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The dream (discuss.online)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/fuckcars@lemmy.world
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[–] 93 points 1 year ago (69 children)

I want trains so people can have cross country road trips on the weekend and not have to stay in their small hometown for the rest of their lives

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  • [–] 49 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

    I lived in Connecticut. I used to live in a city outside the capital, with transport available all the time. Then I moved to the sticks, 50 miles away. Same state, just the most rural part.

    In a group I did, they showed a woman being a success story from the program. In the video, she was using our bus systems in rhe cities. 4/5 people chirped up and aggreed, "hey we don't have busses in Connecticut this video is fake". I was like, no yeah, we have busses, just not here.

    So many people I met in that area, are born, live, work, retire, and die, without ever stepping foot out of their county.

    It's sad.

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  • [+] -12 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    So many people I met in that area, are born, live, work, retire, and die, without ever stepping foot out of their county.

    It’s sad.

    It's not sad. It's called right to self-determination, and it means that people are free to live a boring life.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago*

    No you're right, it's not sad a person doesn't get to travel. I myself have never left New England, but I've been all over it. What's sad is they don't know other cultures or way of life, then become fearful of them, then hateful, and dismissive.

    It's a pathway to ignorance of you aren't a learning seeking person. Those people in rhe class didn't know our state had public transport, and actively thought it was fake, the video no longer resonated with them, as it didn't represent them. That's whats sad.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago* (11 children)

    No, sorry, only cities can have trains, because traditional wisdom™©®¹ says the physics of trains literally stop working outside cities.

    If you tried to do something like that, youvwoukd risk damaging the fundamental laws of reality! Imagine if, like, the weak force or gravity or the ability for oxygen to form ionic bonds just got suddenly 30% weaker. You train people are such blind mad zealots, that you would risk this.

    ¹a Chrysler brand!

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    This is even funnier to me because where I'm from, trains in cities aren't really a big thing, but trains BETWEEN cities very much are.

    This map is outdated as the Lelle-Pärnu route isn't currently serviced, and missing some stops, but this is our railway map:

    Tartu has 2 stations as far as I know, Tallinn has multiple, the other places the train stops are all small enough that only one station exists. Entire point of it is to get people into and out of the cities. In the cities we have buses and (only in Tallinn) trams, used to also have trolleys. But only the capital, Tallinn, is a place where you would take a train from one station to another within the city itself.

    Most of these places are villages and small towns. The population of Puka is like 500. Orava is around 200.

    Now we just need the Tartu-Viljandi-Pärnu route and maybe a Narva-Tartu route, as both would be used by a lot of students (Tartu is a university city), but unfortunately geography doesn't favour my idea, there's protected wetlands between Pärnu and Viljandi as well as between Tartu and Viljandi

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    This is one place where a difference is scale. In the US we always complain about the lack of trains and that is certainly a problem.

    However several major cities have commuter rail lines that may be analogous. Google tells me the area served by my city’s commuter rail isn’t much smaller - the longest line runs about 60 miles and has dozens of stops in many smaller towns (nothing like you’re describing though). We even have lines running to nearby small cities. However the system is designed for commuting to the major city and is limited outside that use.

    The comparison here in the us is that most cities still don’t have commuter rail system (but that is changing!) and we only have 2 practical intercity lines covering a tiny portion of our country

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    Sorry...what? Which argument are you making here?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

    I was probably arguing both sides 😁

    While it’s true we have almost no rail from the perspective of the entire country, we do have a handful of commuter rail systems that seem like a similar scale between cities and towns across metro regions. It’s not nothing

    And of course our one “fast-ish” intercity line

    And of course I recognize the irony of saying a country the size and population of the US is comparable to a much smaller country

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    america has some little splatters on the map

    It's not nothing but it's absolutely not enough to make rail anyones primary mode of transit unless they live there.

    That's a problem.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I’m firmly in the camp of “if you build it, they will come”. Intercity rail in the northeast corridor has been a huge success, generating profits to fund the rest of the system. It’s somewhat self-reinforcing: most of Amtrak is impractical, inconvenient, useless so of course no one will use it. But NEC, especially Acela, proves that people will use intercity rail if it’s actually useful. They will prefer it.

    Continued investment, continued expansion, will make it available to more people to become a primary means of transport.

