I began experimenting with long distance (cross-Europe, and long distances, not just one country to the neighbouring country) train travel, as I no longer wanted to fly due to the pollution from flying.
I rapidly concluded long distance train travel is not viable.
On one occasion I had two days of travel booked, and the very first train was an hour late, which led to a missed connection, and that was it - there was no way I could make my next train, and I lost some hundreds of euros of booked tickets and accommodation, and the compensation offered - if I had the will power to fight through the incredibly hostile claims mechanism on-line - was 30 euro. I was also stuck, as I had left my origin (a long-term AirBnB) and the next place I would live was at my destination. Fortunately, I was in Paris, so I travel to de Gaulle and booked a flight to my destination (where it was then necessary to book a hotel for an night, as I was a day early); I paid some hundreds more euros to complete my journey.
Essentially the problem is that the longer a train journey, the more late it will be, and if you miss a connection, you can lose everything afterwards; but you have to book everything in advance, because the main train routes are fully booked if you try to buy a ticket on the day.
If you get one ticket for the whole journey then it's the provider's responsibility to get you to your destination, even if you miss a connection due to a delay.
If you have bought multiple tickets covering the journey, there are a few European agreements that may be relevant in the event of a missed connection:
- Connections between certain high speed services allow you to 'Hop on the next available train' (HOTNAT) if both services are members of the Railteam alliance
- Connections between most services on international journeys are protected by the newish 'Agreement on Journey Continuation' (AJC)
It's definitely confusing and it's far from perfect, but the situation is improving.
This is not an inherent problem with trains though - it should absolutely be possible to implement a continent wide railway system, which I believe will happen sooner rather than later.
Switzerland already has a unified system, where the main train operator SBB and the local public transport operators use the same ticketing system. Both monthly passes are available and a half fare card, which reduces the price by a lot(not half, as is suggested by the name of the card). The Swiss people are so used to travel by train they pretty much treat it like their own living room.
I don't know if it qualifies as long distance, but I have traveled across Japan a couple of times on train, from Sapporo to Fukuoka. Not in one day, I stopped for a few days in between, but I have done Sapporo to Nara and Kyoto to Sapporo in a day.
I loved all of them, worst train journey I had was Tokyo to Osaka... landed in Japan, slept overnight at an Airbnb and got up to get on the train to Osaka, but we missed our first train... was not a problem catching the next one, but we decided to eat lunch first. Got on the next train and got about 1/3 of the way to Osaka when the train had to stop due to a typhoon. We were stuck in the train for hours, by the time they let us off (we were stopped at a station, but not at the platform) it was too late to book any lodgeing anywhere near the station, and all the food was sold out everywhere nearby. We ate snacks we brought with us and slept on the train station floor! It was an adventure for sure. But things like that can happen when flying too and are quite rare on Japanese trains.
Don't have any experience with cross country train travel anywhere else, but I love doing it in Japan!
Crossing multiple countries over a couple of days, I've never seen this as possibility.
Going from one country to another is normally one train company, from the origin country, and then moving on from that city - in another country - means a different company, from that second country, and so on.
One big difference between train and plane is that, for planes, it takes me only a few clicks on one single website to book a multiple legs flight across most of the world, transparently using several companies and I dont have to carry my luggage around.
I rarely find the same for train.
Air travel is a mess but it is still much better integrated than train for long distance.
I'm not sure what this has to do with American train travel, since it's all within one country (and, generally, one company). It reads as a rationale for why it couldn't work here, except that none of your issues apply to us.
As long as you're just traveling with one company it's usually fine - especially DB, you can usually just hop on the next train.
However with a journey spanning multiple companies you're out of luck... and with seat reservations on TGVs you commonly have to wait until the next day.
It's something that shouldn't be too hard to fix: Give passengers an easy and forgiving way to continue their journey (and make the causing company pay) - ideally this should automatically show up on the App and give the passenger options of new connections etc.
None of this fixes seat reservations on TGVs though, which are also annoying for offers like Interrail/Eurail... EU should probably start regulating seat reservations /s
In the early 1990s I did a round-trip, coast-to-coast trip on Amtrak (basically NYC to Seattle and back), stopping at major cities for a few days each. I had a USARail pass (equivalent to a Eurail pass), which at the time was only available to non-US citizens, so I was quite stoked to have 30 days of unlimited travel for a fixed cost.
On the first route (westward) I took the southern route and on the return trip (eastward) I took the northern route, through Chicago. I stayed in youth hostels (except for a couple of cities where I had friends and relatives), and didn't have a fixed schedule so delays were usually tolerable.
While in San Francisco, Amtrak went on strike for about a week, and my pass was extended correspondingly. An extra week in San Francisco was fun! But again, I didn't have any fixed deadlines so it was all good.
All things considered, the unreliability of the system makes me loathe to travel long distances by train, unless my plans are flexible. However, one huge upside is the views, especially in the middle of the country. In fact, some train lines even exist largely to tout their views, e.g. the Rocky Mountaineer (a Canadian company). Train travel is much more leisurely, and a great way to meet people.
These days many Amtrak routes are actually covered by bus, which may come as a surprise when you get to the train station and are told to board a bus. This is not immediately obvious when booking online, although you may be able to tell by reading carefully; the telltale sign might be as subtle as the icon (bus vs train) shown for that leg.
I did Seattle-Chicago about ten years ago. 48 hours expected duration, and it arrived several hours late.
As a European used to efficient train travel, it was kind of surreal that not only was the passenger train very slow (maybe 1/3 of the speed I’m used to), but it also made long stops to make way for cargo traffic.
It felt like a bit of Wild West time travel to spend days on a train in the amazing landscapes. The food in the dining car was surprisingly good, but got boring by the third day.
Mine was over 12 hours late, as a passenger had to be airlifted off because of cardiac issues. Said passenger had been told not to fly, because of altitude issues, and hadn´t thought through the "mile high" aspect of transiting through Denver.
It is one of the most amazing train trips in the world, and tbh the article doesn´t really do it justice. The day the train spends slowly going up and down the rockies, are just incredible, the scenery is amazing, and you get to know other passengers and the conductors along the way. Had some great card games in the scenery car.
> but it also made long stops to make way for cargo traffic.
This is a huge issue. Cargo trains legally have to yield to passenger trains, but in recent decades cargo trains have been made longer and longer, so they no longer physically fit into the passing sidings (which usually are built for 75 cars). It's a mess.
I rode Canada's VIA rail from Vancouver to Edmonton. Some poor Europeans sitting in the seat in front were freaking out when it became apparent the train was going be 10 hours late on what was billed as a 24 hour trip. They had a connecting flight to catch in Edmonton and missed it by several hours.
> 48 hours expected duration, and it arrived several hours late. […] (maybe 1/3 of the speed I’m used to),
You are used to train journeys of more than 2800 km (more than the distance from Lisbon to Warsaw) with an average speed of over 170 km/h? Where can I find such an itinerary in Europe?
The Seattle-Chicago line is operated by a single company. Europe has dozens of national operators. So any direct comparison is of course difficult to make.
To travel 3000 km on a high-speed train, Japan and China certainly offer the opportunity. Beijing-Guangzhou is 2230 km and operates at 350
km/h.
You know Mussolini was actually pretty progressive on this. He was the first in Europe to introduce green biofuels to public transportation by way of a unique spice based process.
And then the railroad network kind of stagnated for 50 years. the fast speed trains ("Alta velocità") are only available in the North.
In the South you have thoughts and prayers. A trip Bari<>Milano (900km) is mostly around 8-9 hours, going further south elongates the journey incredibly.
I did Chicago-SF on the Zephyr about 20 years ago. It was a nightmare disaster of a trip. Nearly all our movement was at night due to cargo scheduling. We ended up arriving over 48 hours late.
To Amtrak's credit - we complained and they refunded our entire journey.
> As a European used to efficient train travel, it was kind of surreal that not only was the passenger train very slow (maybe 1/3 of the speed I’m used to), but it also made long stops to make way for cargo traffic.
See recent video "I Spent Over 12 Hours on an Amtrak Train (on purpose)":
To be fair, Europe also kind of sucks at long distance trains. If you want to go the same distance as Seattle-Chicago in Europe by train (say Lisbon-Warszawa or Rome-Northern Sweden) you're often looking at 40-50 hours, mainly due to having to make 5-7 connections.
As long as you are just going between two cities with a direct train line it's trivial. The problem is if you are trying to take a train between two cities without a direct train line, like if you wanted to go from Berlin to for example Lisbon instead of Vienna.
Which is obvious because they are different countries? And, also tourists select specific countries to visit so your "use case" is very rare.
Edit
Rare = majority of tourists in Europe go to specific cities and countries. There are trips between countries but it is rare to go around ALL Europe by train. Trains are significantly more expensive that flights.
If continental Europeans want to visit another distant European country, that's a rare use case? Or are you only referring to e.g. US tourists visiting Europe?
Trains are significantly more expensive that flights
Unless you actually want to travel around ALL of Europe (or even all around a few countries in Europe), in which case trains get cheaper again, thanks to things like the interrail ticket.
That's true, and it requires more planning and available time.
I'd like to add a perspective on the contrast between Europe and the U.S. in this context. Having partially lived in both regions (across various European countries, though my main base is Buenos Aires, Argentina), one of the things that bothers me most about the U.S. is the car-centric culture. It feels almost artificial in 2024, as if it’s been taken to an extreme (I say this with a grain of salt). I don’t intend to start a flame war, but it’s surprising to me that in many areas where a 45-minute walk would be natural, there are no pedestrian paths. I’m not suggesting that cities like Los Angeles should be entirely pedestrian-friendly, but there are places where basic walkability is neglected, despite the infrastructure being suitable.
