8 ms·

I’ve visited Europe many times and I do like how the region is so easily accessible without a car, largely because of trains, but there are many more factors ou

I’ve visited Europe many times and I do like how the region is so easily accessible without a car, largely because of trains, but there are many more factors outside of just having trains. European cities are far more walkable and accessible without a car. For decades the US has just not been built up in this way so just dropping trains in doesn’t suddenly make them preferred and thus viable. The reason people drive small/medium city to small/medium city is because once arriving in that city they now need transportation while there. Currently the most convenient and cost effective way to do that is to simply bring the car you already own for moving around in your home small/medium city. If the US is going to move to an environmentally friendly passenger rail system it is going to take a MASSIVE cultural and shift in mindset to reshape cities across the country. Many of which are broke. I’m not saying it’s impossible or an unworthy goal. I simply think it is an extremely unlikely goal until mindsets shift and realize things need to be done differently.

kikoreis 8y ago
Interestingly, the cities are in part broke due to the infrastructure cost of maintaining sprawl — which only cars make possible.
- krferriter 8y ago
  Also gas taxes in the US are far lower than in much of Europe. Gas tax is 5.9x higher in Germany than in my state of NC, for example. Gas tax is what funds a lot of infrastructure development.
  - dorgo 8y ago
    The purpose of gas tax is not bound to infrastructure developement. Germany may spend gas tax money for arbitary purposes. https://www.energie-lexikon.info/energiesteuer.html https://www.energie-lexikon.info/energiesteuer.html
    - flo123456 8y ago
      Germany may spend anytax for arbitrary purposes though.
anyfoo 8y ago
That seems very true to me. As an anecdotical data point: I lived in Munich for over 30 years, and never drove. Did not even have a driver's license. I then moved to the Bay Area, and now I'm driving everywhere. Even to towns that I could actually reach with BART (which are not many), I would then face the problem, as you laid out yourself, to actually get around there.
apatheticonion 8y ago
Excuse my ignorance, but my foreigner layman's opinion is that your cities ain't broke, the US is the richest nation on Earth. Y'all just need to tax better and spend wiser.
- Veelox 8y ago
  Part of it is the US has a lot of land. Japan is one of the more extreme examples but they have ~8.7x people per unit of land. That makes a big difference on the kind of buildings and transportation you build.
  - lostmsu 8y ago
    But isn't a railroad much cheaper to build and maintain, than a highway of the same capacity?
    - TylerE 8y ago
      No, because rail has fixed routes but everywhere in the road network is connected to everything else.
      - adrianN 8y ago
        Everything on the rail network is also connected to everything else.
        TylerE 8y ago
        Hardly, especially not in the US where the track is not owned by a neutral party.
      - v_lisivka 8y ago
        Yep, rail road is hard to scale down, so it's very expensive to connect every single home to rail road. Also, rail roads are not walkable, so they cannot be shared with pedestrians, so this limitation forces create two separate roads: one for pedestrians, bicycles, cars, etc., and second one for rail transport. Trams can be mixed with regular road traffic, but trams cannot use regular rail roads because of different construction of rail road. Also, rail roads are prone to Single Point of Failure problems. To prevent SPF, multiple redundant routes must be built, with lot of expensive junctions between them. Also, you must schedule your travel. So, we need something which 1) can be shared with regular road traffic like trams, 2) can deliver loads of cargo efficiently like rail or metro, 3) can be connected to every house like regular road, 4) can be navigated by any car at any time of day or night, 5) be cheaper than regular road for road, cart, maintenance, recycling, 6) can provide power to carts, 7) can provide navigation and scheduling service to carts, 8) be with low delay (fast). Regular road is 1,3,4,±8. Uber is 1,3,4,5,7,8. Aero-taxi is 1,3,4,±5,7,8. Trams is 1,2,6,7. Metro is 2,6,7. Rail is 2,5,6,7. Edit: Tram-train is 1,2,5,6,7.
rhizome 8y ago
At the dawn of the age of rail, Germany had double the US population in an area about the size of Montana. There were a lot of people who wanted to move around way before cars were a factor, so you see much, much better rail systems in Europe.
- jcranmer 8y ago
  Probably a bigger factor is that, in the early 1940s, virtually the entire infrastructure of Europe was destroyed. In March 1945, there were no operational bridges across the entire length of the Rhine river. All of that infrastructure was rebuilt in the late 1940s and the 1950s to then-modern high speed standards; by contrast, the US has to make do with infrastructure upgraded at great cost around the 1910s.
  - michaelt 8y ago
    Europe also had a big military imperative to build railways pre-WW1: Trains let you move your forces faster, so you can build up a concentration of forces in one location to attack or reinforce a defensive line. So no state in continental Europe wanted to be on the losing side of a railway gap.
    - dsq 8y ago
      This is probably a much bigger factor than usually thought. Military necessity will trump budget constrictions and property rights. Railways pre WW1, roads during and after WW2 and in preparation for the Cold War.
