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> this entire country is the size of a single, largeish US state So why is there no comparable railway network in those largeish US states that are comparable

> this entire country is the size of a single, largeish US state So why is there no comparable railway network in those largeish US states that are comparable to EU countries? Or in the many (almost all of them) states that are smaller than France and Japan?

ams6110 8y ago
There used to be. Americans, for the most part, prefer drive their own cars for short to moderate trips, or fly.
- objektif 8y ago
  Prefer is an interesting choice of words in this case. Its like me prefering comcast as an ISP.
- superseeplus 8y ago
  Sort of off-topic, but every time someone says this, I am reminded of the subprime car loan market where the same car is sold at inflated prices and usurious interest rates to people who have bad credit, then repossessed and sold again. If we had decent public transport, that wouldn't happen.
rayiner 8y ago
Because there would be nowhere to go. Imagine building a rail network in New York. Where would it go? How often do people need to get from NYC to Syracuse? And if you built a train to Syracuse, what would you do once you got there (without a car)? The city is the centerpiece of a region with a million people, less than 1/6 of whom live inside the city?
- coldtea 8y ago
  >How often do people need to get from NYC to Syracuse? For people living to Syracuse, tons of times. Equally many times with any EU train that connects e.g. Paris to a city within 50 or 100 or 200 miles. >And if you built a train to Syracuse, what would you do once you got there (without a car)? The city is the centerpiece of a region with a million people, less than 1/6 of whom live inside the city? If it's "a million people" it should be able to afford its own public transport connected to the train station, which answers the question "what to do there without a car". It's not like there aren't places in Europe, Asia etc that are exactly like this...
  - rayiner 8y ago
    Are there places in Europe and Asia like this? Syracuse doesn’t have a transit network because nobody lives in Syracuse, they live in the sprawl around it. What shocked me about my recent trips abroad (to Munich and Tokyo) was that those cities were completely different. You drive a bit out of Munich and the city just ends and becomea farm land. Even with Tokyo there ia farmland between the city and Narita. In the US, it’a sprawl in every direction, and most of the population lives in that sprawl, and not in the city.
    - coldtea 8y ago
      >Are there places in Europe and Asia like this? Syracuse doesn’t have a transit network because nobody lives in Syracuse, they live in the sprawl around it. Well, not quite: "At the 2010 census, the city population was 145,252, and its metropolitan area had a population of 662,577". There are places like that in Europe. In Greece Athens has a population of 600,000 people and the surrounding metropolitan area is 4 million -- of continuous sprawl in every direction.
- Sharlin 8y ago
  The northeast US conurbation is one of the densest conglomerations of urban centres in the world. A proper high-speed rail system would take you from NYC to Philadelphia in less than an hour and to Boston or DC in a couple of hours. The ”US is so big and sparsely populated” excuse really doesn’t hold water.
  - objektif 8y ago
    Its really insane people defend shortcomings in the US by either saying US is big or saying US is too diverse. Very depressing.
    - niij 8y ago
      The argument is that building train lines isn't the answer because the transport needs in the U.S. are different than Japan, Indonesia, Germany, Russia, etc. Having a cookie cutter "trains are the answer to everything" answer is shortsighted.
      - objektif 8y ago
        Can you please tell me what are those different needs are?
        rayiner 8y ago
        Have you ever been to Japan, Germany, etc? Cities there are shaped completely differently to cities here. The article uses the Vienna Metro as an example of what not to do, and in a way it is. But it’s that way because Vienna is almost entirely low density sprawl, with homes sitting on a quarter of an acre or so. The whole DC metro area is shaped that way, and that drove the structure of Metro. The DC Metro area has 6 million people, about the same size as the Berlin metro area. But 3.7 million Berliners live in the city itself, while just 700,000 Washingtonians do. Berlin and DC are similar of a similar density, but almost all the DC Metro population lives out in the low density suburbs. A lot of the jobs are out there too. A lot of tech jobs are in Reston and Dulles, 20-25 miles west of DC. Do you know what’s 20 miles west of Berlin? Nothing, it’s farm land. The kins of transportation network a city like DC, where the population and jobs are spread out among low density suburbs, and a city like Berlin, with population and jobs concentrated in the core city, needs are completely different.
