Amazing. Writing this from Berlin, which doesn't have maglev trains, but has phenomenal public transit. It's sad to be going back to the US soon where the infrastructure is so primitive.
Agreed. The current incarnation of the US transportation system is also downright unsustainable from a fuel and carbon standpoint, and will lead to various downfalls if something isn't done about it.
As much as I'm a public transportation advocate (I don't own a car, and refuse car rides if a public transportation option is available for the place I need to get to), it's becoming increasingly more difficult to promote this kind of lifestyle with the advent of Uber and other things that have made private gas-guzzling cars even more convenient than ever before. People also just don't like being told what to do and what not to do, even if what they are doing is going to kill their children.
Given the short-sighted nature of people, in general, the only way this is going to change is if we make public transportation more convenient than an Uber. What we need, very seriously, is to make self-driving cars/minibuses running on renewable energy happen as soon as possible. They can then be rigged up to become a "Public Transportation 2.0" system that gets anyone from A to B while dynamically routing and picking up others in-between and avoiding traffic jams from happening in the first place. It would also put the US back on the world map with a brand new, innovative system that's both environmentally efficient, cheaper to ride, and ultra-convenient at the same time.
Huh. I have pretty much the opposite feelings about Uber as you, as a fellow non-driver and public transit advocate. I think Uber (and also car-sharing services like Zipcar) are great for transit advocates, because they make it much easier for city dwellers to justify not owning a car, to the extent that I suspect that they actually increase transit usage.
Many people in my city (Washington, DC) that own cars don't actually need them most days, but they do have occasional needs that aren't easily doable by transit (Costco trips, driving out to see friends in the less-transit-friendly suburbs, hiking in Shenandoah, etc.) so they keep a car for that purpose. But the problem there is the incentives; the fixed costs of car ownership (a car payment, insurance, scheduled maintenance, etc.) are high, and once you've paid them, the incremental cost per mile of travel is really low (certainly way lower than the per-mile cost of transit), so if you have a car, you have a strong incentive to use it more than you need to. Uber and Zipcar are alternatives that make cars available in the circumstances where you need them and thus could allow these people to ditch their personal cars, and they also flip the cost incentives around: low-to-no fixed costs, and comparatively higher per-mile costs, which means you only use it if you really need it, and use transit most of the time.
Yeah, that's also true. It's very rare that I need to travel to a place that requires a car to get to, so I can spend on Uber in those cases, and that allows me to not own a car.
However, this isn't the way a lot of people use Uber; at least where I live a lot of people use Uber because it's faster and more comfortable than public transportation, not because public transportation doesn't get them where they need to. I've seen business school students (i.e. students who have cash to burn) frequently take Uber between MIT and Harvard for god's sake. There's direct bus and subway service, but it involves a 5 minute walk on both ends, they're too lazy to look it up, and don't want to wait outside.
Many medium to low density counties in the US operate on demand bus services that get anyone from A to B while dynamically routing and picking up others in-between.
They are usually subsidized (the county spends more than the service makes, so taxpayers are paying for the service) but still don't see the ridership it would take to justify higher service levels (these places generally don't have traffic jams, just short periods where you might have to wait for the second green to pass through a busy light).
These counties already tend to be depopulating, which is the main way to reduce car traffic levels in such situations. Broader economic change has left them geographically uncompetitive, or automation has destroyed jobs in whatever extraction industry pulled in the population in the past.
I think one of the best ways to improve the availability of public transport would be to treat rising housing prices as a government failure (it's currently considered a success when the value of someones home increases).
The real issue with automobiles and cities isn't so much the cars as the parking.
Parking takes up a huge proportion of urban land and street space that could be used for exclusive bus lanes. Parking requirements makes the building blocks of classic urban neighborhoods, like townhouses, small apartment buildings, and storefronts with apartments above, illegal to build. Using land for parking vastly increases the distance between destinations, making walking impractical. When walking is impractical, transit systems become ineffective because there are too few homes or destinations near them for them to have customers.
If you look at Washington DC's metro its pretty much the same QoS as you get off the Berlin metro. So I am not quite sure how its considered "primitive"
Berlin - 4 - 5 minute trains
DC - 6 minute trains
Berlin - 9 lines, 170 stations
DC - 6 lines, 91 stations
and thats not even the biggest metro system in the US. So really the problem isn't going back to the US, its going back to whatever place you're going to in the US. I am sure if you moved out to Zwiesel you would be in the same situation
Metro and subway systems in the US are to me basically comparable to systems abroad. I'd argue most US city rails are better than Berlin's.
Where you immediately notice is longer distance commuter and cross-country lines. I often take the train from Chicago to Detroit, and every time we stop partway for ~15-30 mins because the company can't run trains in both directions on the tracks. Even when we are moving, most of the time we can't come close to our top speed of 130 mph because we aren't on high speed track. Compare this to EU trains which run across the country non-stop at top speeds of 180 mph. Granted, not everywhere has high quality service, but most major cities do, which definitely can't be said about the US.