  - rhizome 8y ago
    Before WWII Great Britain, Germany, and France all had about twice the rail they have now . After the war, cars and trucking made a big difference and system length decreased fairly steadily as a result because lots of track got rebuilt as roads.
LaGrange 8y ago
> European cities are far more walkable and accessible without a car. A really weird experience I had while visiting CA (SSF specifically) was seeing a fast food place - I think it was Wendy's? - that wasn't reachable by foot in any clear way. Similarly there wasn't any obvious sidewalks or bike lanes on the highway between Brisbane and SSF, and while that _is_ as 2km walk, I'd still expect it to be _possible_. I mean, I've been there for a week, and I'm sure it's possible to work things like that out if you live there longer. Maybe there's an entrance to the county park I didn't notice, or I don't know, a tunnel. But where I live, walking is far more intuitive than that. A tram might help, but it won't solve it.
- fzeroracer 8y ago
  I currently live in Austin and the general infrastructure here is atrocious. There are many places that are inaccessible as you've mentioned by walking and biking in America is incredibly dangerous. Most cities in the US are simply not equipped to deal with any sort of large population growth due to the incredibly bad infrastructure we have in place and zero motivation to improve it.
chungleong 8y ago
I normally live in Europe. At the moment I'm in Baltimore. The city's downtown area (around the inner harbor) is perfectly walkable. Nearby DC is also perfectly walkable, while driving is a nightmare. These two cities should be well connected by rail but they're not. People would drive to a parking lot beside a metro station and get into the city that way. Two cities can only be linked effectively by rail when there aren't stops between them. That's impossible in America, where suburban areas are the political battlegrounds while cities are single-party fiefdoms.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jcranmer 8y ago
  Washington-Baltimore is actually a very good connection by rail--you'll have a train at least once an hour--except that the station for Baltimore is in the wrong location. Baltimore Penn Station is located far to the north of the city, well outside the Inner Harbor that's going to be the center of tourism and visitors. What happened is that, historically, Baltimore-Washington was mainly served by the B&O, whose Baltimore station would have been right next to Inner Harbor (Camden Yards is essentially built on old railroad property). When passenger service was consolidated into Amtrak, the Northeast Corridor instead chose to use Pennsylvania Railroad trackage instead of B&O from DC to NYC, and the freight trackage in the corridor consolidated onto the B&O tracks instead. The resulting residual commuter rail line has the standard commuter rail/freight rail politics going on that limits the number of trains that can transit the route.
  - chungleong 8y ago
    Neither the metro or the lightrail reaches Penn. I don't know who designed the routes. Better connections between DC and BWI would better link the cities but they can't even maintain a bus line. Meanwhile, there's a billion dollar for the Silver line...
    - brianzelip 8y ago
gsanghera 8y ago
Didn't the US car companies actively lobby against and destroy the budding streetcar transport in most cities? I admit its not exactly rail, but you do have trams / streetcars in many European cities too - like Amsterdam. I would think they would be a much preferred public transport option than everyone driving their own car. Culture is not something which happens automatically - sometimes its driven by corporates, and the stronger the incentives for the corporates, the harder to resist, until the only one capable of doing so is the government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
- evgen 8y ago
  This is a rather popular lie that ignores the facts on the ground at the time. No, the US car companies did not lobby against or destroy the streetcar industry, the growth of the suburb and government policies that promoted such growth managed to do that all on their own. The auto manufacturers just set themselves up to take advantage of this decline and the shifting of subsidies to road construction. In this case culture (the shifting demographics that led to the initial growth of the suburb and the self-perpetuating cultural enshrinement of same) is what led and government/corporations followed.
  - gsanghera 8y ago
    With all due respect - I don't understand this. Why would suburban growth not work with tram / local train lines that could be extended? It worked in London - one of the largest cities in the world which had to plan way ahead of time due to its historically narrow streets. I've lived in suburban London for >7 years, and frankly the only time I really needed to use the car was only to haul grocery home. Almost any other travel (including to work) was always achievable with the tube/bus - some combination of these. What the ground truth was then isn't recorded in history. There are post-facto interpretations. I would argue if the incentives were laid correctly, there was no reason for suburbanism to necessarily lead to growth in automobile consumption. The US motor companies had a massive clout. Given a choice back then (and the big roads due to the post-war expansion) it possibly made it easy to convince people that a car was a superior and more personal form of travel (think pre-ubiquitous air-conditioning). That's when you need government to think ahead, especially at the local level.