    We start with places it will best work where people want it, then connect and expand, take advantage of the network affect. But it’s all politics. Politicians need to make it happen. We don’t actually need more money but the wisdom to rebalance the excess car transportation investments

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    I might amend that from 'scale' to 'distribution'. Through the nineteenth century population centers built up around the rail lines. In the twentieth century that didn't matter so you have minor population centers just splattered all over the place.

    This is the reality that our area has dealt with as they have tried to fund better transit, that they have to spend an exorbitant sum to serve a relatively small slice of the population because everyone is just spread everywhere.. Chicken and egg, designing a transit system around current population distribution is infeasible, encouraging a shift to a more amenable distribution requires that a transit system be deployed to motivate people.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    We’ve all come to expect instant results and that’s really not going to happen here. Most of that scatter was built up with huge expansion of cars after wwii, it was built up over 80 years. Building last decades, that’s generally a good thing. But taking these two factors together, rebuilding our population centers should be expected to take a very long time. That doesn’t mean we give up: it means we make the investments and changes now. We plant the trees now, with the expectation that our grandchildren will sit in the shade.

    One of the ways my city has been reinventing itself is with transit oriented development. Build the train first but develop a master plan around stops to develop people oriented population centers. That takes years to build out plus is one stop at a time. A big change last year was to require every community served by transit to establish special zoning near transit to encourage denser population growth. If this works, we’ll be completely different in a century or so

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Sure, it's just an interesting challenge for funding development with public money.

    You draw funds from people who can't benefit unless they further will spend even more money to relocate. Hard to get initiatives passed when your tax base is largely not going to benefit. The chicken and egg effect is harsher than just the time it will take.

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  • [+] -20 points 1 year ago* (48 children)

    That's just not reasonably possible in the U.S. If I wanted to go Orlando to Detroit on a train that averaged 100mph without stopping it would take 12-13 hours, not including the trips to and from the train stations boarding etc. To California you'd have to throw another 1,000 miles on to that, so an extra 10 hours. 26-44 hours of travel on a weekend trip sounds horrible. If I were going for a week, sure. (Also a train without stops is hypothetical, it would take longer even if the train could go 150mph)

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  • [–] 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

    High speed rail. Japan's is 200mph.

    Musk's hyper loop was a scam but various others tests were 288 mph. Could go higher.

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  • [+] -13 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    Japan is smaller than California, with several times the population density.

    Reframe your thoughts as: taxpayers per mile of track. Then begin to understand.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    If you tax billionaires more you can pay for the high speed rail

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago*

    I’d settle for rebalancing money from other forms of transportation.

    There are plenty of highways thoroughly congested where adding more lanes is no longer scalable, not a good investment. Those are clear scenarios where money should be rebalanced toward the more scalable option

    Or look at the huge infrastructure backlog in the US, the number of decades it took to invest in it, and the fate of the infrastructure bill from just three years ago. While there are political concerns, it’s easy to argue that we’ve overextended ourselves to more infrastructure than we can afford to maintain. Rail may be expensive to establish but it’s much more maintainable over time. It’s a better investment for the future.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    It's not like everyone in the country needs to ride it daily. The US has plenty of people. You connect population centers. And if you can build on flat land rather than Japan's mountains, you're on easy mode. Really you're the one that needs to reframe things.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    It's what the people want. There's been several times where high speed rail in Florida was put on a public ballot, and overwhelmingly got voted for. And then the government came back and said, "wha...we didn't think you'd want this? We don't have the money." The last I was involved in explored high speed from Miami through Orlando and the I-4 corridor to Tampa. Huge potential. "We're a poor state, can't do it." FU FL

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Japan still runs trains to areas where there's 1 village every 15-20 miles. Single track, that splits at the odd unmanned platform so people can board and trains can pass each other, and they have a train like every 10-15 minutes.

    The USSR didn't even bother with the platforms sometimes, just had a guy driving a locomotive by a bunch of villages every few hours, stopping any time he saw a farmer who had to take some cows to market or whatever.

    Roads are expensive to build and maintain, cars are expensive to build and maintain. Every trip taken on a train or bike instead of a car saves the tax payers money.

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  • [–] 44 points 1 year ago (17 children)

    150mph is pretty slow for a decent cross country high speed rail service. For example the Chinese HSR hits Max speeds of 240mph with the single longest bit of track covering just over 1800 miles so not only is it possible its already been done.

