
It is not only the AmTrack website. The rail line is really bad as well. In summer your train can be stopped because the rails are too hot. The rails expand too much and warp enough to make it unsafe to run the train on.
I think we need a new system from the ground up.
That’s a problem that can be solved with an angle grinder
I guess it’s covered by 5., but the real, actual reason we can’t have trains is the civil engineering firms can’t extract infinite money from a completed railway.
Also, have you considered how any public works project that runs longer than a single term of the elected official who gets it approved, is letting the next guy get all the credit for it? That’s much worse than having functional mass transit.
Have you looked at railway maps?
There’s a huge sprawling
rainwaterrailway network across America… It’s just only used by freight cause the bastards that own it decided passengers are unprofitableAssuming rail autocorrected to rainwater, agreed. There are interesting parallels between rail in the 1800s and the life cycle of the internet - successful network technology explodes in utility and popularity, then is cannibalized and constricted
It’s the story of the USA in general, y’all seem to fall for it every time, gov makes something mildly socialist, corporate muscle their way in, cannibalise and constrict it, and then everyone’s told “see, there’s no way it could have worked! USA is just too big/different/free/wild
delete as appropriate”
California seems to be good at infinite money extraction for rail that never finishes.
The conservatives that filed the many, many lawsuits that delayed construction over and over again are the same people complaining about how long it’s taking to be completed. They caused the delays and are the most vocal about the delays. It makes no sense.
I mean, it makes perfect sense particularly if you don’t want (really, get paid to not want) people to get off cars
What I don’t get is why people are okay with all-day drives that could be comfy train rides. Not to mention commute traffic jams of everyone going in the same direction at the same time every workmorning and workevening.
I also can’t comprehend all-day drives over all-day trains. If I take a train on my own or with my family, those are (partially) actionable hours. I can read a book, grab a coffee, work on my laptop, draw with my kid. If I go by car, best I can do is a podcast.
Since I don’t own a car, my point of view is also biased by not having to make sense of a large investment. But if you factor is the costs of having the car, gas and tolls… I’d rather go by train. If necessary, I can rent a car at my arrival destination.
If you’re just one person a train can be attractive if you have reasonable transportation to and from the station. A car gets really cheap once it’s a family of 4. Planes also offer significant time savings for a comparable price.
Because public transit is for poor people/minorities, and if they used it they’d be around a bunch of poor people/minorities.
I think this is a big factor. A lot of people are racist, and a lot of people are like pathologically anti-social.
Then they can’t fly less than Leer, a 747 is as “public” as any Amtrak train.
and they see themselves as temporarily embarrassed [m|b|tr]illionaires, right?
I would love to have public transit where I live that could easily get me to work, without having to take the freeway and deal with traffic. There isn’t a train near me which goes to my workplace, sadly.
That seems more like a task for a bus and/or tram network alongside trains, maybe also a taxi (I’d argue there should be a public transit form of taxis to fulfill a hole not covered by existing modes).
Of course, that’s not a personal failure, that’s a policy failure.
Funny thing, there is a public taxi system where I live. Though the taxi doesn’t even go near my place of work. Also, there use to be bus lines going through here, but that disappeared.
It’s a complicated problem. Part of it is that Amtrak is so broken that people wonder if it’s even fixable.
I recently went to a concert in another city for my birthday. I looked into what Amtrak options there were, because I get panic attacks in traffic, and they only offer overnight service, with a middle of the night swap from bus to train. It also would have cost $250 round trip for two tickets vs <$100 in gas to drive, and taken 12 hours vs the 7 to drive.
So instead of taking the extra time off work, we wound up driving, and I had multiple panic attacks instead.
Another part of the problem is that the US likes to talk about whether or not people deserve transit options. Like, my local bus only comes by four times a day between 6am and 6pm, but because I live in a low-income area, I apparently don’t even deserve a bench at the bus stop.
the worst part of Amtrak is how often it’s late, making it not only more expensive than driving or flying but also less reliable.
We don’t have any buses. Or sidewalks. Or bike lanes. Or trains. Even walking near the road is super dangerous. Tell me more about your limited bus schedule.
The railway is good for staying relatively close to the railway. But if you want to go out and touch grass as people say you really need a vehicle. Maybe the Green Wave will fix all this in a few years. But they got to be affordable and they’re not at all
Man, I’d love to be able to get on a train to Tulsa or Springfield, or Kansas City. The problem is that they’d have to lay entirely new rails because the only ones around here are for freight and stay pretty busy all around the clock.