kikoreis 8y ago

Interestingly, the cities are in part broke due to the infrastructure cost of maintaining sprawl — which only cars make possible.

krferriter 8y ago
Also gas taxes in the US are far lower than in much of Europe. Gas tax is 5.9x higher in Germany than in my state of NC, for example. Gas tax is what funds a lot of infrastructure development.
- dorgo 8y ago
  The purpose of gas tax is not bound to infrastructure developement. Germany may spend gas tax money for arbitary purposes. https://www.energie-lexikon.info/energiesteuer.html https://www.energie-lexikon.info/energiesteuer.html
  - flo123456 8y ago
    Germany may spend anytax for arbitrary purposes though.

anyfoo 8y ago

That seems very true to me. As an anecdotical data point: I lived in Munich for over 30 years, and never drove. Did not even have a driver's license. I then moved to the Bay Area, and now I'm driving everywhere. Even to towns that I could actually reach with BART (which are not many), I would then face the problem, as you laid out yourself, to actually get around there.

apatheticonion 8y ago

Excuse my ignorance, but my foreigner layman's opinion is that your cities ain't broke, the US is the richest nation on Earth. Y'all just need to tax better and spend wiser.

Veelox 8y ago
Part of it is the US has a lot of land. Japan is one of the more extreme examples but they have ~8.7x people per unit of land. That makes a big difference on the kind of buildings and transportation you build.
- lostmsu 8y ago
  But isn't a railroad much cheaper to build and maintain, than a highway of the same capacity?
  - TylerE 8y ago
    No, because rail has fixed routes but everywhere in the road network is connected to everything else.
    - adrianN 8y ago
      Everything on the rail network is also connected to everything else.
      - TylerE 8y ago
        Hardly, especially not in the US where the track is not owned by a neutral party.
    - v_lisivka 8y ago
      Yep, rail road is hard to scale down, so it's very expensive to connect every single home to rail road. Also, rail roads are not walkable, so they cannot be shared with pedestrians, so this limitation forces create two separate roads: one for pedestrians, bicycles, cars, etc., and second one for rail transport. Trams can be mixed with regular road traffic, but trams cannot use regular rail roads because of different construction of rail road. Also, rail roads are prone to Single Point of Failure problems. To prevent SPF, multiple redundant routes must be built, with lot of expensive junctions between them. Also, you must schedule your travel. So, we need something which 1) can be shared with regular road traffic like trams, 2) can deliver loads of cargo efficiently like rail or metro, 3) can be connected to every house like regular road, 4) can be navigated by any car at any time of day or night, 5) be cheaper than regular road for road, cart, maintenance, recycling, 6) can provide power to carts, 7) can provide navigation and scheduling service to carts, 8) be with low delay (fast). Regular road is 1,3,4,±8. Uber is 1,3,4,5,7,8. Aero-taxi is 1,3,4,±5,7,8. Trams is 1,2,6,7. Metro is 2,6,7. Rail is 2,5,6,7. Edit: Tram-train is 1,2,5,6,7.

rhizome 8y ago

At the dawn of the age of rail, Germany had double the US population in an area about the size of Montana. There were a lot of people who wanted to move around way before cars were a factor, so you see much, much better rail systems in Europe.

jcranmer 8y ago
Probably a bigger factor is that, in the early 1940s, virtually the entire infrastructure of Europe was destroyed. In March 1945, there were no operational bridges across the entire length of the Rhine river. All of that infrastructure was rebuilt in the late 1940s and the 1950s to then-modern high speed standards; by contrast, the US has to make do with infrastructure upgraded at great cost around the 1910s.
- michaelt 8y ago
  Europe also had a big military imperative to build railways pre-WW1: Trains let you move your forces faster, so you can build up a concentration of forces in one location to attack or reinforce a defensive line. So no state in continental Europe wanted to be on the losing side of a railway gap.
  - dsq 8y ago
    This is probably a much bigger factor than usually thought. Military necessity will trump budget constrictions and property rights. Railways pre WW1, roads during and after WW2 and in preparation for the Cold War.
- rhizome 8y ago
  Before WWII Great Britain, Germany, and France all had about twice the rail they have now . After the war, cars and trucking made a big difference and system length decreased fairly steadily as a result because lots of track got rebuilt as roads.

