You’re saying it’s because people in Europe would only ever travel halfway across, whereas in the states they travel all the way from coast to coast? 😂
The opposing argument is pretty logical too though. The US being so spread out could make sleeper train rides much more attractive compared to extensive long-haul drives where you must be attentive.
It’s a complicated issue that goes beyond the geographical differences.
Car centric cities vs walkable ones. Lower fuels costs and bigger cars vs more expensive fuel and smaller cars. And in this specific comparison, an utterly terrible passenger train experience with minimal usage vs a competitive and robust system utilized by many. A bit of a chicken/egg issue there too.
Yes, but the major factor invoked by think-tanks (which admittedly only care about aviation and car industries) is always that the low-population-density makes track-laying and maintenance unprofitable outside freight, unlike in Europe or Asia, I can get you one example of such a report.
These cost calculations probably aim for optimising cost and not for CO2 emissions :/ anyway, good explanation with the decentralised and public-private mesh rail network
Valid point, especially as rail is more expensive compared to highway and air. At least on its face without emissions and other hard-to-quantify factors.
Many moving parts would have to come together for it to be more viable in the US, and there’s still no guarantee it’ll ever be cheaper. Or popular.
I used to be in a rare situation where I could actually use a light rail to commute and avoid a terrible 45 minute to hour-long drive. I really enjoyed the free time in the train compared to stress in the car. But nearly every one of my coworkers refused the train because it wasn’t massively cheaper and for other relatively-minor reasons. It was eye opening for me.
Europeans don't love sleeper trains. A very small subset of us do. The rest of us stay away, because being essentially trapped in a 6 berth room with unknown creeps of any gender, is the opposite of safe travel.
Europeans love travelling by train, but sleepers are used only by a small minority.
Just checked the prices for a round trip a while ago to Vienna from Amsterdam by train (Nightjet, full cabin booked) and by plane with KLM for 2 people. Prices were very similar.
More likely that it will be trains between cities and AI taxis in cities. Owning a car will make less sense when you can at a moments notice just jump into a AI taxi and trains will be way faster than cars between cities. Within cities I do not see subways making much sense less a few busy routes.
It depends where you live, here in Europe a lot of trips in the cities can also be done by walking, biking or other micromobility options because a lot of the trips are small distance.
It would be possible to slowly restructure the cities in the US to enable it there. It would also make the neighbourhoods much nicer in terms of livelyness and social interactions.
Won’t ever happen that way, unless government sky rocket the cost of ownership. People are selfish and will fight that tooth and nail. Just look at the reaction to the ULEZ, and they are willing to buy the old junk from them.
You are on the right track. Trains go between cities, buses/metros/trams within a city. Cars (AI or not) will still exist, but their use will mostly be for people in rural areas to arrive near the next train station.
Traffic within a city is perfect for public transportation. It is dense enough with sufficient demand. Of course this doesn’t mean that robo taxis will (or should) be completely absent in the city, just that they should be the exception not the rule.
Yeah, you still need to transport items, and people that do things with their hands, but surely in most first world countries, these things are a minority of road traffic.
If you can get those chokepoints out the way, from dystopian 10 lane traffic jams to an overcrowded tube train, everything else would run so much smoother.
That didn’t stop people before cars. Back then people built small railways if we are talking about construction.
We wouldn’t be having this conversation if it weren’t for vehicles like mine keeping up the internet infrastructure up.
There’s also no fucking way you going to put train tracks everywhere to keep up infrastructure. That sounds really fucking stupid
They need specialized equipment. They need heavy equipment.
This statement makes me feel like I’m responding to a 14 yr old with no life experience. Not even going to bother answering it.
A car is a car. Another motor doesn’t turn car into magic.
Electric vehicles have no emissions so there’s no reason people can’t use them specifically for work.
PS: You can respond but I’m not going to bother with you. There’s no point in having a discussion with someone with illrational and militant about their ideals
They also need to get to stores and see friends and family. Asking people to go back to insular homebound living for farm living seems unreasonable.
Another motor doesn’t turn car into magic.
However, if electric, it’s no exhaust, options for flexible energy sources, and hopefully long lived and recyclable batteries. If you are more upset about cars getting in the way of walking, then enjoy the walkable communities that exist today. Unfortunately they tend to be pricey.
If you can train an AI to take the stream of nonsense I am given on a daily basis, and not only turn it into software but also the software they needed rather than what they actually described, then that AI is fucking welcome to my job…
So you expect us to live in a virtual pod with a treadmill and grow all of our own food? And collect rainwater?