That I can agree with. I don't often ride long distance rail because even on the Northeast line which is I think the line with the highest ridership you often have to stop for freight trains and other trains.
I've never had to stop for a freight train on the northeast (between DC and NYC anyway), because Amtrak owns those tracks. You do sometimes have to stop for local commuter trains that share the tracks, or (more commonly) an acela overtaking a regional. By far the most common reason for delay, though, is the aging equipment.
My experience is that the US has awful public transit, with the arguable exception of NYC, purely because of its subway.
Here's the stats for Berlin vs Washington, as you wanted to make the comparison.
Berlin subway (U-Bahn) has 10 lines, 94km (route length).
Berlin trams have 22 lines, 190km.
Washington Metro has 6 lines, 118km.
No trams (under construction?).
I'm excluding the S-Bahn, as Washington doesn't have anything comparable.
Berlin's subway alone carries about 500 million passengers a year, versus 200 million on the Washington metro.
The difference in this case is quite easily explained by density of population - Washington is much smaller than Berlin, with 700k vs 3.5 million. However, this doesn't explain why other US cities have such poor public transit.
If you look at the numbers transported by American metro (subway) systems, there are 18 subway systems in Europe that carry more passengers than Chicago, the USA's second busiest.
>Washington Metro has 6 lines, 118km. No trams (under construction?).
DC is building a streetcar system. The H Street line is basically done and the streetcars are running, but there are issues to work out before it can officially open. Poor project management made it take forever and ended up having neighboring jurisdictions (Arlington) cancel their streetcar plans.
>The difference in this case is quite easily explained by density of population - Washington is much smaller than Berlin, with 700k vs 3.5 million.
DC is not less dense than Berlin is. DC is about the same density, actually. What DC is is small: DC is ~69 square miles vs 344 square miles for Berlin. The Metro actually travels relatively far into the suburbs covering far more than just DC itself (DC again being really tiny).
What is much less dense is the surrounding area. Arlington and Alexandria (both part of DC at one point, but now part of VA) are also relatively dense by US standards (especially where the Metro goes; many people do not own cars or own one car per family) but outside of those and a few other pockets of density most of the region is significantly less dense and thus the number of trips is lower.
Also, the DC area does have two commuter rails systems: MARC and VRE, run by Maryland and Virginia respectively. MARC reaches all the way to West Virginia. Based on a cursory browsing of Wikipedia (so it must be true) this seems to be what the S-Bahn is. Not sure how comparable they are though.
> However, this doesn't explain why other US cities have such poor public transit.
Many parts of the US experienced growth after cars came on the scene, and the infrastructure was designed with them in mind. This has since been shown to be a bad thing, but at the time it seemed like the way cities of the future should be built.
From then on, local governments basically mandated suburban living. Places like New York, DC, San Francisco, Chicago, etc. grew up before the car and so weren't ruined. Their suburbs may have been, but the cities themselves weren't. We are now trying to undo the damage.
The Washington Metro is comparable to the S-Bahn. DC doesn't have a system comparable to the Berlin Metro, because it doesn't have the dense tenement neighborhoods to support such a system.
The DC metro area actually has more population than the Berlin metro area. Most of it is just built in sprawling postwar American style, though it's urbanizing more than many equivalent American cities.
It's easy to call other rail infrastructures "primitive" when your baseline is Berlin to Munich. The US eastern seaboard handles those routes well too. Rail doesn't do so well when you need NYC to Chicago (~800 miles).
You would really compare German intercity travel to Acela (i.e., rail service on the Boston-NYC-Philly-DC route)? Three differences that immediately come to mind:
1) Severely limited track speeds through the entire NE corridor.
2) A boarding experience that seems to be modeled on air travel, with security gates, ID checks and waiting rooms.
3) Very infrequent service compared to main intercity routes in Europe.
Calling it primitive is provocative but pretty accurate.
1) Totally fair: average speed from DC to BOS is half of Berlin-Hamburg.
2) That's not my Acela experience at all; last time I took it (a few years ago) it was no more involved than boarding a Metra train in Chicago.
3) Totally fair.
I guess this is just knee-jerkism on my part. The topic comes up on HN every once in awhile about how backwards the US is w/r/t/ rail transport, and while you could still make a lot of strides on DC-BOS, there are good reasons why most of the country doesn't have rail connectivity. But that wasn't what was being argued here.
Infrastructure isn't a one size fits all arrangement. Passenger rail was once common in America. In fact, America has twice as much rail as the next in line. Why don't we use it for transport?
1) Because we all have cars. Aside from a few outliers (NYC, parts of Chicago, DC, Bay Area), US cities are designed with high car ownership in mind. Less than 10% of US households don't have a car.
