cross-posted from: https://lemmy.skoops.social/post/727
crossposted: https://lemmy.skoops.social/post/665
Oh boy…
Utterly depressing how this planet is predominantly populated by absolute morons with all the zeal and confidence of the best among us.
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”
- Greg, probably
Greg is a fucking moron, plain and simple.
he’s on twatter, so that’s a given.
I just took the train from Switzerland to Italy. Can confirm, people do it.
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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 :)
Ah, but only for normal plebs like you and me. If you fly private, you just show up at the hangar half an hour before takeoff and walk right in. TSA and waiting in the terminal are for peasants.
Wouldn’t a private plane start taking off as soon as you arrive? Assuming the runway is free.
If you have a private airport yes!
You don’t?
This why I drive anything less than 2500 miles. That’s two days of driving and I get to see the country. Flying would take a whole day anyway, and then I’d have to get a rental car on the other end anyway. Plus it’s difficult to find a decent lifted 4wd rental, and I usually travel to spend time in the mountains on unimproved roads and hiking and camping. Probably similar carbon footprint to flying anyway.
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 current political climate, border control is unfortunate becoming much more common. I had the border policy empty our bus and search everyone with dogs and half of us had to open our bags.
On my vacation in Germany we were not once asked on the train for our passports. We are white. The police would demand every non-white persons’ “visa” and most of the time the questioned individual would produce a German ID or an ID from another EU member state.
It was a sad sight.
Couple of years ago only they would just check everyone’s id in a rather respectful way. Might depend on the border being crossed?
We took the trains from Germany to the Czech Republic and back. Then from Germany to Austria and back. Finally we went to France.
I recall some checks on regional trains as well, including in Bavaria and I want to say around Berlin but I can’t remember where exactly.
Not once were we asked though, all checks were selective and clearly biased
Pretty much. And it you look latino… You’ll be lucky if you don’t get interrogated or searched as I heard from close friends…
Well there’s is some racism due to the begger problem in the trains, but they’re also just assholes
TGV > ICE
I stopped counting how many times the ICE broke down on this route. Of course I also had delays when using the TGV but not due to the train itself. Also the seats in the ICE are not comfortable at all.
DB is just fucked tbh, it needs serious reformulating.
The DB board: oh, you mean privatising more?
They see it working in Japan, but I suspect that is because it’s in Japan. Britain is gonna find out soon I guess.
The ICE restaurant car always cures the delay blues, at least for me :)
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.
That doesn’t happen anywhere. Thanks to all stops and what not a german high speed train goes like 100kmh in averge… checkout cologne- berlin
Tokyo > Kyoto is like 475km and takes 2h so its just a matter of will and investment. It even runs every 30 minutes during the day.
Every 30 minutes? Nope. More like every 6 minutes.
Hehe 4sure, everyone knows the german train system is crap. A sad decline
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.
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
Don’t forget the 45m-1hr travel time to and from airports.
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I was so pissed that the only affordable option to get to Bushwick from the airport was a shitty bus that ran late and was packed.
BUILD A TRAIN TO YOUR GODDAMN INTERNATIONAL TRANSIT HUBS
Only a car take me ro point A to point B
Only if you mean that point B is the gigantic parking lot where you still have to walk 15 minutes to the Walmart.
Even without the check-in and security it is typically faster to fly (or drive) the places people typically go on a plane in the US.
The problem is that the railways are prioritized for freight traffic first, so the commuter train traffic takes a looooong time. My understanding is the freight movement by train is better in the US whereas the commuter train movement is better in Europe.
For example, I live in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. To travel to Chicago by different methods is:
- By car: ~6 hours travel time
- By train: ~9 hours travel time
- By plane: ~1.5 hours flight time, call it 4 hours total travel time
The problem is that the railways are prioritized for freight traffic first
This is de facto true. But, the law is that passenger traffic gets priority. It’s just not enforced because the companies have more power than the government is willing to spend on this issue.
Thanks for calling this out. I had forgotten about that bit.
It would be true. Trains are next to non-existent in the US.