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  • [–] 28 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    OP means It’s impossible for Americans because we’re just so dumb.

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  • [–] -4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    China's high speed rail loses enormous amounts of money. Even when you consider the secondary and tertiary economic effects. Even the Chinese government has more or less given up on it.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    All public transit doesn't make money. Even the United States interstate system hasn't made a single penny in profit.

    Public transit shouldn't need to make a profit. It's cool if it does, but it inherently shouldn't need to.

    The benefits of making people travel for jobs and places to spend money generates more tax revenue and more money for businesses than if they were stuck at home otherwise.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    What do you mean given up? They're still laying more rails and running more trains than ever. Even running dozens of trains a day, like 95% of the time the trains are fully booked, or it's just soft sleepers and maybe standing available if you try to book the day of, or even a few days in advance for longer routes.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    It loses huge amounts of money because they’re connecting the entire country, even remote rural areas. There are benefits to that but profit is not one of them.

    Compare it to the interstate highway network in the US. We have good highway access to every state, every region, no matter how remote. I live near interstate I-90 and it serves a huge amount of traffic, well worth the cost. The same is probably true at the other end 3,000 miles away, but can you say that about most of the distance? Very few people would drive the full distance , and Montana for example, can’t have much traffic. This road loses an enormous amount of money, for most of it.

    The entire interstate highway system in the US loses an enormous amount of money and is just not worth it financially. However I would argue it was well worth doing, has been a huge benefit to the country, and is exactly analogous to the same question about a nationwide passenger rail network

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    They said average speed. Those max speeds are only reachable along certain parts of the track, sometimes straight up unachievable between some stops. Mostly they travel well below their max speeds. I would not be surprised if the average speed is not that far from 150 for most of the lines they service, though I don't have any numbers on hand.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    So leave Saturday morning say 8, take a train at 9, get there around 9pm, get to your hotel by 10pm go to bed by 11pm get up at 6. Go have your breakfast meeting, leave for the train station around 8 to leave by 9am to get back by 9pm to get home, get ready for bed and go to work in the morning.

    That is not a weekend trip to me. That's a sitting in transportation for an entire weekend and not doing much of anything.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

    Sounds about the same as flying. Took 12 hrs to get from Cleveland OH to Venice FL. Took a redeye to Chicago, had a layover then took a flight from there to Sarasota FL. Left around 2AM and got in around 2PM.

    Airplanes travel faster, but the whole system moves slower. Can't say whether a train system would be better though...

    Update: for shits and giggles, I looked at getting a ticket to Chicago on our rail system. The fastest route was 10HRs and it involves driving to Indianapolis and taking the shortest direct train from there. To put that in comparison, my drive to Chicago is ~5.5hrs. Greyhound Bus gets me there in 9 hrs.

    So no, it's not even close. That's how bad the rail network is here. If you want to get somewhere, you need almost 3x the time to drive, you'd still need to drive for hours, and the cheapest ticket is 55 bucks one way.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    Jeez not sure why that was so rough Today's flights

    Like why would anyone take that third flight with the stop? Just show up slightly later for cheaper... "I left 8 hours later and got their 20 mins later". Airlines are crazy sometimes

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    The airlines are just showing your all the options. There's a plane going to Denver and a plane leaving from Denver to your destination. The system is not doing anything to determine if that's a good idea or not, it's just showing you there are connected dots there. It's not a planned itinerary that someone decided on.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Pre-covid, and peak season would be my guess. It was January 2020 that we went.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago*

    I usually like the demeaning flights if I have to fly, so I shoot for Spirit. And I try to keep to just a backpack if I can, a tiny suitcase I can carry on instead if I need dress clothes.

    Last time I flew Nashville to Orlando I threw a couple items in a grocery bag and went with that. All my toiletries are usually in a small zip up bag.

    Spirit is terrible, but when it's $44 for the flight why not. I'm already going to get sexually harassed by TSA, I'm not really fretting the attendant running in circles wondering where the pilot is at.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Cross country doesn’t have to be coast to coast.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    There ain't shit in the middle except for Colorado.

