5 ms·

Transportation is the biggest difference between the us and a lot of the rest of the world. Switzerland is the size of a small New England state. Mass transit i

by S_A_P 7y ago

Transportation is the biggest difference between the us and a lot of the rest of the world. Switzerland is the size of a small New England state. Mass transit is a tough thing to scale. That said I’ve noticed that a lot of the jobs in the us that would be considered “glamorous” are by and large the lowest paying jobs with the longest hours. Looking past the status of a company and career and looking into the practical details of a job will make finding a fulfilling and well paying job easier. All in all I think the article is not really apples to apples but has some valid points.

cpursley 7y ago
> Mass transit is a tough thing to scale. Is it? Russia is the largest country on the planet and they have had mass transit figured out for nearly a century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Russia
- elamje 7y ago
  Have you been there? I really don’t think Russia has it figured out better than the US. Russia’s infrastructure is certainly not close to the level of Europe/Japan or China.
  - cpursley 7y ago
    > Have you been there? I really don’t think Russia has it figured out better than the US. Yes, I live here. Russian transportation absolutely blows anything in the US away, and I've traveled extensively in both countries. Transportation is embarrassing and frustrating for me when I come back to the US. The US is absolutely car-dependent. Russia has everything from Rail transport (trans-Siberian, etc), city subways (Moscow subway just built a bunch of new lines including a second ring), trams, electric buses, bus systems, marshrutka mini buses, very cheap taxis (uber & yandex). https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/14/Moscow_metro_ring_railway_map_en_sb_future.svg/1000px-Moscow_metro_ring_railway_map_en_sb_future.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/14/Mo... > Russia’s infrastructure is certainly not close to the level of Europe/Japan or China. Fair enough, but their low tech solutions are cost effective and solve the problem. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2018/07/20/moscow-public-transit-ranks-worlds-most-efficient-a62287 https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2018/07/20/moscow-public-tran...
    - fastball 7y ago
      You don't think US cities have mass transit? The NYC subway[0] is 30 years older than the Moscow Metro[1], if you want to talk about "having things for a century". The US has train lines that cross the entire country as well. No HSR, which is what is needed, but then again neither does Russia. Here is a map of transcontinental railroads in the US in 1887[2]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Metro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Metro [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcontinental_railroad#/media/File:US_Pacific_Railroads_1887.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcontinental_railroad#/med...
      - cpursley 7y ago
        > You don't think US cities have mass transit? No, they are a hilarious joke. NYC metro is a dirty cesspool that can't build anything within budget. Marta in ATL doesen't go anywhere and hasn't added a new line in decades. Everyone knows how bad BART is. Also, it's generally more expensive to take Amtrak than fly. And Amtrak goes nowhere vs the Russian train systems. Just pull up a map to compare. And Russia does have some HSR (could use some more): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Russia
        fastball 7y ago
        Interesting that you decided to exclude Boston, Chicago, DC, and Philly from your list. NYC is a massively overbuilt city, much of which is on an island of bedrock. It wouldn't be any better if it was in Russia with the same geography. Not sure how Amtrak being more expensive than flying is relevant. Plus, I don't think you want to compare train coverage in the US vs Russia. Most of Russia's land area doesn't have good train coverage.
        komali2 7y ago
        But most of the places where people actually live, does. Nobody needs trains to the middle of the Siberian tundra. Middle of south Dakota, on the other hand...
  - Youden 7y ago
    I'm another person who's been there. I've lived for three years in the Bay Area and travelled to a few other US cities (LA, Seattle, Portland, Orlando, Chicago) and surprisingly, even the smaller Russian cities I've visited mostly blow the US out of the water in terms of public transit and are a lot better in other aspects too. The city I stay in the most, where my wife is from, has a population of 110k, is absolutely not wealthy and is pretty far away from Moscow and St. Petersburg. In terms of local transit, there are frequent and affordable minibuses (Marshrutki) with stops all over the place. They cost (in this city) 17 rubles, which at the moment is around a quarter US. My mother in law is on a teacher's salary which is quite low and has no issues with affordability. I think the longest I waited for one was ~5 minutes. For regional transit, there are trains to and from the nearest airport and larger city, as well as the capital. From there you can take trains to Moscow and from there most of the rest of Russia. The trains are also fairly affordable, particularly if you go for the lowest class (which is admittedly something most Americans wouldn't be comfortable with). There are of course also planes.
- masonic 7y ago
  Between major cities, anyway. In the Far East and north, Salekhard-Igarka is still unfinished after over 70 years, even with years of slave labor.