- intertextuality 8y ago
  > How often do people need to get from NYC to Syracuse? Far more often than you'd think. If such a system existed people would use it all the time. Look at the metra lines that go from Chicago to the suburbs in the north/northwest. People take those all the time because living in those areas is significantly cheaper. People would be able to visit families long distance without needing to own a car or cough up for a plane ticket. That land in the US is vast is not really a good excuse.
  - tptacek 8y ago
    Syracuse isn't a suburb of NYC. The distance between those cities is like the distance between Chicago and Iowa City. Nobody commutes to Chicago from Iowa City.
    - intertextuality 8y ago
      Commuting for work, probably not. But along that route I’d imagine people would utilize it, similar to how metra is used for people coming from Wisconsin. Being able to conveniently take the train from Chicago -> Iowa would be great, especially if the route went further.
      - tptacek 8y ago
        Being able to take a train from anywhere to anywhere is else is great, ceteris paribus. That doesn't make it practical.
- objektif 8y ago
  Forget about just inside NY. What about between NY, MA and PA. Are you going to say not many people will travel to/from DC-NY, Boston-NY, Philly-NY? Arguments about distance and space or no passenger will use it are really excuses that was pushed down our throats.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - tptacek 8y ago
    Aren't those places that are already well-served by rail? Aren't these just the exceptions that prove the rule?
    - alistairSH 8y ago
      No, they aren’t served well by rail. At least not at the scale of major European cities. Yes, Amtrak runs from DC, Baltimore, Philly, NYC, and Boston. But, it’s not high speed (except a few sections on the Acela train). And the subways and neighborhood lines are lacking. Take DC for example... the Metro single tracks and stops at every station. No express route across town. And trains only run every 20 minutes off-peak (and that’s assuming they haven’t shut the whole thing down because it’s caught on fire again). So, getting from Tyson’s Corner or Bethesda to Union Station is not fast. An regular train from the inner business centers to Union Ststion, plus a proper bullet train to NYC would make a suitable substitute for flying. Right now, rail just isn’t a workable option for many business travelers.
      - ubernostrum 8y ago
        Acela carries (per Wikipedia's cited source) around 3.5M passengers per year. From Washington Dulles airport, approximately 265k passengers per year fly to Boston. Another 715k fly DCA-BOS. DCA-LGA accounts for 318k. DCA-JFK, IAD-LGA and IAD-JFK do not crack top-ten lists of busiest domestic routes for their origins. To get a feel for just Acela (which is not the only Northeast Corridor train service), it's slightly less than the annual passenger volume by air SFO-LAX, SFO-JFK and SFO-BOS combined. The entire Northeast Corridor carries approximately 12M passengers per year. If it were operated by air, it would be the second-busiest route in the world by passenger volume, slotting between CJU-GMP in Korea (13M/year) and MEL-SYD in Australia (9M/year). In 2012, the New York Times reported that 75 percent of travelers between New York and Washington used one of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor trains (Acela isn't the only one), and between New York and Boston 54 percent used a train: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/16/business/hassles-of-air-travel-push-passengers-to-amtrak.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/16/business/hassles-of-air-t... There certainly are things that could be improved. But Amtrak's operations in the northeast are not some hypothetical potential maybe-someday competitor to air travel. They are and for years have been a real and significant competitor to air travel. And for what it's worth, Amtrak also has a farebox recovery ratio for its entire nationwide network that hovers around 95%, second in the US only to BART Oakland Airport Connector (96%).

