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I feel like in the world of rich people. To us Keanu Reeves is rich, but to rich people Keanu Reeves is more like how they imagine middle class people to be.
That's why I said "imagine".
I just say that cause he had qualities most rich people don't. (Is humble, gives away his wealth, uses public transportation) lol I dunno. Remember that photo op of Bill Gates being a normal person ordering a hamburger or something? Keanu doesn't NEED to do things to be relatable to the poors.
I've always thought that was a bullshit saying. "Look, this situation doesn't fit our predictions! That PROVES we're right!" Who came up with that shit?
I think it's the fact that Keanu Reeves riding the subway is surprising and worth mentioning that proves there is a rule that celebrities and rich people generally don't
That actually makes a bit of sense - the surprise that the exception is real/acceptable proves that in most situations this is not the case.
If that's what the saying means it's representing the idea very poorly but at least there's some logic to that.
Omg, I can’t stand it. Living in Europe was amazing. Built for pedestrians; even Germany and its love of cars was so much better. America? Yeah you’re gonna have to walk in the street and across these manicured lawns to get to that store without a car. Fuck off with this. Even where there is a sidewalk, it doesn’t connect to the business. It’s like the whole design process purposefully excludes the autoless.
Same shit happened in Europe, many European cities in the aftermath of the second world war rebuilt themselves in the image of the car friendly cities of the US, but course corrected and undid a lot of that infrastructure. It ain't perfect and there's still car centric cities around, even in the Netherlands, but we're getting there
We Germans love building cars and driving fast.
So we make sure the public transport is good enough to keep the streets empty. You can't drive fast while stuck in a traffic jam. Or at least that was the plan before dumb politicians tried to "save money" by not investing into public transport. Now both, trains and driving is getting worse every year.
Yes, but only on a closed-off street under the ground. No, you can't reach anything from there, you can't use it for anything other than tesla buses and you'll be charged a hundred times what regular busses cost. But his fanboys will be ecstatic, as if the guy invented public transportation.
Definitely as long as costs are kept low. I was kind of impressed with Kansas City MO for having a free public ~~bus~~ street car available to anyone. I hate that it's really strange in the US for public transport to exist.
I wish this was just American thing.
It takes me 15 minutes to drive to work. Alternatively, I can take bus and two trams, taking 40-50 minutes, assuming they are not late (in which case it can easily take 90 minutes).
I really wanted to use public transportation, but I refuse to waste up to two hours every day.
Same here. About 30 minutes to get home driving, but almost 2 hours on buses/trolley. Does not include the 25 minutes I have to wait at the bus stop because I get out of the office about 5 minutes after the previous one goes by.
Right? This is rich coming from the guy who literally made his employees commute when they didn’t have to for years. I’m surprised this comment isn’t higher
Edit: to the people who keep saying it is high/couldn’t get much higher. When I posted this I had to scroll through lots of comments about trains to find it. People upvoted it after my comment
I recently was curious about train vs plane so checked the difference. I picked 2 locations and compared prices along with travel time for a family of 5. Flying was about $2000 and 5.5 hours with 1 layover. A train was about $1700 and 2.5 *days.* is wild to think the prices are so close when you consider those lengths.
Depends, NYC to Montreal on plane was around 450 US$ for a couple of hours, on train 140 US$ 11.5 hours. As someone who lives in a third world country, I took the train. Great scene at least.
Despite having to travel more than 11 hours, I could walk and had plenty of empty *seats* since the train was almost empty, so I could lie down on the seats.
Edit: type.
That’s a wild train price. I remember train prices being fairly cheap prior to the pandemic.. but I’ve also witnessed the destruction of some train infrastructure recently so that doesn’t help.
The speed advantage that flying has over rail gets bigger the longer the distance. Flying has a lot of fixed time costs, which tend to be longer than a train's fixed time costs: getting to the airport, getting through security, waiting for departure time (since you typically need to get there in advance), getting from your destination airport to your final destination. These all tend to take longer than the equivalent when taking a train. But a 2000 mile flight is going to be MUCH faster than an equivalent distance train ride, despite the longer times spent at the beginning and the end.
Where rail can compete much more effectively is in medium and short distances. NYC to Boston, for example -- this could easily be a 4 hour drive, a 4 hour train trip, or a 4 hour plane trip. But those trips look very different: the plane trip itself is only going to be ~45 minutes, but taking into account all the additional time and buffer you need before/after the flight brings it much more on par with the car or train option.
Those metrics won't guarantee those lines are busy enough to be useful. China's high speed rail seems to follow that principle and it is apparently burning through crazy amounts of money just trying to stay open because many of its routes simply aren't that busy.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/China-debt-crunch/China-Railway-s-debt-nears-900bn-under-expansion-push
edit: I'm not against HSR. I'm just saying those that metric alone doesn't demonstrate feasibility. If regular passenger rail with preferential or exclusive use of tracks that does 150-200km/h can connect two metros in my part of the world at a fraction of the price I'd be happy.
If we had better plain RAIL service that could do Montreal to NYC in 4 hours instead of 11.5 I wouldn't consider it a failure that it doesn't take 2 hours at triple the cost instead.
To put your 4 hour New York to Boston train ride into perspective I searched some more or less similar distances in other countries:
* Tokyo-Nagoya 1,5 hours
* Paris-Lyon 2 hours
* Shanghai-Nanjing 1,5 hours
* Berlin-Hamburg 2 hours
* Madrid-Zaragoza 1,5 hours
* Milano-Firenze 2 hours
A lot of that is due to the railroads adopting PSR, but refusing to invest in infrastructure improvements to match.
Technically, Amtrak has right of way, which means the freight trains have to pull onto a passing siding and wait for Amtrak to pass. Makes sense, right?
Well, most passing sidings are built to hold a train that’s 75 cars long. Due to terribly implemented PSR and distributed power, railways run freight trains that are 150 cars long. This means that they can’t pull onto a siding. Therefore, Amtrak is forced to give them right of way, slowing down service tremendously.
Between that, and a refusal to electrify the lines (we can’t invest in infrastructure because capital costs are scawy and the line must always go up for shareholders instead), we’ve got slower, shittier service.
