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Comment by ohgodplsno | Hacker News Reader

To be completely fair, Paris is an exception. France is an unbelievably centralised country, and everything goes to Paris. Bordeaux is similarly well served, but past that... Good luck in the southeast and its broken 80km/h lines, good luck in the southwest and its complete lack of lines... Hell, even Lyon takes a very long time to get to if you're not coming from Paris.

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I don't agree, let's take 5 big cities spread around the country to Lyon:

- Toulouse: 4h by train, 5h30 by car

- Nice: 5h30 by train, 5h by car

- Strasbourg: 4h15 by train, 5h15 by car

- Le Havre: 5h05 by train, 7h by car

- Nantes: 4h50 by train, 6h45 by car

>Nice: 5h30 by train, 5h by car

Closer to 4h30 by car, although the train does drop you off directly in Part-Dieu. Still, this doesn't take into account the need to go to the train station.

>Nantes: 4h50 by train, 6h45 by car

From personal experience, I can promise you that 6h45 is horribly optimistic.

But really, that only furthers the point: Lyon is the second biggest city in France, and it's more or less equivalent to take the car to get there, with farther places slowly winning out on time. That's _dreadful_.

Those are not door-to-door times. Edit: and how about the cost? Especially if more than one person is going the same way.

Berlin, and Germany in general seems to be a better role model then. Germany is the opposite of France, very decentralised with multiple population/economical centers dotting the country: Hamburg, Berlin, Frankfurt, München, Stuttgart, Köln/Dortmund/Düsseldorf/Essen corridor.

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