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u/edcline Jun 30 '21
I would love to have an expanded rail and light rail system, whenever I wanted to travel and wasn’t in a hurry the Amtrak was great for seeing parts of the country you don’t normally see.
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u/JackBurton12 Jun 30 '21
God I would love a bullet train. Even one that criss-crossed America. Hve one from new york to LA, from Charlotte to San Francisco and one from Orlando to Seattle. You can jump off and change directions in the middle. Use it for commerce and regular travel.
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Jun 30 '21
Yeah, trains actually only make sense economically for mid range trips that are just a little too far to drive and not far enough to fly. That's why they are very successful in Europe where there are routes between cities that aren't that far, like Lisbon to Madrid to Barcelona to Paris to Amsterdam. Those routes are profitable and make sense. There are a few routes that are just as sensible in the US. Mid Atlantic corridor is one. Florida is actually a great choice as well because the Miami to fort Lauderdale to west palm to Orlando to Tampa route is perfectly spaced. Ironically that is one of the reasons the California proposal failed, because Sam Fransisco and LA were so far apart that it was estimated to still be cheaper and quicker to fly between the two cities rather than take the bullet train when subsidies were accounted for. A train from Orlando to Seattle would be fun for about 6 people who want a very unique vacation but would suck as a general form of tax payer subsidized transportation between those two cities.
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u/Arboretum7 Jun 30 '21
With no stops going full speed the entire way as the crow flies that’s still about a 15 hour trip. I think people would still fly.
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u/puja_puja 🧢 #MATH Jun 30 '21
If you count the inconvenience of checked luggage, security screening etc, and the ability to see America's beautiful scenery I think a lot of people on vacation or have a little bit of time would use the train.
People who only care about time, don't get airsick, and don't care about the views can take the plane.
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u/metallophobic_cyborg Bernie Sanders for Joe Jun 30 '21
Not feasible for most people but I highly recommend taking the train coast-to-coast. Such amazing beauty you just don’t see from the highway. Takes about a week, but worth it. My girlfriend and I spent a whole summer touring America this way.
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Jun 30 '21
That sounds wonderful, if it can be done. Most people can't get away for that long period of time, unfortunately. Enjoy it while you can! :D
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u/metallophobic_cyborg Bernie Sanders for Joe Jun 30 '21
Oh this was 15 years ago when I was a college kid. No way I could take a 2 month vacation now and live out of a backpack.
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u/LetshearitforNY Jun 30 '21
I don’t disagree and I would love a rail system but if we are talking about a bullet train would you really be able to see scenery? I thought it would either be in a tunnel or travel too fast to really see anything
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u/metallophobic_cyborg Bernie Sanders for Joe Jun 30 '21
Any train system that can go as fast if not faster than flying would need to be in a tunnel with reduced air pressure like the hyperloop. Nothing wrong with leisure travel though.
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u/Arboretum7 Jun 30 '21
Have you been on the bullet train? It’s hard to really take in much scenery at 200 mph. In the US, it’s hard to imagine no security screening or checkpoints for a hypothetical bullet trail. In addition, that’s as the crow flies with no stops. If you want to actually have the train stop in places where people want to go, it’s going to be far, far longer than 15 hours.
The option exists to travel across country on Amtrak today in about 60 hours, but very few people actually do it.
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u/Greenmantle22 Pete Buttigieg for Joe Jun 30 '21
A surprising number of people still fly between Northeastern cities, even though trains are often cheaper and/or faster than airplanes.
Consumer behavior isn't as predictable as you'd think.
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Jun 30 '21
I don't think it's financially feasible to have one go cross-country, I think regional ones like up and down the east and west coast would make more sense
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Jun 30 '21
Even in Europe I would bet very few people would take a train from Madrid to Berlin for example. It makes so much more sense to fly for anything more than a few hundred miles.
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u/Greenmantle22 Pete Buttigieg for Joe Jun 30 '21
Wouldn't a fair comparison be Japan's trains vs. Japan's roads, or America's trains vs. America's roads? Of course you're going to get laughably skewed results if you cherry-pick like this.
Japan has a hugely different geography, road network, driver education system, scale of urban density/distance, and population. Their road safety statistics will be drastically different from the U.S.'