garmaine 7y ago
I’m not sure transportation is as important as, say, healthcare or work/life balance.
- cpursley 7y ago
  It's a vital part of it. It's much healthier to walk bike or ride transit to work and daily activities. Additionally, being closer to everything means less stress and more free time (better work/life balance).
  - garmaine 7y ago
    Yeah but it doesn’t have anything to do with my healthcare premiums being more than my rent, or my boss making me work 80 hour weeks without overtime and a measly 2 weeks per year vacation which I am discouraged from taking. Those are far more pressing issues imho.
    - cpursley 7y ago
      > Yeah but it doesn’t have anything to do with my healthcare premiums being more than my rent Fair enough.
    - komali2 7y ago
      Pressing, yes, but between the two of us you can tackle those issues that are near and dear to you (while garnering benefit for us all) while I focus on transportation. There's no need for every person to focus on the same issue - otherwise we better all head out to Africa and start irrigating, or something else that has the greatest Utility.
deogeo 7y ago
> Switzerland is the size of a small New England state. Mass transit is a tough thing to scale. If tomorrow all of Europe and Asia was unified into one giant continent-spanning country, would building mass transit there suddenly become more difficult?
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  Yes because the number of stake holders that need to be satisfied and the number of edge cases would increase massively. Look at public transit systems throughout the west whenever they get expanded it's a long painful process because of all the new stakeholders being added and the new edge cases that get brought to light. Edit: Down-voted because inconvenient opinion or down-voted because wrong?
  - deogeo 7y ago
    Perhaps because you don't state any mechanism on how the borders of a country increase the complexity of building a particular transit system - you just assert that it is so. Surely the number of stakeholders is more related to proximity, than borders? And China, Russia, and Canada are all large countries, but seem to manage decent mass transit. In sum, you provide a shaky, ad-hoc justification on why it's more difficult if the country is larger, and ignore counterexamples.
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      >Perhaps because you don't state any mechanism on how the borders of a country increase the complexity of building a particular transit system This is HN. I shouldn't have to exhaustively spell out every detail like I'm on Reddit. I think that stating that a mass transit system that covers more people and more area leading to more stakeholders with more opinions who need to be pleased is more than enough. Presumably most people here have jobs where they work with other people and should be familiar with how increasing the number of stakeholders and/or coverage of a project increases technical and political complexity. Look at the history of public transit in the DC/Maryland/Virginia area for an example of political complexity scaling with the number of people and different jurisdictions covered. >China The land of "the subway is going here, don't like it then screw you". >Russia Which built out most of it's infrastructure back when it could operate similarly to China does today. I would think it would go without saying that having a government that unilaterally steamrolls any opposition to its public works projects is not a practical solution for mass transit in the west. >Canada In basically all of Canada you "need" a car. Most here would say that means they don't have good mass transit.
izacus 7y ago
I never understood that argument - Bay Area, the (arguably) richest place on this planet is smaller then Switzerland and it's transit system is catastrophic in comparison to SBB still. I get that you can't cover Alabama with Swiss railways, but why the heck is traveling from Zurich a Swiss mountain top in the middle of nowhere still faster and more convenient than getting from SF to Mountain View?
- fastball 7y ago
  Out-of-control NIMBYism. Not sure why Switzerland doesn't experience that, but there you go.
- opportune 7y ago
  The thing that pisses me off the most about the Bay Area transit system is how slow it is compared to taking a car. I don’t understand how you can build a rail system that ends up taking 2x longer to get from point A to point B. Even aside from the spotty coverage it’s ridiculous how the train can take longer from station to station than driving
  - Redoubts 7y ago
    I, too, can't believe how many times I've been Caltrain in an Uber Pool.
- S_A_P 7y ago
  From my perspective this is how I see mass transit in the US, and I am 100% for changing the status quo here. READ: Im for sensible, reliable and safe public transit systems by train/bus/subway/ whatever. In Houston, there have always been proposals for hub and spoke train service from the burbs to downtown. They get shot down repeatedly, usually on grounds of imminent domain fights. High speed rail from Houston to Dallas is proposed every so often and will likely arrive on the same time scale is fusion energy. (perpetually 10 years away). Dallas is actually an example of a sane train system, and I quite enjoyed using the Dart when I worked there for 6 months a few years ago. If you happen to use the public transit in many urban areas of the US, people don't seem to want to take care of these sorts of things, so they usually get pretty grimy and in a state of disrepair quickly. People (rightly or wrongly) fear for their safety as sometimes these trains harbor those with drug problems or other mental illness.