If years of trolley problems have taught me anything, it's that you can still kill all the pedestrians you want with your train as long as you make the right choices.
I love the idea of trains, have always loved trains when I was younger, and until very recently had never been on one. My brother purchased tickets for me and my boyfriend to go visit him and so I was very excited to finally get on the train. The thing i didnt really think about was the fact that I get car sick in SUVs and trucks if im not driving because of the softness of the suspension and body roll. The train is a bit bouncy. The trip down was me sleeping for like 30 mins or so, getting up to throw up in the bathroom, repeat for about 19 hours. I felt terribly nauseous and had migrane the entire time.
The trip back I was prepared, I had those anti-car sock glasses and some dramamine, I took it, fell asleep for about 8 hours. Woke up and was okay interms of not feeling sick or anything. But then the train stopped, not at a station, in the middle of a field. They told us there was some freight cargo on the line ahead and we had to wait for a moment. We were there for three hours. The lady next to us had a ticket for a different train to get on after this one, and it was for two hours after our scheduled arrival time. Well she missed it because we arrived 3 hours late.
I know train infustructure would help, and I've always been a proponent of better public transport networks...but now I hate the train 😟. I would rather drive.
There is something to be said for the convenience of cars to be able to start driving in your own time, but for every story like that there is another with someone stuck in traffic for 3 hours because of a major accident on the highway.
That being the case, cars are still going to have their niche for situations where Grandma lives far away from any major city and the closest train station is a 3 hour bus ride away, running twice daily at 6am and 4pm. Can't say I am sympathetic to the FuckCars crowd in that regard, nor do I think we should be dismissive of efforts to make driving more environmentally friendly just because trains are better.
The current situation with trains is shit because we as a country have allowed it to deteriorate.
Waiting 3 hours for a freight train is one such example. The majority of rail lines are owned by freight companies, so they give their own trails priority over passenger trains. That shit is unacceptable.
my grandma is too close for a train but too far for a walk, perfect for a bike if we didnt have a left turn onto 55mph highway with no sidewalks as our only route to her
give me fucking bike lanes i hate being trapped in this house because of bad infrastructure, at least a sidewalk to seperate me from traffic
Bike lanes tend to be really dangerous. Better to bike with traffic on side streets and on busy streets you really want a separated bike path rather than a shared road.
Fast trains so that you can be restricted in exactly when you can visit and still pay for it. And then have to walk the rest of the distance from the train station to her house. There is so many flaws people just failrefuse to see.
Good? For people without mobility restrictions having a short walk as part of traveling or commuting is a good thing. And for everything longer than a few minutes there should be bus, tram and light rail access.
New York City tried that and we ended up with a subway full of crack addicts, homelessness, public nudity, etc. Trains should either be for a long trip but only once in a while or a last resort in a large city.
Cars in big cities are horrible. Terribly inefficient, requiring orders of magnitude more infrastructure, killing air quality and pedestrians alike, and leading to even more suburban sprawl. Cars are not compatible with high population density.
How are they inefficient or at least less inefficient than other solutions? That infrastructure is already there, unlike others. And air quality is more affected by other things than cars.
I visited NYC a while back. The subway impressed me. People call it dirty and say it is full of crackheads. Despite this, it was clean and orderly during my visit.
Cars are even more restricted in travel time. Unlike trains, which typically come multiple times an hour, car travel has to be planned around rush hour and gridlock.
Honestly, I don’t even know how we can be debating this. Car dependence is a dead end. Cars don’t scale because a linear increase in drivers requires a non-linear increase in surface area. Car dependence makes it impossible to meet our climate goals. These catastrophic failures are so much worse than needing to walk a few blocks. There are so many flaws that car people just failrefuse to see.
That's a problem with the infrastructure and transit policy, not the technology. I can't afford a car, where I'm at I'm able to take a train to cities nearby, I can take a free shuttle to the train station or bike because it's not very far. In the past in the US at least there were more train and tram routes, when cars because more prevalent cities stopped developing the infrastructure, but if done properly it can be superior to driving.
Even the Netherlands or Japan have many places where only travel by car makes sense. We will always need some cars. Maybe your situation is like that. But your personal situation doesn’t dictate whether or not it makes sense for society to build a lot more trains, which is what we’re talking about.
Also, describing how much less convenient trains are for you presently than driving is kind of missing the point. Everyone already agrees that train lines don’t exist to service many places. We’re not talking about what exists now, but how things should change.
The fact that cars mathematically cannot scale with population is “so very minor”? Or that cars are the most expensive form of transportation? Or that cars require tons of parking and wide roads that lead to inefficient use of land, contributing to a housing crisis and ugly sprawl?
So what is a “major” problem? Ah right, walking a few blocks.
Cars scale with the population very well. Rural and small cities have smaller roads and better infrastructure for traveling short distances while still being able to be used for long distance. The housing crisis goes a lot deeper than people think, if cars are contributing, then not much.
Ah right because America is a few blocks long. And here I thought the American would be bad at geography (I don't know a single thing about geography).
No urban designer or transportation expert thinks that cars scale with population. Talking about rural and small cities is the opposite of scaling with population. Car dependent big cities like LA or Houston have hellish traffic.
At least have a cursory look at the link I posted in my last comment. Cars play a huge role in bad land use. This is why they have an enormous effect on housing supply.
You seem to be lost. You made the point that walking from a train station to your final destination was some major problem. I’m not even sure what point you think your last paragraph is responding to. Yes America is bigger than a few blocks. So is Europe and China. So what?
I know right, a plane ride will take me exactly to her house! What kind of logic is this? Can you recommend a method to travel across the US to visit my grandma that wouldn't require me paying or being restricted in where I could go? That is how modern travel works in every form.
Also anyway when I take the train I could take a bike with me and bike the rest of the way, or in my city there is a free shuttle from the train station to the center of downtown, with buses every direction from there, any many bigger cities have light-rails or subways that connect from train stations. And it's healthy to walk, people have walked for thousands of years.
I mentioned in another comment, I'm talking about visiting my grandma who lives on the opposite coast, like once a year or less, it's not cheap to drive that far. And for a trip that would be better to drive than fly I'd rather take a train, it's more pleasant and comfortable, they usually have bars and food served, I don't have to worry about parking or traffic and I could rent a car there if I need one.
It’s pretty obvious that a single train full of passengers is more energy efficient than the same number of people driving a bunch of individual 4000 lb SUVs.