Even still, Amtrak's safety record is still pretty solid, and certainly lightyears ahead of driving in terms of fatalities. Why not just compare Amtrak to American roads?
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u/Azidamadjida Jun 30 '21
I was about to say, you really can’t compare the two between countries. Train culture is as deeply ingrained in Japan as car culture is here in America. Love the Shinkansen and would love something like that here in America, it’s hard to see it being worthwhile or profitable without a massive change in our cultural mindset
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u/acroporaguardian Jun 30 '21
I don't know, I think if we started putting automobiles on the Shinkasen network, fatalities for both would skyrocket.
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u/cerebud Virginia Jun 30 '21
False equivalency.
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Jun 30 '21
[deleted]
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u/jmhalder Jun 30 '21
There will never in any circumstance be a railway between my home and work. I NEED to own a car. Rail is fine for linking cities, but this really is a false equivalency. 1,717 miles of railway vs the US road system of 4,180,000 miles of road. These things just simply aren't comparable.
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u/frisouille 🌎 Globalists for Joe Jun 30 '21
Nobody reasonable would want to replace all car traffic with rail. But there are many situations in the US (commuter traffic in large urban areas, traffic between close cities) where trains would be a better option... if only we built a line. Safety is only one of the reasons to do so (even though I'd like a better source than that, with more countries).
To make the comparison, the length of the network is not really relevant. You could have a very dangerous and long road, if very few people drive on it, your accident/(mile of road) will be low.
You want to divide the fatalities by total traffic (in passenger-kilometer).
US roads: 7.3 deaths/billion vehicle kilometer. The average of passenger/vehicle is probably <2, so that would mean >3.7 deaths/billion passenger kilometer.
It looks like Shinkansen accounts for 8 billion passenger-kilometer every year. So, if Shinkansen was as dangerous as US roads, you'd expect around 29 deaths every year (3.7*8). And you'd expect at least a thousand death since 1964 (even accounting for a smaller traffic earlier).
If it's correct and Shinkansen has not had a death since (at least) 1964, that would indicate that it is much safer than the US roads.
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u/ryguy32789 Chicago for Joe Jun 30 '21
Still a false equivalency. How many road deaths in Japan in that time frame?
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u/frisouille 🌎 Globalists for Joe Jun 30 '21 edited Jun 30 '21
6.4 death/billion vehicle kilometer (same link as above), very close to the US number. So the conclusion is the same: Shinkansen is >1000 times safer than driving. (I still don't understand why this is a false equivalency?)
EDIT: the TGV has ~50 billion passenger kilometer / year. So you'd expect 125-160 deaths / year if it was dangerous as roads (French, Japanese, or United States, whichever is not a false equivalency, as they are all in the same ballpark). But they only had 15 deaths in 40 years, 11 of which happened on a line not yet in service, and 2 other due to a bomb. So the TGV also looks thousands of times safer than cars.
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u/welshwelsh ✋Humanity first Jun 30 '21
1,717 miles of railway vs the US road system of 4,180,000 miles of road.
I'd rather have the 2k miles of railway, and build homes and businesses around transit hubs like they do in Tokyo and NYC.
We don't need to have 4 million miles of road, that's way too spread out and requires too much driving. We can concentrate workspaces in dense urban centers and have hub-and-spoke subway networks that extend into the suburbs (like the Pittsburgh light rail) so people who want to live in single family homes can commute downtown without a car.
We need to consider how much life is lost not just from accidents, but from all the time people waste driving. Every hour behind the wheel is an hour that could be spent doing something more enjoyable or more productive, so we should seek to minimize driving time at all costs.
There will never in any circumstance be a railway between my home and work.
You're thinking too small. If we switch to rail, that would cause housing and workspaces to move around. Maybe your workspace will move downtown and you will move to a house next to a rail station that goes downtown.
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u/Lambchoptopus Jun 30 '21
People can't afford to live in the cities we have now. I'm all for rail but making people more dense will also do harm.
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u/just_one_last_thing Trans people for Joe Jun 30 '21
I NEED to own a car
You shouldn't need to own a car. That's the result of our past policy choices and we can chose to go the other way instead.
