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Wait, you guys have trains?
Wait, you guys have trains?
Depending on whether the stars are right. Or whether you need to cross the tracks - there’s always one when you need to cross the tracks.
there’s always one when you need to cross the tracks.
This, but you ever notice that it’s pretty much never passenger trains? This efficient mode of transportation is largely designed for and used by industry rather than for travel or commute. The exception is within big enough cities like DC and NYC to get from one side of the city to the other or anywhere between. Sure there are some trains that go between cities, but they’re largely unreliable because passenger cars yield to industrial freight, and so people are less inclined to opt for them over planes or cars, and so there are fewer trains available to go wherever you’re going in the window you’re trying to go. So you book a flight instead.
I’d take a long train ride over a road trip any fucking day. I don’t understand anybody who would rather drive than chill and read a book or play games or watch movies or nap.
Exactly, it’s not that the US doesn’t have trains, there are plenty. Lots of relatively small towns have rails going to or through them. The problem is that only a tiny fraction of them are passenger rail.
This, but you ever notice that it’s pretty much never passenger trains? This efficient mode of transportation is largely designed for and used by industry rather than for travel or commute.
Yet massive amounts of goods are shipped long-distance via truck anyway, clogging up highways and polluting far more per-ton and per-mile moved.
Truly the worst of both worlds! USA! USA! USA!
Got it, always cross the tracks
Stand on the tracks to summon the train.
The train needs a human sacrifice
Oh yeah, we have so many trains. They go everywhere, we have a very comprehensive network of them
Oh wait… Did you mean passenger trains?
We have trains that have lethal derailments every year or so.
Although there are many improvements to be made, like international euro rail connecting the capitals, better prices, a reliable DB and most importantly EU standard track system, I love our euro rails.
But I’ve gotta confess, the fact the US train is called Marc is kinda cool.
“Hey, I wonder where Marc is. Is he coming?”
“Nah men, Marc is completely derailed again. He burned down an entire town and he’s toxic AF.”
Don’t forget BART and DART as well.
Well at least Marc never comes prematurely.
Just wait until BORT’s date with METRA, the sexy sounding voice assistant of trains
Removed by mod
He live in Cananda you wouldn’t know him…
MARC is unfortunately only a regional train for Maryland, and he is very limited on the weekends… The national passenger train system is called Amtrak.
Oooh, is he Swedish?
american trains look better and nobody will ever pry that fact from my cold dead hands.
You clearly need to look at more train pictures
I am sure there are magnificent american trains but some american trains are probably ugly too
My point is: beauty is not bound by borders and there is so much out thereall the euro trains look like futuristic renders of trains, american trains make me feel happy.
euro trains will simply never compare, also the E bell goes hard, and you will never take that away from me.
Have you seen the trains in the Netherlands?
can’t say i have, but im assuming it’s safe to say they look pretty boring.
Based on what do you think it’s safe to say that?
based on the american trains that i live around.
IDK, they’re just more visually pleasing to me. European trains just look like the proof of concept render of what a train will look like.
You sound very confident for someone who clearly hasn’t even seen half the trains Europe has to offer.
It’s like confidently saying you Ford Fiesta is the best car in the world, but you’ve never even seen a Mercedes C63 AMG.
I’m starting to think you’re just trolling at this point either that or you’re extremely dense
ah yes when you get to the station and the announcements say “the next train to so-and-so has been cancelled, sorry for the inconvenience” Always a fun day
You haven’t seen Croatian rail then ;)
Meanwhile in Greece:
I think you may have Europe confused with Japan.
Deutsche Bahn will definitely proof that public transit in the EU isn’t necessarily…. there? Working? …
It’s definitely better than nothing but it doesn’t feel better than nothing.
Big Money Wasted
Me When My metro train (Santiago) doesn’t immediately arrive as soon as i touch the platform.
I am here to represent the germans. The country where the only thing we agree about is, how fucking shit our trains are
I havent seen one company where “train didn’t come” isn’t a valid excuse for bring late. Like, no further questions.
I was late for a hair appointment because I missed the bus, and I swear they wrote it down in my file because every time I went back, for the next year they were like “So… Did you come by bus today?”
Also yeah no problem if your train doesn’t come once - but if it happens more than once it’s going to reflect badly even though it’s out of your control. You’ll start to get the comments “You should take the earlier one!” I travelled by bus with 2 transfers to college and it was ROUGH.
I used it every time it happened, very rarely when I just slept in. My boss also came by S-Bahn so he was late from time to time as well. Of course if we had an important meeting or a customer appointment we came in a whole hour early, to compensate for 3 train failures, which never happened. But if you came 20 minutes late on a regular Tuesday nobody cared that much (boring office IT job).
There’s a classic that Irish rail used to pull out of their bag of shite excuses until they got slagged to death over it:
Leaves on the track.
No joke. C’mon now lads. In fairness though the train service in Dublin and inter-city is pretty reliable and reasonable.
My understanding is that leaves contain some compound(s) that, when wet and under the extremely high pressures that train wheels provide, becomes one of the most effective lubricants we know about. In other words, the brakes literally won’t do anything because you’ll slip-n-slide your way at the same speed you were going before.
Sounds like the Irish version of the german winter chaos. The very moment the first snowflake drops it’s total chaos, trains being terminated left and right due to an old railway switch that still saw Adolf freezing shut again.
