A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.skoops.social/post/727
crossposted: https://lemmy.skoops.social/post/665
Oh boy...
I just took the train from Switzerland to Italy. Can confirm, people do it.
Wait till this guy finds out you can take a train from France to England.
It's going to blow his mind
"Trains don't float, IDIOT"
Even for very long distances (where flying is almost mandatory unless you are ready to spend weeks traveling) trains make things easier.
For example I'm living in a small village in the south east of France and I will be traveling to the carribean in summer for family, I will be walking to the train station is my village to take the train, 2 changes later I will be in London from where I'll take the plane to cross the Atlantic.
Same thing on the way back but with a night train.
And don't forget, airports all have to be on the edge of town anyway. So even if you're not in a small town, you're taking a train or a bus or a cab to the airport.
Meanwhile, big train and bus terminals can exist in the dead center of town. I can walk to the Empire State Building from Union Station in New York. But even one time, Gilbert Godfried suggests a picking up a connecting flight at the Twin Towers and everyone yells at him.
Once, I arrived in Chicago by train, and had time to wander around before my bus departed for home. I walked around for a bit outside of Union Station, scanning the horizon and trying to locate the Sears Tower. (Yeah, I know it technically has a new name.) I couldn't find it. Then, I realized that I had to look up.
That is, the train station is literally 1 block from the tallest building in the city. I so wish that the Borealis train came through here; it'd be just as fast, cheaper, and so much more relaxing to head down to The Loop for the weekend. As it is, I almost never visit Chicago because getting there is such an enormous pain in the ass. (Contrary to the popular imagination, it is a nice place. I've only been murdered there, like, three times, tops.)
Well ackchuwally you didn't consider me living in the Bay Area who can only get to SFO by car before my 17 hour flight to India. How do you think a train will help me there soygirl?
Love it when people argue that it takes 45 minutes to fly from Y to X. 45 minutes is roughly the time your plane is airborne. The whole process takes 3-5 hours door to door.
Once I flew to a city that's about 6 hours away by car. Work was paying for it, and I figured it would be easier and less stressful to fly than to drive. A coworker drove instead. He left 2 hours after I left for the airport. After my plane arrived they were cleaning it out and one of the attendants hit his head and had to go to the hospital for stitches. I scrambled and was able to get on to another flight, although it took me about 2 hours into the opposite direction, where I then had to sprint from one end of the airport to the other. When I finally landed in my destination city my coworker had been there for over an hour. There was nothing easier or less stressful about that day.
That said, that was my worst experience flying, usually it is very easy - especially if I'm traveling by myself.
It means your driving coworker was thinking about you the entire time while driving and wishing you went on the ride with them :)
I had a US colleague stay with me in Ireland for a week and he was asking if it was possible to catch a train to England. It's amazing the geographic ignorance of some people and Americans seem to be especially afflicted. Maybe it's because the USA is so big, large cities so far apart, and public transport so terrible it doesn't occur to them that Europe is not the same.
I'm from Australia and wouldn't have been able to confidently say there wasn't a tunnel between Ireland and England. There are long tunnels in a few places and one there wouldn't be too surprising to me
You live in a world with the chunnel. The odds that a similar passage between islands formerly of the same empire is not so remote.
Maybe. On one hand, I'm inclined to agree, but I also don't know how many of these sorts of tunnels exist. There's one connecting mainland Japan with Hokkaido too.
Edit: The Wikipedia page lists oodles of underwater tunnels, but most are well below 15 km long, with the channel tunnel at 50.4 km.
I actually think that's a fair question, the distance between Ireland and Scotland is less than the English channel and that can be crossed by rail. If I were to travel to Japan or some other place that I don't know, then I'd assume that some of the islands are connected by rail and some aren't, so in a conversation it would be natural for me to ask the same question: can I go there by rail?
To be fair, these exist not in Ireland but in other places they do.
In their defense, I have no idea what the capital of Kentucky or Virginia is :/
PS: I don't know it for most states 🙃 actually, I didn't know California's, New York's or Illinois'...this is starting to look like a conspiracy to make your largest city not the capital, lol
Kentucky is Frankfort. Yes its spelled differently from Germany's one.
California is Sacramento, New York is Albany, and every once in a while the capital is the biggest or most important city like seriously, Philadelphia was nearly the nation's capital but fumbled even being the state capital.
Oh and ohio is fun here because Columbus has slowly grown to be the biggest city in ohio. Cleveland and Cincinnati are more historically significant while Columbus was just a big city focused on the university and business. But as the great lakes manufacturing and ohio River manufacturing fell by the wayside and Columbus kept growing it beat them out.
and yes it's spelled differently from Germanys one
That's because it's not named after the German one. It's named after "Frank's Ford" which is part of a creek in the area.
Some people say it's because there is a surprisingly large German population in the area, but it was already called Frankfort by the late 1700s when the large influx of German immigrants really started.