What I want to convey is that it's difficult to compare both regions' approaches to moving, and say that the article is amazing!
> Passenger trains between major cities in Europe are in the 200-300 km/h range.
I don't know which country exactly you mean, I live in central Europe (Slovenia) and no train goes over 200 km/h, most go 60-80 km/h.
Also, every time I'm at the train station in Ljubljana (Slovenia's capital), there's an announcement about the train from Budapest being ~40min late. And it's a way shittier looking train than the local commute ones going 60.
French high speed trains are fast, for instance the average speed of the train on the Paris-Strasbourg section (~400km in length) is 250km/h. This is the global average speed, so it is even faster on the high-speed section, going at around 320km/h. I often take this train, which is very convenient.
To emphasize just how fast this is in comparison to regular rail:
When I was visiting France some years back and took the TER train on the way from Paris to Strasbourg (300mi / 500km), and that crawled. On the way back, we took the TGV, which flew.
If you look at booking tickets on SNCF's website, the difference is stark: about 5 hours via the TER, versus a little under 2 hours via the TGV. (From that perspective, it's a little funny to describe the TER as crawling, seeing as that's not meaningfully different from driving that distance.)
There are some portions of Amtrak that have comparable max speeds (notably, the Acela) but even then, the average speeds on those routes are nowhere near 200km/h.
Some information online indicates that the non high speed train takes about 20 mins more than the high speed train on that route. It does not seem a huge time difference
The connection that takes 20min longer has two additional stops (the fast connection is a direct one) but it is still served by TGV or ICE trains, like the direct connection.
The distance between Paris and Strasbourg is >400km, so even the "slow" connection has an average speed of ~200 km/h. The actual regional train connection (TER) takes nearly 5 hours with plenty of stops in between. Slightly faster non-regional but non-TGV connections only exist on lines that are not served by TGVs.
This reminds me of Voyager buses in Ontario during the 80s/90s. They had two routes between Ottawa and Toronto.
One took maybe 6 hours. The other 12+ or some such. The 12+ hour took almost the same route, but stopped at every. single. town.
Woe to the person wanting to go from Ottawa to Toronto, and buying the wrong ticket. This is pre-Internet so research was less common and easy, and if you have no idea it could matter...
That’s all very well if you’re going thousands of km. For a plane journey that takes less than 3 hours, though, the train may still win, because the train doesn’t involve… airports. No getting to the airport, security, hanging around because the train is inexplicably an hour late (trains are sometimes late, but even in the worst systems not on the scale/frequency of plane lateness), no half-hour spent boarding the train, no taxi-ing, no sitting around for 20 minutes at the end while they get around to opening the train door, no walking through a km worth of airport.
Sure, but… cities in the USA are thousands of km. Seattle to Chicago (the example given by the GP) are 2800 km distant. Those cities are slightly more distant than Lisbon and Warsaw. Chicago to Washington DC is almost the exact distance as London to Marseille (1000 km). Chicago to Houston, Texas is the same distance as London to Rome.
To go back to the first example, Seattle to Chicago is a 4 hour (scheduled, which already includes taxi time at both ends and a buffer for late departures) plane ride. Even a TGV running continuously at top speed (320km/h), with no stops, would take 8.5 hours to complete the same journey. Wikipedia tells me that the fastest start-to-end scheduled speed of a TGV is only 280 km/h, which would take over 10 hours.
Unfortunately, the monetary and political interests in security theater became entrenched after 9/11. I'm afraid something similar might happen to trains eventually, if they're ever used in a sufficiently theatrical instance of violence. I'm enjoying the ease of access while it lasts.
Wait until you find out how quickly you can board and exit a train at a station that’s right in the center of the city, versus traveling to an airport, going through security, waiting to board, and then waiting some more for the plane to hopefully get its take-off slot from air control.
You can get from London to Paris by train in less time than it takes to go from Manhattan to boarding a plane at JFK.
Ah yes, the fake line of argument that for airplanes you have to drive an hour to get to the airport two hours before your flight, while in the case of trains, a powerful genie comes into your house, packs your suitcase and whisks you away in his powerful arms directly to your seat on the train 13.21 seconds prior to departure.
It's BS. In existing cities, train stations are just as hard to build in the city center as airports -- neither happens. You do not in fact need to get to airports hours in advance, and security theater in airports is still excruciating, but you can get PreCheck or Clear and cut the time way down. There is some time advantage to boarding trains, but it's on the order of 20-40 minutes, not hours.
Paris and London are only 213 miles apart! It's about 2/3rds the distance that SF is from LA, much less say SF to Seattle or NYC to Chicago. Rail travel works great in Europe because distances are small, density is high, and the cities grew up centered around rail infrastructure.
In existing cities, train stations are just as hard to build in the city center as airports -- neither happens
only in countries where they neglected building train stations before the cities grew to todays sizes. but even then it's not true. US cities are less dense, so it should be easier to find space. train stations are also much much smaller than airports and trains don't make as much noise as airplanes. there are many more reasons not to build airports in the middle of a city, none of which apply to trains.
the main problem for trains is finding a route for the track into the city. that can be and is solved with tunnels though. or the chinese approach where the high speed trainstations are sometimes built away from the center of the city and instead the center is connected by a dense network of subway lines. a process that started less than 20 years ago but now puts many chinese cities at the top of the list of the largest subway networks in the world.
The "big country" contributes in that passenger-only high speed rail would be ruinously expensive to lay down and maintain. Long distance passenger rail exists at all in the US only because it can share track with freight rail.
I've taken the California zephyr a few times over the last few years and it's a phenomenal experience. I'm hoping to do the Chicago-San Francisco trip in the coming years.
My fear is that some influencer/personality is going to start posting about the train system, and then it's going to become a crowded mess :P It feels a bit like a well kept secret right now. I think one of the things that makes it so enjoyable is that it's so uncrowded most of the time. I almost always get two seats to myself every time I take it (in coach). And there's somehow always a table available in the observation car whenever I decide to go there. Or you sit with someone and make a new friend :P
There are a lot of transit focused “creators” already documenting their trips - the one I tend to follow on YouTube is Miles in Transit but he often intersects with other creators as well
It's less the transit creators I'm worried about, since that's pretty niche. It's if a general influencer starts sharing aesthetics of train travel on eg Instagram which I think would cause its usage to boom.
I did the same trip. Highly recommended. On the trip I learned that there is an Amtrak Rail pass, which includes 10 rides. It seems that it often is on sale at the beginning of the year. So if you are interested in such a trip, you may want to look out for that.
My daughter recently moved to Vancouver. I was in Seattle for a work trip so decided to take Amtrak to visit her for the weekend. This was my first real train travel. Overall, it was pretty good and probably is what I will do in the future in the same situation.
The train moved at a frustratingly slow speed (< 10 mph) for probably 30% of the trip, but aside from that I liked the more relaxed atmosphere of the travel and it was overall more comfortable.
The train itself was a bit bumpier than I expected and the wifi was not very good. Those things and the slow speed would mean I could not imagine taking a much longer trip than this one. With the extra time and hassle of dealing with an airport, this one balanced out as probably only being slightly slower travel but it was less expensive and more relaxed. If it were Seattle to San Francisco, as an example, the slowness would be too much for me. The comfort and amenities like wifi and food would have to be a lot better than they are.
Am I the only one who finds it surreal to see long distance trains in the US? Don’t get me wrong - I know they exist. It’s just that I feel like they never get depicted anywhere in the media. I also don’t think I know a single American who has gone to another US city by train.
Media depictions are a hugely underrated aspect of public transport perception.
In japanese and korean media (my experience is with a ton of anime and k dramas, more in the former than the latter though) trains are very common casual and serious backdrops for a variety of scenes, either within the train, at the station, or just a train passing by on the bridge in the background.
In Hollywood/American TV, it's always cars, with the occasional airport/plane. It riles me up quite unreasonably that shows/movies set in New York fuckin city with 24-7 subway service, and characters are shown trying to catch a cab in Manhattan in the middle of the night to go 20 blocks away. At least Marvelous Mrs. Maisel acknowledged this directly as a class thing for some characters and other characters took the train, but most movies just assume the American viewer cannot relate to someone using the subway.
It's almost certainly less to do with location scouting and production design, and more about perceived biases. If studio executives think American audiences can't relate to trains or subways because they're less commonly used in real-life, we're going to see fewer of them on the screen. There's probably a cultural blind spot at play there, too; if writers don't ride trains--or even perceive them--very often, they're far less likely to write about them. It's a vicious circle.
As for locations, a quick Google search found a genuine New York City R17 subway car[0] that can be rented out in LA. The Sierra Northern Railway--a freight carrier in California--has rented out[1] its rolling stock, facilities, and tracks to film productions for nearly a century. They've got quite the roster, spanning multiple eras. There's also Amtrak, the various local/regional metro systems, other rental companies, and even private collectors if they need something specific.
As for stations, that's even easier. Various urban backlots have underground subway station entrances[2] where you could characters exiting the station. Or the station platform itself is just a long room; you don't have to show the actual tracks, or you could composite in a train moving across the frame, etc. Plenty of permanent sets can play that role. Set designers do far more with less all the time. Hell, you can just reference it off-screen for a sitcom. That's a huge chunk of Seinfeld (or any sitcom). Shit happens, everyone reacts...often poorly, with hilarious results.
A subway set is probably expensive, especially if you want a working train.
Almost everything set in London uses either the disused Aldwych Station on the Piccadilly Line, the disused Charing Cross station on the Jubilee Line, or the Waterloo and City line at weekends when it is normally closed — sometimes even when the setting ought to be a much larger train and style of station elsewhere.
Yeah, the technical aspects of the subway shots in Seinfeld are interesting, and really give a sense of how hard everybody worked to make that show what it was.