I live near Acela, which is not high speed, not cheap, and does not have enough capacity but is also the only part of the US with convenient intercity rail. I would never fly or drive when I can take this train, but outside of Acela ……
Yeah, a lot of people don’t realize that there are major cities in the US without passenger trains. Not just lacking inter-city rail, trams, etc., but literally no train stations for people.
Columbus, Ohio has a metro area of 2.1mill people. And if they want to take the train to NYC, they first have to take a three hour bus ride to Cincinnati. As they tore down their last passenger train station over forty years ago.
a three hour bus ride to Cincinnati
I was about to call you out for this, until I remembered the six hour bus rides I used to have to take from Columbus to Akron when I was in college (less than two hours by car, natch).
And that’s just the people who live nearby. For the 1mill people who live outside the city proper, there’s probably another hour or two of travel and wait before the bus sets off.
You can thank John Kasich for that. IIRC DeWine’s admin is doing a feasibility study of doing the “Three C” route Obama tried to fund
Does Cincinnati still have its one train a day at 2am or some other ungodly hour? Or are they on the “three trains a week” schedule?
I think it’s daily now but yes, still at like 3am. Used to be a few times a week.
I’m inside the 275 loop in Cincinnati but can’t get downtown without getting a ride in a car to a bus station. At that point, might as well just use the car to get downtown. Or to wherever else I’m going. Train travel is WAY too slow in the US. I’ve never had a vacation longer than a week, I’d barely be arriving at anywhere interesting and I would already be due back at work.
Lol I used to take Amtrak back and forth between Philly and DC. Once I decided to check out if an Acela ticket would be worth it - it was like three times the price and got there a whopping 10 minutes sooner.
The Acela is worth it going to NYC and further north. Every town in Connecticut apparently still has an Amtrak stop (which is cool, but goddamn). Compare the travel times of the Acela and Amtrak between DC and Boston.
Yeah, I’ve been using trains for travel in the northeast lately.
It’s less travel time, there’s no ridiculous security theater, and I don’t get these nickel and dime charges for checked bags.
I did enjoy taking Amtrak between Philly and DC a few years ago - as long it wasn’t raining, that is.
I’m fairly resilient to uncomfortable travel unless it’s actively painful like ear popping sometimes, so I usually just choose on price and speed most of the time.
I’m sure the US will make train travel the same grueling experience as they made air travel
Yeah I took the train from Chicago to Springfield, and was shocked that I had to go through security and also present the same credit card that I used to buy the ticket. In Europe I literally just get on the train most times…
Not to mention you’re lucky if you don’t have to take a connecting flight to get where you’re going, which adds a few more hours at least. But at least it gives you more opportunities to eat that delicious, healthy and inexpensive airport food!
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.
Don’t forget that train stations tend to be in the city centre while the airport is 30-60 minutes outside in a field somewhere, so travel time is much reduced.
Putting transit time to the airport is a bit unfair. Depends on how far you live from the airport.
Airports are almost never in the city center.
Train stations are in the city center, plus in Europe they’re always connected to the rest of the public transportation network, which generally means the subway.
If you live within the urban area getting to the train station is invariably a shorter trip, if you live outside it depends if you’re lucky enough to live nearest the side of the city were the airport is or not.
My own experience when living in London before Brexit is that for example to go to Paris, even when I lived just outside the Greater London area and on the side of the city with an airport (London Stansead), door-to-door going to Paris by flying didn’t end up being any faster than taking the Eurostar train from St. Pancreas and even back then you had to go through passport control for the train because the UK was never in the Schengen Area so taking the train didn’t shave of that time.
Part of the problem is that peripheral airports aren’t anywhere as well connected to the public transportation network as city center train stations are, so often the best way to get there is by car, by which point you’re either doing an Uber or Taxi to it (which if you’re outside the city is actually a bit of an expense) or you take your own car but then you have to park it which unless you’re doing a daytrip or such means longer term parking areas, which are further away from the actual boarding gates, and all that shit adds up. And then on the other side you have the exact same problems but in reverse order, so you “pay” the overheads of having to go through an airport twice each way when you fly.
