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Comment by fallingknife | Hacker News Reader

Here's the problem:

short trips - cars beat trains

long trips- planes beat trains

This is why we have successful train service only in the northeast where the trips are medium length, and cars advantages are mitigated by the awful traffic on 95.

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Basically the Acela corridor only works because Boston, New York, and Washington DC actually have working subway systems, so when you get dumped off at the train station, you can get somewhere within the city without paying a bajillion dollars in taxis or Ubers.

People also like to point at the German train system, which is very good, but mostly people have the experience of coming into Berlin on it, and again, Berlin has one of the best public transit systems in the world.

Agreed about Berlin, but to me that says that as part of a commitment to HSR, we also have a commitment to local transport. Fortunately, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit here.

For example, I live in Seattle. We regularly vote to tax ourselves to build and operate transit service. In 2019, just before the pandemic hit, we had a 10-minute citywide bus network with fast, easy transfers across about 85% of the city. People used the heck out of it, especially in combination with the two light rail stations that opened in 2016.

When my spouse and I took a three-week trip across Germany to see where parts of our family are from[0], we didn't touch the wheel of a car once. Big city like Frankfurt, small town like Lutherstadt Wittenberg, in-between like Leipzig, they all worked. They were some combination of walkable, understandable bus service, and local rail.

There's infrastructure and there's culture. Americans don't have the idea that cities and towns can be accessible on foot and by transport, so we don't hold ourselves to that standard. But we could, with no loss of convenience for many of us.

If you have a set route, like a commute from the suburbs into a city, then a train should be the better choice.

If it isn’t then your local authority does a poor job on infrastructure.

A friend is living in the Japanese sticks but on a Shinkansen line. He commutes via Shinkansen directly to Shinagawa station, almost next to his office. Zero changes, a 1hour train ride with reserved seating in a quiet environment. He almost always clocks in for the ride and does quiet work, but it's also a great way to relax. The expensive train fare is essentially what he saves on Tokyo rent in exchange for being able to afford a great house with a large yard.

This sounds quite idyllic, your friend is very lucky

If I'm going into Boston from the ex-urb where I live, I'll take the commuter rail if I go in "9-5" because the commute at rush hour is awful and parking is expensive. But it doesn't work if I'm going in for an evening event, say, because the drive isn't as bad, parking tends to be cheaper, and the schedules outside of rush hour are not frequent.

In general, train on the Northeast Corridor is pretty good especially if you're not going the whole route. But I actually would be faster to drive to Manhattan than taking the Acela. However, it's a lousy drive and I hate driving into Manhattan.

The problem is that you have to get to the station and then from the other station to your destination. This really only works in 2 situations. Dense urban centers where it makes sense to have stations at walking distance intervals, or cases where the city is so hard to drive/park in that it makes sense to drive to the rail station and then catch a train in (e.g. NY). Other than that it is fairly impossible to match the convenience of a car.

Local infrastructure should optimize for bicycles (and walking too). Then you can have your stations at decent distances both from living districts and from each other.

This might work in northern locales, but given the climate it's not practicable here in the American South. Nobody wants to walk or ride a bike through sweltering heat (i.e. ~85-90°F with high humidity) from May through September.

One wonders how people were capable of living there before the invention of the car.

> Dense urban centers where it makes sense to have stations at walking distance intervals, or cases where the city is so hard to drive/park in that it makes sense to drive to the rail station and then catch a train

Yes! This is exactly what cities should be aiming for.

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