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America is too big for planes, too. If your transportation solution is flying, now everyone has to get around via endless highways or big, complicated regional airports, and you can only have so many of those. There’s a reason why rural areas in North America have completely different politics from urban areas, and why so much of it is driven by a sense of isolation and abandonment. Trains promise to help here because they are able to stop in small places that will never, ever have practical airports.
A good rail network provides a reliable, consistent, repeatable, and straightforward three hour connection from Nowheresberg to the nearest city. Slow, but good enough to feel like they exist in the same planet. Unfortunately, that promise is subtle, and it plays out over decades, so the reward system we’ve created for ourselves is incapable of supporting it. And thus, we have Amtrak and confederate flags
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I see the argument that OP is quoting but I’m left wondering one thing: if most folks in the countryside could travel to a “big” city in three hours, what business would they conduct? Outside of tourism, that is.
My understanding is this would be most useful to middle-men and business people, but the common man wouldn’t have much use for it.
It’s nice to be able to go see a show, have some drinks after, stay the night in a hotel, then hop on the train the next day. Whether it’s with family or friends, a train journey can be a nice time to catch up, read, or watch the scenery go by.
Being able to do this reliably does foster a sense of connection, like you are able and encouraged to also enjoy these activities. It might not be as quick as for those in the city, but it is achievable.
Are you counting things like shopping, medical care, visiting friends and family, education , and events like concerts or sports as tourism?
DO they need to have a reason? You can simply look at existing traffic to see where a train would offer better scale.
- most sufficiently large cities have existing traffic to support rail in and out. Basically commuter rail
- most sufficiently large city pairs less than 500 miles apart have existing traffic to support intercity rail. Amtrak.
- the vast majority of transportation funding goes toward road and air, while rail has been undergfunded at least half a century
Thanks for the deeper think on this. I’m out my depth by not living in such an area - I knew I wasn’t going to cover all the bases on my own.
Are you counting things like shopping, medical care, visiting friends and family, education , and events like concerts or sports as tourism?
So, no, but after reading this it makes a lot more sense. Thank you.
Yeah, but the US is too big for trains too. It’s too big for planes, cars, all of it. It’s been nearly 25 years since Herbert Garrison invented the gyroscopic monowheel but just like Nikola Tesla, he’s being silenced by all these corporate fatcats and government bailouts.
I just really hate flying and really like going places. Give me rails, I don’t want to drive either.
Father, I yearn for the rails!
I really love flying but hate going places, especially fucking packing it’s bloody endless and you always forget something
I love flying but hate everything to do with air travel from the airports to the seats and especially security.
Oh yeah?! Well I hate flying but love everything to do with air travel from the airports to the seats and especially security! I kiss every TSA agent I meet, sloppy style!
Oh yeah??? Well I love flying and packing and traveling and free handjobs when TSA thinks my belt looks suspicious, but I hate the emissions that contribute to climate change.
Rural America is covered in local airports. No large commercial carriers, but the airports exist.
We need more rail. The argument starts from a bad premise.
Yeah this stupid-ass post was made by someone who has both never lived in a rural area, and never looked at Google Maps lol
They’re not viable as general passenger hubs.
Every county has a county seat. There’s nothing preventing the county seat from being a regional travel hub.
Why not though? Honest question, I’ve been to an airport that had a terminal of around 30 square metres with decent passenger service in the EU.
I’d say it’s the flying that’s not scalable, not the airport footprints.
Flying is much more energy intensive, there are heightened security concerns and pilots are expensive
Yeah, I get that flying is not an ideal solution because of those reasons, but the aspect that was being talked about was airport footprints, which should be easier in the US than in the EU, with all that space.
Most municipal airports can’t handle jet engine planes around here. They are all just small body, single engine aircraft on poorly maintained and non-level runways. They are fine for recreational flights, crop dusters, or flight instruction, but most rural airports here are little more than a few hangers and an administrative building with a runaway.
So the airport I’m talking about is Sønderborg, it also can’t service jets, the only passenger service operates 2-3 twin turboprop planes to Copenhagen and back. The airport is six hangars, the terminal literally is a single room with enough room for the passengers of a single plane.