(separate and equally important issue to work on here) The projects that do get off the ground seem to turn into boondoggles that blow their budget 10x or more and end up serving 1/10th of the proposed areas. California comes to mind as an example of this recently. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-california-governor-rail/california-will-not-complete-77-billion-high-speed-rail-project-governor-idUSKCN1Q12II https://www.reuters.com/article/us-california-governor-rail/... I admit it was impossible to glean this from my comment and it would be easy to see what I said as anti mass transit and all of the political baggage that carries with it. That isn't the case here. Pragmatically speaking, though you are misguided if you think that it is as easy to implement rail and other forms of mass transit in the US vs a small European country. That is not to say its impossible, or that other countries haven't done it. But I do stand by my statement that rail projects in Switzerland are not the same as those in the US. Its not apples to apples. In my opinion, for this sort of thing to take off in the US, it would take a sea change in how most people view urban living. That means people will need to decide that they don't need a 4-5k sq foot home in the burbs with a 30-40 mile commute every day...
bhaak 7y ago
> Transportation is the biggest difference between the us and a lot of the rest of the world. Switzerland is the size of a small New England state. Mass transit is a tough thing to scale. I don't buy this argument. "We are much bigger than $OTHER_COUNTRY therefore we can't have comparable public transport". I concur that for the whole country this might be a viable argument but it doesn't explain why the public transport in metropolitan areas are also often not good at all.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  I wonder how many people that don’t buy that argument have driven across the USA a few times?
  - opportune 7y ago
    The commenter restricted it to metro areas and I concur. There is not too much difference in density from cities like Seattle and San Francisco from European cities. I don’t think we should be building high speed rail from Anchorage to Lincoln, NE but there is no reason we can’t have a ubahn/sbahn system in each large city and high speed rail down the coasts
    - SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
      >There is not too much difference in density from cities like Seattle and San Francisco from European cities. Not sure I can get on board with that. It's the number of cities. Switzerland has ONE city with a population over 250k. USA has EIGHTY EIGHT or so over 238 times the area. That matters where you invest, how you build, etc. As to why we can't have high speed rails, ask California.
CPLX 7y ago
I live in the wealthiest and most successful city in the history of world civilization and I can’t take a fucking train to any of the three massive airports. In fact recently at LaGuardia it’s been so dysfunctional that’s it’s impossible to be picked up by cars. Meanwhile, not too long ago I was in Lucerne, where I got on a train and then got off an hour or two later 100 feet from the check in counter at Zurich airport, a completely different city. They could do this in NYC if they wanted to. They don’t. It’s not because of the size of the country.
- caymanjim 7y ago
  Other than LaGuardia sucking all around, this complaint is completely invalid. You can take multiple subway lines directly to JFK from Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. I do it myself all the time. You can take the E from Manhattan directly to the AirTran in under an hour. You can get there from Queens and Brooklyn even faster. NJ Transit trains (which you can get from midtown Manhattan) go directly to a Newark Airport monorail. Mass transit in NYC has problems, but it's one of the most connected places on earth.
  - CPLX 7y ago
    > You can take multiple subway lines directly to JFK You're kidding right? You can take a subway line to downtown Jamaica Queens, or to the fringes of a remote airport parking lot in Howard Beach, but you most certainly cannot take a subway anywhere near an actual JFK airport terminal. As you point out, you can then walk hundreds of yards and navigate several sets of stairs or elevators to have the privilege of paying five bucks to get on the useless and slow "AirTrain" people mover and wait another 20 minutes and walk another hundred yards into the terminal. In the rest of the world they take trains -- real trains, actual trains that go places -- and they run them into the terminals. You get on a train at a subway or train station in the center of the city and you get off in an airport, not 3 miles from an airport. If you've never experienced this go to Zurich, or London, or Munich, or like almost anywhere else. They way we do it is insane. They're spending billions of dollars to totally renovate LGA right now and they still can't get this basic concept right.
carlob 7y ago
> Transportation is the biggest difference between the us and a lot of the rest of the world. Switzerland is the size of a small New England state. Mass transit is a tough thing to scale. What about railways in China? I don't think size matters, it's more a question of political will: take Germany (or even worse the UK) and France and compare their train systems, France is just light years ahead in terms of low prices and fast speeds, all other factors (country size, economy, terrain) are pretty similar.