The first scenes to take place in a subway (to my knowledge, anyway) were in the 30th episode, which was called "The Subway". And indeed, most of the episode takes place in a subway.
The subway set for this show was rented from Warner Brothers and was sent to the Seinfeld lot in several pieces on trucks. It was apparently a huge PITA and presented a lot of technical limitations.
They assembled it on springs and had a bunch of crew shake the car to simulate movement. They had to light it using stage lights, manually simulate the mechanical opening of the doors, etc. And it was apparently difficult to do anything but a closeup without it looking fake.
They redecorated it for each of the different subways that it was used to depict (in the episode, different characters are simultaneously taking different subways to different places).
After the episode, the set was disassembled and placed back on the truck to send back to WB, but the truck driver went under a low underpass, which the set struck and was destroyed. As a result, Tom Azzari, Seinfeld's Production Designer, led a small team within the show to design, engineer, and build an entirely new subway set, fixing all the technical problems while they were fresh in the team's memory. They even got actual subway light fixtures and pneumatic doors. This set was used for the remainder of the show, and went on to be used in other shows and films as well.
(There are a few interviews about this process on the Seinfeld DVD extras, Season 03 "Inside Looks")
Earlier this month I took a train Washington to New York, plenty of people on that.
I then went down to Miami, train was fairly full - not many stayed on the entire trip but I wouldn’t expect them to, they got off at various stations along the way. Everyone I head in the dining car was American.
When I visited New York (from the UK) last year I took trains up to Connecticut and Rhode Island. I was surprised at how regular and comfortable the trains were given the US's reputation for passenger rail. I saw that you could go south as well. Is it just that the each coast is particularly well connected compared to the rest of the country?
Well I got an Uber from my office to Union station, as the metro in DC isn’t great. Obviously no need for an Uber in New York as I could get the subway.
Had I flown to Miami I’d still need a taxi to my hotel, just like I did from the train station. I don’t get that argument.
The with respect to Amtrak, shorter line trains on the east coast and CA capital corridor these trains are commuter trains and often have more ownership/priority on the rails so they are more frequent and punctual. If you took metro north, it’s a pretty extensive commuter line as well.
The US actually has a handful of pretty nice passenger rail corridors, with decent schedules and nice trains. Washington DC to Boston is one such corridor. Portland to Vancouver is another one I've taken that also worked pretty well.
It’s so funny that this all came up today, last night my partner showed me the episode of Sex and the City where Carrie and Sam travel from NYC to San Francisco by train, though it’s mostly depicted as being an annoying hassle (imo their expectations of what train travel would be like were too high).
I've done it, or at least several long sections. I found that I met more interesting people on long distance buses than Amtrak and VIA. Younger people, more diverse, less moneyed. But the experience is much less comfortable, and the places they drop you to get food are utterly abysmal. My best memory was pulling over at some rest stop in who knows where and everyone is grabbing fast food trash because that's all there is, and I noticed some vegetables on the counter in the gas station, asked about them and the guy says they were free, dropped off by a local farmer. So I got some fresh tomatoes and they tasted glorious after days of stale motel bagels and Burger King.
Another awkward thing about bus travel in the US in particular is if you get off anywhere that isn't a major city, you're often stuck on the edge of a highway miles away from any accommodation that might be available in the town the bus is supposedly servicing. Most people get picked up by friends with cars to get where they're actually going, so if you hitch your pack and walk to town you really are gonna look like a hobo.
To be honest, if where you're going is on the train line, the train is better in almost every way. Much more comfortable, nicer views, somewhat better food, sometimes (but not always) more convenient stops. But there's a lot of Turtle Island the trains don't go and you'd miss so much if you didn't take the bus. Unfortunately even bus service is getting rarer. I remember wanting to visit a town of around 25,000 people and was shocked to discover there was no way to get there at all. I would have had to walk 20km from the closest Greyhound stop, which is absurd. I emailed a local museum and the curator offered me a lift back and forth, which was kind, but holy heck. Imagine being a kid stuck in a place like that! Just bananas.
You’d probably spend a lot of time sleeping overnight in a bus station waiting for a bus for the next leg of your journey. Coast to coast by bus sounds miserable.
Certainly does sound miserable - worse than in a seat on amtrak, let alone a roomette or bedroom.
However you can take the 1310 from LA to Phoenix, then half an hour wait before the 2245 to St Louis, and a 1h25 wait at 0720 for a St Louis to New York.
66 hours with 64 hours on the actual bus, miserable for both you and your fellow passengers.
I was thinking that making a trip of it and taking your time and doing it slowly would probably be the only way to make it enjoyable. As a utilitarian means of travel though, miserable.
I bicycled across in 1985 and scariest part was there was no public transport on regular roads. What if the bicycle breaks down? There was no bicycle shops and bicyclists either, except on top of cars. Where they drive to use the bicycle? No idea.
When I was 7 my family moved from the West Coast to the East. We didn’t have much money and my mom was deathly afraid of flying so we took a train. Seeing the U.S. this way is a treat and I highly recommend. Like TFA you meet interesting people, see and experience new things that you just don’t get to see traveling other ways.
I was pleased to read such positive contagious excitement and someone who can still see the wonder of the American west. And excitement of trying new experiences.
Years ago I decided to take the Lake Shore Limited from Albany to Chicago for a business trip just to have a different experience. Two things I didn’t expect:
1. It was very difficult to get pre-approved for the expense because my employer’s process had to make sure I wasn’t costing them extra money. Somehow this was not an issue with plane tickets.
2. Overnight stops interrupted my sleep (in seat) as boarders banged luggage around and discussed seat selection when groups were involved.
Interesting, but would book a room if traveling this way next time.
As a European everything felt like being in a movie. Especially going through desert it felt like I travelled back in time. Literally Wild West. I got see forests, mountains, canyons, and desert all in the same ride. That's definately not possible where I come from.
The US has actually pretty good train infrastructure, it's just almost entirely dedicated to freight. The US moves far more goods by rail, farther and cheaper than just about any other country in the world.
It was, but then all the Class-Ⅰ rail carriers merged until we were left with a west-coast duopoly (UP and BNSF) and an east-coast duopoly (CSX and NS) and they closed all the “redundant” lines they could.
We did, and then when airplanes came around, it turned out that people/other interests found air travel better than train travel for most intercity travel.
Even on the East Coast, there used to be way more rail lines that took passengers -- if this were a hundred years ago, I could have walked a mile or two to a spur which would take me to one of the mid-sized cities connected to The Big City by commuter rail; now they're mostly rail trails.
Unlike in Europe, where rail maintenance is heavily subsidised by the government, in the US it is paid for by the private rail operators to a much greater extent. Thus the rail operators have much more say over how the rail is used and obviously priorities the more profitable traffic, which in the US is cargo.
So if the US government would wanted to build out cross country passenger rail they would either have to build new tracks, or use eminent domain to take back control of the existing tracks. Both options would be very expensive and wildly unpopular.
Which Europe are you talking about? Europe is a collection of independent counties and what you just mention is all wrong.
Most of the European railway companies have been privatized and there are companies that run the rail network and companies that run the train. Subsidies are not a thing in many of the European countries
Probably because most cities are so spaced out you'd still need a car to get from home to the train station and from the train station to your office when taking the train to work, for example. So it's easier to just drive there.
So it's easier to drive to San Francisco from Seattle instead of parking your car at the train station in Seattle, take a train and then do your business on downtown SF, come back to Seattle and take your car back home?
(It's a figurative example I'm not sure there's a train from Seattle to SF)
Of course not, but even with state of art train technology (let's say 250mph), that would still be an over 3 hour commute each way (just the railway part!). If it's just for a business trip every now in a while, it's faster to just fly there.
I'm just saying, this is such a rare use case that it's not as high of a priority as expanding the roads that 80% or more of the residents in a city use daily. Whereas for freight it makes a ton of sense.
(fun fact, there actually is a train route there!)
As some who used to travel for meetings quite a lot to a city 3 hours away by high speed rail, it really isn't. Once you take into account that you can show up for your train 5 mins before it leaves, plus the fact that the train station is almost always much closer to where you want to be, the difference in time between trains and planes pretty much disappears for shorter trips.
Plus the train is just so much nicer and more comfortable. It's quieter. Your seats are much bigger and have more legroom than even the nicest business class seats. You can get up and walk around if you want. You often have a restaurant car where you can sit and grab a drink or something to eat. Train travel is just so much more relaxing compared to flying.
3 hours is about Osaka to Tokyo, a route that sees a massive volume of business travel on the bullet train in Japan, arguably far more than flying. SF to Seattle would be about 1300 km which is more like Hiroshima to Morioka, around 6.5 hours by train including a connection; I think at that point there'd be a split in favour of flying, but around a third of travellers would probably still opt for the train due to its comfort and convenience.
> that would still be an over 3 hour commute each way (just the railway part!). If it's just for a business trip every now in a while, it's faster to just fly there.
Even for flights which take 45 minutes in the air, I’d never expect to get to the airport, through security, through all the boarding and unboarding nonsense, and from the destination airport to where I was actually going, in 3 hours.
IIRC last time I was in Seattle airport, after I got off the plane (which was late, of course), I spent half an hour just walking through airport and to the rather inconveniently located light rail. Everything involving flying takes forever.
Relative to the current situation or in absolute terms? If there was a Shinkansen style trains between LA and SF with the same quality and timetable as the Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka, do you not think Americans would flock to it?
Originally, the "15 minutes city" is simply a city planning guideline, which tells you that cities should strive to have every amenities close to where people live, ideally everyone should have everything in a 15 minutes radius. Far-right lunatics interpreted it as being constrained by the government in a 15 minutes radius around their home, which is insane thinking indeed.
