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by throwawaynay 1582 days ago
That doesn't change the fact that trains and public transportation in the US are crap.

In the US, can you travel +1000km for next to nothing at +300km/h in an environmentally friendly way?(in most cases you can arrive up to 5 minutes before the train leaves btw, no waiting)

It's easier to travel through Europe than through the US and we're like 40 different countries....
3 comments
ac29 1582 days ago
> In the US, can you travel +1000km for next to nothing at +300km/h in an environmentally friendly way?

No, but the way that is worded essentially the only form of travel that meets those criteria is high speed electric rail in a country with little to no fossil fuel usage in the electric grid. For various reasons, passenger rail isnt as viable in the US as Europe (population density, suburban sprawl, etc).

You absolutely can travel >1000km at >300km/h for next to nothing in the US though, since air travel is quite inexpensive.

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dixie_land 1582 days ago
and we have 50 states?
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giardini 1582 days ago
throwawaynay says >"It's easier to travel through Europe than through the US and we're like 40 different countries...."

Certainly public transportation in USA lags Europe but there's no need to overstate the case. <sarcasm>It only took two world wars and innumerable smaller wars before that to get "Europe" to the point where it has "300km/h" trains.</sarcasm>

BTW I question the "300km/h" number: Only a few trains in Europe travel at that speed. Most trains in Europe are 10X slower. Many I could outrun on foot and many more on a bike.

As for "environmentally friendly" I remember when many European trains' toilets dumped fecal matter directly onto the space between the tracks (or do they still?). I'm still careful walking around railroad yards in Europe: one stumble and I could scratch my leg and catch God-knows-what from a 1970s-era Algerian turd dropped on the rails. "Railroad system as waste processing facility" comes to mind as a topic.

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orhmeh09 1582 days ago
A little bit of poo like that isn’t going to hurt the environment to a degree at all comparable to the massive damage done by car pollution and tearing down forests and obliterating animal migration routes.
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