by S_A_P 7y ago

cpursley 7y ago

> Mass transit is a tough thing to scale. Is it? Russia is the largest country on the planet and they have had mass transit figured out for nearly a century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Russia

elamje 7y ago
Have you been there? I really don’t think Russia has it figured out better than the US. Russia’s infrastructure is certainly not close to the level of Europe/Japan or China.
- cpursley 7y ago
  > Have you been there? I really don’t think Russia has it figured out better than the US. Yes, I live here. Russian transportation absolutely blows anything in the US away, and I've traveled extensively in both countries. Transportation is embarrassing and frustrating for me when I come back to the US. The US is absolutely car-dependent. Russia has everything from Rail transport (trans-Siberian, etc), city subways (Moscow subway just built a bunch of new lines including a second ring), trams, electric buses, bus systems, marshrutka mini buses, very cheap taxis (uber & yandex). https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/14/Moscow_metro_ring_railway_map_en_sb_future.svg/1000px-Moscow_metro_ring_railway_map_en_sb_future.svg.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/14/Mo... > Russia’s infrastructure is certainly not close to the level of Europe/Japan or China. Fair enough, but their low tech solutions are cost effective and solve the problem. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2018/07/20/moscow-public-transit-ranks-worlds-most-efficient-a62287 https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2018/07/20/moscow-public-tran...
  - fastball 7y ago
    You don't think US cities have mass transit? The NYC subway[0] is 30 years older than the Moscow Metro[1], if you want to talk about "having things for a century". The US has train lines that cross the entire country as well. No HSR, which is what is needed, but then again neither does Russia. Here is a map of transcontinental railroads in the US in 1887[2]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Metro https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Metro [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcontinental_railroad#/media/File:US_Pacific_Railroads_1887.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcontinental_railroad#/med...
    - cpursley 7y ago
      > You don't think US cities have mass transit? No, they are a hilarious joke. NYC metro is a dirty cesspool that can't build anything within budget. Marta in ATL doesen't go anywhere and hasn't added a new line in decades. Everyone knows how bad BART is. Also, it's generally more expensive to take Amtrak than fly. And Amtrak goes nowhere vs the Russian train systems. Just pull up a map to compare. And Russia does have some HSR (could use some more): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Russia
      - fastball 7y ago
        Interesting that you decided to exclude Boston, Chicago, DC, and Philly from your list. NYC is a massively overbuilt city, much of which is on an island of bedrock. It wouldn't be any better if it was in Russia with the same geography. Not sure how Amtrak being more expensive than flying is relevant. Plus, I don't think you want to compare train coverage in the US vs Russia. Most of Russia's land area doesn't have good train coverage.
        komali2 7y ago
        But most of the places where people actually live, does. Nobody needs trains to the middle of the Siberian tundra. Middle of south Dakota, on the other hand...
- Youden 7y ago
  I'm another person who's been there. I've lived for three years in the Bay Area and travelled to a few other US cities (LA, Seattle, Portland, Orlando, Chicago) and surprisingly, even the smaller Russian cities I've visited mostly blow the US out of the water in terms of public transit and are a lot better in other aspects too. The city I stay in the most, where my wife is from, has a population of 110k, is absolutely not wealthy and is pretty far away from Moscow and St. Petersburg. In terms of local transit, there are frequent and affordable minibuses (Marshrutki) with stops all over the place. They cost (in this city) 17 rubles, which at the moment is around a quarter US. My mother in law is on a teacher's salary which is quite low and has no issues with affordability. I think the longest I waited for one was ~5 minutes. For regional transit, there are trains to and from the nearest airport and larger city, as well as the capital. From there you can take trains to Moscow and from there most of the rest of Russia. The trains are also fairly affordable, particularly if you go for the lowest class (which is admittedly something most Americans wouldn't be comfortable with). There are of course also planes.
masonic 7y ago
Between major cities, anyway. In the Far East and north, Salekhard-Igarka is still unfinished after over 70 years, even with years of slave labor.

garmaine 7y ago

I’m not sure transportation is as important as, say, healthcare or work/life balance.