I can see how small airports would make sense in Denmark since the landscape of islands and peninsulas makes direct paths by road or train nearly impossible. I’m in Ohio, which is comparable to Poland in geography. Rolling plains along a smooth coastline in the north with sizable hills and low mountains in the south. Flying from Toledo to Akron doesn’t make any sense since driving that is less than 2 hours, and so passenger rail would be a mich better option. You barely even see commercial flights from Cleveland to Cincinnati since the driving distance is doable for a day trip. A rail line connecting Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati would be perfect for us instead of lots of tiny airlines.
I’ve tried to use them and they’re generally not affordable for most people, since you’re comparing to cost of driving a relatively short distance.
- The town I grew up in had a small airport where you could buy a ticket on a prop plane to get you to a bigger airport to make your flight. But it was cheaper and easier to drive an hour, and buses are even cheaper
- similar to where I went to college
- now I live just outside a major city, but it’s possible to take a small plane to a nearby tourist destination. Sure it avoids traffic but you need a car there and it’s cheaper to pick an off time for travel and drive the two hours
Edit to add: yes it’s also the airport that’s not scalable. A small airport requires minimal infrastructure, mostly provided by businesses. But for passenger service, someone needs to build a terminal, make sure there’s parking, have security staff on duty, install scanners, etc. d you have enough business to support that?
Literally no idea how a regular person would actually use those for realistic transportation. I figured those places were for private jets, people learning to fly and cargo/farm/industrial flights.
Would booking a flight on somebody’s cesna even work and be affordable/safe?
It takes a high level license to be paid to fly people.
It is fairly applicable to learn enough to fly one self (in theory from reading). There are airplane clubs where one owns a tiny part of a plane. Fuel and maintenance are not free, but not horrible for a few hours travel.
A very cleverly designed club could work somewhat for weekend trips within a tank of gas distance. Maybe.
Do Australia, Canada or India have the same problem?
Australia and Canada, yes. India has a much more developed rail infrastructure.
The main driver for passenger rail success is population density–people per square mile or per square kilometer. The US, Canada, and Australia do not have enough population density in most areas to really support a passenger rail service.
There are parts or sections of the US that are starting to get the kind of density that supports trains, and trains do tend to appear when that happens.
But we do have that kind of population density. Any pair of million person cities less than 500 miles apart is potentially good,and that’s most of the population
I hear this argument often, but it perplexes me. Yeah, the US has large areas with little population density, but surprisingly, comparatively nobody lives there. The places with high population density have lots of people living there. We could have trains in places where people live, but for the most part, we don’t. Not even a single high-speed line to connect the Northeast Corridor, just the Acela. The Great Lakes region has higher population density than, and about the same size as, Spain, but Spain has a well-developed rail system.
It’s not really about population density.
The DC metro system was built when the population was 750k. The population of Columbus, Ohio is about 950k. Columbus could support a rail system (which would also bring more growth).
All those countries are very small, poor and sparsely populated with people who’d want to travel.
USA: 9.53 Mio km² | 33.6 inhabitants per km² | $85,373 GDP (PPP) per capita | 32.5 Bn pkm (rail) | 1.98 Tn pkm (air, domestic + international (by departure)
Canada: 9.98 Mio km² | 4.2 inhabitants per km² | $60,495 GDP (PPP) per capita | 1.44 Bn pkm (rail) (2007) | 198 Bn pkm (air, domestic + international (by departure)
Australia: 7.69 Mio km² | 3.6 inhabitants per km² | $66,627 GDP (PPP) per capita | 10.5 Bn pkm (rail) | 220 Bn pkm (air, domestic + international (by departure)
India: 3.29 Mio km² | 426.7 inhabitants per km² | $10,123 GDP (PPP) per capita | 1,157 Bn pkm (rail) | 233 Bn pkm (air, domestic + international (by departure))
This quick comparison misses international inbound tourism, infrastructure size and infrastructure cost per capita as well as an actually spatially differentiated interurban density-adjusted connectivity parameter (or whatever that’d be called), so take it with a grain of salt, but I’d argue that while having different markets, those English-language adjacent countries have similarities and relevant differences.
Yeah yeah but like, America #1. USA USA USA USA 🌎🏈🇻🇮🇺🇲🇺🇸🇦🇸🌭🍔🔫
Coming from a more rural region, even if trains were available, when people go to the city they come back with their car filled up with stuff because it’s easier to find/cheaper in the city, most won’t take the train even if it’s available if they have their car they can rely on.
