But this fellah seemed to have that part figured out: Bike to the train station, and take the bike on the train. That part seems straight-forward. The train stations were near-enough to where they wanted to start, and near-enough to where they wanted to be.
The problems they lament seem to revolve chiefly around the specifics of taking the bike on a train, and the limited schedule of the train, and the lack of adhesion to that schedule.
Those problems wouldn't be improved if the vastness of the US were reduced, would they?
Where I live in the Netherlands the train quite literally stops in front of my door, as in my building that is ~50 meters from the train station where I can take a train every 10 minutes (15 on weekends) to any other city in the country, and even outside the country to Germany or France.
I'm even planning a Eurotrip by train this summer with some mates, I'd say the distances here are comparable to get from NL to PL for example.
And besides, how is it that the US is "too wide" for trains to work, but apparently building an equivalent highway system is perfectly possible? China is also a massive country, yet they have incredible passenger train options to get cross country.
A self-driving car can stop 2 meters outside your house on an arbitrary schedule. That's going to be the competition with trains in the very near future.
Not sure what you mean by the last bit - the US already has that highway system, and the local roads serving the last mile, because that last mile infrastructure already has to exist to get from public transit to your house.
China doesn't have the exact same problem because so much of the country lives in dense wall-to-wall housing, which sucks no matter how you spin it if you like having any kind of space to yourself.
> A self-driving car can stop 2 meters outside your house on an arbitrary schedule.
No it can't, because cars aren't allowed on the streets around my house, with the exception of emergency vehicles and logistical vehicles like moving or delivery vans. The closest spot where a taxi could stop to drop me off is a lot further than where the bus or trains are. The closest parking space is actually a good 200-300m away from my door, reserved for residents so also always full, whereas I have a bus stop literally in front of my door and a train station 20 steps from it. I can also rent a bicycle 24/7 from the train station if all other modes of transport fail me (and I didn't have access to my bike for whatever reason).
Same in the center of the city, you cannot get to many places by car. A deliberate choice, for example when we dug out the hideous polluting highway and replaced it with a canal instead (which funnily enough was a canal in the first place before they made it into a highway). Utrecht is a perfect example of gov't realizing a mistake it made with car-centric design, doubling back and correcting it in a way that increases the QoL of every single resident of Utrecht.
This isn't even to say that the Netherlands is some kind of dystopia for drivers, if anything drivers here tend to be happier since they don't need to contend with a bunch of other people on the road, and more than half the country drives anyways.
> Not sure what you mean by the last bit - the US already has that highway system, and the local roads serving the last mile, because that last mile infrastructure already has to exist to get from public transit to your house.
My point was that building out the highway system was a deliberate policy choice made in lieu of a strong passenger rail/public transport network. Had they focused on making passenger rail more viable, then we'd be talking about the opposite world here, where building highly space-inefficient and expensive highways would be a ludicrous proposition.
> China doesn't have the exact same problem because so much of the country lives in dense wall-to-wall housing, which sucks no matter how you spin it if you like having any kind of space to yourself.
We're talking about cross-country lines here, if anything it's even more absurd that the Chinese can have such a strong rail network when the majority of the country has no use for the lines serving the far-west of the country where there aren't that many people. Whether the cities are shit to live in or not is a separate discussion altogether.
The Brightline in Florida exists, as does the Acela on the East Coast. These things are entirely possible in the US, we just don't seem to want them enough.
Suppose in some hypothetical future, we can take the (expensive) train to our destination in Somewhere, USA, and it drops us off.
So there we are, at a train station in Somewhere, USA.
What happens next? A bus? Light rail? Uber/Lyft/taxi? A friend who has time to show up? Renting a car? What's our next move? (Lots of destinations don't have much for local public transport.)
For contrast: When I drive myself to Somewhere, I've still got my car to use after I get there. I can go anywhere I want to go, at any time I choose to do so, and I can bring as much stuff and as many people as suits me without much additional cost.
I don't have to wait around for a train. I don't have to deal with checking luggage, or retrieving luggage. I can just pop into town -- with my car -- and set forth to do whatever I want. The bags can ride along with me until I get to wherever it is that I'm crashing for the night and until then, they don't present any particular burden at all.
