There’s also some great movies about American poverty, and it feels like there’s always a scene where car trouble of some kind tips their life into an immediate downward spiral. They need it to get to work to sustain everything else, making one traffic stop the moment of despair.

The one I really appreciated, as heart wrenching as it was, is called Straw.

Really I wish I could live without one. Ive decided on harm reduction instead.

I learned something weird about cars and money and such just this last week. I got tired of working on a truck just to spend more money dumping fuel in it, and I took what I considered the nuclear option. I traded the truck in. On a used 2nd generation Nissan Leaf.

The car wasn't expensive. I could easily afford it. But as I was working on the required financial gymnastics to fit a car payment in my budget, I saw that the truck has been using $200 of gas every month. And the auto insurance dropped by about $100 each month. The car payment is $200. It costs something like 70 cents to charge it after my commute.

The silly car isn't cheap. It's free. And its so quiet and smooth, no wonder people get evangelical about their EV's.

You just grew a 3rd ball.

I love picnicface.

It's wilder that we don't use gasoline in our barbecue grills.

We tried it pretty well back in the 1970s. It was not uncommon to see LP powered conversions on the road. People even experimented with wood gas systems. The problem with LP, at least where I lived, was those engines didn't start well in cold weather. And the second issue was regulations required fueling stations to have someone(s) trained and dedicated to doing those refills. It was deemed not safe to let the common man, (you know morons), do that. That added to the cost. And finally, with an LP tank in your car, you could be driving around with a possible bomb or at least a BLVE under your ass. Which is not safe for those around you.

Sometimes to day you will still see LP powered delivery vans rolling down the road. So it hasn't totally gone away.

Could have sworn I remembered a video of a sedan, maybe in Russia, that had allegedly been converted to run on something like propane and the tanks were stored in the trunk. Sure this was more affordable than regular vehicle fuel, but when it got rear-ended… it exploded!

YouTube isn’t full of these videos by any means so maybe it’s safer than I thought?

We use bald eagle urine instead

German made Siemens and French made Alstom can reach 400 and routinely go 300.

"can"

In my experience in both Portugal and the UK is that they never do.

Only train I know of in the UK that actually goes that fast in practice is the Eurostar service (that goes through the Channel Tunnel) and that's not a pendolino. A number of long distance trains services in the UK are done by pendolino trains, but the rail track is not good enough for them to go at 250km/h.

In Portugal the Alfa train that goes between Lisbon and Porto and which is a pendolino train does up to 220km/h, but the average speed between both cities is a lot less than that (around 180km/h, if I remember it correctly). No other train there goes even that fast.

Only time I ever went that fast (faster, even) in a train in Europe was with the Thalys (basically the Belgian TGV) from Brussels to Paris and back and that's not a pendolino train.

You see, whilst that tech is indeed capable of a top speed of 250km/h, actual stretches of rail line capable of safely supporting it are pretty rare.

Definitely French, the Swiss trains are very reliable but generally not fast.

The best way to get from the Netherlands to Germany by train is to take the train to the border, taxi/über across the border, then back on the train.

I thought the UK trains were trash and over priced because Thatcher privatized them?

Yes, but it's much harder to justify the cost with the significantly cheaper train travel.

Plus driving here feels different. My guess is it's the population density.

Conspiracy theory: Germany is surrounded by countries doing quite well with their trains. Germany has the strongest car industry in Europe. Thus Deutsche bahn executives must be payed off by the German car industry to keep the trains run bad.

I won't disagree with you on the DB app. Absolute dumpster fire. If they could accurately display their delays it would be so much better. They have so many trains running at major hubs people would find the next best train if they were honest and reported accurately. Nothing like watching an alternative train leave and then the app adds 10 more minutes to your delay.

Don't even get me started on trying to find a bus with DB navigator. Would it kill them to put the fucking stieg info on there? I've missed so many bused because of this.

Just a side note here: MEX trains are a product for Baden-Württemberg (often designed with the bwegt brand in mind), which is not used anywhere else as far as I'm aware. They replaced the older RB trains that have become a rarer sight in BW.

BW, but I've traveled Berlin to Munich to Stuttgart with stops in between via regional rail with a D-ticket. So I'm most unfamiliar with the Northwestern parts of the country.

Trains were mostly on time, if late they seemed to average 10 minutes late, and a few times there were some very late trains. But between the major hubs it was usually possible to just take a different train. I feel like people don't give Germany enough credit for the sheer number of trains it has. You're running trains on lines every hour that other European countries would only have a train every 2 or 3 hours.

Although I'll admit the first place I lived was a small village and my daily commute relied on one train that was nearly 15 minutes late every day. I learned to adjust for it.

No train delay has ever compared to getting stuck in Atlanta traffic for 4 hours. It should on average take 1 hour to drive through Atlanta. I've yet to have a train delayed by 3 hrs

Hamburg main stations is the second busiest in the EU.....

There's a few on this board who would disagree, lmao, but thanks. Man's gotta live in the world he's given, not stamp his foot and demand it bend for him. I wasn't the first here, I won't be the last.

Depends on who you talk to. Seems the more rabid members of fuckcars want to ban cars completely, and jail anyone who resists lol

I am not brave enough to ride

god, I wish. bus routes here are generally 3x longer at minimum

last route I checked against a 22min drive was 90min by bus

Are you calling kolanki a cop?