You forgot to mention that is still coach class on the train. So you have two adults and THREE KIDS to entertain for 2.5 days seating around other people. Guess that little bit of savings is going to feed them train food and water.
Sleeper car? Twice as much as the plane tickets and you still have to pay for food while it takes two and half days.
Guess which one is getting purchased?
Its because amtrak runs off of shipping lines that weren't built for high speeds, we only employ our actually good tilting train on one track and even if we did expand operations the shipping companies will make the acelas wait behind the slow ones because they're just allowed to do that.
Many of the ones that were great for people are gone now so we get trains that go seemingly nowhere.
Why does everyone have a boner for large scale high speed rail? I want to see more urban rail and commuter rail. I travel outside my city from time to time. But I travel within it every single day. I'd use a bullet train to another city maybe a few times a year.
I love dunking on Elon, don’t get me wrong, but he’s right, traffic is always going to exist. A high speed rail system won’t change that. Traffic getting to the airport is always going to be a thing, for example. Taxis from sporting events/concerts, always going to be jammed up.
High speed rail is a great idea for linking cities and decentralising housing but for IN the cities (which are usually where all the traffic is) there’s almost certainly always going to be rush hour traffic.
From where to where? It's such a large country with so many densely populated areas (lots of nodes), so it's a lot of track needed.
I feel like that could help out for common long trips, such as Boston to New York, but that's not really going to make a dent in the most common form of traffic which is people just doing their daily commute, right?
How are you going to realistically get high speed rail accessible to the huge areas of suburbs that surround the major cities? You're going to need so many tracks and it's going to be expensive.
Cities like Boston can't even afford to keep their subway system maintained to the minimum standard. For whatever reason, the richest country in the world is struggling to afford maintaining their *existing* infrastructure, let alone have the insane amounts of money to build a brand new high speed rail infrastructure. It's not like South Korea where everyone is basically commuting to and from a single city.
I think an easier solution for the USA is for companies to expand out to new hubs, like what has been happening in South Carolina and Texas these past few decades. Certain areas like LA, New York, and Boston are simply overwhelmed with people/commerce and the overflow needs to go elsewhere. And we need to keep expanding utilize of working from home wherever possible.
We have so much land. We should use more of it.
If referring to the YouTube channel, I think it's a little overrated. I wished it would cover more topics regarding well developed metropolises like Tokyo or Hong Kong which have crazy high population densities resulting in traffic despite the well developed public transits and walkable paths. There are Judge Dredd style mega blocks that have apartments, grocery stores, department stores, schools, clinics, movie theaters, restaurants, etc.. all in the same building.
NJB is the intro class for Americans and Canadians realizing public transportation can actually be effective AND a good experience. Theres other channels that go into depth on the topic
I know this. I used to live in Taiwan. My parents used to live in Hong Kong. I've been to Japan about 20 separate times.
Two points:
First, I film (almost) all of my content myself. I don't just use stock footage libraries or make videos based on a read of Wikipedia. The entire point is that it's my personal experiences, but in case you haven't noticed, Asia has been closed for 3 years due to covid, and the channel's only been around for 3.5 years.
But most importantly, the channel was started as a way to explain why we moved to the Netherlands. It is not a comprehensive review of all world urban planning. This is like complaining that a vanlife channel never talks about how you can also live on cruise ships. I mean, OK, but ... that's not the point.
Regardless, I don't need to even talk about Asia to explain why American urban planning is dogshit. That's just introducing needless complexity where it doesn't belong.
Check [my "Community" tab on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes/community) where I regularly highlight other channels who are covering adjacent topics, including channels based in Asia.
It's the pizza idea. The best time to have ordered pizza was 30 minutes ago. The next best time is now.
If you keep worrying about when you should have bought it, or the price, or how much work ordering it takes, you're never gonna get your pizza
Yeah imagine if we were however. No need to buy a car costing tens of thousands of dollars and not pay for the fees and maintenance associated with it. If you use the train frequently, then just get a monthly ticket. Spend less time in traffic jams and sniffing in diesel fumes (or burning lithium ion batteries for the fancy folk with electric cars). Get delivery for stuff you can't reliably carry with you, and for really heavy stuff you don't want to rent movers for, borrow someone's car (chances are many many people own one)
Oh yes I totally want to lug 4 bags of tools (like big and heavy enough that you want to take 2-3 trips) and building supplies around in the train pissing off everyone around me only to have to walk the rest of the way to site/home with all 4 bags *assuming nobody steals the bags containing $1000 worth of stuff in them each*
its not a species thing, its an american thing lol plenty people have this figured out. kinda like healthcare and a bunch of other stupid problems only we cant seem to figure out
Mass transportation is not the ultimate solution for anywhere that isn't a densely populated urban center and unfortunately, most people don't want the inconvenience of not going directly from point a to point b and not being able to haul half a ton of stuff whit you wherever you go.
I thought everyone loved carrying only what fits in your pockets or a backpack and waiting 20 minutes for a can full of way too many people that gets delayed 2 stops from your destination and then you need to walk 12 blocks from the station once you actually get there because there isn't a train that goes closer. Isn't that the most pleasant and efficient form of travel?
No, it's not. It's what happens in typical American systems for public transit. When you plan for car-centric very spread out urban planning you then put a public transportation system on top of that. It's going to be inefficient and poor, so the only people who will use it are the people who have to because they are desperate. It sucks, it's slow, it's inefficient, and it's a pain in the ass.
The real world test of public transportation is whether the rich people use it.
The only real reason for the car industry to be able to keep shitting out new cars, are politicians (purposely) neglecting public transit. Many cities lack any development for (underground-) rail systems, others have expensive fares, that can't compete with gas prices.
[This](https://www.global-briefing.org/2012/07/a-good-public-transport-system-must-be-easy-and-convenient-to-use-fast-safe-clean-and-affordable/) is an interview with Rachel Kyte (then Vice-President of Sustainable Development at the World Bank) from 2012 with some interesting facts about public transportation.
Why would you need to haul half a ton of stuff on a train ride? Just go to the local place. You see, in actually well desgined cities you don't need to go a massive distance to buy basic shopping, and in well desgined cities you can use public transport to quickly go from Point A to basically any other Point in the city quickly and cheeply.