LaGrange 8y ago

> European cities are far more walkable and accessible without a car. A really weird experience I had while visiting CA (SSF specifically) was seeing a fast food place - I think it was Wendy's? - that wasn't reachable by foot in any clear way. Similarly there wasn't any obvious sidewalks or bike lanes on the highway between Brisbane and SSF, and while that _is_ as 2km walk, I'd still expect it to be _possible_. I mean, I've been there for a week, and I'm sure it's possible to work things like that out if you live there longer. Maybe there's an entrance to the county park I didn't notice, or I don't know, a tunnel. But where I live, walking is far more intuitive than that. A tram might help, but it won't solve it.

fzeroracer 8y ago
I currently live in Austin and the general infrastructure here is atrocious. There are many places that are inaccessible as you've mentioned by walking and biking in America is incredibly dangerous. Most cities in the US are simply not equipped to deal with any sort of large population growth due to the incredibly bad infrastructure we have in place and zero motivation to improve it.

chungleong 8y ago

I normally live in Europe. At the moment I'm in Baltimore. The city's downtown area (around the inner harbor) is perfectly walkable. Nearby DC is also perfectly walkable, while driving is a nightmare. These two cities should be well connected by rail but they're not. People would drive to a parking lot beside a metro station and get into the city that way. Two cities can only be linked effectively by rail when there aren't stops between them. That's impossible in America, where suburban areas are the political battlegrounds while cities are single-party fiefdoms.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jcranmer 8y ago
Washington-Baltimore is actually a very good connection by rail--you'll have a train at least once an hour--except that the station for Baltimore is in the wrong location. Baltimore Penn Station is located far to the north of the city, well outside the Inner Harbor that's going to be the center of tourism and visitors. What happened is that, historically, Baltimore-Washington was mainly served by the B&O, whose Baltimore station would have been right next to Inner Harbor (Camden Yards is essentially built on old railroad property). When passenger service was consolidated into Amtrak, the Northeast Corridor instead chose to use Pennsylvania Railroad trackage instead of B&O from DC to NYC, and the freight trackage in the corridor consolidated onto the B&O tracks instead. The resulting residual commuter rail line has the standard commuter rail/freight rail politics going on that limits the number of trains that can transit the route.
- chungleong 8y ago
  Neither the metro or the lightrail reaches Penn. I don't know who designed the routes. Better connections between DC and BWI would better link the cities but they can't even maintain a bus line. Meanwhile, there's a billion dollar for the Silver line...
  - brianzelip 8y ago

gsanghera 8y ago

Didn't the US car companies actively lobby against and destroy the budding streetcar transport in most cities? I admit its not exactly rail, but you do have trams / streetcars in many European cities too - like Amsterdam. I would think they would be a much preferred public transport option than everyone driving their own car. Culture is not something which happens automatically - sometimes its driven by corporates, and the stronger the incentives for the corporates, the harder to resist, until the only one capable of doing so is the government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

evgen 8y ago
This is a rather popular lie that ignores the facts on the ground at the time. No, the US car companies did not lobby against or destroy the streetcar industry, the growth of the suburb and government policies that promoted such growth managed to do that all on their own. The auto manufacturers just set themselves up to take advantage of this decline and the shifting of subsidies to road construction. In this case culture (the shifting demographics that led to the initial growth of the suburb and the self-perpetuating cultural enshrinement of same) is what led and government/corporations followed.
- gsanghera 8y ago
  With all due respect - I don't understand this. Why would suburban growth not work with tram / local train lines that could be extended? It worked in London - one of the largest cities in the world which had to plan way ahead of time due to its historically narrow streets. I've lived in suburban London for >7 years, and frankly the only time I really needed to use the car was only to haul grocery home. Almost any other travel (including to work) was always achievable with the tube/bus - some combination of these. What the ground truth was then isn't recorded in history. There are post-facto interpretations. I would argue if the incentives were laid correctly, there was no reason for suburbanism to necessarily lead to growth in automobile consumption. The US motor companies had a massive clout. Given a choice back then (and the big roads due to the post-war expansion) it possibly made it easy to convince people that a car was a superior and more personal form of travel (think pre-ubiquitous air-conditioning). That's when you need government to think ahead, especially at the local level.