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As someone who has recently spent a few months in various Western European countries for work: You would be surprised In many urban areas, it is basically NYC.

As someone who has recently spent a few months in various Western European countries for work: You would be surprised In many urban areas, it is basically NYC. Which is great, and makes getting around easy. But once you get farther out, things dry up fast. And a good comparison would actually be Amtrak and the like on the East Coast of the US. Considerably cheaper (I would guess, off the top of my head, 60% of the cost for a comparable trip). But much like with US trains, your savings are at a cost of time. And a lot of the time, those savings aren't particularly significant once you factor that in. As someone who travels a lot for work, I didn't see a huge difference in how I approached things while working on budgets. Fly to major city nearby and then get a train/rent a car to go to a smaller town (if needed). The former was more of an option, which was nice, but the latter was a lot faster if there were a few connections. And even when there was the option to just do pure train, the amount of time versus savings wasn't worth it. And for personal travel? Even then, a flight was a lot more logical and not a lot more expensive once I factored in vacation hours and the like to handle transit times. In terms of cities? Yeah, we are horrible (although, the UK and Ireland is almost as crap as we are once you get out of London). In terms of general (inter)national travel? A car is a lot less required, but not to the extent that a lot of us would think.

ghaff 10y ago
Pretty much. There's this notion that you can practically teleport around Europe for next to nothing using trains that just isn't true. On a couple of trips over the past few years, I've looked into taking trains between destinations in Western Europe (e.g. Dusseldorf to Paris) and it's turned out that taking the train was going to take me far longer and cost far more than flying. The US doesn't have great train systems for the most part but, as you say, in the region that's most comparable to much of Western Europe, the Northeast, it really isn't all that different. ADDED: What you tend not to have in the US is compact walkable towns and small cities once you get out of the large cities. Though I'd also say, that at least in the UK, small towns away from the main railroad lines will have bus service that's probably better than the US equivalent but it may still just be a few times a day.
- w0utert 10y ago
  >> On a couple of trips over the past few years, I've looked into taking trains between destinations in Western Europe (e.g. Dusseldorf to Paris) and it's turned out that taking the train was going to take me far longer and cost far more than flying. That comparison is a little disingenuous, of course flying between two cities with an airport, that are not major hubs connected directly by hi-speed rail, will be faster and cheaper. Now consider how you'd get to Dusseldorf or Paris from whatever random smaller city with a train station (in western Europe basically any city with a population over ~100K). I'm not sure if there even are international airports around western Europe that arent directly accessible by train... Besides traveling for business or pleasure, trains here are heavily used for commuter traffic as well. If you live and work close to a train station, which is quite common in the more densely populated countries, traveling by train will 100% be faster that sitting in a traffic jam every day. And in many cases your employer will even cover most or all of the cost (at least here in the Netherlands). Obviously trains are still only point-to-point transportation, so if you need to be somewhere without a train station, or without many connections to larger hubs, you will lose time. But compared to the pitiful state of passenger rail in the US (or at least that's how I experienced it), it's pretty great here. I took the train from San Jose to SFO once: there was only one train every hour or so, which took something like 2:30 hours at a snails pace to get to San Francisco, then I had to get on the BART (which is actually pretty good), then I needed to get on the AirTrain, all just to get to the departures. By car it usually takes less than an hour... There really is no excuse for that...
saiya-jin 10y ago
it is an option. usually not the cheapest one, but in quite a few cases makes more sense/convenience compared to flying - ie if you have less than 5-6 hour distance to cover it's faster, plus the hassle of airports, security, baggage limits, ending in the middle of nowhere compared to city centre etc are not that great. another good thing is, you can buy in most cases tickets just days ahead, most trains have constant prices so your price isn't within 50-1000 eur boundary for same flight, same seat, depending on timing.
- ghaff 10y ago
  I don't really disagree with that. Especially if you're travelling between downtown locations that aren't too far apart on main railroad lines, e.g. York to London or London to Brussels, the train makes a lot of sense. (As indeed is the case in the Northeast US.) It just isn't the panacea that it often seems to be painted as.
CPLX 10y ago
I literally have no idea what you're talking about. I recently returned from Switzerland, and there is a good fast train going basically everywhere, whenever you want to go, and it's amazing and stone cold simple to figure out. You can do seemingly impossible things like wake up in an entirely different city to a place like Zurich, get on a train, and get off in the Zurich airport terminal and check right in. It's not cheap, but nothing in Switzerland is and it's relatively inexpensive by those standards. It's amazing. And Switzerland has an unusually strong reputation for rail but honestly my experience in places like France and even the UK has been similar. If you want to go somewhere else, you go to the nearest train station and buy a ticket to that place, and then you go to that place. I live in NYC and it's not even close, and this is the best rail served area in the country by far. I can't get on a train anywhere in this city and get off in an airport terminal. Let's pause and think about that for a second. I live in New York Fucking City and I can't get on a train and get off at an airport. Newark is as close as it gets if you're near Penn Station, but you're still dropped off a long and tedious "Airtrain" ride away. And the PATH that runs from lower Manhattan just inexplicably stops short of that Newark Airport Airtrain, despite the fact that the same mainline track system continues right along. Same story at JFK. And Laguardia they don't even bother to pretend. It's completely fucking dysfunctional, obviously so. The idea that U.S. rail transport, or transport in general, is even semi-remotely comparable to northern and western Europe is frankly ludicrous.
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago
  Switzerland can't support TVG-style speeds because of its topology (too many mountains, curves), but then again, the country is small enough that you can get to Zurich from Geneva in ~2 hours 46 minutes.
  - melling 10y ago
    According to this, they have more hsr than the US: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-speed_railway_lines https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-speed_railway_l...
    - 10y ago
wbl 10y ago
My dad and I went on a driving trip around England and the Isle of Skye. The only destinations we couldn't have reached with train were Mediobogdium and Uig when we got to the Isle of Skye.
morgante 10y ago
> But much like with US trains, your savings are at a cost of time. That's the difference though. In the US, trains are so expensive that they're almost always more expensive than flights. Also, comparing to NYC is disingenuous. NYC has by far the best public transport in the US. There's a very significant drop-off in quality (other major cities have poor public transport, and for smaller cities it's nonexistent).

