A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
Situation in Europe is far from ideal. In most cases it’s cheaper to fly than to travel by rail across multiple country borders – which I’ve always found odd, considering the journey takes much longer and each connection brings some degree of uncertainty.
18 min delays aren’t uncommon. Or your train being outright cancelled, announced only in the local language (fair enough).
The whole system is chronically underfunded, probably in part thanks to the car lobby
It's cheaper to fly because of all the subsidies for flights
I once heard of someone who had to go from somewhere in the south of England to London, and took a plane to Berlin and another to London because it was cheaper than the train.
I don't understand why plane tickets are so cheap compared to plane tickets. Part of it is that plane fuel isn't allowed to be taxed while other forms of energy are, but there's got to be more. The situation is insane.
Anyway, let's at least tax plane fuel.
That’s insane, especially considering Berlin is pretty deep into Germany. If it were Brussels or Schiphol – just a hop across the channel – I’d kind of get it.
Plane tickets have been getting more expensive. Recent (EU?) legislation places an extra tax on short-haul flights that would be 2h or less by train. The days of 30 EUR Ryanair flights seem to be a thing of the past. And the Epstein War has driven up prices for the foreseeable future.
Still cheaper to fly in most cases though.
Anyway, I’ve never been able to make up my mind about the right way forward. Make flying punishingly expensive so as to force travelers toward already expensive, but environmentally better alternatives? Or coordinate to reduce train ticket prices, e.g. through a system of subsidies? The latter is probably a lot harder to realize
Why not a balance between both? Use additional plane revenue to improve rail travel in the short- and middle-term?
The most ridiculous situation I came across was getting the train from Biarritz in France to Bilbao in Spain and back. I heard the phrase "It's another country" uttered in both French and Spanish - turns out they really hate each other! We had to walk a few minutes from France across the border to another station in Spain.
Yup, I live in Warsaw, its hard to book sleeping train to Vienna. There are maybe 15-25 beds available everyday. In the meantime for the same prive or lower you can fly to Vienna. And probably more than 2000 people fly there
Freight Trains in USA, for comparison.
You've got plenty of trains and train lines, but your government, unlike most of the world, refuses to subsidise public transit, so they all go for the option that's most profits-per-km, Freight
Another one I found:
Apparently this is a weak point for Europe, and even other rail systems like China's. The US has a relatively efficient cargo rail network, while more stuff is shipped across the EU in trucks than it probably should be.
Well, Electric Trucks are prevalent now, so still pretty efficient
Electric Trucks are prevalent now,
That would be nice, but only ~4% of the new trucks in the EU where electric in 2025. And there are a lot of old trucks which are almost exclusively ice-vehicles.
edit: source
Eh. I wasn’t specifically thinking of emissions, but overall cost, manpower, and road congestion.
Diesel cargo trains dramatically reduce all that vs an electric 18 wheeler, even if EV trucks are prevalent. Though I suspect they’re still pretty rare.
Yeah, UK is the worst train service in Europe, that's nothing new.
That's cause the UK privatised 90% of rail in the 1980s
Try Barcelona suburban rail service (aka ‘Rodalies RENFE’).
Here in Canada we have more former abandoned rail then active rail lines. And around where I am people are fighting to stop the old rail lines being used as biking and walking trails. YAY
I feel like many people oppose rails to trails because then there’s much less of a chance it will become rails again, so you have to let go of the hope of any sort of trains coming back. Though becoming a trail is certainly a lot better than the track land being split up and sold off to developers, since then there’s no chance.
Yeah, that is not at all the case here. There is no new passenger rail even as a dream and these rails used to be everywhere. We are talking about at least 40 years since a train was ever down these lines, and they have sat there doing nothing this whole time.
Funny thing, the UK we had the opposite problem, people fighting to stop the reopening of lines that have become walking and biking trails (usually for freight train profit)
We also converted many of our local innercity lines into into ELR, which is slower but it's also cheaper and they're all loop lines with a schedule of 1 every 5-10 minutes
I live in Jersey, and we have tons of them. And fortunately they are turning some into pedestrian paths, rails-to-trails style, but we have literal (albeit old) infrastructure for rail lines between places that are only accessible via rail by going to Newark, changing, and hopping on a different line. We're talking hours for a 30 mile ride.
I need me some eminent domain. There's some major hubs west of Newark that you can only drive between.
But yeah, seeing them turned into trails is at least better than nothing. But I want moooorrreee.
There are some trail networks in the eastern provances that allow people to go snowmobiling for weeks at a time on groomed trails (former rail lines) and I have known people that is what they did for their vacation each year, stopping in at all the small towns on the way.
Why ? that can't be dangerous if no trains are running
Land owners have gotten used to just using the land for free, and they don't want people near their land and other self serving things.
oh, ok. Landowner things I guess
Asshole landowner things yes.
Americans be like: Chicago
wait till you see not only passenger trains but all trains lines in brazil, and for reference brazil is bigger than USA if you exclude Alaska and all random island USA owns
Europe is not a single country. Sadly things are not the same everywhere. South-eastern european countries still lack the infrastructure required for secure transport with trains.
South Eastern European countries need to become less corrupt and a culture change, for sure. Then they can make headway in so many things.
Everyone support Murkan Cowboy Capitalism, and get out there and drive big clumsy SUVs!
Looks like China 50 years ago.