I live in a "15 minutes city", Paris, I have 5 grocery stores in a 5 minutes walking radius, I go to work in 15 minutes using the metro, and if I want to I can get anywhere in France in a few hours by taking the train. That someone would not want this and instead fight for their rights to commute 2 hours everyday by car is insane to me.
I have come to realize that a lot of people on both sides think of the 15 minute city as a jail - the far left thinks it is a good thing if you never travel: they assume everything you could want could be in 15 minutes so no need and thus it won't feel like a jail.
I think it's a good thing if you never need to travel. Why would I want a 40 minute drive to get to a supermarket if I could instead get to an identical one in 10 minutes?
Similarly why would I want to travel for an hour to go to an office to sit on zoom meetings all day instead of doing it from my spare bedroom.
Reducing required travel is a great thing for me, gives me more time to do things on interesting travel. Rather than spending 90 minutes a week driving to/from the shop I save 78 hours a year, which is more than enough time to take up a new hobby.
They are not, at least no more than anyone else. nimby covers all sides of the asile. most live within a 10 minute drive of a supermarket and are happy with that. Food deserts are generally very left wing - poor people (or framers who are obviously to rural to get anything)
Nobody on the far left thinks this. If they thought that then why would they be into subway systems so much? Same for progressive urban planners more generslly.
I didn't say a majority but if you follow the urbanist movement for long you will see them. They are not into subways. A minortiy for sure but they exist and are vocal
Judging a whole urban design philosophy by the most fringe members of the most fringe groups hardly seems like a good faith argument. Especially when those people are almost never even urban designers or in any way related to the field.
Did you link to the right comment? I read all the parent comments as well as the reply, and none talk about trains being so rare that they wouldn't exist.
Or do you just make the logical jump from "few trips should require a train" to "no trains exist"? There is no logical connection between those statements.
I'm not going to spend hours in the archives of every urbanist blog and forumn to find a few dozen examples. I was asked for one and so I found the most recient here.
I don't think anyone thinks that everything you want is within 15 minutes - just that most daily necessities and services are available within 15 minutes.
I have _never_ seen anyone take that stance; the same people who argue for planning ‘15 minute cities’ (that is, correctly planned cities; this isn’t some new idea and is how cities were historically normally planned) generally also advocate for good _commuter_ (ie medium range) and intercity transport.
I mean, I’m sure there’s someone out there advocating for efficient city design but who’s opposed to developing transport, but they’re an extreme outlier.
OOC, is this a purely theoretical bogeyperson, or have you ever actually seen anyone take this stance? If the latter, just how many (to the nearest ten, say) posters of Pol Pot did they have on the wall?
If you choose to interpret a piece of advice on how to improve your neighborhood as some Orwellian authoritarian propaganda poster commanding you to never leave your house, I'm afraid I can't do anything for you anymore.
I live in Melbourne (and have for 15 years), so I'm not some rural hillbilly crying about cars per se - in fact I'm not even talking about cars: That placard literally says: 'Stay Home!'
I think bicycle paths and pedestrian access to places is extremely important, and not just for the environment, but being told that I should 'stay home' as part of some bigger picture plan to combat climate change is absolutely redolent of bureaucratic authoritarianism and environmental tyranny, and it really isn't hard to imagine a scenario running from this placard and the idea behind it to one where traveling away from one's 'neighborhood' (as defined in the photo) is punishable.
> it really isn't hard to imagine a scenario running from this placard and the idea behind it to one where traveling away from one's 'neighborhood' (as defined in the photo) is punishable
Please take a deep breath and step away from the Rupert Murdoch. This campaign is merely trying to get people invested in the areas in which they live, which is a noble goal. It's sad that some of the language it uses has been warped into trigger words by the media. Fear is a lucrative business.
so the presentation leaves a bit to be desired but you are throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
for one i don't think this poster is is presenting a government mandate but i believe it's a demand from people to the government to build like this (it's from the climate action museum, which, as far as i could tell is not supported by government)
likewise it is not about forcing people to stay home but demanding the right for people to do so and live their daily life without having to travel every day.
the title "stay home!" is an unfortunate choice. but to be fair, you also have to read the whole title: "your most radical move! stay home!" which clearly suggests that staying home is a choice you make (just like many of us refuse to return to work in the office) and not something forced on you from the outside. if you read anything else then you either miss the point or you are intentionally twisting it.
do you think fighting against neighborhoods like this is going to help you prevent that dystopia that you seem to be afraid of? negative thinking is not going to help us make the world better.
a commenter above mentions paris. i can share the exact same experience from vienna. literally. that's what we are talking about.
I understand a lot of what you're saying, but the fact is that radical anything - whether it's the radical left or right, radical environmentalists, radical feminists, etc., are all ultimately trying to move their grievances and solutions into the mainstream. Just because the makers of the placard admit 'staying home' would be radical right now doesn't mean that they want it to stay that way - indeed political issues to some extent always begin as radical ideas and by definition those that are eventually accepted by a society are no longer seen as radical when they are accepted.
You might try to say this is just a slippery slope argument, but they are already advocating for something they (and you) admit is radical - the only caveat is that they qualify it as being radical for now. Clearly if a few radical environmentalists 'stay home!' there isn't going to be a dent in any metric that these people swear by - staying home will only begin to affect things if many or most people do it, whether by choice or by force, and that's the kind of wholesale societal change that I find absolutely bonkers and terrifying.
side note: when i lived in singapore i actually felt what it means not to be able to travel outside of city borders. i mean, yeah, you could travel, but you had to check a border crossing point, change currency, etc...
it felt like a trap. china during covid was similar. just replace passport controls with vaccination checks every time you travel from one city to another.
i believe many of the city states and islands would feel the same. even new zealand felt like that when your goal was to be among people. it is perfect to get away from people though.
I began experimenting with long distance (cross-Europe, and long distances, not just one country to the neighbouring country) train travel, as I no longer wanted to fly due to the pollution from flying.
I rapidly concluded long distance train travel is not viable.
On one occasion I had two days of travel booked, and the very first train was an hour late, which led to a missed connection, and that was it - there was no way I could make my next train, and I lost some hundreds of euros of booked tickets and accommodation, and the compensation offered - if I had the will power to fight through the incredibly hostile claims mechanism on-line - was 30 euro. I was also stuck, as I had left my origin (a long-term AirBnB) and the next place I would live was at my destination. Fortunately, I was in Paris, so I travel to de Gaulle and booked a flight to my destination (where it was then necessary to book a hotel for an night, as I was a day early); I paid some hundreds more euros to complete my journey.
Essentially the problem is that the longer a train journey, the more late it will be, and if you miss a connection, you can lose everything afterwards; but you have to book everything in advance, because the main train routes are fully booked if you try to buy a ticket on the day.
So it just doesn't add up.
If you get one ticket for the whole journey then it's the provider's responsibility to get you to your destination, even if you miss a connection due to a delay.
If you have bought multiple tickets covering the journey, there are a few European agreements that may be relevant in the event of a missed connection:
- Connections between certain high speed services allow you to 'Hop on the next available train' (HOTNAT) if both services are members of the Railteam alliance
- Connections between most services on international journeys are protected by the newish 'Agreement on Journey Continuation' (AJC)
It's definitely confusing and it's far from perfect, but the situation is improving.
This is not an inherent problem with trains though - it should absolutely be possible to implement a continent wide railway system, which I believe will happen sooner rather than later.
Switzerland already has a unified system, where the main train operator SBB and the local public transport operators use the same ticketing system. Both monthly passes are available and a half fare card, which reduces the price by a lot(not half, as is suggested by the name of the card). The Swiss people are so used to travel by train they pretty much treat it like their own living room.
I don't know if it qualifies as long distance, but I have traveled across Japan a couple of times on train, from Sapporo to Fukuoka. Not in one day, I stopped for a few days in between, but I have done Sapporo to Nara and Kyoto to Sapporo in a day.
I loved all of them, worst train journey I had was Tokyo to Osaka... landed in Japan, slept overnight at an Airbnb and got up to get on the train to Osaka, but we missed our first train... was not a problem catching the next one, but we decided to eat lunch first. Got on the next train and got about 1/3 of the way to Osaka when the train had to stop due to a typhoon. We were stuck in the train for hours, by the time they let us off (we were stopped at a station, but not at the platform) it was too late to book any lodgeing anywhere near the station, and all the food was sold out everywhere nearby. We ate snacks we brought with us and slept on the train station floor! It was an adventure for sure. But things like that can happen when flying too and are quite rare on Japanese trains.
Don't have any experience with cross country train travel anywhere else, but I love doing it in Japan!
If you get everything on one ticket (and sometimes not) you can usually simply take the next train, with or without proof of delay on your ticket.
Crossing multiple countries over a couple of days, I've never seen this as possibility.
Going from one country to another is normally one train company, from the origin country, and then moving on from that city - in another country - means a different company, from that second country, and so on.
If you've never seen it as a possibility, have you looked at OBB NightJet? Every one I've taken has been this way.
This.
One big difference between train and plane is that, for planes, it takes me only a few clicks on one single website to book a multiple legs flight across most of the world, transparently using several companies and I dont have to carry my luggage around.
I rarely find the same for train.
Air travel is a mess but it is still much better integrated than train for long distance.
I'm not sure what this has to do with American train travel, since it's all within one country (and, generally, one company). It reads as a rationale for why it couldn't work here, except that none of your issues apply to us.
I had largely the same experience.
As long as you're just traveling with one company it's usually fine - especially DB, you can usually just hop on the next train.
However with a journey spanning multiple companies you're out of luck... and with seat reservations on TGVs you commonly have to wait until the next day.