ghaff 10y ago

Pretty much. There's this notion that you can practically teleport around Europe for next to nothing using trains that just isn't true. On a couple of trips over the past few years, I've looked into taking trains between destinations in Western Europe (e.g. Dusseldorf to Paris) and it's turned out that taking the train was going to take me far longer and cost far more than flying. The US doesn't have great train systems for the most part but, as you say, in the region that's most comparable to much of Western Europe, the Northeast, it really isn't all that different. ADDED: What you tend not to have in the US is compact walkable towns and small cities once you get out of the large cities. Though I'd also say, that at least in the UK, small towns away from the main railroad lines will have bus service that's probably better than the US equivalent but it may still just be a few times a day.

w0utert 10y ago
>> On a couple of trips over the past few years, I've looked into taking trains between destinations in Western Europe (e.g. Dusseldorf to Paris) and it's turned out that taking the train was going to take me far longer and cost far more than flying. That comparison is a little disingenuous, of course flying between two cities with an airport, that are not major hubs connected directly by hi-speed rail, will be faster and cheaper. Now consider how you'd get to Dusseldorf or Paris from whatever random smaller city with a train station (in western Europe basically any city with a population over ~100K). I'm not sure if there even are international airports around western Europe that arent directly accessible by train... Besides traveling for business or pleasure, trains here are heavily used for commuter traffic as well. If you live and work close to a train station, which is quite common in the more densely populated countries, traveling by train will 100% be faster that sitting in a traffic jam every day. And in many cases your employer will even cover most or all of the cost (at least here in the Netherlands). Obviously trains are still only point-to-point transportation, so if you need to be somewhere without a train station, or without many connections to larger hubs, you will lose time. But compared to the pitiful state of passenger rail in the US (or at least that's how I experienced it), it's pretty great here. I took the train from San Jose to SFO once: there was only one train every hour or so, which took something like 2:30 hours at a snails pace to get to San Francisco, then I had to get on the BART (which is actually pretty good), then I needed to get on the AirTrain, all just to get to the departures. By car it usually takes less than an hour... There really is no excuse for that...

saiya-jin 10y ago

it is an option. usually not the cheapest one, but in quite a few cases makes more sense/convenience compared to flying - ie if you have less than 5-6 hour distance to cover it's faster, plus the hassle of airports, security, baggage limits, ending in the middle of nowhere compared to city centre etc are not that great. another good thing is, you can buy in most cases tickets just days ahead, most trains have constant prices so your price isn't within 50-1000 eur boundary for same flight, same seat, depending on timing.

ghaff 10y ago
I don't really disagree with that. Especially if you're travelling between downtown locations that aren't too far apart on main railroad lines, e.g. York to London or London to Brussels, the train makes a lot of sense. (As indeed is the case in the Northeast US.) It just isn't the panacea that it often seems to be painted as.

CPLX 10y ago

I literally have no idea what you're talking about. I recently returned from Switzerland, and there is a good fast train going basically everywhere, whenever you want to go, and it's amazing and stone cold simple to figure out. You can do seemingly impossible things like wake up in an entirely different city to a place like Zurich, get on a train, and get off in the Zurich airport terminal and check right in. It's not cheap, but nothing in Switzerland is and it's relatively inexpensive by those standards. It's amazing. And Switzerland has an unusually strong reputation for rail but honestly my experience in places like France and even the UK has been similar. If you want to go somewhere else, you go to the nearest train station and buy a ticket to that place, and then you go to that place. I live in NYC and it's not even close, and this is the best rail served area in the country by far. I can't get on a train anywhere in this city and get off in an airport terminal. Let's pause and think about that for a second. I live in New York Fucking City and I can't get on a train and get off at an airport. Newark is as close as it gets if you're near Penn Station, but you're still dropped off a long and tedious "Airtrain" ride away. And the PATH that runs from lower Manhattan just inexplicably stops short of that Newark Airport Airtrain, despite the fact that the same mainline track system continues right along. Same story at JFK. And Laguardia they don't even bother to pretend. It's completely fucking dysfunctional, obviously so. The idea that U.S. rail transport, or transport in general, is even semi-remotely comparable to northern and western Europe is frankly ludicrous.

seanmcdirmid 10y ago
Switzerland can't support TVG-style speeds because of its topology (too many mountains, curves), but then again, the country is small enough that you can get to Zurich from Geneva in ~2 hours 46 minutes.
- melling 10y ago
  According to this, they have more hsr than the US: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-speed_railway_lines https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-speed_railway_l...
  - 10y ago

wbl 10y ago

My dad and I went on a driving trip around England and the Isle of Skye. The only destinations we couldn't have reached with train were Mediobogdium and Uig when we got to the Isle of Skye.

morgante 10y ago

> But much like with US trains, your savings are at a cost of time. That's the difference though. In the US, trains are so expensive that they're almost always more expensive than flights. Also, comparing to NYC is disingenuous. NYC has by far the best public transport in the US. There's a very significant drop-off in quality (other major cities have poor public transport, and for smaller cities it's nonexistent).