    I say this tongue in cheek, I definitely have a plan to fly my family to Denver to start an RV road trip, because I think the most beautiful places in the US are out in that no man's land. The coasts are just the best parts.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago*

    Then don’t make that choice for that trip? Make that choice where it is a good choice. For x stops, there are mathematically like x^2 possible trips, each with varying number of people that make that choice. If there are ten stops, there’s like 100 possible trips that are possible on a line and many of this will be the best choice for many people

    Do you disagree with the interstate highway system if you’d never drive to Vermont? Do you disagree with the global air network because you’d never fly to Talinn (shout out to my Estonian buddy in this thread). The network effect, connecting the dots, supporting the vast number of intermediate trips is what makes the whole system worthwhile, even if you personally would not use parts of it

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I don't think they literally meant journeys from one end of the country to the other, but rather travelling distances of 100-500 km. Maybe even up to 1000 km would be preferable by rail, especially with night trains.

    I do agree that if you for some reason specifically want to travel from Orlando to Detroit, plane is by far the superior option. But Orlando to Miami? Or Orlando to Atlanta? High speed rail would be perfect.

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  • [–] -2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    The train from to Miami has been quoted and attempted over and over since I was about 7 growing up in the greater Orlando area. 28 years later and it's still in talks. They tried to connect Tampa to Daytona through Orlando. (All they needed to do was follow I4 as the road already goes there.). This is as far as that has gotten: (15 years on that alone)

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yeah, and the problem isn't the trains, it's the politics, and ultimately the voters.

    The train would make things better, and we could build it, but the will to do so isn't there.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    The “cross country in a weekend” is a bit of an exaggeration but Detroit to Chicago, Detroit to Minneapolis, Detroit to New York City should be perfectly reasonable for a weekend trip if trains went at a reasonable high speed.

    There’s zero reason for train to be slower than automobile.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    Was curious about the lake on that last one, ouch. That one might be hard with any speed rail. Chicago Detroit should be easy, Minneapolis a little harder but you could probably get it down to 6 hours each way

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    For New York, train goes via Toronto. It’s 16h by train vs 9.5h by car. 9 hours is right at the limit of what I would consider not-insane for a weekend trip (19h travel for 38h visit gives 2:1 ratio of visit:travel time).

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    If you had a sleeper car it'd work alright. Obviously leaving Friday night would make it much nicer. Otherwise your always stuck with after dark Saturday night, and maybe a couple hours Sunday morning. But if you can get bottomless mimosas with breakfast and sleep during the 9 hours back it'd make you be able to leave in the afternoon Sunday.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    We have immediate benefits from intercity rail centered on NYC, we would have immediate benefits from intercity high speed rail centered on Chicago ….. then it would show immediate benefits to connect the two.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    That's not how it works. HSR could be used to alleviate traffic in dense urban regions, without actual cross-country interconnectedness.

    So-Cal, Nor-Cal AND something connecting the two with a couple of stops in between.

    Salt Lake area.

    Houston - Forth-Worth-Dallas - Austin triangle.

    Florida.

    Urban areas connecting the Great Lakes.

    I won't address the East Coast specifically, as it's quite evident that it'd have needed something around the same time Japan, Europe or China made strides.

    Just to do a quick jump over the border, various governments have been attempting to build a HSR in the Windsor - Quebec City corridor for decades, but the political will is simply not there, and we still have the worlds widest and highest traffic highway that costs a fortune to maintain instead (along with the catastrophe that is the 407ETR).

    Meanwhile as the latest example, Italy built up a new HSR system by 2015, in an area that is comparable in size and density to Florida. It has a monthly pass system that even allows you to take your bike on every route. It's also a national corporation. How come transit in NA is not allowed to be national, except when it comes to funding roads from tax payer money?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    attempting to build a HSR in the Windsor - Quebec City corridor for decades, but the political will is simply not there

    Personally I put a lot of the blame on my own country, south of that border (from the good old days of international cooperation). While of course it’s up to Canada and that route would serve most of the population, it would be an even more appealing project if it connected to to an even greater whole rather than just ended. NYC has Acela as the start of intercity rail, A midwestern regional network centered on Chicago would be fantastic, but now imagine Canada HSR connecting the two at Windsor , Niagara Falls, Montreal . Imagine a HSR network serving like 150M people or more, if people on both sides of the border can get our shit together

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Asian high speed rail says otherwise. Check out chinas glow up from 2008 to 2022

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  • [–] -3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    So about 14 hours each way plus traveling to the form the trainstation to your final destination. So I would assume ~30 hours of travel on a weekend. Nope, still rediculous. Also that's a couple hundred miles shorter than Orlando to Denver. Cross country weekend trip just isn't practical without taking a plane.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    14 hours each way

    The G75 says 11 HRs. These stations are in the center of town with walk on service (takes me north of an hour to get to any airport in the states, plus another hour through security).