I might have been better-rested if I took the hypothetical train, but getting dropped off at a train station isn't a very complete solution.
Those places are comfortable with subpar transit conditions. There's nothing actually individually desirable about taking the train compared to having a private car take you directly between points A and B, people just seem to shy away from admitting that in favor of pro-social signaling in support of public transit.
Ah yeah, the subpar conditions of ... not being dependent on the car for 100% of your life. The subpar conditions of ... not having to spend hours driving on the highway. The subpar conditions of ... having a choice.
I wonder if there are psychological studies on why Americans en masse cannot even perceive the idea of there being other transportation options than cars and (to a lesser extent) planes. Even though in the rare cases when someone manages to provide a well-planned alternative Americans do use it, see Northeast Corridor (2200 trains a day, 15 million passengers a year, 14% of intercity traffic, replacing most air travel between some of the cities).
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Note: it's both funny and sad reading about the state of anything in the US that keeps pretending it's not a third-world country.
For example, Empire Corridor, passenger rail corridor in New York State running between Penn Station in New York and Niagara Falls: "In the 1890s, the Empire State Express between New York City and Buffalo was about 1 hour faster than Amtrak's service in 2013." (Wikipedia)
This is in a thread about self-driving cars - spending hours on a highway vs a train makes no difference to me if I'm not steering, except that I'm not packed in with the public, which I don't want.
I wonder if there are psychological studies on why non-Americans cannot perceive why trains are genuinely an undesirable solution in the US looking forward in 2026. America could have trains if it wanted to; we don't because they aren't actually a forward-looking solution to transit in the US given all other constraints, such as having spacious homes instead of being packed in like sardines like all the "first-world" examples of public mass transit.
I think that a lot of it isn't country-specific at all. People often just believe that the way they do things is the best way to do those things.
That's not usually a problem in and of itself. A person can believe that a Kosher diet is best and that's OK. It's also OK when a person believes that bacon cheeseburgers are a necessary spice of life.
They can find joy in being spread out over an expansive rural property, with room for some chickens and a whole fleet of cars and to serve dinner to 34 guests on a holiday. A person can also appreciate the rote efficiency of a sleep tube apartment and spend their waking hours not in their own space, but in spaces that are shared with everyone.
It's part of the human condition to have strong opinions. It's often OK that these opinions aren't compatible with eachother. It's good to be tolerant of others' ideas and practices.
It only becomes particularly problematic when folks stop being tolerant and start projecting their opinions onto others. Discourse can devolve pretty quickly when that happens. It can degrade to places well beyond "No true Scotsman" namecalling and invocations of Godwin's law -- whole wars have started over differences of opinion.
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Now, of course, there is are local elements as well. For instance, a person who grew up in Vietnam may have a very different idea of what dinner consists of compared to the ideas of a person who grew up in Guatemala.
Regionalized differences of opinion shows up very often in online discussions because people of cultural different backgrounds get to converse together. It's usually OK. Sometimes, it isn't OK.
A lot of the Web is US-centric, or at least in English. A lot of people in the world speak English as a second language because that's the language that Americans use, so that's what they were taught. The news, worldwide, covers whatever it is the US is doing. And when I went to public school in Ohio [USA], where we were taught over and over again that the US is the very best place on earth and were stand and pledge our allegiance to the flag, and our country, every single morning.
That kind of shit all tends to promote an us-vs-them response on all sides, instead of tolerance and acceptance.
That's not a particularly useful operating mode, but it's what we've got.
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Sometimes, it seems like it's fun to make fun of Americans with their big cars and their dumb flimsy houses made of sticks, paper, and stone dust, with the worst electrical plugs that carry the most uselessly-low voltage. (Those Yanks can't even figure out how to build a proper kettle! Look at them, all driving to Wal-Mart instead of just walking to the shops! Wasting away on the freeway commute when they could be enjoying a nice Schnitzel on the train!)
And since so much of the web is US-centric, it's easy to imagine that people sometimes find themselves surrounded by Americans that they variously find to be unsavory. And if that happens, then it may be the case that they don't like that very much.
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But I don't pop in over to European- and Asian-centric online forums much. When I do, then I don't spend any time at all making fun of their cultural or societal differences.
