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Comment by mkempe | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, I've travelled from NY to SF in both directions by road, rail, and air. The only experience that was much worse than my travels in Europe and Japan was by rail (namely Amtrak).

There are more people in Europe, there is more land in Europe, etc. Stop with the fake excuses.

Europeans enjoy all of it: cars, trains, and airplanes. The simple fact is that North America is lame and deficient in passenger rail transportation compared to Europe and East Asia, and the comparison keeps getting worse.

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We have states as big as European countries with nothing but corn. The only people paying to cross that are people going across the coasts, which still takes three days by train compared to a day and a half or two days by car.

Why would we pay for that?

Amtrak long distance trains UNLIKE airplanes are used to connect cities in the middle to other cities in the middle.

Amtraks trains from the west coast to Chicago sell the same seat 2x - 3x over the course of one journey. Most people are NOT going end to end. I have ridden the California Zephyr from California to Denver.

I have see others get on (there are seat tickets) :

* in Utah going to Iowa.

* Nevada going further east in Nevada

* etc.

>There are more people in Europe

Well duh. The key to making trains useful is having people focused in heavily populated areas. If the US were like Europe, some heavily built rail in the Midwest would cover the vast majority of the population.

Look at this map to put in perspective how much more rail would be required to connect together the major population centers of the US. https://becovegan.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/europe-us-over...

The flagged comment by mkempe has a point. Europe doesn't stop at Berlin and Vienna.

Here's a better map of the European railway network: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/1b/European_rail...

Russia isn't Europe and that map is pointless because it's just showing some railways without ridership details. The US also has a massive rail network, it's just almost exclusively used for freight.

Your map didn't show ridership either; the purpose of mine was just to show that the European railway is larger than what your map showed. And it certainly is used by passengers all across its length, from Faro to Moscow and beyond.

This is a pretty inflammatory way of saying, “Americans like cars and airplanes. They don’t like trains.”

You’re only making the argument harder for Americans (like me!) who like trains by being dismissive of excellent path-dependent and population-dependent reasons why the US passenger train networks died out.

Nope. I'm saying that Americans are unfortunately missing out on what is elsewhere a great, modern transportation system. If the federal government hadn't used massive war-driven budgets to replace rail with highways, and continued to massively subsidize highways, you'd be there, too.

Yes, if we had not invested heavily in both highways and airports, we may have invested more in trains (there were other problems with the railroads at the time). But that was over 70 years ago. It's not an "excuse" to explain that things are the way they are, and that it makes no sense today to fund renewed railroad investment.

There's a reason we're flush with self-driving car companies and not railroad companies.

US government subsidies to airports and highways haven't stopped. They dwarf public subsidies to railroads.

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