But cars are still more efficient (L/km/passenger) than planes so we don’t need more planes for rural regions either.
Yeah going to the grocery store was a 40 minute round trip growing up. You go there and buy as much as you can so you don’t have to go again for two more weeks. Having a train will not be suitable for this type of trip.
A 40 minute round trip would be average in most US cities, eg Dallas, Denver, Atlanta, suburban Chicago, etc
Those cities have grocery stores every exit off the highway. I’m in NW Ohio and while every town over 15,000 people has at least onc grocery store, lota of the surrounding villages do not. 30 miles each direction to a grocery store is rough. Growing up in suburbs of major cities, i cant remember a grocery store being further than 5 miles away. It’s a vastly different experience.
No, but a walkable city is. Even in a small town, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to park once then walk to the grocery, the movie theater, the home center, etc
May I point out that this effect is killing small towns and living-wage jobs? Before the car, there had to be stores and groceries and doctors’ practices, et cetera, in small towns. Those provided local jobs for people, and community. Now, people drive into the city, or to the regional Walmart, and the small towns are decaying, mired in crippling poverty, isolation, and the diseases of despair that we see today. So the car might offer “freedom” to load up on a large selection of cheap consumer goods, but at the cost of dignity, connection, and meaning.
(Walmart, by the way, can be seen as predatory, killing small business with prices they can’t match, but also, it is successful largely because it is so well-adapted to a car-based lifestyle. It’s not the cause, it’s an effect.)
A good rail network also connects to major airports to give people a range of choices so they can pick the best combination for their travel
Removing all the train stations in towns across the USA was a huge mistake
Not if you own a car factory.
Or a highway. See also: Roger Rabbit.
Or better yet, a senator
Thank you for writing the text and a link.
I don’t know why this is so hard for people who post screenshots of websites.
Plenty of places with developed rail networks are still conservative in rural places.
Yeah, but passenger rail collapsed hard. Amtrak is a shell of the former service and most states that kept their systems focused only on commuters into cities.
You also see a lot of rural towns encouraged to spread out far more than before because cars provided transportation. A small town in the early 20th century looked a lot more like a very small city instead of the hollow suburban form they have today.
I meant in other countries. Rural France is still conservative, for example. So is rural Japan.
You cannot compare conservativism in the United States to conservativism in other Western democracies. Particularly a place like France. You’re using the same word for two things but they’re not the same thing. The Overton window does not even overlap between the two cases. Which is exactly the point being made.
Yeah, but that conservatism still involves as somewhat competent government helping people out. I don’t think they would push for the economics of American conservatism.
American conservatism killed passenger rail. The only places you see functional passenger rail are large, non conservative cities.
I could provide a pseudo valid arguement for aircraft in the future to these remote locations. But i would rather waste time and comment space providing this pointless comment that doesnt contribute to anything.
Planes, few cripple trains, and a shitload of giant automobiles
True, my southern Illinois relatives are aware they can catch an Amtrak to the cities, but the trains suck really bad and the stations are often in a terrible place to leave anything of value (like your car) so they just drive when the occasionally need to go to the city for something like real healthcare
What cities? One of the high speed rail proposals is that it makes a lot of sense to build a Midwest passenger rail network with Chicago as the center. There’s already a huge freight rail network and huge underutilized right of way. Think of how many decent sized cities are within a couple hundred miles of Chicago, and all the business and personal reasons to travel among them. We just need to stop sending all our transportation money to yet more roads we can’t afford to maintain
The Amtrak station in St. Louis is not a great spot to leave anything of value. I live in St. Louis so I’m not one of these crazies that thinks my city is a war zone but that lot gets plenty of attention from thieves breaking windows looking for guns and money.
And SoIL folks don’t go to Chicago, remember there is a substantial number of Illinoisans calling for everything south of Springfield to be split into the 51st state. No it wouldn’t be sustainable or make sense but they hate being “controlled” by cook county
And the Amtrak in southern Illinois can be hours late.
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Mom, I want to go to school and learn to form my own opinions.
Honey, we already have opinions for you at home.
Also because(I’m only assuming that its the same in the states) usually politicians don’t really care about investing in rural infrastructure and wehen you can see the quality from all of your infrastructure decline its easy to use populism to catch the votes from people who feel left out.