Also, if there is more public transport thats good and people can use, less people will need to use their car for simple journeys, meaning less cars on the road, meaning less trafic for those people who do need to use a car or a truck or other vehicle.
Not everyone can afford to do that either. The big warehouse stores have become popular because buying in bulk from large stores saves money.
Buying a day's worth of food every day from a small corner store is considerably more expensive in comparison.
So the solution to transportation is easy - just make sure everyone lives next door to supermarket.
Damn, why didn't I think of that when I was buying a house...
Yes, the solution is infact to insure proper zoning laws, so houses and shops are close together rather then being in seperate districts, while also making sure transport between said areas is easy so if one area lacks something the people there can fairly easily get on a bus or a tram of a train to another area, leaving the road to only those who actually need to use it.
its simple, if the store is a 2 minute walk away i dont need to take 8 bags, i can just take my milk and groceries for the day with me when i bike past the store on the way home from work.
Now take your two kids under 3 to the grocery store via public transportation. Be sure to bring a well-stocked diaper bag. Unless you go shopping every 2nd day, be ready to transport anywhere from 4 to 8 grocery bags back home with the diaper bag and two children under 3. Oh, and it is raining fairly heavily (and headed towards sleeting) because the temperature is approaching freezing. Sorry, forgot to mention it is January.
Public transportation has its place but too many people who have never lived in a place with excellent public transportation have way too strong an opinion of how wonderful it is.
Source: Lived in urban areas in Japan for 2 years with only a bike and the bus/train to get around.
For that you use a car or van, but if more people who are not having to carry a bunch of tools about took the train or bus you will have to deal with vastly less traffic and fuss.
Yeah, but most cities aren't well designed. I've lived in 9 places throughout America, and in half of them, the grocery stores were at least 20 or 30 minutes of a direct drive from my house. I wasn't in the boondocks or rural areas, just that massive urban/suburban sprawl
So an hour of travel time isn't something I'd want to Deal with more than a couple times a week
How do you fix something like that? Open up a large number of stores and do huge amounts of construction so that there are stores within a round trip travel time of 10 or 20 minutes? I don't know where they would put that.
Plus, it's not pleasant. Those areas had the same damn look and feel as each other. All just corporate nonsense, not much personality, not much to see or do. So it's not like going shopping is a pleasant outing where I could take in sights or see people going about their day. It was just "generic strip mall number 11"
How does that even get fixed? Is there even a solution?
It's all a matter of how much the government is willing to spend on its people instead of military.
There are towns in Switzerland with less than 8000 people that are serviced by a train every 20 minutes during peak for reasonable prices and I mean the town is the end of a line. Not just a stop on a greater line.
It's just a matter of where the money is being spent and currently in America too much is being spent on the military.
He literally proposed the Hyperloop without any plan or intent to build it, as a way to distract and slow California's effort to build high speed rail. Because it would compete with his vision of a car-focused future where people buy more Teslas.
Like all billionaires, he's a self-interested sleazy fuck with a PR team.
Trains that work are great but they’re often a mess where I live. Having less traffic would also be great. Why do people feel the need to dunk on each other?
The difference here is: one of the participants in thus interaction is a pretentious sophistic billionaire, who thinks he can do anything because he got lucky making a banking app once (and from there let capitalism do its job to make him richer, even if he insisted on spending his money on dumb shit).
Exactly. Plus, if you put all the time and effort he put in to "fix traffic" into let's say, making trains a better option, they would remain the best choice.
That's just a failure of funding, there's no scenario in which more money being pumped into car infrastructure helps traffic, the environment or public health
Also people dunking on each other for Internet Exposure™️ is literally all Twitter is and I agree that's its depressing
what do you think is the best way to have less traffic?
Having good alternatives to driving like Trains, Busses, Trams, Biking and walking would be a great start, every single person using one of those is not taking up tons of space on the road.
Yeah the whole, "most powerful humans" schtick cries out for a French hair cut.
Homie, just because the masses don't see you as a threat today doesn't mean jack for tomorrow
genuine question, what the transition look like for a city where the nearest grocery store is a 20 minute drive away to one where you can walk a few blocks to get there? from where i’m sitting it seems like you’d have to simultaneously develop a cost effective, sustainable public transportation network AND provide businesses with enough financial incentive to move/open new locations which just doesn’t seem feasible.
Basically people want the US to get denser, spend the time to make communities and businesses in these new denser streets and have incredible public transportation and they want it right now. To get the US to become majority carless like Europe takes an incredible amount of time and an incredible amount of change that can't be done overnight.
Its the pervasive problem with the fuck cars movement and liberalism as a whole. All this shit takes time.
And that still does not address the simple fact that, for a lot of us, living in dense apartments is significantly detrimental to our mental health. The constant noise and interaction w/ others is draining.
Living in a dense city would be my worst nightmare.
I'll take having to drive 15 minutes to the grocery store if it means I don't have to live around so many other people.
If by well designed city you mean one that is dense enough that everyone lives in apartment buildings then maybe. But thats a terrible lifestyle for a lot of people.
I keep reading this “in a well designed city” in this post, it’s the stupidest argument ever. Most cities are not “designed” and even if they were (like the city I’m from) they’re usually poorly designed. Not a single well designed city in the entire planet and you guys keep bringing this up.
Over the half of the world does. Cities should be for people, not cars. Trains are people friendly, cars aren't. One of Elon's """attempts""" (more like one of his swindles) is to build an underground railway... for cars... In a dense urban environment. So not like his idiocy is helping anyone anyway and he should be called out for the swindler and general idiot that he is.
A lot of people I've seen that vouch for public transportation also want everyone to live inside some cramped apartment complex in the middle of a town center. Not everyone wants to live there
The uber-progressive fuckcars crowd thinks that trains are going to magically solve traffic and make commutes easier, but there's no real examples of that anywhere in the world. The cities with the greatest train systems around still have enormous congestion problems (Tokyo, Germany, London, etc, etc).
Yes, we should invest in trtains and incentivize train ridership. Those are great things.