It's something that shouldn't be too hard to fix: Give passengers an easy and forgiving way to continue their journey (and make the causing company pay) - ideally this should automatically show up on the App and give the passenger options of new connections etc.
None of this fixes seat reservations on TGVs though, which are also annoying for offers like Interrail/Eurail... EU should probably start regulating seat reservations /s
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In the early 1990s I did a round-trip, coast-to-coast trip on Amtrak (basically NYC to Seattle and back), stopping at major cities for a few days each. I had a USARail pass (equivalent to a Eurail pass), which at the time was only available to non-US citizens, so I was quite stoked to have 30 days of unlimited travel for a fixed cost.
On the first route (westward) I took the southern route and on the return trip (eastward) I took the northern route, through Chicago. I stayed in youth hostels (except for a couple of cities where I had friends and relatives), and didn't have a fixed schedule so delays were usually tolerable.
While in San Francisco, Amtrak went on strike for about a week, and my pass was extended correspondingly. An extra week in San Francisco was fun! But again, I didn't have any fixed deadlines so it was all good.
All things considered, the unreliability of the system makes me loathe to travel long distances by train, unless my plans are flexible. However, one huge upside is the views, especially in the middle of the country. In fact, some train lines even exist largely to tout their views, e.g. the Rocky Mountaineer (a Canadian company). Train travel is much more leisurely, and a great way to meet people.
These days many Amtrak routes are actually covered by bus, which may come as a surprise when you get to the train station and are told to board a bus. This is not immediately obvious when booking online, although you may be able to tell by reading carefully; the telltale sign might be as subtle as the icon (bus vs train) shown for that leg.
I did Seattle-Chicago about ten years ago. 48 hours expected duration, and it arrived several hours late.
As a European used to efficient train travel, it was kind of surreal that not only was the passenger train very slow (maybe 1/3 of the speed I’m used to), but it also made long stops to make way for cargo traffic.
It felt like a bit of Wild West time travel to spend days on a train in the amazing landscapes. The food in the dining car was surprisingly good, but got boring by the third day.
Mine was over 12 hours late, as a passenger had to be airlifted off because of cardiac issues. Said passenger had been told not to fly, because of altitude issues, and hadn´t thought through the "mile high" aspect of transiting through Denver.
It is one of the most amazing train trips in the world, and tbh the article doesn´t really do it justice. The day the train spends slowly going up and down the rockies, are just incredible, the scenery is amazing, and you get to know other passengers and the conductors along the way. Had some great card games in the scenery car.
> but it also made long stops to make way for cargo traffic.
This is a huge issue. Cargo trains legally have to yield to passenger trains, but in recent decades cargo trains have been made longer and longer, so they no longer physically fit into the passing sidings (which usually are built for 75 cars). It's a mess.
I rode Canada's VIA rail from Vancouver to Edmonton. Some poor Europeans sitting in the seat in front were freaking out when it became apparent the train was going be 10 hours late on what was billed as a 24 hour trip. They had a connecting flight to catch in Edmonton and missed it by several hours.
> 48 hours expected duration, and it arrived several hours late. […] (maybe 1/3 of the speed I’m used to),
You are used to train journeys of more than 2800 km (more than the distance from Lisbon to Warsaw) with an average speed of over 170 km/h? Where can I find such an itinerary in Europe?
The Seattle-Chicago line is operated by a single company. Europe has dozens of national operators. So any direct comparison is of course difficult to make.
To travel 3000 km on a high-speed train, Japan and China certainly offer the opportunity. Beijing-Guangzhou is 2230 km and operates at 350 km/h.
> As a European used to efficient train travel
As an European myself, try to do a train trip in south of Italy and then discover if it's efficient enough
Or in Germany where now about half of the rides are on time.
The Balkans are also a great place to experience efficient train travel :)
You know Mussolini was actually pretty progressive on this. He was the first in Europe to introduce green biofuels to public transportation by way of a unique spice based process.
The trains ran on thyme.
And then the railroad network kind of stagnated for 50 years. the fast speed trains ("Alta velocità") are only available in the North.
In the South you have thoughts and prayers. A trip Bari<>Milano (900km) is mostly around 8-9 hours, going further south elongates the journey incredibly.
I did Chicago-SF on the Zephyr about 20 years ago. It was a nightmare disaster of a trip. Nearly all our movement was at night due to cargo scheduling. We ended up arriving over 48 hours late.
To Amtrak's credit - we complained and they refunded our entire journey.
> As a European used to efficient train travel, it was kind of surreal that not only was the passenger train very slow (maybe 1/3 of the speed I’m used to), but it also made long stops to make way for cargo traffic.
See recent video "I Spent Over 12 Hours on an Amtrak Train (on purpose)":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPcuL2S2dgk
USA is a rather big country, coast to coast travel is going to take a good amount of time compared to travel times between major European cities
The Seattle-Chicago train operates at an average speed of 50 mph, so 80 km/h.
Passenger trains between major cities in Europe are in the 200-280 km/h range.
The problem isn’t the big country, it’s the slow trains (that even get deprioritized after cargo, to add insult to the injury).
To be fair, Europe also kind of sucks at long distance trains. If you want to go the same distance as Seattle-Chicago in Europe by train (say Lisbon-Warszawa or Rome-Northern Sweden) you're often looking at 40-50 hours, mainly due to having to make 5-7 connections.
That, and train tickets are a nightmare, unless you don’t care about the price.
The ÖBB NightJet is surprisingly cheap, e.g. I payed 59€ for Berlin - Vienna in a sleeper coach
As long as you are just going between two cities with a direct train line it's trivial. The problem is if you are trying to take a train between two cities without a direct train line, like if you wanted to go from Berlin to for example Lisbon instead of Vienna.
Exactly, that’s an organizational nightmare and you just don’t know where you end up stuck.
Which is obvious because they are different countries? And, also tourists select specific countries to visit so your "use case" is very rare.
Edit
Rare = majority of tourists in Europe go to specific cities and countries. There are trips between countries but it is rare to go around ALL Europe by train. Trains are significantly more expensive that flights.
Not arguing against your "majority" characterization, it's certainly true, but throwing out there that my wife and I travelled by train:
I think I have the order right? And all of that cost something under $500 each.If continental Europeans want to visit another distant European country, that's a rare use case? Or are you only referring to e.g. US tourists visiting Europe?
Take a flight, much cheaper.
Trains are significantly more expensive that flights
Unless you actually want to travel around ALL of Europe (or even all around a few countries in Europe), in which case trains get cheaper again, thanks to things like the interrail ticket.
That's true, and it requires more planning and available time.
I'd like to add a perspective on the contrast between Europe and the U.S. in this context. Having partially lived in both regions (across various European countries, though my main base is Buenos Aires, Argentina), one of the things that bothers me most about the U.S. is the car-centric culture. It feels almost artificial in 2024, as if it’s been taken to an extreme (I say this with a grain of salt). I don’t intend to start a flame war, but it’s surprising to me that in many areas where a 45-minute walk would be natural, there are no pedestrian paths. I’m not suggesting that cities like Los Angeles should be entirely pedestrian-friendly, but there are places where basic walkability is neglected, despite the infrastructure being suitable.
What I want to convey is that it's difficult to compare both regions' approaches to moving, and say that the article is amazing!
A large part of this is that ~no Americans would ever consider a 45-minute walk "natural".
Is it rare because it’s painful, or painful because it’s rare?
Not at all rare. I used to make somewhat regular business trips by train from Prague to Berlin.
But that’s not very far - there are multiple services on this route and the trip takes just 4h
Yeah, I admit it’s not a great example.
You =/> major tourists [1].
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/487572/leading-european-....
> Which is obvious because they are different countries?
1980 called and wants your attitude back.
Distance is also a factor. I see train timings listed for Madrid to Berlin to be more than 24 hours.
> Passenger trains between major cities in Europe are in the 200-300 km/h range.
I don't know which country exactly you mean, I live in central Europe (Slovenia) and no train goes over 200 km/h, most go 60-80 km/h.
Also, every time I'm at the train station in Ljubljana (Slovenia's capital), there's an announcement about the train from Budapest being ~40min late. And it's a way shittier looking train than the local commute ones going 60.
French high speed trains are fast, for instance the average speed of the train on the Paris-Strasbourg section (~400km in length) is 250km/h. This is the global average speed, so it is even faster on the high-speed section, going at around 320km/h. I often take this train, which is very convenient.
To emphasize just how fast this is in comparison to regular rail:
When I was visiting France some years back and took the TER train on the way from Paris to Strasbourg (300mi / 500km), and that crawled. On the way back, we took the TGV, which flew.
If you look at booking tickets on SNCF's website, the difference is stark: about 5 hours via the TER, versus a little under 2 hours via the TGV. (From that perspective, it's a little funny to describe the TER as crawling, seeing as that's not meaningfully different from driving that distance.)
There are some portions of Amtrak that have comparable max speeds (notably, the Acela) but even then, the average speeds on those routes are nowhere near 200km/h.
Some information online indicates that the non high speed train takes about 20 mins more than the high speed train on that route. It does not seem a huge time difference
The connection that takes 20min longer has two additional stops (the fast connection is a direct one) but it is still served by TGV or ICE trains, like the direct connection.
The distance between Paris and Strasbourg is >400km, so even the "slow" connection has an average speed of ~200 km/h. The actual regional train connection (TER) takes nearly 5 hours with plenty of stops in between. Slightly faster non-regional but non-TGV connections only exist on lines that are not served by TGVs.
This reminds me of Voyager buses in Ontario during the 80s/90s. They had two routes between Ottawa and Toronto.
One took maybe 6 hours. The other 12+ or some such. The 12+ hour took almost the same route, but stopped at every. single. town.