Short train rides are less convenient than car trips. Especially since you'll most likely need a car at the destination.
Trains also only take you to limited stops. Cars can take you anywhere.
2) Flights are faster for longer range trips and America is a fairly spread out country. Chicago to Denver would still be a long highspeed rail trip.
3)Trains only make sense for intermediate range trips that begin and end in cities that people will stay close to the train station. Washington to New York, train is the best option.
But that sort of utility wouldn't support a robust nationwide network of passenger rail.
> But that sort of utility wouldn't support a robust nationwide network of passenger rail.
You don't need nationwide, you need regional. The East Coast and parts of the Midwest would do well with a decent train network. Sure, Chicago to Denver is never going to be reasonable, but Chicago to Indianapolis or St. Louis? That could be a train trip.
As American re-urbanizes, these sorts of trips become more and more reasonable to make by train as cars become less necessary.
The public transit is generally really phenomenal as you said but this year they went crazy with the renovation works.
I mean closing down the most important train line (north-south) for more than 4 months? And now also splitting the east-west metro line in two (again for a few months).
Aside from planned stuff tomorrow and Thursday the trains are off due to strikes. It happens multiple time a year as well.
This usually leaves you with highly unreliable buses and trams.
Primitive? Really? Doesn't seem to affect usage rates does it? Its a myth really, one that is perpetuated simply because people think its correct and far too many who like the idea of it being correct don't want to know otherwise.
Maybe Berlin and Germany stand out amongst Europe, but with regards to passenger miles trains are less that seven percent of all travel within the EU [1]. High speed rail does two things, eats up a lot of money and takes riders of slower rail. Even Japan has seen this as when the amount of high speed rail made available increased overall ridership decreased.
there is a lot of romance about trains but in the end they cost more per mile to build, use, and maintain, that even flying, in many areas. Slower than flying except over short distances and less convenient and timely over that short distance compared to cars. Public light rail is a boon doggle in many US cities, the costs to implement are beyond any reasonable time table of recovery.
Freight is king of the rail in the US, even Europe envies its status here and that makes a far greater impact on the environment than moving people
I think it's inner-city transport the parent is referring to. It really is fantastic in Berlin. Nothing beats a good metro for inner-city transport, and Berlin has it. Tokyo and New York is better, though, but then again those are vastly bigger cities.
And yeah, long-range train passenger transport generally sucks but it's not really relevant, as it's not inner-city.
Besides, train travel doesn't need to suck - Maglev may just go fast enough and be cheap enough to maintain to fix most of the problems. The train in the article will go for 40 minutes - that's far less than you need just to check in at the airport. And it will cover 330km - that's 4 hours by car. it would be foolish to pick any other means of transport between the two cities. It could go from SF to LA in 1h15m. Depending on how bad the airports are, it could even be competitive with air between NY and LA. But it won't become truly interesting until these trains go faster than planes (and I believe they will do so, eventually)
and I have no issues with inner city travel in Atlanta or Chicago. The issue at hand based on the original article is transport between cities. Hence the point I made is valid, the trope that Europe is some bastion of passenger transport by train simply isn't true, unless you count a few percentage points as an amazing number.
Not really if you count door to door. 1h15 Paris to Brussels, city-center to city-center and less time wasted.
Same thing with London-Paris, even if you fly to LCY, you're still going at least to Orly.
> and less convenient and timely over that short distance compared to cars
But not everybody can have a car or can drive or even want to bother with that.
"Less convenient", sure, let me worry about where to park my rented car, how to drive in an unknown city (even with GPS), etc. In Europe this is really not worth it in some cities (even in cities like Toronto, you shouldn't bother if you're going to the city center, trains beat flying for nearby cities (Ottawa/Montreal)
I would be happy with more reliable slower rail rather than high speed rail. If you know it's going to take 3 hours and you can get a seat, you can plan for that - it's when it might be anywhere between 1.5 and 5 hours, assuming your train isn't cancelled, and you might have to stand the whole way, that it becomes unpleasant.
As much as I'm a public transportation advocate (I don't own a car, and refuse car rides if a public transportation option is available for the place I need to get to), it's becoming increasingly more difficult to promote this kind of lifestyle with the advent of Uber and other things that have made private gas-guzzling cars even more convenient than ever before. People also just don't like being told what to do and what not to do, even if what they are doing is going to kill their children.
Given the short-sighted nature of people, in general, the only way this is going to change is if we make public transportation more convenient than an Uber. What we need, very seriously, is to make self-driving cars/minibuses running on renewable energy happen as soon as possible. They can then be rigged up to become a "Public Transportation 2.0" system that gets anyone from A to B while dynamically routing and picking up others in-between and avoiding traffic jams from happening in the first place. It would also put the US back on the world map with a brand new, innovative system that's both environmentally efficient, cheaper to ride, and ultra-convenient at the same time.