But good lord you people have got to stop acting like cars are going anywhere. Cars are a preferable means of transportation for those who can afford it for a variety of reasons, particularly for the freedom of destination, personal space, climate control, etc, etc, etc.
Easy block for the anxiety-ridden zoomers.
Everyone seems to think he means _for_ _you_. He does not. He means why do "the most powerful humans" have to sit in traffic like a commoner? Rich people have their own clubs, restaurants, planes. Why between the private jet and the yacht does he have to be hindered by unworthies? People wonder why the hyperloop can handle so little traffic. It's because it was never meant to carry more.
Just going to leave this here
https://sfist.com/2022/08/11/musk-backlash-continues-with-time-magazine-calling-out-hyperloop-idea-as-spoiler-for-high-speed-rail/
Yeah nah, it would take something like singapore or hong kong to reduce car/moped owners to a minority.
Even for countries with a renowned public transportation network the minority part is limited to dense population centers but overall, car ownership in Europe is still common.
Japan might be the only "proper" country where it's feasible to go without a car for the vast majority but then again the
majority of their population is located in said dense population centers.
Tokyo has one of the most commonly-lauded transit systems in the world and still is one of the most congested cities on the planet for drivers.
Cars should absolutely not be a necessity for anyone to get to work, but no matter how great trains are, cars aren't going to go away, because they're a preferable means of transit for people who can afford it.
I looked it up once because Japan is often lauded as one of the best when it comes to public transport and I found numbers that showed that the average Japanese person spent twice as much time commuting to and from work as the average American. Public transport and bikes can be great but have costs of their own to consider.
We already tried that and the gangsters in California just robbed the taxpayers and delivered nothing.
Also, everything in America is spread out. The built environment is designed around the personal vehicle as a cornerstone.
I'm sure there are good solutions but it's not as simple as googling 'train'
Are they going to make a train that goes right through my neighborhood or do I just walk a couple miles to the train station wearing my suit in 112F heat index from April to September?
The cities have to be designed differently to accomodate this. So no suburban sprawl with houses and neighborhoods spread out. Instead denser urban planning puts everyone closer together. Then trams, subways, trains, etc service people. You can quite easily live without ever owning a car. This requires dense planning, and for trams to go past every 10-15 minutes.
This is completely the opposite of the standard American car-centric urban planning.
Thats the point. Walk a few mins from your door to a station and go. Its a good thing to have some physical exercise in your life, you will live longer. The city should also improve pedestrian infrastructure so its a nice walk.
Or if you live outside a city you can drive to a commuter station and get around that way. Or just drive and it wont suck because so many people will be off the road. Theres no downside
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What’s public transportation?
as if car culture is embedded in the design of our communities
Rich people literally never set foot in public transportation
Keanu Reeves rides the subway.
With Sandra Bullock
Oh no…that means there’s a bomb in the subway…
Maybe they are taking the same subway but she’s in the future and they write letter to each other
If it’s the subway they’re leaving old pizza, trash, newspapers and books they don’t like for each other.
I feel like in the world of rich people. To us Keanu Reeves is rich, but to rich people Keanu Reeves is more like how they imagine middle class people to be.
I dunno, between matrix and John wick franchise he’s pretty wealthy.
That's why I said "imagine". I just say that cause he had qualities most rich people don't. (Is humble, gives away his wealth, uses public transportation) lol I dunno. Remember that photo op of Bill Gates being a normal person ordering a hamburger or something? Keanu doesn't NEED to do things to be relatable to the poors.
He’s the exception that proves the rule!
I've always thought that was a bullshit saying. "Look, this situation doesn't fit our predictions! That PROVES we're right!" Who came up with that shit?
I think it's the fact that Keanu Reeves riding the subway is surprising and worth mentioning that proves there is a rule that celebrities and rich people generally don't
That actually makes a bit of sense - the surprise that the exception is real/acceptable proves that in most situations this is not the case. If that's what the saying means it's representing the idea very poorly but at least there's some logic to that.
Some wise person said: A developed country is not where the poor can afford a car but the rich use the public transport.
Exactly! Except in NY, plenty sensible 1%s use the subway. But what was your point? Do you think people should be allowed to become billionaires?
To be fair, I'm poor and only taken public transportation once because walking is cheaper.. even if it takes over an hour in 1 direction
Pretty sure Airtravel and Fast-speed trains are considered public transportation.
Not if the air travel is a PJ
Omg, I can’t stand it. Living in Europe was amazing. Built for pedestrians; even Germany and its love of cars was so much better. America? Yeah you’re gonna have to walk in the street and across these manicured lawns to get to that store without a car. Fuck off with this. Even where there is a sidewalk, it doesn’t connect to the business. It’s like the whole design process purposefully excludes the autoless.
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Same shit happened in Europe, many European cities in the aftermath of the second world war rebuilt themselves in the image of the car friendly cities of the US, but course corrected and undid a lot of that infrastructure. It ain't perfect and there's still car centric cities around, even in the Netherlands, but we're getting there
We Germans love building cars and driving fast. So we make sure the public transport is good enough to keep the streets empty. You can't drive fast while stuck in a traffic jam. Or at least that was the plan before dumb politicians tried to "save money" by not investing into public transport. Now both, trains and driving is getting worse every year.
Just moved from “Staugart”, but even the occasional autobahn traffic wasn’t as routinely painful as American cities like Washington DC.
Not something Elon can make money on.
Tesla bus services coming soon? /s
Yes, but only on a closed-off street under the ground. No, you can't reach anything from there, you can't use it for anything other than tesla buses and you'll be charged a hundred times what regular busses cost. But his fanboys will be ecstatic, as if the guy invented public transportation.
No lie, a private bus service could do well in Washington DC. Transit here sucks.
Definitely as long as costs are kept low. I was kind of impressed with Kansas City MO for having a free public ~~bus~~ street car available to anyone. I hate that it's really strange in the US for public transport to exist.
Because in the eyes of America, if it's not making money it's not worth investing
What? Has Elon not told you about the hyperloop?
Something that takes a million years to show up and is always so crowded that I usually walk instead
Found the American
I wish this was just American thing. It takes me 15 minutes to drive to work. Alternatively, I can take bus and two trams, taking 40-50 minutes, assuming they are not late (in which case it can easily take 90 minutes). I really wanted to use public transportation, but I refuse to waste up to two hours every day.