Woe to the person wanting to go from Ottawa to Toronto, and buying the wrong ticket. This is pre-Internet so research was less common and easy, and if you have no idea it could matter...
I recall this being named the "milk run".
See https://openrailwaymap.org/ and choose "Max speeds".
Much of Western Europe has yellow, orange, red and purple lines, i.e. lines over 200km/h.
Parts of Central and Eastern Europe do not, as you say.
Most Western European countries have networks of 300km/h trains; assume that’s what they’re referring to.
Is it really a mystery that long routes with less expected users see less investment?
Or do you expect that fast trains would unlock a lot of travel between Chicago and Seattle?
Wait until you find out how fast passenger jets are.
That’s all very well if you’re going thousands of km. For a plane journey that takes less than 3 hours, though, the train may still win, because the train doesn’t involve… airports. No getting to the airport, security, hanging around because the train is inexplicably an hour late (trains are sometimes late, but even in the worst systems not on the scale/frequency of plane lateness), no half-hour spent boarding the train, no taxi-ing, no sitting around for 20 minutes at the end while they get around to opening the train door, no walking through a km worth of airport.
Sure, but… cities in the USA are thousands of km. Seattle to Chicago (the example given by the GP) are 2800 km distant. Those cities are slightly more distant than Lisbon and Warsaw. Chicago to Washington DC is almost the exact distance as London to Marseille (1000 km). Chicago to Houston, Texas is the same distance as London to Rome.
To go back to the first example, Seattle to Chicago is a 4 hour (scheduled, which already includes taxi time at both ends and a buffer for late departures) plane ride. Even a TGV running continuously at top speed (320km/h), with no stops, would take 8.5 hours to complete the same journey. Wikipedia tells me that the fastest start-to-end scheduled speed of a TGV is only 280 km/h, which would take over 10 hours.
I am so often boggled at how crappy air travel is now.
Used to be, decades ago, just show up and go to the plane like it was a bus. Some dude would take your luggage and throw it into the cargo hold.
You'd be boarded and gone in 15.
When landed, they'd open then cargo hold and hand out luggage.
I had this experience in a transfer to a prop plane in Mexico. Fast, easy, quick.
Unfortunately, the monetary and political interests in security theater became entrenched after 9/11. I'm afraid something similar might happen to trains eventually, if they're ever used in a sufficiently theatrical instance of violence. I'm enjoying the ease of access while it lasts.
See Spain since 2004. Though it's still only a minor inconvenience compared to air travel.
Wait until you find out how quickly you can board and exit a train at a station that’s right in the center of the city, versus traveling to an airport, going through security, waiting to board, and then waiting some more for the plane to hopefully get its take-off slot from air control.
You can get from London to Paris by train in less time than it takes to go from Manhattan to boarding a plane at JFK.
Ah yes, the fake line of argument that for airplanes you have to drive an hour to get to the airport two hours before your flight, while in the case of trains, a powerful genie comes into your house, packs your suitcase and whisks you away in his powerful arms directly to your seat on the train 13.21 seconds prior to departure.
It's BS. In existing cities, train stations are just as hard to build in the city center as airports -- neither happens. You do not in fact need to get to airports hours in advance, and security theater in airports is still excruciating, but you can get PreCheck or Clear and cut the time way down. There is some time advantage to boarding trains, but it's on the order of 20-40 minutes, not hours.
Paris and London are only 213 miles apart! It's about 2/3rds the distance that SF is from LA, much less say SF to Seattle or NYC to Chicago. Rail travel works great in Europe because distances are small, density is high, and the cities grew up centered around rail infrastructure.
In existing cities, train stations are just as hard to build in the city center as airports -- neither happens
only in countries where they neglected building train stations before the cities grew to todays sizes. but even then it's not true. US cities are less dense, so it should be easier to find space. train stations are also much much smaller than airports and trains don't make as much noise as airplanes. there are many more reasons not to build airports in the middle of a city, none of which apply to trains.
the main problem for trains is finding a route for the track into the city. that can be and is solved with tunnels though. or the chinese approach where the high speed trainstations are sometimes built away from the center of the city and instead the center is connected by a dense network of subway lines. a process that started less than 20 years ago but now puts many chinese cities at the top of the list of the largest subway networks in the world.
The "big country" contributes in that passenger-only high speed rail would be ruinously expensive to lay down and maintain. Long distance passenger rail exists at all in the US only because it can share track with freight rail.
I've taken the California zephyr a few times over the last few years and it's a phenomenal experience. I'm hoping to do the Chicago-San Francisco trip in the coming years.
My fear is that some influencer/personality is going to start posting about the train system, and then it's going to become a crowded mess :P It feels a bit like a well kept secret right now. I think one of the things that makes it so enjoyable is that it's so uncrowded most of the time. I almost always get two seats to myself every time I take it (in coach). And there's somehow always a table available in the observation car whenever I decide to go there. Or you sit with someone and make a new friend :P
Would highly recommend!
There are a lot of transit focused “creators” already documenting their trips - the one I tend to follow on YouTube is Miles in Transit but he often intersects with other creators as well
It's less the transit creators I'm worried about, since that's pretty niche. It's if a general influencer starts sharing aesthetics of train travel on eg Instagram which I think would cause its usage to boom.
I did the same trip. Highly recommended. On the trip I learned that there is an Amtrak Rail pass, which includes 10 rides. It seems that it often is on sale at the beginning of the year. So if you are interested in such a trip, you may want to look out for that.
My daughter recently moved to Vancouver. I was in Seattle for a work trip so decided to take Amtrak to visit her for the weekend. This was my first real train travel. Overall, it was pretty good and probably is what I will do in the future in the same situation.
The train moved at a frustratingly slow speed (< 10 mph) for probably 30% of the trip, but aside from that I liked the more relaxed atmosphere of the travel and it was overall more comfortable.
The train itself was a bit bumpier than I expected and the wifi was not very good. Those things and the slow speed would mean I could not imagine taking a much longer trip than this one. With the extra time and hassle of dealing with an airport, this one balanced out as probably only being slightly slower travel but it was less expensive and more relaxed. If it were Seattle to San Francisco, as an example, the slowness would be too much for me. The comfort and amenities like wifi and food would have to be a lot better than they are.
Am I the only one who finds it surreal to see long distance trains in the US? Don’t get me wrong - I know they exist. It’s just that I feel like they never get depicted anywhere in the media. I also don’t think I know a single American who has gone to another US city by train.
Media depictions are a hugely underrated aspect of public transport perception.
In japanese and korean media (my experience is with a ton of anime and k dramas, more in the former than the latter though) trains are very common casual and serious backdrops for a variety of scenes, either within the train, at the station, or just a train passing by on the bridge in the background.
In Hollywood/American TV, it's always cars, with the occasional airport/plane. It riles me up quite unreasonably that shows/movies set in New York fuckin city with 24-7 subway service, and characters are shown trying to catch a cab in Manhattan in the middle of the night to go 20 blocks away. At least Marvelous Mrs. Maisel acknowledged this directly as a class thing for some characters and other characters took the train, but most movies just assume the American viewer cannot relate to someone using the subway.
> In Hollywood/American TV, it's always cars, with the occasional airport/plane.
Except for the movie Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Classic:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planes,_Trains_and_Automobiles
Yeah, people in “Friends” never took the subway which is just weird.
Of course it’s because these shows are shot in LA, and they have Manhattan street sets built and ready in Hollywood studio lot, but no subway set.
It's almost certainly less to do with location scouting and production design, and more about perceived biases. If studio executives think American audiences can't relate to trains or subways because they're less commonly used in real-life, we're going to see fewer of them on the screen. There's probably a cultural blind spot at play there, too; if writers don't ride trains--or even perceive them--very often, they're far less likely to write about them. It's a vicious circle.
As for locations, a quick Google search found a genuine New York City R17 subway car[0] that can be rented out in LA. The Sierra Northern Railway--a freight carrier in California--has rented out[1] its rolling stock, facilities, and tracks to film productions for nearly a century. They've got quite the roster, spanning multiple eras. There's also Amtrak, the various local/regional metro systems, other rental companies, and even private collectors if they need something specific.
As for stations, that's even easier. Various urban backlots have underground subway station entrances[2] where you could characters exiting the station. Or the station platform itself is just a long room; you don't have to show the actual tracks, or you could composite in a train moving across the frame, etc. Plenty of permanent sets can play that role. Set designers do far more with less all the time. Hell, you can just reference it off-screen for a sitcom. That's a huge chunk of Seinfeld (or any sitcom). Shit happens, everyone reacts...often poorly, with hilarious results.
0. https://www.thevillaserena.com/subway-car-standing-set.asp
1. https://movierailroad.com/
2. https://www.alamy.com/subway-entrance-in-the-soho-set-area-b...
A subway set is probably expensive, especially if you want a working train.
Almost everything set in London uses either the disused Aldwych Station on the Piccadilly Line, the disused Charing Cross station on the Jubilee Line, or the Waterloo and City line at weekends when it is normally closed — sometimes even when the setting ought to be a much larger train and style of station elsewhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldwych_tube_station#Use_in_me...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charing_Cross_tube_station#Use...
https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/media/filming-and-photography/fi...
Seinfeld was also filmed in LA, but I recall at least one episode where they took the subway.
The TV Guide episode with the cigar Indian?
Yes that’s the one, where Kramer stops to get a gyro.
There is also an infamous episode where they are playing Risk on the subway.
a gyros*
Yeah, the technical aspects of the subway shots in Seinfeld are interesting, and really give a sense of how hard everybody worked to make that show what it was.
The first scenes to take place in a subway (to my knowledge, anyway) were in the 30th episode, which was called "The Subway". And indeed, most of the episode takes place in a subway.