    The flight from Orlando to Denver is certainly faster at closer to 5 HR (plus airport travel), as its a direct flight overland. But it's five hours in a tiny seat versus 11 hours in a sleeper car.

    You're also moving far fewer people - between 140 and 230 two to three times a day - compared to the thousands of people you can move on an active train line round the clock.

    Cross country weekend trip just isn’t practical

    On what planet is a five hour flight each way practical for a weekend getaway?

    The airline solution reduced comfort, increased individual costs, drastically increased pollution, and still didn't achieve the stated goal.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    I never said the plane was practical for a weekend getaway either. My response was that this "I want trains so people can have cross country road trips on the weekend" just wasnt practical to the majority of cases. A lot of people are saying HSR would be good for interstate trips, and yes they would. Even next state over.

    But right now it's set up horrible so it is more expensive and takes longer for most even semi long trips. Like this

    Cheapest and fastest route is to drive. Once you factor in everything it'll take to get into an airport and out, and you have a vehicle while your there. So most Americans compare prices to that and say it's better to just drive. It'd be nice if there was a 3 hour train that covered that for $50. Trips like that Id love

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    My response was that this “I want trains so people can have cross country road trips on the weekend” just wasnt practical

    You deliberately selected a pair of destinations with one of the longest possible lines, then complained that said travel was "too long".

    But right now it’s set up horrible so it is more expensive and takes longer for most even semi long trips.

    The US has a policy of de-prioritizing passenger rail in favor of commercial shipping. If you're a lump of coal or a box of Amazon merch, you make the Orlando to Charleston run significantly faster.

    Cheapest and fastest route is to drive.

    This is a result of domestic policy, not material efficiency. You can make the Beijing to Shanghai route - 819 mi - in around 5.5 hrs, the same time it would take you to cover the 380 mi car ride from Orlando to Charleston. Twice as fast as an American bus over less than half the distance.

    That's because the state and municipal governments decided to build a major HSR artery between these two cities. A deliberate policy choice.

    As another counterpoint, the Amtrak route from DC to NYC (238 mi) is a 3HR train ride that takes you straight into the center of Manhattan. The Lincoln Tunnel and the Washington Bridge alone can take north of an hour to get through on rush hour. Nevermind riding a car up from Virginia.

    Why does DC/NYC have a high speed artery while Orland/Charleston not? It certainly isn't because people don't want to travel up and down the Atlantic Coast in large numbers, particularly during tourist season. But the "quality" of the passengers - working class schmucks, rather than Wall Street business goons and DC politicians - is significantly different.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    What a ridiculous take.

    1. If driving is better for you, then drive
    2. You’re choosing a route without practical train service.

    To me your argument is that yes, we need to build up more usable rail here so it can be a reasonable choice. If Acela were there, it might be a better choice, and that doesn’t even count as “high speed”.

    As someone in the NorthEast, not likely to ever take a train to Florida, let’s git’r done. I can see the huge advantage of the long connected route serving the whole coast, for the thousands of intermediate trips that would become feasible, even if I personally wouldn’t benefit

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    That’s not even a fair comparison.

    That train would be well worth having

    • for the huge number of people making intermediate trips on the line
    • the smaller number of people going the distance
    • the huge number of cars that could take off the roads
    • each airplane it can replace

    Every time someone brings this up they don’t seem to realize that the full distance is made up of many segments of many lengths. Even here in the Northeast, it’s not especially common for people to take Acela the full distance Boston to DC. However trains are full from the segments. I would never again travel Boston—>NYC another way. Someone else feels the same about Philadelphia—>NYC, or Philadelphia—>DC. And you can say similar about all the other stops. There’s a huge value in serving a long route, even if it is to serve all the segments and few people go the distance

    A commonly used rule of thumb is high speed intercity trains can be the most convenient choice between cities up to 500 miles apart. For longer distances flying would be faster. However most cities are within 500 miles of another city and the “network effect” of connecting the dots is huge

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    • [–] 24 points 1 year ago

    honestly trains that are more affordable than airplanes is super exciting for me

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    [–] 18 points 1 year ago

    Stupid school holidays ... now the trams only come every 7 minutes instead of 3.5.