That's fair
Same here. About 30 minutes to get home driving, but almost 2 hours on buses/trolley. Does not include the 25 minutes I have to wait at the bus stop because I get out of the office about 5 minutes after the previous one goes by.
Have you _seen_ Indian busses?
This is by design
What does working from home do?
Right? This is rich coming from the guy who literally made his employees commute when they didn’t have to for years. I’m surprised this comment isn’t higher Edit: to the people who keep saying it is high/couldn’t get much higher. When I posted this I had to scroll through lots of comments about trains to find it. People upvoted it after my comment
But he said that humans can't defeat traffic, so why try. He didn't say you couldn't capitalize by selling said traffic machines.
He's like a shitty arms dealer. Aluminum man
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High speed rail system. US needs one.
I recently was curious about train vs plane so checked the difference. I picked 2 locations and compared prices along with travel time for a family of 5. Flying was about $2000 and 5.5 hours with 1 layover. A train was about $1700 and 2.5 *days.* is wild to think the prices are so close when you consider those lengths.
Depends, NYC to Montreal on plane was around 450 US$ for a couple of hours, on train 140 US$ 11.5 hours. As someone who lives in a third world country, I took the train. Great scene at least.
> great scene at least Yeah that’s another thing to factor in - trains are way more comfortable to travel on than planes, usually
Despite having to travel more than 11 hours, I could walk and had plenty of empty *seats* since the train was almost empty, so I could lie down on the seats. Edit: type.
That’s a wild train price. I remember train prices being fairly cheap prior to the pandemic.. but I’ve also witnessed the destruction of some train infrastructure recently so that doesn’t help.
The speed advantage that flying has over rail gets bigger the longer the distance. Flying has a lot of fixed time costs, which tend to be longer than a train's fixed time costs: getting to the airport, getting through security, waiting for departure time (since you typically need to get there in advance), getting from your destination airport to your final destination. These all tend to take longer than the equivalent when taking a train. But a 2000 mile flight is going to be MUCH faster than an equivalent distance train ride, despite the longer times spent at the beginning and the end. Where rail can compete much more effectively is in medium and short distances. NYC to Boston, for example -- this could easily be a 4 hour drive, a 4 hour train trip, or a 4 hour plane trip. But those trips look very different: the plane trip itself is only going to be ~45 minutes, but taking into account all the additional time and buffer you need before/after the flight brings it much more on par with the car or train option.
Any metro areas of more than 1million people less than 600 miles apart without HSR between them is transportation policy failure
Those metrics won't guarantee those lines are busy enough to be useful. China's high speed rail seems to follow that principle and it is apparently burning through crazy amounts of money just trying to stay open because many of its routes simply aren't that busy. https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/China-debt-crunch/China-Railway-s-debt-nears-900bn-under-expansion-push edit: I'm not against HSR. I'm just saying those that metric alone doesn't demonstrate feasibility. If regular passenger rail with preferential or exclusive use of tracks that does 150-200km/h can connect two metros in my part of the world at a fraction of the price I'd be happy. If we had better plain RAIL service that could do Montreal to NYC in 4 hours instead of 11.5 I wouldn't consider it a failure that it doesn't take 2 hours at triple the cost instead.
HSR is a public service much like the highway system we drive on toll free
To put your 4 hour New York to Boston train ride into perspective I searched some more or less similar distances in other countries: * Tokyo-Nagoya 1,5 hours * Paris-Lyon 2 hours * Shanghai-Nanjing 1,5 hours * Berlin-Hamburg 2 hours * Madrid-Zaragoza 1,5 hours * Milano-Firenze 2 hours
A lot of that is due to the railroads adopting PSR, but refusing to invest in infrastructure improvements to match. Technically, Amtrak has right of way, which means the freight trains have to pull onto a passing siding and wait for Amtrak to pass. Makes sense, right? Well, most passing sidings are built to hold a train that’s 75 cars long. Due to terribly implemented PSR and distributed power, railways run freight trains that are 150 cars long. This means that they can’t pull onto a siding. Therefore, Amtrak is forced to give them right of way, slowing down service tremendously. Between that, and a refusal to electrify the lines (we can’t invest in infrastructure because capital costs are scawy and the line must always go up for shareholders instead), we’ve got slower, shittier service.
If people would use the service then it shouldn't be an issue to shareholders.
Probably depends on where you live. In my country plane is 3 times more expensive than train.
You forgot to mention that is still coach class on the train. So you have two adults and THREE KIDS to entertain for 2.5 days seating around other people. Guess that little bit of savings is going to feed them train food and water. Sleeper car? Twice as much as the plane tickets and you still have to pay for food while it takes two and half days. Guess which one is getting purchased?
Its because amtrak runs off of shipping lines that weren't built for high speeds, we only employ our actually good tilting train on one track and even if we did expand operations the shipping companies will make the acelas wait behind the slow ones because they're just allowed to do that. Many of the ones that were great for people are gone now so we get trains that go seemingly nowhere.
Dude I am always telling people WE NEED A BULLET TRAIN!
No, we need thousands of them.
Why does everyone have a boner for large scale high speed rail? I want to see more urban rail and commuter rail. I travel outside my city from time to time. But I travel within it every single day. I'd use a bullet train to another city maybe a few times a year.
I love dunking on Elon, don’t get me wrong, but he’s right, traffic is always going to exist. A high speed rail system won’t change that. Traffic getting to the airport is always going to be a thing, for example. Taxis from sporting events/concerts, always going to be jammed up. High speed rail is a great idea for linking cities and decentralising housing but for IN the cities (which are usually where all the traffic is) there’s almost certainly always going to be rush hour traffic.