The subway set for this show was rented from Warner Brothers and was sent to the Seinfeld lot in several pieces on trucks. It was apparently a huge PITA and presented a lot of technical limitations.
They assembled it on springs and had a bunch of crew shake the car to simulate movement. They had to light it using stage lights, manually simulate the mechanical opening of the doors, etc. And it was apparently difficult to do anything but a closeup without it looking fake.
They redecorated it for each of the different subways that it was used to depict (in the episode, different characters are simultaneously taking different subways to different places).
After the episode, the set was disassembled and placed back on the truck to send back to WB, but the truck driver went under a low underpass, which the set struck and was destroyed. As a result, Tom Azzari, Seinfeld's Production Designer, led a small team within the show to design, engineer, and build an entirely new subway set, fixing all the technical problems while they were fresh in the team's memory. They even got actual subway light fixtures and pneumatic doors. This set was used for the remainder of the show, and went on to be used in other shows and films as well.
(There are a few interviews about this process on the Seinfeld DVD extras, Season 03 "Inside Looks")
Chandler did however take a train to Poughkeepsie
> a single American
Hi there, nice to meet you! I've take the train:
Earlier this month I took a train Washington to New York, plenty of people on that.
I then went down to Miami, train was fairly full - not many stayed on the entire trip but I wouldn’t expect them to, they got off at various stations along the way. Everyone I head in the dining car was American.
When I visited New York (from the UK) last year I took trains up to Connecticut and Rhode Island. I was surprised at how regular and comfortable the trains were given the US's reputation for passenger rail. I saw that you could go south as well. Is it just that the each coast is particularly well connected compared to the rest of the country?
It's that the East Coast is particularly dense compared to the rest of the country, and has a lot of walkable cities.
So you can take a train to New York, or DC, or a number of lesser cities, and not need a car when you arrive.
Well I got an Uber from my office to Union station, as the metro in DC isn’t great. Obviously no need for an Uber in New York as I could get the subway.
Had I flown to Miami I’d still need a taxi to my hotel, just like I did from the train station. I don’t get that argument.
Miami has a particularly poor placement for its Amtrak station
~Every airport in America has rental cars; basically no train station does.
The with respect to Amtrak, shorter line trains on the east coast and CA capital corridor these trains are commuter trains and often have more ownership/priority on the rails so they are more frequent and punctual. If you took metro north, it’s a pretty extensive commuter line as well.
The US actually has a handful of pretty nice passenger rail corridors, with decent schedules and nice trains. Washington DC to Boston is one such corridor. Portland to Vancouver is another one I've taken that also worked pretty well.
It’s so funny that this all came up today, last night my partner showed me the episode of Sex and the City where Carrie and Sam travel from NYC to San Francisco by train, though it’s mostly depicted as being an annoying hassle (imo their expectations of what train travel would be like were too high).
That's the one where Carrie complains about the fact the shower at the toilet are above each other.
You've obviously never watched a Hallmark Christmas movie. Train travel is pretty much the norm in that world :)
What about long distance bus travel? Is is possible to go coast to coast on a bus?
I've done it, or at least several long sections. I found that I met more interesting people on long distance buses than Amtrak and VIA. Younger people, more diverse, less moneyed. But the experience is much less comfortable, and the places they drop you to get food are utterly abysmal. My best memory was pulling over at some rest stop in who knows where and everyone is grabbing fast food trash because that's all there is, and I noticed some vegetables on the counter in the gas station, asked about them and the guy says they were free, dropped off by a local farmer. So I got some fresh tomatoes and they tasted glorious after days of stale motel bagels and Burger King.
Another awkward thing about bus travel in the US in particular is if you get off anywhere that isn't a major city, you're often stuck on the edge of a highway miles away from any accommodation that might be available in the town the bus is supposedly servicing. Most people get picked up by friends with cars to get where they're actually going, so if you hitch your pack and walk to town you really are gonna look like a hobo.
To be honest, if where you're going is on the train line, the train is better in almost every way. Much more comfortable, nicer views, somewhat better food, sometimes (but not always) more convenient stops. But there's a lot of Turtle Island the trains don't go and you'd miss so much if you didn't take the bus. Unfortunately even bus service is getting rarer. I remember wanting to visit a town of around 25,000 people and was shocked to discover there was no way to get there at all. I would have had to walk 20km from the closest Greyhound stop, which is absurd. I emailed a local museum and the curator offered me a lift back and forth, which was kind, but holy heck. Imagine being a kid stuck in a place like that! Just bananas.
You’d probably spend a lot of time sleeping overnight in a bus station waiting for a bus for the next leg of your journey. Coast to coast by bus sounds miserable.
Certainly does sound miserable - worse than in a seat on amtrak, let alone a roomette or bedroom.
However you can take the 1310 from LA to Phoenix, then half an hour wait before the 2245 to St Louis, and a 1h25 wait at 0720 for a St Louis to New York.
66 hours with 64 hours on the actual bus, miserable for both you and your fellow passengers.
I did it in 2006. I stayed at hostels in different cities and it was a three week trip. It was fun
I was thinking that making a trip of it and taking your time and doing it slowly would probably be the only way to make it enjoyable. As a utilitarian means of travel though, miserable.
The comfort of bus travel is way inferior to train travel!
I bicycled across in 1985 and scariest part was there was no public transport on regular roads. What if the bicycle breaks down? There was no bicycle shops and bicyclists either, except on top of cars. Where they drive to use the bicycle? No idea.
> Where they drive to use the bicycle? No idea.
Depends on the type of bike. Sometimes parks and trails.
When I was 7 my family moved from the West Coast to the East. We didn’t have much money and my mom was deathly afraid of flying so we took a train. Seeing the U.S. this way is a treat and I highly recommend. Like TFA you meet interesting people, see and experience new things that you just don’t get to see traveling other ways.
I was pleased to read such positive contagious excitement and someone who can still see the wonder of the American west. And excitement of trying new experiences.
Years ago I decided to take the Lake Shore Limited from Albany to Chicago for a business trip just to have a different experience. Two things I didn’t expect: 1. It was very difficult to get pre-approved for the expense because my employer’s process had to make sure I wasn’t costing them extra money. Somehow this was not an issue with plane tickets. 2. Overnight stops interrupted my sleep (in seat) as boarders banged luggage around and discussed seat selection when groups were involved.
Interesting, but would book a room if traveling this way next time.
I did the California Zephyr and it was the most amazing any type of ride I have ever done. It was surreal. Do recommend.
Ditto. Roomette is highly recommended.
tell us more :)
As a European everything felt like being in a movie. Especially going through desert it felt like I travelled back in time. Literally Wild West. I got see forests, mountains, canyons, and desert all in the same ride. That's definately not possible where I come from.
Don't get me wrong, but there are third world countries that have better train infrastructures
The US has actually pretty good train infrastructure, it's just almost entirely dedicated to freight. The US moves far more goods by rail, farther and cheaper than just about any other country in the world.
> just about any other country in the world.
Well the US is the 3rd largest country in the world, with the 3rd largest population, and in terms of rail tonne-km is also 3rd.
I.e. it sits where you'd expect, per sq km and per capita.
Passenger wise though it's 10th.
The question is why they don't develop it for people as well. Instead of just "let's add another lane" for cars
It was, but then all the Class-Ⅰ rail carriers merged until we were left with a west-coast duopoly (UP and BNSF) and an east-coast duopoly (CSX and NS) and they closed all the “redundant” lines they could.
See Abandoned & Out-Of-Service Rail Lines map: https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=10akDabya8L6nWIJi-4...
We did, and then when airplanes came around, it turned out that people/other interests found air travel better than train travel for most intercity travel.
Even on the East Coast, there used to be way more rail lines that took passengers -- if this were a hundred years ago, I could have walked a mile or two to a spur which would take me to one of the mid-sized cities connected to The Big City by commuter rail; now they're mostly rail trails.
Unlike in Europe, where rail maintenance is heavily subsidised by the government, in the US it is paid for by the private rail operators to a much greater extent. Thus the rail operators have much more say over how the rail is used and obviously priorities the more profitable traffic, which in the US is cargo.
So if the US government would wanted to build out cross country passenger rail they would either have to build new tracks, or use eminent domain to take back control of the existing tracks. Both options would be very expensive and wildly unpopular.
Which Europe are you talking about? Europe is a collection of independent counties and what you just mention is all wrong.
Most of the European railway companies have been privatized and there are companies that run the rail network and companies that run the train. Subsidies are not a thing in many of the European countries
They could also adjust the regulations for cargo trains to make mixing freight and passenger trains better.
For example, by limiting the maximum length of a freight train.
Then relatively minor subsidies (e.g. additional passing loops) could be used to improve reliability.
Or, they could let the market decide. The current system seems to work for most people.
Probably because most cities are so spaced out you'd still need a car to get from home to the train station and from the train station to your office when taking the train to work, for example. So it's easier to just drive there.
> Probably because most cities are so spaced out […]
The US population is fairly concentrated around the 'edges'. About 40% of the population lives in a coastal county:
* https://ecowatch.noaa.gov/thematic/coastal-population
And two-thirds of the population with-in 100 miles (160 km) of the border:
* https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone
So it's easier to drive to San Francisco from Seattle instead of parking your car at the train station in Seattle, take a train and then do your business on downtown SF, come back to Seattle and take your car back home?
(It's a figurative example I'm not sure there's a train from Seattle to SF)
Of course not, but even with state of art train technology (let's say 250mph), that would still be an over 3 hour commute each way (just the railway part!). If it's just for a business trip every now in a while, it's faster to just fly there.