Edit: I’m not saying we shouldn’t reduce our need for freight. Growing food in your backyard (half of my yard is good production) reduces the need for freight emissions. And I cycle to work. But drive or fly on holidays, I wish we had a more reliable train network.
How far and how often is the key, on a well planned city people should live close to their jobs and recreational areas, taking away people commuting to work and grouping people with similar destinations together you can solve traffic and give people more mobility.
They said transporation, not freight. I think they mean you can access everything on foot. But just for your heresay against the pod, your pod was made 10% smaller and your treadmill was made 10% faster.
You make a good point but it’s hard to agree. I don’t like home, and would prefer not to work in my own home. I want to see the world, I like to travel. Perhaps if my life had more social mobility I wouldn’t be so starved for literal mobility. I have a car, could go drive anywhere. But it’s not real freedom.
You still need to drive to do all these things, that’s often a considerable distance though if you live in suburban areas since everything is far away.
One argument that keeps coming up in favor of cars that the United States is big. Well, if it’s big, we have plenty of room to build things close to where people live. It’s only zoning laws that force things to be unnecessarily far away.
Yes that was my point, not that we need cargo trams.
And it’s not just US that has this issue although there is taken to the extreme.
Many suburban areas in Europe have the same issues but the advantage is that many of them were built around small villages that they have ballooned so there was something that could give local services for residents already.
Basically in countries with more micromobility, they have smaller grocery stores. There will be one on every corner and you can just walk to it.
I see you mentioned suburbs. Yeah. The thing keeping shops and homes far apart in that case is zoning laws. And also building code dictating single family housing. In a more dense suburb in amsterdam or chicago you might have some rowhouse apartments but the first floor will be for shops, and one of those shops willcbe your nearest grocery store.
More lanes → more people driving + more people taking that specific route → problem gets worse.
Usually a better approach is to invest on mass transport; for example even if a bus takes the space of three cars (I’m guessing), it’s able to comfortably transport at least 20 people.
Sadly, any sort of mass transportation system is also prone to the same sort of vicious cycle; for example, if queue time for buses is too long, people will avoid taking them unless strictly necessary, so their usage is lower, so the companies put even less buses on those lines, so queue times increase even more. It’s basically what happened in my city (Curitiba), that used to have a fairly decent mass transport system.
I’ve heard the rule of thumb is that mass transit will basically always take about as long as driving there: because people will choose one or the other based on time.
So if you want your mass transit to improve it’s always worth it to do it at the expense of drivers: they’ll become your riders.
I’ve heard the rule of thumb is that mass transit will basically always take about as long as driving there
From personal experience this is true with some caveats - it doesn’t take into account waiting times, or that mass transport will never stop exactly where you want it to, or that sometimes you need take multiple ones to reach your destination. All those things add time that potential passengers take into account before deciding “I’ll take the bus” vs. “I’ll drive” or “I’ll take a uber”.
So if you want your mass transit to improve it’s always worth it to do it at the expense of drivers: they’ll become your riders.
Yup - and that’s what a mayor here did in the 90s, to encourage the usage of the bus system. For example certain central avenues got bus-exclusive lanes, and car transit in the leftover lines actually decreased because of that.
Same in my city, although mass transit was already terrible to begin with. Now, buses are often late or don’t arrive at all. Bus stops still have no shade which is miserable in this heat.
Tbh, as someone living in rural community all i want is decent public transportation of any sort. Like, it would be nice to have trains or escooters but, we don’t even have busses ( though that having been said i don’t how busses would get out here without it making tarc fare more expensive) or making bikes or scooter ( e or otherwise) a viable option in my area or making walking a more viable option. Admittedly i don’t know how they would do the last one but, the others they’ve been trying to do for awhile. I’m hoping that this not only made sense but, actually was on point.
The US (and much of europe) needs to realize that car centric planning is not the solution to mobility problems, it’s the cause! Suburbia could be more walkable if a few steps were taken during planning:
Note that the commenter said rural rather than suburban, and that’s a really whole other can of worms, but on the other hand they aren’t as frustrating to have cars. The population density is so low and the distances so large, it’s hard to figure any thing other than cars to meet those needs.
But I’m in suburbia, in fact right next to one of my cities mixed use mandate (all new housing must be dense housing and must construct retail space and office space with any housing construction). They also have very little parking for the retail space. So what has happened with those projects? The housing has filled up, but no company wants the retail space. A company could choose to open up a store there to serve that community and not much else owing to tiny parking, or they can set up 5 miles away for not much more and serve dozens of communities.