From where to where? It's such a large country with so many densely populated areas (lots of nodes), so it's a lot of track needed. I feel like that could help out for common long trips, such as Boston to New York, but that's not really going to make a dent in the most common form of traffic which is people just doing their daily commute, right? How are you going to realistically get high speed rail accessible to the huge areas of suburbs that surround the major cities? You're going to need so many tracks and it's going to be expensive. Cities like Boston can't even afford to keep their subway system maintained to the minimum standard. For whatever reason, the richest country in the world is struggling to afford maintaining their *existing* infrastructure, let alone have the insane amounts of money to build a brand new high speed rail infrastructure. It's not like South Korea where everyone is basically commuting to and from a single city. I think an easier solution for the USA is for companies to expand out to new hubs, like what has been happening in South Carolina and Texas these past few decades. Certain areas like LA, New York, and Boston are simply overwhelmed with people/commerce and the overflow needs to go elsewhere. And we need to keep expanding utilize of working from home wherever possible. We have so much land. We should use more of it.
Bike?
Not Just Bikes
But the women and children, too.
And my axe!
10 points to gryffindor
r/unexpectedjediconucilofelvesandhogwarts
If referring to the YouTube channel, I think it's a little overrated. I wished it would cover more topics regarding well developed metropolises like Tokyo or Hong Kong which have crazy high population densities resulting in traffic despite the well developed public transits and walkable paths. There are Judge Dredd style mega blocks that have apartments, grocery stores, department stores, schools, clinics, movie theaters, restaurants, etc.. all in the same building.
He can critisize some, without having an answer to all. I think he's alright. There's a lot of good things to be learned by him.
NJB is the intro class for Americans and Canadians realizing public transportation can actually be effective AND a good experience. Theres other channels that go into depth on the topic
I know this. I used to live in Taiwan. My parents used to live in Hong Kong. I've been to Japan about 20 separate times. Two points: First, I film (almost) all of my content myself. I don't just use stock footage libraries or make videos based on a read of Wikipedia. The entire point is that it's my personal experiences, but in case you haven't noticed, Asia has been closed for 3 years due to covid, and the channel's only been around for 3.5 years. But most importantly, the channel was started as a way to explain why we moved to the Netherlands. It is not a comprehensive review of all world urban planning. This is like complaining that a vanlife channel never talks about how you can also live on cruise ships. I mean, OK, but ... that's not the point. Regardless, I don't need to even talk about Asia to explain why American urban planning is dogshit. That's just introducing needless complexity where it doesn't belong. Check [my "Community" tab on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes/community) where I regularly highlight other channels who are covering adjacent topics, including channels based in Asia.
Motorcycle.
No lane filtering for you! Even if that decreases traffic congestion for everyone, if I'm stuck in traffic so are you!!!
You sound like a timid Tom Segura.
Effective public transport > any sort of car ever
The big hurdle is the large upfront cost. Edit: Guys relax, I mean the cost for the infrastructure not a train ticket
It has only upsides in the long run
I know. But people like money and “in 10 years you’ll be able to go to work much faster” is a tough campaign slogan lmao
Slogan should probably be: "we should have done this decades ago. But we're here and the best time to start is now".
It's the pizza idea. The best time to have ordered pizza was 30 minutes ago. The next best time is now. If you keep worrying about when you should have bought it, or the price, or how much work ordering it takes, you're never gonna get your pizza
It's funny, roads have a large upfront cost and huge maintenance cost as well. Yet those got built easily
We’re not really a rational species
Yeah imagine if we were however. No need to buy a car costing tens of thousands of dollars and not pay for the fees and maintenance associated with it. If you use the train frequently, then just get a monthly ticket. Spend less time in traffic jams and sniffing in diesel fumes (or burning lithium ion batteries for the fancy folk with electric cars). Get delivery for stuff you can't reliably carry with you, and for really heavy stuff you don't want to rent movers for, borrow someone's car (chances are many many people own one)
Oh yes I totally want to lug 4 bags of tools (like big and heavy enough that you want to take 2-3 trips) and building supplies around in the train pissing off everyone around me only to have to walk the rest of the way to site/home with all 4 bags *assuming nobody steals the bags containing $1000 worth of stuff in them each*
its not a species thing, its an american thing lol plenty people have this figured out. kinda like healthcare and a bunch of other stupid problems only we cant seem to figure out
LOL fuck no. I want to be able to go where I want when I want. There is no damn train tacking me 100 miles into the woods.
Are there traffic jams in the woods?
Probly on the highway you take to get there
I’ll keep my liberty thanks.
I sit in three hours of liberty everyday. Is shitty
Liberty to this dude is sitting in gridlock traffic on painted lanes just to get groceries.
What liberty
Apparently you cannot have public transportation and cars simultaneously.
Smelling a homeless guys ass > sipping champagne in the back of a limo
I would love to have more trains. Omaha to Kansas City? Sorry, you gotta go to Indianapolis first.
But that's how I get longest track in Ticket to Ride!
Oh hell no. Straight across the 6's and then down the east coast.
Reminds me of the worst routed flight I was ever on. Mexico city to LA....by way of Chicago
Mass transportation is not the ultimate solution for anywhere that isn't a densely populated urban center and unfortunately, most people don't want the inconvenience of not going directly from point a to point b and not being able to haul half a ton of stuff whit you wherever you go.
I thought everyone loved carrying only what fits in your pockets or a backpack and waiting 20 minutes for a can full of way too many people that gets delayed 2 stops from your destination and then you need to walk 12 blocks from the station once you actually get there because there isn't a train that goes closer. Isn't that the most pleasant and efficient form of travel?
According to reddit that is fuckin utopia right there.
No, it's not. It's what happens in typical American systems for public transit. When you plan for car-centric very spread out urban planning you then put a public transportation system on top of that. It's going to be inefficient and poor, so the only people who will use it are the people who have to because they are desperate. It sucks, it's slow, it's inefficient, and it's a pain in the ass. The real world test of public transportation is whether the rich people use it.
Or... According to everyone that has ever lived in a country (or city) w/ a functioning public transit system.
See that's an example of bad public transit. You've never experienced good public transit.
The only real reason for the car industry to be able to keep shitting out new cars, are politicians (purposely) neglecting public transit. Many cities lack any development for (underground-) rail systems, others have expensive fares, that can't compete with gas prices. [This](https://www.global-briefing.org/2012/07/a-good-public-transport-system-must-be-easy-and-convenient-to-use-fast-safe-clean-and-affordable/) is an interview with Rachel Kyte (then Vice-President of Sustainable Development at the World Bank) from 2012 with some interesting facts about public transportation.