Spent a couple of weeks in Japan and got to take the shinkansen twice. Of course Tokyo’s subway system was awesome aside from shutting down at midnight but I had no problems getting around in Osaka or Kyoto either. The shinkansen is so dope it’s hard to describe. They provided the best views I got of Fuji on the way down to Osaka and back from Kyoto. I tried to get a picture of a passing train but it was over in a blink. I took a train from San Francisco to Chicago and it took 3 days. The scenery was beautiful but the roomlette was like trying to sleep in the Disneyland Star Tours ride. 3 days proved too long to rely on edibles and sublingual distillate and I ended up with CHS. The southerly route back was awful, nothing but the drabbest of views and I didn’t get a roomlette for the trip back and trying to sleep in economy was very difficult and uncomfortable.
car industry would lobby any meaningful change to it.
If NYC and LA were the only cities, trains would be amazing. Just one HSR sleeper line straight across the empty desert, trains leaving every 5 minutes to meet demand.
With the amount of passengers and the lack of stops along the way, a state-of-the-art 500-600 km/h maglev like the L0 series shinkansen would be able to bring the travel time down to 6-8 hours while being a lot cheaper, more comfortable, more spacious, and with much better access to the city.
My god, it could even be worth trying to build a hyperloop.
For context, a flight is already 6.5 hours and cost 350-400. To have comparable speed it would only take building two complete mag level rails.
hyperloop
Hyperloop are a scam
Yes, so it’s a testament to how ridiculously ideal for public transit this fictional scenario is that in this fiction, hyperloop might be a worthy investment.
One of the reasons hyperloop was a scam is that they never really tried. There were some very public-facing stunts, like the design competitions, but they didn’t do the SpaceX thing of throwing a couple billion dollars worth of government subsidies at failing prototypes until they started working.
Another reason is that high-speed rail makes a lot more sense when you have regular stops like a real-world HSR line would. Accelerating and decelerating take distance, so the faster you go the longer you need to go between stops for a top speed to matter.
And another reason is that high-speed rail didn’t exist yet, and this was presented as a better alternative. If you already have the best open-air HSR money can buy, the next logical step is to stop having it be open-air.
Though, saying that, an atmospheric pressure pneumatic tube where the surrounding air is brought up to the same speed as the maglev train would probably make a lot more sense than a vacuum tube.
HSR existed long before hyperloop
If only people tended to live together in big conglomerations this would be so much easier to solve!
Hilarious! Love it! “one free checked car per passenger” is gold.
To be fair, only one time in my adult life have I flown somewhere and NOT rented a car as soon as I landed.
So you only flew to the Americas?
Or you don’t like cities abroad?
I don’t like cities anywhere. I don’t travel to visit cities, I travel to experience remote areas in different parts of the world. I’ve lived in Europe and used lots trains but the places I enjoy are usually more difficult to get to
America has trains. We use them for freight because it doesn’t care if it sits for a while or takes weeks to cross the country. Much of the US is too spread out for trains to be super useful for passengers. The areas that make sense do have reasonable passenger rail usage, mostly the east coast metropolis and Chicago to nearby cities.
The contiguous United States has a higher population density than Spain, which has a great high speed rail system. Metropolitan France is not much more denser than that as well.
Chicago to nyc is currently a 20 hour train or a two hour flight. High speed rail would be a massive expense to get a best case scenario of maybe 4 hours. The flight just makes more sense for people. Both cities have good rail options for inter city transport, or even out to suburbs.
If you guys ever properly tax your carbon, that 4 hour electric train will sound much better than a 1 or 2 hour flight in jet fuel.
Though this is a problem worldwide, even here in Europe jet fuel isn’t taxed enough.
Carbon tax is hilarious to me, the third world is burning all of the trash they don’t send down river into the ocean and are absolutely ravaging the world and idiot Europeans are okay with being fleeced for flying mass transit or driving a fuel efficient car. The only carbon tax I’m okay with is private jets - not because carbon taxes make any sense, I’m just fine with arbitrarily taxing the rich. Carbon dioxide makes plants grow faster and the world has historically had higher levels than it has now. It is not a pollutant. People are fucking stupid.
You can’t generalize population density across the entire continent like that. Montana and Wyoming have a wildly different population density than California or New Jersey and they’re all in the contiguous United States. Even just looking at the region east of the Mississippi to between the Mississippi and the Rockies, shows a striking difference in population density.
Also, Spain is like 1/16 the size of the US with mostly a singular population center in the literal center of the country. And, the Paris metropolitan area is comparable to the tri-state NY Metro area and a fraction of the size of the surrounding region from NY to D.C., which itself is a tiny fraction of the area we call the East Coast.
Fits more with c/fuck cars, but solid meme and welcome here
Americans should stop train train-haters.
I live on a hill in Alaska, am I qualified to be an urban transpotstion person or do you need to live in the denali mountain range?
