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A helpful suggestion for all American commuters whose flights were just grounded: (lemmy.world)
submitted 22 hours ago by to c/microblogmemes@lemmy.world
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[–] 42 points 21 hours ago (27 children)

American passenger trains suck, though.

Just as expensive as flying, except that it takes days of travel time instead of hours. And there are very few stations -- some entire states don't have a single passenger rail station.

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  • [–] 8 points 20 hours ago (9 children)

    i regularly take an interstate trip on amtrak. $99 round trip, takes 8hrs vs a 5 hour drive.

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  • [–] 6 points 20 hours ago (5 children)

    Just out of curiosity where about are you taking this? Amtrak in the northeast corridor is a vastly different service from Amtrak in the rest of the country.

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  • [–] 2 points 20 hours ago (3 children)

    texas eagle

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  • [–] 2 points 14 hours ago (1 child)

    Interesting, the stuff I usually look at for examples is Midwest areas. For instance Cleveland to New York city is around a 7 and to 8 hour drive but Amtrak schedules it at 13 hours and I guarantee that route will have a delay.

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  • [–] 1 point 13 hours ago

    yeah that tracks. delays are common, and it tends to be a little under twice the drive time.

    i wouldnt call it convenient travel, but for my ride its definitely cheaper than driving or flying.

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  • [–] 5 points 13 hours ago

    That's because American rail tracks have never been built for speed. Some time ago there was an article about a new (or completely rebuilt) track, and they were happy to save a few million on the project by building it in a way that limits the speed to 80-100mph, instead of spending just a few percent more that could have enabled 200mph for bullet trains.

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  • [–] 3 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

    I tried to take an Amtrak from Albuquerque to Denver, a 7ish hour drive. The train is over a day, i think closing in on 2 days. And about 4 times the price of a plane ticket.

    Edit: Amtrak's ticket finder was down last night. It is 44 hours one way, $310 for one way coach, $1600 for private.

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  • [–] 3 points 19 hours ago

    Still ridiculous that it's slower than driving.

    And that's a very short trip. Most people wouldn't take a plane anyway to go somewhere that's a 5-hour drive away. So I don't think that's very representative of what it would be like for the average person to replace an airline trip with a rail trip.

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  • [–] [S] 20 points 21 hours ago* (15 children)

    Well, yeah. There's a reason planes got popular in the US, place is fuckin' huge, takes a while to get anywhere especially thru the mountains. Well, that and our rail service was systematically crippled by a long series of utter fucking bastards so that people had no choice, that contributed too. But hey, it could be worse; we could be stuck with Deutsche Bahn...

    (FWIW the only states without are South Dakota and Wyoming last I checked (well and hawaii/alaska), and lets be real the kind of person that would take a train would never want to go to SD/WY. Real pretty scenery - real ugly everything else.)

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  • [–] 4 points 5 hours ago (3 children)

    There was also the whole auto industry conspiracy to destroy commuter rail and public transportation.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 hours ago

    People say that, but it wasn't like there was anyone fighting for commuter rail and public transportation until it was too late. Private railroads hated having to serve passengers and multiple municipalities let mass transit due once it required a public subsidy.

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  • [–] 4 points 21 hours ago (6 children)

    the kind of person that would take a train would never want to go to SD/WY

    But people who live in SD/WY might want to go other places?

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  • [–] [S] 9 points 20 hours ago* (2 children)

    If you want a real answer, it's because WY/SD have such a small and low-density population that there's not really anywhere useful to put a train station. And yeah, obviously in an ideal world it would be better to have them connected with passenger rail for the usual host of very good reasons. But, with the limited resources and the minuscule (but growing!) ridership on Amtrak, it would be a tremendous expenditure to extend coverage and would grant no real benefit to the people living there that isn't better served with intermittent air travel or their current car-centric infrastructure.

    If you want a slightly less real, but possibly more honest, answer: Ew, no, fuckem they can stay put in their racist little shitholes. They wanted this, they can figure out how to cope with the result.

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  • [–] 3 points 13 hours ago (1 child)

    Hey at least deutsche bahn has connections and a lot of rail. You can at least theoretically get somewhere using DB

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

    It's easy to have vast amounts of pristine rail if you never wear it out by doing something crazy like "running trains on it". Seriously wtf is going on with that system - the last two interurban trips I tried to take on DB both involved going approximately to the city limits before getting stuck onto a coach bus because there was some massive technical failure that shut down the whole system. Like nah I'll happily take Amtrak over that shitshow. Sure it's slow and useless if you're trying to go anywhere that isn't between the country's largest metro areas, but it's reliably and predictably slow and useless. Moribundity you can count on!

    (And non-sarcastically, even tho it sucks there's straightforward ways to improve it pretty rapidly. It's bad for sure, but it's still shockingly useful for the few areas it's able to be useful in. The incredible amount of overhauling that needs to be done for DB is... well, I'm glad it's not my problem to deal with because holy shit is that a mess. Starting from nothing does have some perks and, yknow, at least amtrak's radios don't melt when it gets a bit warm out)

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  • [–] 2 points 7 hours ago (1 child)

    Trains are so huge in Europe thanks to the wars of the 17th-19th centuries.

    America is roughly the same size and only now has half the population of Europe.

    In 1800 Europe had about 150 million people. That’s about half the current population density of the USA for landmass BUT still extremely dense populations around the capital cities in the countries.

    A nationalized train system was a lot easier for a individual nation the geographic size of Virginia with the a population larger than current US states.

    Especially when your neighbor is invading you every 20 years.

    American Rail during the civil war helped the north dominate the south (though the rivers of the USA may have been even more beneficial for the north) BUT showed the need for off rail transport and helped usher in the military application of wheeled and tracked vehicles that can go off rail. Weird how that works.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 hours ago

    TIL on Lemmy: the solution to the US' atrocious transportation is a civil war between all states.

    By any chance, would that help get decent bus services too? I'm guessing those are rather a post-WW2 thing.

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