ams6110 8y ago

There used to be. Americans, for the most part, prefer drive their own cars for short to moderate trips, or fly.

objektif 8y ago
Prefer is an interesting choice of words in this case. Its like me prefering comcast as an ISP.
superseeplus 8y ago
Sort of off-topic, but every time someone says this, I am reminded of the subprime car loan market where the same car is sold at inflated prices and usurious interest rates to people who have bad credit, then repossessed and sold again. If we had decent public transport, that wouldn't happen.

rayiner 8y ago

Because there would be nowhere to go. Imagine building a rail network in New York. Where would it go? How often do people need to get from NYC to Syracuse? And if you built a train to Syracuse, what would you do once you got there (without a car)? The city is the centerpiece of a region with a million people, less than 1/6 of whom live inside the city?

coldtea 8y ago
>How often do people need to get from NYC to Syracuse? For people living to Syracuse, tons of times. Equally many times with any EU train that connects e.g. Paris to a city within 50 or 100 or 200 miles. >And if you built a train to Syracuse, what would you do once you got there (without a car)? The city is the centerpiece of a region with a million people, less than 1/6 of whom live inside the city? If it's "a million people" it should be able to afford its own public transport connected to the train station, which answers the question "what to do there without a car". It's not like there aren't places in Europe, Asia etc that are exactly like this...
- rayiner 8y ago
  Are there places in Europe and Asia like this? Syracuse doesn’t have a transit network because nobody lives in Syracuse, they live in the sprawl around it. What shocked me about my recent trips abroad (to Munich and Tokyo) was that those cities were completely different. You drive a bit out of Munich and the city just ends and becomea farm land. Even with Tokyo there ia farmland between the city and Narita. In the US, it’a sprawl in every direction, and most of the population lives in that sprawl, and not in the city.
  - coldtea 8y ago
    >Are there places in Europe and Asia like this? Syracuse doesn’t have a transit network because nobody lives in Syracuse, they live in the sprawl around it. Well, not quite: "At the 2010 census, the city population was 145,252, and its metropolitan area had a population of 662,577". There are places like that in Europe. In Greece Athens has a population of 600,000 people and the surrounding metropolitan area is 4 million -- of continuous sprawl in every direction.
Sharlin 8y ago
The northeast US conurbation is one of the densest conglomerations of urban centres in the world. A proper high-speed rail system would take you from NYC to Philadelphia in less than an hour and to Boston or DC in a couple of hours. The ”US is so big and sparsely populated” excuse really doesn’t hold water.
- objektif 8y ago
  Its really insane people defend shortcomings in the US by either saying US is big or saying US is too diverse. Very depressing.
  - niij 8y ago
    The argument is that building train lines isn't the answer because the transport needs in the U.S. are different than Japan, Indonesia, Germany, Russia, etc. Having a cookie cutter "trains are the answer to everything" answer is shortsighted.
    - objektif 8y ago
      Can you please tell me what are those different needs are?
      - rayiner 8y ago
        Have you ever been to Japan, Germany, etc? Cities there are shaped completely differently to cities here. The article uses the Vienna Metro as an example of what not to do, and in a way it is. But it’s that way because Vienna is almost entirely low density sprawl, with homes sitting on a quarter of an acre or so. The whole DC metro area is shaped that way, and that drove the structure of Metro. The DC Metro area has 6 million people, about the same size as the Berlin metro area. But 3.7 million Berliners live in the city itself, while just 700,000 Washingtonians do. Berlin and DC are similar of a similar density, but almost all the DC Metro population lives out in the low density suburbs. A lot of the jobs are out there too. A lot of tech jobs are in Reston and Dulles, 20-25 miles west of DC. Do you know what’s 20 miles west of Berlin? Nothing, it’s farm land. The kins of transportation network a city like DC, where the population and jobs are spread out among low density suburbs, and a city like Berlin, with population and jobs concentrated in the core city, needs are completely different.
intertextuality 8y ago
> How often do people need to get from NYC to Syracuse? Far more often than you'd think. If such a system existed people would use it all the time. Look at the metra lines that go from Chicago to the suburbs in the north/northwest. People take those all the time because living in those areas is significantly cheaper. People would be able to visit families long distance without needing to own a car or cough up for a plane ticket. That land in the US is vast is not really a good excuse.
- tptacek 8y ago
  Syracuse isn't a suburb of NYC. The distance between those cities is like the distance between Chicago and Iowa City. Nobody commutes to Chicago from Iowa City.
  - intertextuality 8y ago
    Commuting for work, probably not. But along that route I’d imagine people would utilize it, similar to how metra is used for people coming from Wisconsin. Being able to conveniently take the train from Chicago -> Iowa would be great, especially if the route went further.
    - tptacek 8y ago
      Being able to take a train from anywhere to anywhere is else is great, ceteris paribus. That doesn't make it practical.
objektif 8y ago
Forget about just inside NY. What about between NY, MA and PA. Are you going to say not many people will travel to/from DC-NY, Boston-NY, Philly-NY? Arguments about distance and space or no passenger will use it are really excuses that was pushed down our throats.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- tptacek 8y ago
  Aren't those places that are already well-served by rail? Aren't these just the exceptions that prove the rule?
  - alistairSH 8y ago
    No, they aren’t served well by rail. At least not at the scale of major European cities. Yes, Amtrak runs from DC, Baltimore, Philly, NYC, and Boston. But, it’s not high speed (except a few sections on the Acela train). And the subways and neighborhood lines are lacking. Take DC for example... the Metro single tracks and stops at every station. No express route across town. And trains only run every 20 minutes off-peak (and that’s assuming they haven’t shut the whole thing down because it’s caught on fire again). So, getting from Tyson’s Corner or Bethesda to Union Station is not fast. An regular train from the inner business centers to Union Ststion, plus a proper bullet train to NYC would make a suitable substitute for flying. Right now, rail just isn’t a workable option for many business travelers.
    - ubernostrum 8y ago
      Acela carries (per Wikipedia's cited source) around 3.5M passengers per year. From Washington Dulles airport, approximately 265k passengers per year fly to Boston. Another 715k fly DCA-BOS. DCA-LGA accounts for 318k. DCA-JFK, IAD-LGA and IAD-JFK do not crack top-ten lists of busiest domestic routes for their origins. To get a feel for just Acela (which is not the only Northeast Corridor train service), it's slightly less than the annual passenger volume by air SFO-LAX, SFO-JFK and SFO-BOS combined. The entire Northeast Corridor carries approximately 12M passengers per year. If it were operated by air, it would be the second-busiest route in the world by passenger volume, slotting between CJU-GMP in Korea (13M/year) and MEL-SYD in Australia (9M/year). In 2012, the New York Times reported that 75 percent of travelers between New York and Washington used one of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor trains (Acela isn't the only one), and between New York and Boston 54 percent used a train: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/16/business/hassles-of-air-travel-push-passengers-to-amtrak.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/16/business/hassles-of-air-t... There certainly are things that could be improved. But Amtrak's operations in the northeast are not some hypothetical potential maybe-someday competitor to air travel. They are and for years have been a real and significant competitor to air travel. And for what it's worth, Amtrak also has a farebox recovery ratio for its entire nationwide network that hovers around 95%, second in the US only to BART Oakland Airport Connector (96%).