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BART is also ridiculously slow. To compare, within the similarly dense and similarly sized Swiss middlelands I can hop on the train system and compete with cars
by m_mueller 7y ago
BART is also ridiculously slow. To compare, within the similarly dense and similarly sized Swiss middlelands I can hop on the train system and compete with cars going highway speeds while reading HN or do whatever. In the Bay area I felt like I had to plan half a day to get into SF one way alone. There's no reason why you can't have at least Swiss quality rail there, not even talking about Japanese levels.
- djrogers 7y agoI'm not sure what day you tried to take BART, but getting to SF from the far end of a line takes about an hour or less. Oh, and there are several stretches of that where the train will run at 70MPH - freeway speeds. Sure, it could be faster (and quieter, and more comfortable) but it's not slow.
- m_mueller 7y agoI went from San Jose to SF which is about 1h 35min for a distance that's slightly less than Basel to Zurich, once you get there. There's two major factors that make it slow for me: One, American trainstations are often far away from town centers. Two, BART stops everywhere even though it's quite a sizeable distance. For these distances we'd typically have an interregional connection that only stops 3-4 times. Basel Zürich takes about 55min btw. and you arrive right in each city's center, with tons of public transport to connect you further. SF main station by comparison looked tiny to me, with less connections than lots of Swiss towns with maybe 200k inhabitants have. And I'm not even talking about HSR, for that have a look at Paris to Lyon or Tokyo to Osaka for some example.