I'm just saying, this is such a rare use case that it's not as high of a priority as expanding the roads that 80% or more of the residents in a city use daily. Whereas for freight it makes a ton of sense.
(fun fact, there actually is a train route there!)
it's faster to just fly there.
As some who used to travel for meetings quite a lot to a city 3 hours away by high speed rail, it really isn't. Once you take into account that you can show up for your train 5 mins before it leaves, plus the fact that the train station is almost always much closer to where you want to be, the difference in time between trains and planes pretty much disappears for shorter trips.
Plus the train is just so much nicer and more comfortable. It's quieter. Your seats are much bigger and have more legroom than even the nicest business class seats. You can get up and walk around if you want. You often have a restaurant car where you can sit and grab a drink or something to eat. Train travel is just so much more relaxing compared to flying.
3 hours is about Osaka to Tokyo, a route that sees a massive volume of business travel on the bullet train in Japan, arguably far more than flying. SF to Seattle would be about 1300 km which is more like Hiroshima to Morioka, around 6.5 hours by train including a connection; I think at that point there'd be a split in favour of flying, but around a third of travellers would probably still opt for the train due to its comfort and convenience.
> that would still be an over 3 hour commute each way (just the railway part!). If it's just for a business trip every now in a while, it's faster to just fly there.
Even for flights which take 45 minutes in the air, I’d never expect to get to the airport, through security, through all the boarding and unboarding nonsense, and from the destination airport to where I was actually going, in 3 hours.
IIRC last time I was in Seattle airport, after I got off the plane (which was late, of course), I spent half an hour just walking through airport and to the rather inconveniently located light rail. Everything involving flying takes forever.
Because Americans prefer to fly?
Relative to the current situation or in absolute terms? If there was a Shinkansen style trains between LA and SF with the same quality and timetable as the Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka, do you not think Americans would flock to it?
How do you know if they never had the option to use a train?
There are also first world countries that have shittier trains than the ones here. I'm saying this from first hand experience.
I don't think you can compare the most advanced and rich country to other first world countries.
Someone can definitely do worst, that's out of discussion. We are looking at the upside potential.
The picture of this post show interstate trains that are old, slow and dirty. I'm sure standards can improve.
USA is an early adopter?
It really is a nice way to travel. I did SF → Orlando and back a handful of times.
The Zephyr is amazing. Fun place to hack on something personal, like freshening up an old Window Manager or library
I always try to travel by train if I can when im travelling Intercity. Its always so enjoyable and quite cheap.
The company I work for has done this trip a few times. Most recently this year.
wefunder.com/train
It’s a great experience, and something I wish more people tried. The cross country train that is, coworkers optional :)
Wow, I had no clue the '15 minute city' wasn't just a far right delusion:
https://blinry.org/coast-to-coast/bb378f508c52d809.jpg
That's wild.
No thanks.
Originally, the "15 minutes city" is simply a city planning guideline, which tells you that cities should strive to have every amenities close to where people live, ideally everyone should have everything in a 15 minutes radius. Far-right lunatics interpreted it as being constrained by the government in a 15 minutes radius around their home, which is insane thinking indeed.
I live in a "15 minutes city", Paris, I have 5 grocery stores in a 5 minutes walking radius, I go to work in 15 minutes using the metro, and if I want to I can get anywhere in France in a few hours by taking the train. That someone would not want this and instead fight for their rights to commute 2 hours everyday by car is insane to me.
I have come to realize that a lot of people on both sides think of the 15 minute city as a jail - the far left thinks it is a good thing if you never travel: they assume everything you could want could be in 15 minutes so no need and thus it won't feel like a jail.
I think it's a good thing if you never need to travel. Why would I want a 40 minute drive to get to a supermarket if I could instead get to an identical one in 10 minutes?
Similarly why would I want to travel for an hour to go to an office to sit on zoom meetings all day instead of doing it from my spare bedroom.
Reducing required travel is a great thing for me, gives me more time to do things on interesting travel. Rather than spending 90 minutes a week driving to/from the shop I save 78 hours a year, which is more than enough time to take up a new hobby.
Sopermarkets should be that close and normally are. But the special asian food mart or good hobby shop draws people from farther away
Sure, so why are the right wing so against having supermarkets that close?
They are not, at least no more than anyone else. nimby covers all sides of the asile. most live within a 10 minute drive of a supermarket and are happy with that. Food deserts are generally very left wing - poor people (or framers who are obviously to rural to get anything)
Nobody on the far left thinks this. If they thought that then why would they be into subway systems so much? Same for progressive urban planners more generslly.
I didn't say a majority but if you follow the urbanist movement for long you will see them. They are not into subways. A minortiy for sure but they exist and are vocal
Judging a whole urban design philosophy by the most fringe members of the most fringe groups hardly seems like a good faith argument. Especially when those people are almost never even urban designers or in any way related to the field.
who said anything about judging the movement? I just said many exist.
Would you please you give us some examples? I've long considered myself an urbanist and genuinely have no idea what you're talking about.
https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=41832409 that commenter allowed for trains but set a goal such that it would rarely be used and so wouldn't exist.
there are many that are even stronger against leaving the neigborhood. (many can still be a small minority)
Did you link to the right comment? I read all the parent comments as well as the reply, and none talk about trains being so rare that they wouldn't exist.
Or do you just make the logical jump from "few trips should require a train" to "no trains exist"? There is no logical connection between those statements.
Well, I guess that single Hacker News comment is an example, if it also seems totally speculative and innocuous. Paranoid people have enemies, too.
I'm not going to spend hours in the archives of every urbanist blog and forumn to find a few dozen examples. I was asked for one and so I found the most recient here.
I don't think anyone thinks that everything you want is within 15 minutes - just that most daily necessities and services are available within 15 minutes.
I have _never_ seen anyone take that stance; the same people who argue for planning ‘15 minute cities’ (that is, correctly planned cities; this isn’t some new idea and is how cities were historically normally planned) generally also advocate for good _commuter_ (ie medium range) and intercity transport.
I mean, I’m sure there’s someone out there advocating for efficient city design but who’s opposed to developing transport, but they’re an extreme outlier.
OOC, is this a purely theoretical bogeyperson, or have you ever actually seen anyone take this stance? If the latter, just how many (to the nearest ten, say) posters of Pol Pot did they have on the wall?
What are you on about? No one thinks being constrained to a 15 minutes radius is a good thing, no one even wants that.
The issue is clearly with maga/qanon right-wingers who were told this benign left-wing talking point was in fact a plot to keep them in their homes.
> The issue is clearly with maga/qanon right-wingers who were told this benign left-wing talking point was in fact a plot to keep them in their homes.
The placard literally says 'Stay Home!'
If you choose to interpret a piece of advice on how to improve your neighborhood as some Orwellian authoritarian propaganda poster commanding you to never leave your house, I'm afraid I can't do anything for you anymore.
I live in Melbourne (and have for 15 years), so I'm not some rural hillbilly crying about cars per se - in fact I'm not even talking about cars: That placard literally says: 'Stay Home!'
I think bicycle paths and pedestrian access to places is extremely important, and not just for the environment, but being told that I should 'stay home' as part of some bigger picture plan to combat climate change is absolutely redolent of bureaucratic authoritarianism and environmental tyranny, and it really isn't hard to imagine a scenario running from this placard and the idea behind it to one where traveling away from one's 'neighborhood' (as defined in the photo) is punishable.
> it really isn't hard to imagine a scenario running from this placard and the idea behind it to one where traveling away from one's 'neighborhood' (as defined in the photo) is punishable
Please take a deep breath and step away from the Rupert Murdoch. This campaign is merely trying to get people invested in the areas in which they live, which is a noble goal. It's sad that some of the language it uses has been warped into trigger words by the media. Fear is a lucrative business.
so the presentation leaves a bit to be desired but you are throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
for one i don't think this poster is is presenting a government mandate but i believe it's a demand from people to the government to build like this (it's from the climate action museum, which, as far as i could tell is not supported by government)
likewise it is not about forcing people to stay home but demanding the right for people to do so and live their daily life without having to travel every day.
the title "stay home!" is an unfortunate choice. but to be fair, you also have to read the whole title: "your most radical move! stay home!" which clearly suggests that staying home is a choice you make (just like many of us refuse to return to work in the office) and not something forced on you from the outside. if you read anything else then you either miss the point or you are intentionally twisting it.
do you think fighting against neighborhoods like this is going to help you prevent that dystopia that you seem to be afraid of? negative thinking is not going to help us make the world better.
a commenter above mentions paris. i can share the exact same experience from vienna. literally. that's what we are talking about.
I understand a lot of what you're saying, but the fact is that radical anything - whether it's the radical left or right, radical environmentalists, radical feminists, etc., are all ultimately trying to move their grievances and solutions into the mainstream. Just because the makers of the placard admit 'staying home' would be radical right now doesn't mean that they want it to stay that way - indeed political issues to some extent always begin as radical ideas and by definition those that are eventually accepted by a society are no longer seen as radical when they are accepted.
You might try to say this is just a slippery slope argument, but they are already advocating for something they (and you) admit is radical - the only caveat is that they qualify it as being radical for now. Clearly if a few radical environmentalists 'stay home!' there isn't going to be a dent in any metric that these people swear by - staying home will only begin to affect things if many or most people do it, whether by choice or by force, and that's the kind of wholesale societal change that I find absolutely bonkers and terrifying.
side note: when i lived in singapore i actually felt what it means not to be able to travel outside of city borders. i mean, yeah, you could travel, but you had to check a border crossing point, change currency, etc... it felt like a trap. china during covid was similar. just replace passport controls with vaccination checks every time you travel from one city to another.
i believe many of the city states and islands would feel the same. even new zealand felt like that when your goal was to be among people. it is perfect to get away from people though.