There are billions of dollars aligned against fixing the problem though so its going to look bad on paper to start fixing things, at least at first. You'd need to fix the political system to allow that kind of multi election cycle thinking to exist.
It’s not money controlling the issues. It’s hatred of minorities and mistrust of the government (that people voted in), as well as of course a slew of other issues. But it starts with mentalities, not dollars.
Probably an intenet myth. But I have somewhere in my memory, that the machines are hard to clean. So enployees mark them out of order to not have to clean them.
It doesn't happen to ice cream machines at other fast food franchises nearly as frequently, and the machines at McDonald's give unhelpful error codes and are generally designed to require pricey field technician visits (that are helpfully provided by the manufacturer) to resolve.
There was a third party device that was created to get around the error code issue, providing actual details of what was wrong and saving franchise owners thousands of dollars. So naturally the manufacturer sued the creator and petitioned McD's corporate to disallow its use.
It doesn’t have to be that way but it currently is, and that’s why Americans don’t take trains. Have you seen Amtrak? It’s like an 1800’s coal train; the LA Metro (light rail) is great if you want to get stabbed by a tweaker on the way to work.
I used to take Amtrak between Philly and DC. It took about 2 hours which is a bit shorter than driving if you're lucky enough to not hit major traffic. The problem was that if it rained you had water pouring into the car from multiple spots in the ceiling. Just an amazing thing to see in 200-year-old technology. Even Amish buggies don't leak like that.
I thought about taking the Acela on that route once. Cost 4X as much and shaved a whopping 10 minutes off the time.
I do not understand Amtrak at all. The Keystone has been the absolute best thing about moving back east for me. $25 to Manhattan, grab a bagel, see a show, $25 home. And the Keystone is the crappy commuter train, the Pennsylvanian is way nicer. I've done it tons of times and it's only been late once, and no leaks on the rain.
Getting to DC costs hundreds each way and isn't any faster than driving. I'm better off buying a ticket to Baltimore and then taking the $7 commuter to DC...
Omg, the soft sleepers. Took them all over China. Hangzhou, yinchuan, chengdu, kunming. Once completely fucked up with language and took a slow train hard seat to Xian from Beijing. More than 24hrs over May Day/labor week. People were crawling in the windows in the middle of a field. Cannot recommend that.
Was it just absolutely packed and the window was the only way to make it inside? Maybe you ended up spending hours pressed against other people? Not sure if folks would be motivated to try to board without a ticket
Yes. Climbing in the windows and sitting in the aisle. I went to the bathroom once. It was like those puzzles with one piece missing, including those standing in the bathroom.
Somewhere between 40 and 100 USD depending on location.
But as wages increase and the market is able to bear higher prices, its unlikely to increase to those prices, since the rail network isn't run for profit.
Prices will still go up as labor costs increase, just not as much as they could, similar to rent and food.
There are of course far cheaper options such as hard sleepers, soft seats, and hard seats, which pack 6 beds per birth, 8 seats, or ~12 seats respectively, and also a more expensive option on some trains that's 2 beds per berth.
Intrigued by the different options. I can search images of each of the four seating option types to compare… I am curious if you might find it a good use of your time to share photos of each of the options as you remember them, maybe with little annotation wherever is relevant?
Sorry, I don't have pictures I took myself that show the layout, but the app has examples. I think the top business class pic is actually Premium Business Class.
Theres a few other layouts, but you get the gist.
::: spoiler spoiler
High speed from Beijing to Shanghai:
And for slow trains:
:::
Most slow trains have a dining car in my experience.
There’s also some great movies about American poverty, and it feels like there’s always a scene where car trouble of some kind tips their life into an immediate downward spiral. They need it to get to work to sustain everything else, making one traffic stop the moment of despair.
The one I really appreciated, as heart wrenching as it was, is called Straw.
The worst part is that scenario you mention is a real thing that can happen and does happen to a lot of people in the US. You should see some of the cars in my deep red no-vehicle-inspection state. I once witnessed a car running on four donut spares, one headlight, and one taillight. And probably no insurance. The alternative is possibly losing a job and becoming homeless.
Really I wish I could live without one. Ive decided on harm reduction instead.
I learned something weird about cars and money and such just this last week. I got tired of working on a truck just to spend more money dumping fuel in it, and I took what I considered the nuclear option. I traded the truck in. On a used 2nd generation Nissan Leaf.