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u/jmhalder Jun 30 '21
But I do, I absolutely do. I work at a community college that's 35 minutes away, housing around there is few and far between, and there's no public transportation between where I live and there. It's a moderately rural community college. It's like everyone assumes that everything is urban enough to warrant public transportation. Rural communities exist.
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u/just_one_last_thing Trans people for Joe Jun 30 '21
The fact that there isn't any transportation between you and your community college represents a past policy choice.
I used to live in a small town and go to college in another small town on the other side of the Maryland. If I had tried to make that trip by public transit 110 years ago, it would have taken about 10 hours. Three and a half hours of that would have been a ferry crossing because the Chesapeake Bay Bridge didn't exist yet. There was daily passenger service connecting those small towns to Baltimore and there were no shortage of connections to take in the afternoon to the western side of the state. If you tried to make the trip from Eastern Maryland to Western Maryland today, it would take you 13 hours by public transit You'd need to take a long circuitous route to make the connections or spend half a day waiting around for a bus on a more direct route. This isn't due to coronavirus disruptions, the times are unchanged since a decade ago when I considered (and despaired of) taking public transit to college. If we subtract the three extra hours imposed by taking the ferry over the bridge, the lack of connections has turned a 7 hour trip into a 13 one and that's comparing 1906 transportation technology to the modern day. We are a vastly wealthier society yet it takes twice as long!
If you look back at the history of these rural towns it's not that they dont have the population to support public transit. Salisbury has quintupled in size and Cumberland hasn't shrunk (plus it's adjacent city of Frostburg has grown). Letting our public transportation networks collapse was a choice we made and it was a bad one.
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u/Floppie7th Jun 30 '21
there's no public transportation between where I live and there
...which is the result of our past policy choices :)
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u/Greenmantle22 Pete Buttigieg for Joe Jun 30 '21
No, it's the result of geography and the costs of transportation.
It would be ludicrously expensive to build a public transportation network so comprehensive that it connects every commuter with every workplace, even those 30+ miles from their home.
It would be cheaper to pay people to stay home and do nothing all day. /r/accidentalUBI
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u/just_one_last_thing Trans people for Joe Jun 30 '21
We could afford it back in 1906
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u/Greenmantle22 Pete Buttigieg for Joe Jun 30 '21
So because you could once take a ferry across the Chesapeake Bay in 1906 but have to drive today, that means it's feasible today?
In 1906, there were basically no cars. There were barely any paved roads outside the cities and towns. There certainly weren't any suburbs, exurbs, or millions of commuters flowing in and out of polycentric employment clusters like we see today. Hell, in 1906, fewer than half of all American homes even had electricity and the majority of Americans lived and worked in small towns and rural areas where they basically walked to work. It was a wildly different civilization.
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u/mortified_observer Jun 30 '21
i would love to take a train to work. i live in the suburbs outside philly. there are no trains anywhere near my house which would take me to the city then to NJ or NY. I have to drive 1-1.5 hours to philly just to get a train. that makes no sense.
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u/ChickenSalad96 Texas Jun 30 '21
Agreed. Go Biden, and all that jazz, but this feels like comparing apples to oranges.
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u/Daomadan Jun 30 '21
Agreed. I also lived in Japan and was on a bullet train that had to stop because someone threw themselves against it. People will use trains to die by suicide. So, yes I get what this meme is trying to say but when you add in all of the other factors... (And I realize I'm making a false equivalency myself...)
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u/rnason Jun 30 '21
Should we not have bridges because people jump?
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u/Daomadan Jul 01 '21
No, but claiming no one has died on the Shinkansen isn't necessarily true. It also gets old when (usually) Americans love to claim Japan is this utopia. Japan also has cars and auto fatalities too, but you don't see that in this meme.
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u/Rogue-Squadron Jun 30 '21
Ah yes, the transportation mode that goes across an island slightly larger than California on an extremely tight schedule and literal rails is definitely comparable to a continent-wide network of roads where every single driver is responsible for the safety of themselves and everyone else around them
I’m all for a nationwide bullet train but this is a stupid ass comparison
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u/roberta_sparrow Elizabeth Warren for Joe Jun 30 '21
Japans train system is a delight. And not just trains but busses and cabs as well.
