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Comment by franciscop | Hacker News Reader

Oh no I'm very happy for this initiative! My comment was not about the initiative, but about the corruption, incompetence and delays that plague the Spanish train systems. At least now it's free so that's great news! See in my other comment, they had to force airlines to make planes more expensive because people were using planes instead of the Madrid <=> Valencia train.

Also I'm comparing it to Tokyo, which as others comment is a bit unfair since it's basically the best train network in the world.

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you should also try the LA metro for how bad a transit network can be under poor management and corrupt city government. we have some of the best weather in the world, where multi-modal transportation is imminently viable, and yet we've built for cars and sprawl instead.

i remember in tokyo that train headways during rush hour is as little as 90 seconds. and it's punctual as hell. in LA, we're lucky if we get down to 10 minutes, plus or minus 20 minutes. LA is not quite as big or rich as tokyo, but it's on a similar scale, yet we have an order of magnitude worse public transit. it's so frustrating.

We have enjoyed riding metros in Mexico City and Guadalajara, and everywhere more prosperous where we have been, and were eager to try out the LA metro last February. NEVER AGAIN!

The smell alone is sufficient, but the headways, good lord. Spotted several sets of foreign tourists just as astoundingly bewildered as we were.

So we rode buses. Good god. Never again. Sorry LA. You suck. No, I don't enjoy driving in LA gridlock (done it many times). What an apex cultural disaster.

I have to admit the transit was really cheap. I'd pay double for Paris's transit in a heartbeat.

it's infuriating. LA would be 17th by GDP in the world if it were a country. for comparison, tokyo would be 10th (if it were a country) and mexico is 16th. we have perfect weather for 8 months out of the year, and for the other four, it's a bit hot or a bit cold, but humidity is mild and we never get snow.

yet, we can't have world-class transit because it's only for poor people. the only reason we're building any transit right now is because the olympics are coming here in 2028 and the rich folks sponsoring it can't deign to be embarrassed by the dearth of viable transit here.

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