cpursley 7y ago
It's a vital part of it. It's much healthier to walk bike or ride transit to work and daily activities. Additionally, being closer to everything means less stress and more free time (better work/life balance).
- garmaine 7y ago
  Yeah but it doesn’t have anything to do with my healthcare premiums being more than my rent, or my boss making me work 80 hour weeks without overtime and a measly 2 weeks per year vacation which I am discouraged from taking. Those are far more pressing issues imho.
  - cpursley 7y ago
    > Yeah but it doesn’t have anything to do with my healthcare premiums being more than my rent Fair enough.
  - komali2 7y ago
    Pressing, yes, but between the two of us you can tackle those issues that are near and dear to you (while garnering benefit for us all) while I focus on transportation. There's no need for every person to focus on the same issue - otherwise we better all head out to Africa and start irrigating, or something else that has the greatest Utility.

deogeo 7y ago

> Switzerland is the size of a small New England state. Mass transit is a tough thing to scale. If tomorrow all of Europe and Asia was unified into one giant continent-spanning country, would building mass transit there suddenly become more difficult?

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
Yes because the number of stake holders that need to be satisfied and the number of edge cases would increase massively. Look at public transit systems throughout the west whenever they get expanded it's a long painful process because of all the new stakeholders being added and the new edge cases that get brought to light. Edit: Down-voted because inconvenient opinion or down-voted because wrong?
- deogeo 7y ago
  Perhaps because you don't state any mechanism on how the borders of a country increase the complexity of building a particular transit system - you just assert that it is so. Surely the number of stakeholders is more related to proximity, than borders? And China, Russia, and Canada are all large countries, but seem to manage decent mass transit. In sum, you provide a shaky, ad-hoc justification on why it's more difficult if the country is larger, and ignore counterexamples.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    >Perhaps because you don't state any mechanism on how the borders of a country increase the complexity of building a particular transit system This is HN. I shouldn't have to exhaustively spell out every detail like I'm on Reddit. I think that stating that a mass transit system that covers more people and more area leading to more stakeholders with more opinions who need to be pleased is more than enough. Presumably most people here have jobs where they work with other people and should be familiar with how increasing the number of stakeholders and/or coverage of a project increases technical and political complexity. Look at the history of public transit in the DC/Maryland/Virginia area for an example of political complexity scaling with the number of people and different jurisdictions covered. >China The land of "the subway is going here, don't like it then screw you". >Russia Which built out most of it's infrastructure back when it could operate similarly to China does today. I would think it would go without saying that having a government that unilaterally steamrolls any opposition to its public works projects is not a practical solution for mass transit in the west. >Canada In basically all of Canada you "need" a car. Most here would say that means they don't have good mass transit.

izacus 7y ago

I never understood that argument - Bay Area, the (arguably) richest place on this planet is smaller then Switzerland and it's transit system is catastrophic in comparison to SBB still. I get that you can't cover Alabama with Swiss railways, but why the heck is traveling from Zurich a Swiss mountain top in the middle of nowhere still faster and more convenient than getting from SF to Mountain View?

fastball 7y ago
Out-of-control NIMBYism. Not sure why Switzerland doesn't experience that, but there you go.
opportune 7y ago
The thing that pisses me off the most about the Bay Area transit system is how slow it is compared to taking a car. I don’t understand how you can build a rail system that ends up taking 2x longer to get from point A to point B. Even aside from the spotty coverage it’s ridiculous how the train can take longer from station to station than driving
- Redoubts 7y ago
  I, too, can't believe how many times I've been Caltrain in an Uber Pool.
S_A_P 7y ago
From my perspective this is how I see mass transit in the US, and I am 100% for changing the status quo here. READ: Im for sensible, reliable and safe public transit systems by train/bus/subway/ whatever. In Houston, there have always been proposals for hub and spoke train service from the burbs to downtown. They get shot down repeatedly, usually on grounds of imminent domain fights. High speed rail from Houston to Dallas is proposed every so often and will likely arrive on the same time scale is fusion energy. (perpetually 10 years away). Dallas is actually an example of a sane train system, and I quite enjoyed using the Dart when I worked there for 6 months a few years ago. If you happen to use the public transit in many urban areas of the US, people don't seem to want to take care of these sorts of things, so they usually get pretty grimy and in a state of disrepair quickly. People (rightly or wrongly) fear for their safety as sometimes these trains harbor those with drug problems or other mental illness.(separate and equally important issue to work on here) The projects that do get off the ground seem to turn into boondoggles that blow their budget 10x or more and end up serving 1/10th of the proposed areas. California comes to mind as an example of this recently. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-california-governor-rail/california-will-not-complete-77-billion-high-speed-rail-project-governor-idUSKCN1Q12II https://www.reuters.com/article/us-california-governor-rail/... I admit it was impossible to glean this from my comment and it would be easy to see what I said as anti mass transit and all of the political baggage that carries with it. That isn't the case here. Pragmatically speaking, though you are misguided if you think that it is as easy to implement rail and other forms of mass transit in the US vs a small European country. That is not to say its impossible, or that other countries haven't done it. But I do stand by my statement that rail projects in Switzerland are not the same as those in the US. Its not apples to apples. In my opinion, for this sort of thing to take off in the US, it would take a sea change in how most people view urban living. That means people will need to decide that they don't need a 4-5k sq foot home in the burbs with a 30-40 mile commute every day...