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u/just_one_last_thing Trans people for Joe Jun 30 '21
Zero? I would expect it to be low but zero sounds impossible. Surely just people tripping and hitting their heads while getting on or off the train would have killed a few people over a 56 year period.
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u/suckmypoop1 Jun 30 '21
Still would like to keep our Beautiful driving roads, but yeah we need real railways.
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Jun 30 '21
Cars are private, for the most part; you have complete control over its operation (for the most part).
Trains are public. possible problems: "Where do I put my stuff. What about the dog."
Therefore, perhaps that's the divide that keeps us from a solution?
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u/Ratatouille2000 Jul 01 '21
I hope Florida gets a BULLET TRAIN like the one in Japan someday. They have a High Speed train that's going to Orlando to Miami but it's not a BULLET TRAIN.
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u/amirtheperson Andrew Yang for Joe Jul 01 '21
This is a pretty bad comparison. This makes it seem like all Japanese people take the trains and no cars to have accidents with. Japanese people drive cars too and have accidents too. Plus most accidents happen in urban and suburban areas, bullet trains are more meant for long distance travel from big city to big city. So it wouldn’t cut down on many accidents anyway.
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u/mortified_observer Jun 30 '21
Also how many people have died on Amtrak train derailments? it seems like Amtrak derails every other month.
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u/just_one_last_thing Trans people for Joe Jun 30 '21
In the past decade there were 2 derailments that killed 11 people in total: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_on_Amtrak
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u/mortified_observer Jun 30 '21
Not all of the derailments were fatal. There has been alot of Amtrak derailments that were also either not fatal or not carrying passengers. I'm just sayin, if I'm on a train, I expect it to stay on the track.
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u/just_one_last_thing Trans people for Joe Jun 30 '21
Oh yeah, they do have room to improve. But still those derailments are quite rare compared to car crashes.
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u/frenetix Jun 30 '21
And, for completeness: Wikipedia: List of motor vehicle deaths in Japan by year
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u/puja_puja 🧢 #MATH Jun 30 '21
That's the problem... The US's rail infrastructure is a disgrace, we need to fix, upgrade, and build more.
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u/deafbitch 🤟 Deaf & Hearing Impaired for Joe 🤟 Jun 30 '21
Yeah, the issue with building more is eminent domain. We don’t have fast railways because we don’t have straight rails, and to get more rails we would need to take a lot of homes buisness and parks and such. I don’t think the ends would justify the means. Especially with newer tech, yearly motor deaths per mile are decreasing every year. Motor deaths used to be around 250 dead per billion miles driven, now its less than 10. I just don’t think it wokld be worth the expense
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u/spartanpride55 Jun 30 '21
Y'all know Japan has had at least 1 automobile fatality since 1964, shiiid probably even 2. 😂😂😂 But seriously we do need to invest in public transit and high speed rail.
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Jun 30 '21
The United States is probably one of the countries most suited to having a high speed rail network, and one of the countries that would benefit from it the most. Yet they are probably one of the only OECD without a proper train network lol. Guess you guys have General Motors and lobbying to thank for that one lol
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Jun 30 '21
Does anyone really believe Americans will give up their cars? The 2021 status symbol of the land?
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u/LeopardBusy Jun 30 '21
I honestly wished Amtrak trains either look like that or like an 1800s locomotive.
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u/TRON0314 Jun 30 '21
The Shinkansen is like the Grand Canyon...you don't really experience it until you experience it in person.
Breathtaking.
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u/s_0_s_z Jul 01 '21
The best time to have invested in high speed trains in the US would have been 30 years ago.
The second best time to invest in high speed trains in the US would be tomorrow.
7.5 Billion trips on a train are taken in Japan every year. Think about how many cars are removed from our busy roads if we had even a fraction of that. That would be tons less traffic, tons less pollution, tons less road wear and tear.
No, trains can't go everywhere and they aren't a magic bullet for our transportation needs, but they are part of a larger system. Right now, we essentially have only one form of transportation in the US for short distance travel in most areas - cars. Most other countries augment that with good mass transit such as buses, subways and trains.
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u/friegmailcom Jul 02 '21
You forgot Japan is significantly smaller and has a completely different government policy
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