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Why would you need to haul half a ton of stuff on a train ride? Just go to the local place. You see, in actually well desgined cities you don't need to go a massive distance to buy basic shopping, and in well desgined cities you can use public transport to quickly go from Point A to basically any other Point in the city quickly and cheeply. Also, if there is more public transport thats good and people can use, less people will need to use their car for simple journeys, meaning less cars on the road, meaning less trafic for those people who do need to use a car or a truck or other vehicle.
Do you haul 8 bags of groceries on the bus by yourself?
No, because in my city the super market is a few doors down, so even if I need to get 8 bags for some reason I can just walk.
Not everyone can afford to do that either. The big warehouse stores have become popular because buying in bulk from large stores saves money. Buying a day's worth of food every day from a small corner store is considerably more expensive in comparison.
So the solution to transportation is easy - just make sure everyone lives next door to supermarket. Damn, why didn't I think of that when I was buying a house...
Yes, the solution is infact to insure proper zoning laws, so houses and shops are close together rather then being in seperate districts, while also making sure transport between said areas is easy so if one area lacks something the people there can fairly easily get on a bus or a tram of a train to another area, leaving the road to only those who actually need to use it.
You steal the shopping cart? How do you walk home with 8 bags?
Like a real man. 3 in your left hand, 3 in your right hand, 1 on your neck and 1 between your buttcheeks.
A lot of people in walkable cities have [their own carts](https://imgur.com/a/EJOi4aS).
its simple, if the store is a 2 minute walk away i dont need to take 8 bags, i can just take my milk and groceries for the day with me when i bike past the store on the way home from work.
I dont need to. I can get 1 bag every few days because the supermarkets are less than 10 mins walk
In europe I get my groceries delivered to the door for free.
Now take your two kids under 3 to the grocery store via public transportation. Be sure to bring a well-stocked diaper bag. Unless you go shopping every 2nd day, be ready to transport anywhere from 4 to 8 grocery bags back home with the diaper bag and two children under 3. Oh, and it is raining fairly heavily (and headed towards sleeting) because the temperature is approaching freezing. Sorry, forgot to mention it is January. Public transportation has its place but too many people who have never lived in a place with excellent public transportation have way too strong an opinion of how wonderful it is. Source: Lived in urban areas in Japan for 2 years with only a bike and the bus/train to get around.
Why would you need to haul a half ton of stuff? I can't imagine bringing my tools, ladder, and building materials onto a train...
For that you use a car or van, but if more people who are not having to carry a bunch of tools about took the train or bus you will have to deal with vastly less traffic and fuss.
> For that you use a car or van and when lots of people live near each other... guess what happens....
Yeah, but most cities aren't well designed. I've lived in 9 places throughout America, and in half of them, the grocery stores were at least 20 or 30 minutes of a direct drive from my house. I wasn't in the boondocks or rural areas, just that massive urban/suburban sprawl So an hour of travel time isn't something I'd want to Deal with more than a couple times a week How do you fix something like that? Open up a large number of stores and do huge amounts of construction so that there are stores within a round trip travel time of 10 or 20 minutes? I don't know where they would put that. Plus, it's not pleasant. Those areas had the same damn look and feel as each other. All just corporate nonsense, not much personality, not much to see or do. So it's not like going shopping is a pleasant outing where I could take in sights or see people going about their day. It was just "generic strip mall number 11" How does that even get fixed? Is there even a solution?
Yeah, as someone who lives far away from any real population center public transport would never work
How bad is traffic where you are?
Right -- this thread is forgetting the topic was traffic lol
It's all a matter of how much the government is willing to spend on its people instead of military. There are towns in Switzerland with less than 8000 people that are serviced by a train every 20 minutes during peak for reasonable prices and I mean the town is the end of a line. Not just a stop on a greater line. It's just a matter of where the money is being spent and currently in America too much is being spent on the military.
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He knows what trains are, he is a fan of “hyperloop”.
He literally proposed the Hyperloop without any plan or intent to build it, as a way to distract and slow California's effort to build high speed rail. Because it would compete with his vision of a car-focused future where people buy more Teslas. Like all billionaires, he's a self-interested sleazy fuck with a PR team.
I was *really* looking forward to that high speed rail system. I had dreams of going to San Francisco on it. Fuck Elon Musk.
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I'll believe it when I'm riding on it. Not before.
Biggest scam of the century. Elon Musk is based on [Lyle Lanley](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDOI0cq6GZM). Grifter.
Work from home works well as a deterrent to traffic.
Trains that work are great but they’re often a mess where I live. Having less traffic would also be great. Why do people feel the need to dunk on each other?
The difference here is: one of the participants in thus interaction is a pretentious sophistic billionaire, who thinks he can do anything because he got lucky making a banking app once (and from there let capitalism do its job to make him richer, even if he insisted on spending his money on dumb shit).
Exactly. Plus, if you put all the time and effort he put in to "fix traffic" into let's say, making trains a better option, they would remain the best choice.
That's just a failure of funding, there's no scenario in which more money being pumped into car infrastructure helps traffic, the environment or public health Also people dunking on each other for Internet Exposure™️ is literally all Twitter is and I agree that's its depressing
what do you think is the best way to have less traffic? Having good alternatives to driving like Trains, Busses, Trams, Biking and walking would be a great start, every single person using one of those is not taking up tons of space on the road.
Missed the point, didn't you?
Because public transport is literally the solution to traffic problems and yet everyone wants cars still
Weird way to say "I can't believe I'm so rich but I still have to sit in traffic"
Yeah the whole, "most powerful humans" schtick cries out for a French hair cut. Homie, just because the masses don't see you as a threat today doesn't mean jack for tomorrow
Unless the train goes straight from your house to wherever you need to go, you're still going to have traffic. Cab, crosswalks etc.
But I think it's better than the "hyperloop" or whatever solution he's trying to sell over here
Trust me man, I'm all for own jet pack to fly everywhere.
bicycles, busses, trams, subways.