You clearly havent heard of swedish trains.
The railroad here is a bad joke at this point, mainly due to shutting down the organization that was responsible for maintainence and shoving it into another agency that has no clue. As a bonus the new agency doesn’t even do the repair work themselves but hires contractors at the lowest bidder. So stuff breaks constantly, which causes delays.
At this point just getting the rail network to “normal” standards would cost billions. Let alone expanding it to cope with current traffic levels.
To be fair, most higher density areas in Sweden have fairly good infrastructure for public transit. The national railways are a disgrace, but that mostly affects long distance travel. Mostly. Short to medium distance commute works fairly well everywhere I’ve tried it.
Scandinavia has more in common with Canada when it comes to public transportation
Canada has high speed trains?
[cries in Swedish]
As an American, I don’t have access to trains, buses, bike lanes, sidewalks or even a shoulder on the road. The last time I tried to walk home from the tire shop two miles away, three people stopped to offer me a ride because it is that dangerous. I live inside the 275 loop that runs around Cincinnati.
I did this math recently. To walk to work would take me either a 2 hour walk, a 17 minute drive, or a 45 minute bus ride.
I live in Utrecht, one of The Netherlands’ larger cities. I don’t even have a car anymore. I can reach any place in the city by cycling in 15min max. Planning a trip with Google maps often shows cycling to be as fast or even faster than by car. Amsterdam by train is 30min, train leaves every 10min. I can take my bike in the train or take a public transportation bike from any train station. Cars are stupid.
How easy is it for you to take your bike on the train in that area? I was visiting Utrecht recently and was really surprised they only allowed 2-3 bikes on the entire train (off peak hours too).
I avoid rush hour because people are annoying. I usually have no issue with bringing my bike, most of the times there are a few bike areas on each train and when it’s 5 instead of 3 while people can still pass the hallway no one would care about it. But it’s just as easy to use a bike from NS (national railway), they are at every station and it’s cheap. A folding bike is free to take by train, I might buy an electric one in the future.
I lived a year in Nijmegen when I was younger, and later another year in Duesseldorf, so what you’re describing isn’t foreign to me. But where I live now there are no options other than car. If you don’t own one you need a friend with one or an Uber.
Damn, that sucks. I never have to worry about traffic, I have no time delay when traveling during rush hour by bike. More people on bikes means less cars, less traffic jams. I don’t understand why other countries move away from cars, there are only benifits and no downsides switching to a stronger public transit and cycling infrastructure. It unclugs traffic so businesses have faster travel times, there are less accidents, the city is cleaner, there is more room to build as there is less need for parking space, road maintenance is cheaper, the cities get a better feeling for being in as people are invited to be in the streets instead of their cars. There’s more room for greenery, which has a mental benifit as well as rainwater management. Kids can play on the streets safely again instead. It’s not hard to do. Rotterdam was rebuilt after the second world war when it was wiped from the map by German bombing. They built it up like American cities, completely car focused. They completely changed it to bike friendly because of accidents and clogging, making a very shitty city a very nice one.
Yeah, my “Public Transit” option on google maps is entirely greyed out. This is my daily commute to work:
It’s always entertaining to see the Europeans go “lol just ditch your car, it has to start somewhere” like it wouldn’t require me to move my entire family across town, (and pay 3x as much rent to live in the city…) Like I don’t even have the option of taking public transit, because there are no connecting lines between my home and my job. Literally none. The nearest bus stop is almost as far away as my job, and it’s in the opposite direction.
That’s so sad that it’s just greyed out lol. Even google maps is like, nah you’re fucked dude
To be fair, Google Maps sucks ass in this regard. If you ever visit Europe, never EVER trust it for public transit information. Always look on the native apps and websites. Google Maps regularly offers me routes that either don’t exist anymore, not at that time or day of the week, unnecessarily require a group taxi somewhere or are simply extremely inefficient. Instead of a 95min travel it wanted me to go for a route that took 145 minutes the last time (luckily I knew it was bullshit).
Even FOSS apps that may acquire travel data through rather novel means will provide more accurate information than the billions of dollars available to Googles car heads.
require me to move my entire family across town, (and pay 3x as much rent to live in the city…)
(I’m an American BTW.)
San Francisco Bay Area resident checking in. I think we have some of the best public transit in the US, which is pretty shit compared to most urban areas in Europe and Asia. Our trains come frequently enough and are generally on-time but the coverage is pretty bad. Public transit in SF can be pretty unpleasant though.
It’s funny, but after traveling around Europe, I’ve learned one important lesson: avoid booking flights with short layovers! If the transfer time is less than 3-4 hours, you’re playing a risky game. Delays happen more often than you’d think, and in some cases, flights get pushed to the next day due to ‘bad weather’ (or other mysterious reasons). Better to have a buffer than to get stuck at the airport overnight!
Unless you’re living in austria or switzerland (which technically isn’t europe but lets roll with it), you will never have trains on time.
It absolutely technically is Europe. If you meant the EI, then only Switzerland is not part of the European Union, Austria is.
I am well aware. The part in brackets only referred to switzerland.
What continent do you suppose switzerland is part of then? Africa?
Well, we’re in the mountains above Europe, I guess.