The car wasn't expensive. I could easily afford it. But as I was working on the required financial gymnastics to fit a car payment in my budget, I saw that the truck has been using $200 of gas every month. And the auto insurance dropped by about $100 each month. The car payment is $200. It costs something like 70 cents to charge it after my commute.
The silly car isn't cheap. It's free. And its so quiet and smooth, no wonder people get evangelical about their EV's.
Sure its more expensive than owning no car at all. Owning no car at all just isn't an option for a lot of people in the US. So instead of spending money on tires/brakes/insurance/fuel/oil/fluids/tires for an F150, I'm paying for tires/insurance for a dorky little EV. And I have an extra ~$400 in my budget.
Correct, so you dodged the 25-35% cost of driving out of the lot, but unless its so old the resale value is like 5-10% of the og cost, depreciation is still going to be your greatest loss, likely 10-20% per year. Thats a few thousand dollars.
This reminds me of when my parents made me get a job to pay for auto insurance at 16, though I didn't have a car or plan to get one right away. Their rates would go way up unless I had a separate plan, so I had to get one. And then I needed to get a car to get to a job, so I had to spend everything I had saved up as a kid to get a barely functioning car and insure it. I will say that it was sadly a good intro into life as soon to be adult in America.
Having taken the bus to work for two years now, I have to say.. The complete and utter lack of responsibility has been liberating. Like, sure.. There's still some stigma there where I feel kind of poor or something standing in my uniform at the bus stop while cars whiz past me, but I only spend $70 CAD /mo on my commute, and it I want, I can travel anywhere in the city using that same pass. That's pretty reasonable.
Plus, as someone actively engaged in nature-based spirituality, it feels kind of nice knowing that I'm traveling a bit more responsibly than I would have with our vehicle.
I feel you friend, I'm the same way. I've told so many people that and they are so carbrained that they refuse to understand anything beyond time to get there. Yes my bus takes about 10-20% longer, and they immediately augh at me for being a fool, such a fooly fool.
But my ride is mine. I read a book, I think about other things, my time is mine. It's not worried if the asshole will cut me off, the heightened blood pressure, the anger, the worried if I'm in an okay parking spot. None of that exists. I'll gladly take 45 minutes on the bus over 30 minutes of stressful driving.
Yeah, I can tolerate up to 2x the length of the drive, above that is where I start to get annoyed. I know transfers happen, and they are unavoidable, but a well oiled system keeps them to a minimum and keeps bus routes direct.
Where I live, and for the places I want to go, typical travel times are:
car: 15 minutes
bike: 25 minutes
walk: 1.5 hours
transit: 45 minutes
Or:
car: 20 minutes
bike: 35 minutes
walk: 2 hours
transit: 1 hour
And, that's if it's a good time of day for transit. If I'm coming back home near 11pm the transit option can be essentially the same as walking. If I have the option to leave at 11:15 so I can arrive 5 minutes before the bus instead of leaving at 11:00 and waiting 20 minutes for the bus, and the bus is on time, and the bus I'm supposed to connect to is on time, then the bus option can be noticeably faster than walking. But, if the first bus is running late (which happens all the time) it can mean missing the next connection, and walking is actually faster than taking the bus, even if it's a walk of more than an hour.
So, needless to say, I bike whenever the weather permits. But, unfortunately, winter is awful here, the bike lanes and trails aren't plowed in the winter, so biking for roughly half the year isn't a real option.
I would love to have this opportunity because I fucking hate maintenance on my car. As soon as my car senses my bank account reaching a certain threshold it decides that the starter should die the next weekend.
We tried it pretty well back in the 1970s. It was not uncommon to see LP powered conversions on the road. People even experimented with wood gas systems. The problem with LP, at least where I lived, was those engines didn't start well in cold weather. And the second issue was regulations required fueling stations to have someone(s) trained and dedicated to doing those refills. It was deemed not safe to let the common man, (you know morons), do that. That added to the cost. And finally, with an LP tank in your car, you could be driving around with a possible bomb or at least a BLVE under your ass. Which is not safe for those around you.
Sometimes to day you will still see LP powered delivery vans rolling down the road. So it hasn't totally gone away.
if liquid lpg is injected, not gas then it can start on lpg only no problem. this kind of thing appeared later so maybe it was not available at that time, and there are cars that use lpg as only fuel. most of cars just carry extra container for lpg and leave gasoline tank as is, and it works as backup
Could have sworn I remembered a video of a sedan, maybe in Russia, that had allegedly been converted to run on something like propane and the tanks were stored in the trunk. Sure this was more affordable than regular vehicle fuel, but when it got rear-ended… it exploded!