There was one successful mixed use development, but they were massive and dedicated a huge amount to multiple parking decks. People pay a lot of money to live there and it is walkable distance wise, but it’s car centric and unfortunately would have failed without accommodating cars.
Best walkable experience I’ve had was a place with trams and pedestrian bridges, as well as roads and parking decks. Businesses could count on the reach afforded by accommodating cars, and pedestrians never had to step on a car road or suffer a bus stuck in traffic. However, it was a massively expensive place to be.
I have a buddy that owns a big truck. It exists for one reason - to haul his trailer RV thing when he, his wife, and their FIVE kids go camping. Otherwise it sits there and looks pretty. He hates driving it, but the trailer is freakin’ yuge so yeah. It’s never, ever used as a commuter vehicle. The trailer has solar for power in addition to using an external generator that can use like, two or three different fuels.
He works from home, she doesn’t work and takes care of the kids/house. Their ‘commuter’ vehicle is a small hybrid SUV, again, to carry the five kids to and from school.
Their house is decked out in solar panels and they normally pay next to nothing for electricity, which they get from the grid via wind power because Texas.
EDIT: I need to stress the size of the trailer. The thing in it’s towable state is every bit as big as a semi trailer. If it was smaller, yeah, I’d agree (and so would he) that a smaller truck would be required. But he did his research and got a truck that can actually tow the thing properly. And again, he uses the thing maybe twice a year.
Do you know what people in Denmark, the Netherlands, and similar RV-heavy countries in Europe use to haul an RV with a family of four to six? Anything from a hatchback to a minivan depending on the amount of people. A truck is wildly inefficient for anything (except for the modest sized ones which hardly gets made anymore).
Not to dissuade your point or anything, but from reading their comment I’m picturing one of those large campers that you really only see in NA, like a tour bus that you have to tow. I’m no expert on towing capacity but I think one would actually have a use case for a large truck in that situation. Totally agree that they’re utterly overkill for just about any other situation though.
Because it makes USAians think of sleeper agents, which are communist, which is anti-capitalist, ergo sleeper trains are made by communists to weaken the capitalist of Americania, which is immoral and deeply unpatriotic. /s
Seriously though, good video. Regulation is very important.
Also, did everyone just forget about the pandemic we just went through? Haven’t we decided as a society stuffing lots of people in a small space is bad for our health?
Micro mobility is great if you plan on never leaving a 5 or 10 square mile area. The problem with that is the majority of Americas have at least 1 trip a month that’s 30+ miles.
No one is making that kind of trip with a micro mobility solution. Especially not in the heat and cold extremes we have now.
The problem with that is the majority of Americas have at least 1 trip a month that’s 30+ miles.
That trip is almost invariably traveling into a major city center. Like living in/near Buffalo and needing to go to NYC for a service that is not available in your closest city. Which will be extremely well connected by transit to everywhere in the peripheral area and paradoxically, will probably be very easy to make with a system of micromobility connecting into a rapid transit trunk line system.
Might go something like this: Say you live in one of the suburbs of Buffalo. You might bike to a local train station, get off at the main terminal and transfer for an intercity train to New York, get off at Grand Central Terminal, transfer for the subway, get off, and bike to your destination.
Might go something like this: Say you live in one of the suburbs of Buffalo. You might bike to a local train station, get off at the main terminal and transfer for an intercity train to New York, get off at Grand Central Terminal, transfer for the subway, get off, and bike to your destination. A transit system that integrates microbobility will let you bring your bike on the train.
So you just turned a 45 minute trip into at least a 3 to 4 hour one with layovers. Worse, you’re going to be exposed to the elements for a big leg of it.
You can put micromobility devices on a bus or train (or have one at either end). Or travel at 25km/h in a larger vehicle once a month until you get out of the micromobility path network. Or go to a car parked outside the network.
yup. point out how people can ride transit safely, they don’t want to hear it. cars are literally destroying the only ecosystem we have in the universe, and we’re letting the car chuds do it because…?
trust me, if the situation was reversed, they’d happily run everyone else down if it meant saving their way of life.
they don’t even fucking care about their own kids.
You know what’s interesting? I’ve never paid more than £150 for a ticket to fly anywhere in Europe. Paying thousands sounds completely bonkers to me. I bet I can fly from London to the US cheaper than $1000.
There are several Portlands in the US, so I’m not sure which one you’re talking about, but I guess if it’s the one on the West Coast, then it’s about the same distance as from London to Tenerife. That would cost me £68 one way booked two weeks in advance. I remember flying from Frankfurt to Tenerife for free. Yes, free. But that was a long time ago, hard to find deals like that these days… But man, $800, what the fuck?
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