In fact, I avoid starting that kind of confrontation at every cost. I avoid this simply because I'm not a complete piece of shit.
I guess you've never ridden on the Shinkansen or anywhere in Switzerland. I'd much rather take those trains than do the equivalent drives, especially if I'm the one behind the wheel.
In this thread I'm assuming I'm not behind the wheel. I don't own a car and I don't like driving, I take taxis and rideshare everywhere that a plane can't.
> What happens next? A bus? Light rail? Uber/Lyft/taxi? A friend who has time to show up? Renting a car? What's our next move? (Lots of destinations don't have much for local public transport.)
You're saying all this as if this exact scenario isn't solved in plenty of places across the world? You take the bus or tram or metro or cycle or just walk if it's close enough. If the city is actually built with public transport in mind, not just a single bus line that runs every 2 hours bolted on as an afterthought, those options can be easier and faster than finding a parking spot, unless you feel entitled to park your vehicle anywhere you please to the detriment of everyone who isn't you.
Where I live in the Netherlands it's faster to bike most places than driving, because we don't solely cater to drivers and don't devote half the city to letting people store their cars. Even up North in the villages you can still get around by bike, since cycling lanes are dead cheap to build and maintain and can go down in the middle of a swamp if you needed to.
> When I drive myself to Somewhere, I've still got my car to use after I get there.
Sure, and when I cycle to Somewhere, I've still got my bike. Same logic, except I can lock it to a post and forget about it rather than needing to find a dedicated slab of real estate specifically reserved for my vehicle's existence. And if I took the train, I can rent a bike when I get there, which is a thing that exists in basically every city that actually invested in making it work.
> I can go anywhere I want to go, at any time I choose
That only holds true because decades of car-centric design have made it so. In the Netherlands you couldn't just go anywhere you wanted by car, because there are plenty of streets and whole areas where cars flat out aren't allowed, because we actually prioritize the people who have to live with those infrastructural choices over random passersby who don't want to be "inconvenienced" by having to walk 5 minutes or share the road with someone who isn't also in a car.
If the US bothered to build out the infrastructure, you could go anywhere you wanted to go via public transport as well.
What happens in your scenario if you can't find parking anywhere near your destination and the only option is lugging your bags along roads that weren't built for pedestrians? I know I've been in similar situations in the past where I had to drive around for fucking ages trying to find a single spot, I definitely would've preferred walking than that whole circus.
> I might have been better-rested if I took the hypothetical train, but getting dropped off at a train station isn't a very complete solution.
Right, in a country that gutted its public transit and zoned everything to be car-dependent, a train station by itself isn't a complete solution. That's a policy failure, not an argument against trains.
> If the US bothered to build out the infrastructure, you could go anywhere you wanted to go via public transport as well.
Public transit != mass transit. There's no reason that self-driving vehicle fleets can't be municipally subsidized and provide a dramatically better private experience than any mass transit anywhere in the world, and we already have the infrastructure for it.
See above comment, why does the number of vehicles matter? I've left stadium events via taxi and ride-share, often there is a queueing area where cars pull up, you get in and leave. It's like a train that takes you home.
Let's say you go to a concert or similar event where there's potentially thousands of people leaving at the same time. How many robotaxis do you need to carry the same amount of people as a single train carriage is capable of carrying? 200? 300? What about what an entire train, with multiple carriages, could carry?
Also why on earth would I want the gov't paying fucking Google for their robotaxis, rather than having them put that money into public transport which serves everyone else and not just the pockets of some silicone valley douchebags?
Sure, 200 or 300, why not? I've been to events of this size and left them in taxis or rideshare. Automatic demand allocation + wage surging systems at companies like Uber funnel drivers to the events and people leave. Presumably that allocation only gets smarter when the cars all drive themselves. Trains would still have the last mile problem here, the main difference would be spacing out the congestion potentially to different remote hubs.
This misses a couple things:
- As an individual going between destinations, my mind is on my travel and not focused on the externalities of how optimal or efficient the transport is for other people. The fact that a train can fit more people is a downside, because being packed in with the public while trying to travel is not actually desirable. This is why even trains charge for expensive private rooms.