Who really knows haha
As an American, neither do i. I was taught them but unlike STEM courses i would never use that knowledge in my adult life.
Meanwhile i knew there wasn't a tunnel between IE/UK.
Some of us are more worldly i guess...
If it wasn't for NI being somehow behind the times compared to both England and Ireland, there would be a chunnel between them.
I doubt it. The enormous cost of the chunnel made economic, as well as symbolic and political sense. Between ireland and UK it wouldn't.
Come to think about it, maybe now it should be closed
You can go from Paris to Stuttgart in less 3h 30min by train. No customs, no TSA, downtown to downtown.
Freiburg to Paris in about 3h, just went last weekend.
In the US people will argue it's quicker to fly or drive than take the train then show up 2 hours early to be sure to make it through check-in and TSA security to be sure to make their flight on time. Then waste another hour waiting for luggage
One of the factors is that the US is surprisingly huge. It takes EU tourists by surprise that a quick jaunt from NYC to visit their friend in Chicago is several days by road (unless you drive like an American roadtripper for fourteen hours a day) moreover, there's just huge tracks of land featuring not-too-exciting vistas (unless you plan your road trip to feature pretty routes, in which case multiply the distance by 1.3), so for the short while that airlines were regulated and we weren't worried (yet) about the air-travel carbon footprint (Huge. Enormous. Colossal.) it made sense to fly everywhere in the US.
Now that it's insanely expensive and inconvenient to fly, and we shouldn't be doing it, it's time for the US to build HSR for realsies, if the automotive / fossil fuel industrial complex will let us.
The US isn't as huge as you seem to believe (or Europe not as small). Europe is not as square, so its land area is much smaller, but the distances are comparable.
A trip from Hamburg to Vienna is not that much shorter than a trip from NYC to Chicago, but it's easily done by train in Europe: Board the NJ491 at 8pm in Hamburg central station (in the city centre, no need to be there more than a few minutes before boarding), have a good nights sleep, get your breakfast served at your bed (in the comfort category), take a shower and arrive well rested in Vienna (city center, no need to wait for your luggage) at 10am the next day.
Admittedly, a lot of people do fly from Hamburg to Vienna as well, as it can be cheaper than the train due to tax exemptions for the airlines (not everything is perfect in Europe), or they just don't like sleeping in a train, but these trains are usually well utilised.
EDIT: The link to truesize doesn't seem to work correctly, here's what I meant to show: 
Now that it's insanely expensive and inconvenient to fly, and we shouldn't be doing it, it's time for the US to build HSR for realsies, if the automotive / fossil fuel industrial complex will let us.
I took an Amtrak from Quebec to Washington DC. The entire process was amazing. Hung out at the train station. Walked around on the train. Sat in massive ass seats. The bathroom was the size of a new York apartment. No TSA, metal detectors, overpriced food and drinks, getting blown up with ads.
Greyhound is unfortunately the next best thing if you don't live in a major city.
I feel so much frustration that driving and flying are the primary ways it travel in the US.
This comment reminds me a meme about someone's European family visiting them in Vancouver, BC. The family decided that they wanted to go to Toronto for the weekend.
It's 45 hour drive between Vancouver and Toronto if you want to stay in one country. 41 hours if you drive through the States. It's almost 4 days by train.
I've been in Germany two years and gone to France three times by train.
I honestly don't think people appreciate public transit enough. Trains are the fucking bomb and if people could make trains and trams and buses a priority I think the world would be a remarkably more fun and enjoyable experience.
Vote for the political parties, even at and especially the local level, that want to put more money into public infrastructure focused around public transit. Cars and planes have their places, but they should never be the priority when city planning and a strong country is one connected by high speed rail and convenient, reliable public transit.
Thats like 700km so in a proper high speed train it would be 3h or less from station to station. Thats probably faster than flying if you include all the boarding and travel to the airport.
I could walk from Germany to France in about 30 mins.
I meant Toronto to NYC is 700km
Germany and France share a border so yeah its 0 seconds if you are standing on the border and for one of the longest distances from Berlin to Strasbourg for example its 6h by train.
45 minutes to fly, but god help you if you check luggage, might as well be all day at that point.
Luggage doesn't matter.
Gotta leave the house 2 hours before the 2 hours before your flight. Then board, Then fly. Then disembark.
If flight is noon, you leave the house at 8 to be at the airport for 10. Then security theatre (remove your shoes, you're going to the LaNd Of TeH FrEe!!!).
If you're lucky, you're hailing a cab at JFK at 1:30pm.
That's your "45 minute flight". 6 hours, if you're lucky.
I've only ever travelled to Germany from France via train. I wouldn't bother flying,that's waaay to much of an effort
The high speed Paris to Berlin train just started in December:
There are about 25 trains per day on the route, but I guess according to this American they're all empty?
I love the multiple layers to it. Obviously European travel is not what he believes it to be, but neither is American airplane travel, and he must know that, but he's so desperate to pretend otherwise.