bhaak 7y ago

> Transportation is the biggest difference between the us and a lot of the rest of the world. Switzerland is the size of a small New England state. Mass transit is a tough thing to scale. I don't buy this argument. "We are much bigger than $OTHER_COUNTRY therefore we can't have comparable public transport". I concur that for the whole country this might be a viable argument but it doesn't explain why the public transport in metropolitan areas are also often not good at all.

SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
I wonder how many people that don’t buy that argument have driven across the USA a few times?
- opportune 7y ago
  The commenter restricted it to metro areas and I concur. There is not too much difference in density from cities like Seattle and San Francisco from European cities. I don’t think we should be building high speed rail from Anchorage to Lincoln, NE but there is no reason we can’t have a ubahn/sbahn system in each large city and high speed rail down the coasts
  - SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
    >There is not too much difference in density from cities like Seattle and San Francisco from European cities. Not sure I can get on board with that. It's the number of cities. Switzerland has ONE city with a population over 250k. USA has EIGHTY EIGHT or so over 238 times the area. That matters where you invest, how you build, etc. As to why we can't have high speed rails, ask California.

CPLX 7y ago

I live in the wealthiest and most successful city in the history of world civilization and I can’t take a fucking train to any of the three massive airports. In fact recently at LaGuardia it’s been so dysfunctional that’s it’s impossible to be picked up by cars. Meanwhile, not too long ago I was in Lucerne, where I got on a train and then got off an hour or two later 100 feet from the check in counter at Zurich airport, a completely different city. They could do this in NYC if they wanted to. They don’t. It’s not because of the size of the country.

caymanjim 7y ago
Other than LaGuardia sucking all around, this complaint is completely invalid. You can take multiple subway lines directly to JFK from Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. I do it myself all the time. You can take the E from Manhattan directly to the AirTran in under an hour. You can get there from Queens and Brooklyn even faster. NJ Transit trains (which you can get from midtown Manhattan) go directly to a Newark Airport monorail. Mass transit in NYC has problems, but it's one of the most connected places on earth.
- CPLX 7y ago
  > You can take multiple subway lines directly to JFK You're kidding right? You can take a subway line to downtown Jamaica Queens, or to the fringes of a remote airport parking lot in Howard Beach, but you most certainly cannot take a subway anywhere near an actual JFK airport terminal. As you point out, you can then walk hundreds of yards and navigate several sets of stairs or elevators to have the privilege of paying five bucks to get on the useless and slow "AirTrain" people mover and wait another 20 minutes and walk another hundred yards into the terminal. In the rest of the world they take trains -- real trains, actual trains that go places -- and they run them into the terminals. You get on a train at a subway or train station in the center of the city and you get off in an airport, not 3 miles from an airport. If you've never experienced this go to Zurich, or London, or Munich, or like almost anywhere else. They way we do it is insane. They're spending billions of dollars to totally renovate LGA right now and they still can't get this basic concept right.

carlob 7y ago

> Transportation is the biggest difference between the us and a lot of the rest of the world. Switzerland is the size of a small New England state. Mass transit is a tough thing to scale. What about railways in China? I don't think size matters, it's more a question of political will: take Germany (or even worse the UK) and France and compare their train systems, France is just light years ahead in terms of low prices and fast speeds, all other factors (country size, economy, terrain) are pretty similar.