Fair. It depends on the city too many do have transit to the Airport or are working on expanding out that way.
A couple of main airports are indeed well connected to the public transit network (for example Amsterdam Schiphol has a train station under the airport connected to the main train line and it takes about 15 minutes to get to Amsterdam Centraal Station on a regular commuter train).
However I was talking about the peripheral airports, which are at best on a train line which doesn’t have many options (such as London Gatwick) or at far end of a subway line as peripheral airports are the ones that could potentially be faster to use for somebody living outside a main city (which, as I mentioned above, in my own experience was not the case).
Add in 2 hours of traffic between JFK and anywhere you want to get to. Or try your luck with La Guardia!
I actually prefer La Guardia. When I was regularly staying in Brooklyn it was like a 30 minute cab ride from the airport.
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?
trains will help by offering emotional support
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’m not sure that an 8 hour route between these cities with ~900 km between them really makes our case here. I don’t think there’s really a strong argument to be made that taking the train is better than flying between these cities.
International trains in Europe are a weak point of our network, one which we desperately need to improve.
That no one travels from Germany to France is of course entirely false. Frankfurt to Paris would be a far stronger example, coming in at 3 hours 30 minutes for ~500 km.
Germany in general is a bad example for train travel.
Lille Marseille is a 1k km trip and is done in less than 5 hours I believe
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.
I love traveling by train, but in Poland it’s so fucked I have to either drive or waste days just to get somewhere. They just deleted train I could use to get to Warsaw in about 5h, now it’s extra transfer, almost 7 hours, and I have to do it a day earlier, so extra night in a hotel vs 4,5h drive. The same with Berlin, I’d love to just ride a train, it’s less than 4 hours drive vs 6,5 hour train ride (which is fine, I can go with that), price of the single ticket is more than gas for my car, so twice as much for two person – I could live with that, but the transfer time is under 30 minutes, which with notoriously unreliable trains means I would probably miss the connection and lost all my bookings (or just tried to go back with train/bus just to my village (already losing ~80€ for the tickets), and then grab a car.
I’m not familiar with Poland’s political or train situation, but these problems are fixable. Vote for progressives, make it a priority, we need to start taking power back from the inept and corrupt and start fixing problems again.
I’m sorry your trains aren’t good. Everyone deserves good trains.
It’s the other way round. Individualism prevents communism. People drive cars to prevent them from voting for those parties.
Downvoters, do you think all that bad urban planning is incompetence of the specialists while every comment section is filled with geniuses who for some reason are enlightened about public transport but never in the position of power to bring it to life?
It’s the other way round. Individualism prevents communism
Is that supoosed to be a good thing or a bad thing ?
Downvoters, do you think all that bad urban planning is incompetence of the specialists
No, they’re just narrowly constrained as to what they can do eg. They cant knock back a Cosc-Co because there’s no train station so, you end up with a sprawling shit hole as de facto
A good follow on Mastodon who’s an actual traffic expert and teaches it
A good read
https://bookwyrm.social/book/1907724/s/killed-by-a-traffic-engineer
Is that supoosed to be a good thing or a bad thing ?
I don’t judge. I just care about the mechanisms.
No, they’re just narrowly constrained as to what they can do
It’s turtles all the way down. At some point, somebody makes a decision against public transport.
A good follow on Mastodon who’s an actual traffic expert
Thanks for the link. Frustrating content but good.
So… Fucking… American…
I dunno if anyone from the US would use a Canadian city in an example.
I think many americans don’t realize Toronto is in Canada.
'Murican*
I’ve only ever travelled to Germany from France via train. I wouldn’t bother flying,that’s waaay to much of an effort
Ok sure, but that’s going the other way. According to that guy travelling by train to France from Germany isn’t physically possible.
Good point well made
Only if you cannot decide which of the hundreds of passenger trains crossing that border every day to take. IIRC there are over 20 trains a day from Berlin to Paris.
Not to mention a french city named Strasbourg.
No one takes the train from Kehl to Strasbourg. It’s just way too pleasant a stroll to skip that.