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    [+] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    They're not controlled by automakers, they're controlled by drivers.

    Except in places like NYC, richer people tend to live in the suburbs. They rely on driving. The people who rely on public transit are often the people not rich enough to afford a car.

    Transit is for the poor, cars are for the rich. So, if you want donations to your political campaign, you better not be pushing anything anti-car.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    It's not just that. It's also the wealthy and powerful not wanting to interact with the unwashed masses. That's the largest driving force behind US car-centric infrastructure lately

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    • [–] 15 points 1 year ago

    I grew up with public transit, it was a nuisance when a bus went through every 15 minutes rather than 10.

    I want a time machine to go back and yell at myself to appreciate it more, because ever since I left my hometown, I missed it.

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    [–] 15 points 1 year ago

    I was gonna comment "fuck cars" but then I checked where I was.

    Fuck cars.

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    [–] 13 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Move to Italy

    • Dirt cheap cost of living

    • Housing prices like it's 1999

    • Main line HSR that runs from Venice to Lyons and Milan to Reggio Calibre

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    Any idea on how hard it is to immigrate to Italy and what kind of job prospects there are? I think it'd be a cool place to live, but I honestly haven't really considered it.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Any idea on how hard it is to immigrate to Italy

    The legislature made it significantly more difficult just a month or two ago

    what kind of job prospects there are?

    None. The labor economy is completely in the shitter.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Plus, I assume virtually every job there is expects you to be fluent in Italian. Italian plus English would be very useful in some jobs, but like most countries you have to know the language.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    And boy does that HSR move. Used it to get from Rome to Naples a few years ago, and while being extremely comfortable it moved at around 320 km/h. I think it took like 1 hour to get to Napoli.

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    • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    But trains are not boring?

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    • [–] 11 points 1 year ago* (4 children)

    You are gonna love Tokyo.
    It is going to be hard to do thing like this any time soon in the US & AU because of big oil

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Plus the massive distance between cities, suburban areas and outlying rural areas.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Not too mention the decades of extremely car centric infrastructure design connecting them.

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    • [–] 9 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    --rural areas U.S.A has entered the chat-- We need those trains, the stations they serve, and last mile fully electric self-driving vehicles to get our older citizens to their doctor's appointments in the larger cities, and to and from the fancy train stations, and not have them be made to remember to reserve a seat 3-5 days in advance, and be waiting 45 minutes for a bus to show up to take them where they need to be and then another 45 to get back home. Also, last mile fully electric self-driving vehicles for round-trips to grocery stores around town, TIA.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago*

    Neighborhood electric vehicles are available. Rural USA can try electric buses. Increasing numbers of buses on routes will help. USA older folk are very un healthy. They are obese. Many are unable to walk in their own and need assistance. This is mostly unique to USA.

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    • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    To be fair that's how it is in a lot of countries.

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    [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    God damn I’d love that. My country has been trying to build a ferry free west coast. A road from southern Norway, along the coast and up to Trondheim. Back in 2012 they decided to green-light the project, but it’s still being argued about.

    One of my issues with the whole project is how we’re not building any form of infrastructure based around trains. It’s cars. The geography is really harsh here, but adding train tracks by the road would be more future proof than just highways.

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    [–] 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Wouldn't it be way easier to implement self driving on a rail system? The trains I take to work are frequently cancelled due to lack of operators.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    We have a metro in Sydney that does this. It's usually pretty alright, but difficult to build and scale. The lines that actually go out of the city would never be able to achieve such things, the construction and setup alone is astronomical.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    Not really, because existing track would need to be retrofitted with all of the sensors and whatnot specific to automation. Then there would still need to be a large number of staff available to reroute trains when some run late or have issues, because trying to predict all of those situations is impossible.

    Smaller rail systems are frequently automated, like light rail at airports and even some subway systems where minimal human oversight is enough to handle it when things don't work perfectly.

    The shortage of operators has a lot more to do with intentionally trying to ruin rail by cutting funding and putting in barriers to working. There are a ton of people who would enjoy being operators if it paid well and was a reliable position.

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    • [–] 10 points 1 year ago

    Thing is that I live near a city that has this (ok not train travel that could replace plane travel) and I just want to be able to afford to live in it.

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