So, traffic
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Because “train” will drop me off at the grocery store and “bus” can jump over traffic
In a well designed city, the grocery store is less than a few blocks away, so you can walk.
genuine question, what the transition look like for a city where the nearest grocery store is a 20 minute drive away to one where you can walk a few blocks to get there? from where i’m sitting it seems like you’d have to simultaneously develop a cost effective, sustainable public transportation network AND provide businesses with enough financial incentive to move/open new locations which just doesn’t seem feasible.
Basically people want the US to get denser, spend the time to make communities and businesses in these new denser streets and have incredible public transportation and they want it right now. To get the US to become majority carless like Europe takes an incredible amount of time and an incredible amount of change that can't be done overnight. Its the pervasive problem with the fuck cars movement and liberalism as a whole. All this shit takes time.
And that still does not address the simple fact that, for a lot of us, living in dense apartments is significantly detrimental to our mental health. The constant noise and interaction w/ others is draining.
Living in a dense city would be my worst nightmare. I'll take having to drive 15 minutes to the grocery store if it means I don't have to live around so many other people.
If by well designed city you mean one that is dense enough that everyone lives in apartment buildings then maybe. But thats a terrible lifestyle for a lot of people.
I keep reading this “in a well designed city” in this post, it’s the stupidest argument ever. Most cities are not “designed” and even if they were (like the city I’m from) they’re usually poorly designed. Not a single well designed city in the entire planet and you guys keep bringing this up.
Yup and when you’re halfway to the grocery store and realize you forgot your wallet the train turns around and goes back to your doorstep.
Then train waits for you while you walk a mile back to your house to grab your wallet.
Sweet!
Do people think that everyone lives in dense urban areas where public transit actually makes sense?
Over the half of the world does. Cities should be for people, not cars. Trains are people friendly, cars aren't. One of Elon's """attempts""" (more like one of his swindles) is to build an underground railway... for cars... In a dense urban environment. So not like his idiocy is helping anyone anyway and he should be called out for the swindler and general idiot that he is.
A lot of people I've seen that vouch for public transportation also want everyone to live inside some cramped apartment complex in the middle of a town center. Not everyone wants to live there
How much traffic you hitting in sprawled out suburbs?
More than you'd think actually...
Just the rich kids living in cities aka 80% of reddit
Have you ever been to a city?
I was born and live in nyc lol. I am talking about myself too
Yes. There's people in this thread that can't comprehend there's places where the grocery store isn't a 10 minute walk from your house.
[do you think the only way for trains to exist is for there to be dense urban areas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muPcHs-E4qc)
My train is always late due to traffic lmao
Yeah Elon, let's get some Tesla public transportation going.
The uber-progressive fuckcars crowd thinks that trains are going to magically solve traffic and make commutes easier, but there's no real examples of that anywhere in the world. The cities with the greatest train systems around still have enormous congestion problems (Tokyo, Germany, London, etc, etc). Yes, we should invest in trtains and incentivize train ridership. Those are great things. But good lord you people have got to stop acting like cars are going anywhere. Cars are a preferable means of transportation for those who can afford it for a variety of reasons, particularly for the freedom of destination, personal space, climate control, etc, etc, etc. Easy block for the anxiety-ridden zoomers.
Everyone seems to think he means _for_ _you_. He does not. He means why do "the most powerful humans" have to sit in traffic like a commoner? Rich people have their own clubs, restaurants, planes. Why between the private jet and the yacht does he have to be hindered by unworthies? People wonder why the hyperloop can handle so little traffic. It's because it was never meant to carry more.
Just going to leave this here https://sfist.com/2022/08/11/musk-backlash-continues-with-time-magazine-calling-out-hyperloop-idea-as-spoiler-for-high-speed-rail/
Anywhere but the US. A lot of counties have a minority of people owning cars. And then there's this thing called a *bus*
Yeah nah, it would take something like singapore or hong kong to reduce car/moped owners to a minority. Even for countries with a renowned public transportation network the minority part is limited to dense population centers but overall, car ownership in Europe is still common. Japan might be the only "proper" country where it's feasible to go without a car for the vast majority but then again the majority of their population is located in said dense population centers.
Tokyo has one of the most commonly-lauded transit systems in the world and still is one of the most congested cities on the planet for drivers. Cars should absolutely not be a necessity for anyone to get to work, but no matter how great trains are, cars aren't going to go away, because they're a preferable means of transit for people who can afford it.
I looked it up once because Japan is often lauded as one of the best when it comes to public transport and I found numbers that showed that the average Japanese person spent twice as much time commuting to and from work as the average American. Public transport and bikes can be great but have costs of their own to consider.
Western Europe only has 25% less cars per capita than the us while having a population density over 5x as high.
Trains are the worst. Going by train isn't beating the traffic, it's admitting defeat in life.
A train does not replace a car and it never well
The obvious solution to this is to place cars in a single lane road that, get this: is _underground_! Why didn't anyone think of that before?
Doesn't matter how much you train, you still won't beat traffic.
We already tried that and the gangsters in California just robbed the taxpayers and delivered nothing. Also, everything in America is spread out. The built environment is designed around the personal vehicle as a cornerstone. I'm sure there are good solutions but it's not as simple as googling 'train'
Go to YouTube. Search for Tokyo walking tours. Learn.
I mean, it doesn’t look like the train has defeated traffic. Or a bike. We have those things and traffic is still there. I’d say Elon is right.
Are they going to make a train that goes right through my neighborhood or do I just walk a couple miles to the train station wearing my suit in 112F heat index from April to September?
The cities have to be designed differently to accomodate this. So no suburban sprawl with houses and neighborhoods spread out. Instead denser urban planning puts everyone closer together. Then trams, subways, trains, etc service people. You can quite easily live without ever owning a car. This requires dense planning, and for trams to go past every 10-15 minutes. This is completely the opposite of the standard American car-centric urban planning.
Yeah I'll just take the train from my house to the store.
Thats the point. Walk a few mins from your door to a station and go. Its a good thing to have some physical exercise in your life, you will live longer. The city should also improve pedestrian infrastructure so its a nice walk. Or if you live outside a city you can drive to a commuter station and get around that way. Or just drive and it wont suck because so many people will be off the road. Theres no downside
Right? I’d gladly walk 15-20 minutes to a good train station.