- Whether a private company or Google provides it is immaterial to this as well: I'm not chasing after Google trying to pay them, it is just literally more desirable to travel alone and privately whoever is providing it. I have no problem if the government wants to build its own robotaxi fleet, maybe it'd be better, maybe worse, let God sort them out. I'd use the one that has better service and fits my budget.
Seemingly very rare that anyone argues for public transit expansion based on any of the following:
- They like being in a box with strangers for a long duration, where bad behavior of just one individual becomes stressful and inescapable. You can increase funding for social services to reduce the number of homeless people responsible for this disruption, but you can't stop strangers from farting.
- They prefer the lesser convenience of having to plan 3+ legs of a trip instead of 1, e.g. having to walk to/from a transit station at both ends of the track.
Trains do some things better that matter to me as a rider: they are faster. They have food service and bathrooms. But "look how packed in we could be" is not an argument that's going to convince anyone who has a choice.
Because this creates a huge backlog and queues of cars. Even at 4 people per car a moderate 16k-person event needs 4 000 trips from the stadium in a short time.
Also because this creates a huge pressure on the system. Those 4k trips will starve the system in other places because companies won't just have a few thousand idle cars just laying around in case of events. Welcome to surge pricing.
BTW a similar pressure exists at peak hours when everyone leaves for work, or from work. Two trains carrying 2000 people with 15 minute intervals will need 500 cars minimum (4 people per car) for the same trip in the same direction.
2000 employees at Spotify office in Stockholm will need 500 cars minimum to take them home. In the center of the city. When other offices also leave work for home. Lol.
(In Stockholm subway carries 1.3 million passengers a day. Good luck replacing this to 1-4-people per car)
> Seemingly very rare that anyone argues for public transit expansion based on any of the following:
<lists imaginary reasons no one has or argues for when talking about public transit>
- Those events do happen today exactly as described and nobody dies.
- I'm not sure why those trips would starve the system, or why companies would not have idle cars lying around "in case of events". Where there is space for events to happen, they happen all the time. Surge pricing solves immediate high demand, over a longer window there's no reason to believe that companies would essentially leave money on the table by not having a larger fleet, especially if that fleet can be trivially re-allocated automatically over areas much larger than a single city, or state.
- In cities I've lived in, people don't just leave work exactly at 5pm like robots and immediately congest the roadways.
- This is a parallel concern, but why is a company like Spotify of all things not fully remote? Why do any of those employees need to bombard transit at all?
- Buses are also cars that don't require additional infrastructure to carry more people
> <lists imaginary reasons no one has or argues for when talking about public transit>
My point was that nobody ever argues those things because they're the worst parts of public mass transit, and they are among the most self-evident justifications for private transit. Instead it has to be "The US can't fathom" and other broad strokes like that because the idea that it can and simply rejects it is harder to accept.
> - Those events do happen today exactly as described and nobody dies.
Ah yes, the great counterargument of "nobody dies".
> I'm not sure why those trips would starve the system,
"I'm not sure why huge surge in demand in one part of the system would not starve other parts of the system."
> or why companies would not have idle cars lying around "in case of events".
Because companies are not in the business of having huge fleets of expensive hardware just sitting in extra rented garage space just for these occasions.
> over a longer window there's no reason to believe that companies would essentially leave money on the table by not having a larger fleet,
Why would they care when there's no public transportation to speak of, and all are stuck with their fleets of cars, as you so desire?
> - In cities I've lived in, people don't just leave work exactly at 5pm like robots and immediately congest the roadways.
That's why it's called peak hour, not peak millisecond. Just one more lane, and a a few hundred thousand cars on the road should fix all problems.
> This is a parallel concern, but why is a company like Spotify of all things not fully remote?
This is an irrelevant concern because Spotify was just an example of a company having an office in the center of the city. One of hundreds of such companies, with thousands of people.
> Buses are also cars that don't require additional infrastructure to carry more people
Keywords: busses, more people.
> My point was that nobody ever argues those things because they're the worst parts of public mass transit
You either argue for busses, as above, or complain about "oh my god I need to sit with some strangers in the same place" and "oh my gid it's inconvenient to plan a trip with more than one stop".
Yes, that's about the extent of the arguments. And yes, that's why it's invariably Americans who cannot even begin to conceive other modes of transportation.