YouTube isn’t full of these videos by any means so maybe it’s safer than I thought?
it's very common in turkey italy mexico and a couple other countries that sell lpg (propane-butane mix) at lower prices than gasoline, nothing explodes these tanks need to be certified (varies by country) and gasoline is already flammable so nbd
in a city where i live most of taxis are hybrids modified to run on lpg so it has to be both safe and durable
its a mix that varies by season because in winter higher pressure at the same temperature is needed, and in summer the opposite. and also in winter gasoline has a little butane dissolved, because it's cheaper and has high octane number, and makes engine startup easier. its a bit complicated but it works
Are you familiar with the way California has winter and summer blends? I think it’s a slightly different principle, focused on being environmentally friendly in the summer when it shouldn’t be too hard for engines to start.
every country has these seasonal changes (except those near equator) both for gasoline diesel and lpg and this is before we get into renewable components
gasoline and lpg are changed for the same reason, it is to keep vapor pressure at the same temperature lower in summer and higher in winter. too low and it's hard to start, too high and volatile components bubble out = gasoline degrades and makes smog in the city. diesel is more complicated because it gels out at lower temperatures but how exactly this happens depending on several things, and mitigations are different
I like four-bangers, I like short shifters, I like si's, subarus, lancers, pop pop pop on the downshift, stomp click click vrooom.
Do I get stuck in traffic sometimes? Ehh, once a week maybe.
Would I give it all up for the betterment of humanity as a whole, and hang my childhood on the memory rack forever?
...yeah. The irony of that, though is that being American and living in the rural south gotta throw the glowies a bone every now and then It's barely even considerable, at all. There is no bus route. There is no train. There's no carpool, I work third with one other person who lives on the other side of the city.
So, if I have to drive, and my preferance is 32mpg little cars, and for now... I have to, and I enjoy it,...
There's a few on this board who would disagree, lmao, but thanks. Man's gotta live in the world he's given, not stamp his foot and demand it bend for him. I wasn't the first here, I won't be the last.
Making superior options for long distance travel, commuting, and random short-distance trips doesn't mean cars go away, it means the 98% of people who aren't into cars get off the road for the rest of us.
Riding is best learned with the appropriate amount of respect, a motorcycle safety foundation certified riding course, and lots and lots and lots of practice.
Or you can just hop on a bike for the first time in SEA, where even children and grandmas ride, and its treated with the same cultural reverence as a minivan.
India is tough, but everyone goes slow in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Indonesia so most accidents are relatively minor. Lotta people texting with phone in hand while riding. They're cracking down on drunk driving at least.
I don't blame you. I hope I didn't sound like I was minimizing your concerns. Motorcycles are absolutely more inherently dangerous, especially for the rider, than cars. Not only are motorcycles harder to see, but sometimes just being around them seems to [occasionally] make other drivers act dumber for some reason. You have no cushion around you like you would with a car. You have to put a lot more effort into being visible, thinking ahead, and anticipating danger zones. If you're in an accident, you don't have the luxury of four walls, a seatbelt, and airbags.
Then there's the "physics" which are very different from the physics of a four wheeled vehicle. You not only have to understand those, you also have to basically beat your own instincts out of yourself so you automatically respond correctly when you do inevitabely find yourself in an emergency situation.
Statistically, the majority of motorcycle wrecks occur at speeds under 30 mph (~48 kph). Usually because someone didn't see the rider and/or the rider either wasn't aware of or didn't know how to apply the appropriate technique. As a rider, you will be much safer with proper training and safety gear. But you will never be as safe as in a passenger vehicle. I don't blame people who look at motorcycles and go "Nope. Hard pass." at all.
Mine is only 15-20 minutes. But recently leadership gave an employee at a different office an award for something else. The guy had to give an impromptu speech about it. He mentioned the usual stuff but then commented on how his commute was an extra hour compared to his previous job, but “so worth it”. I wanted to reach through the screen.
Pendolino is an Italian family of high-speed tilting trains (and non-tilting) used in Italy, Spain, Germany, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Finland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia (Czech railways are operating), the UK, the US, Switzerland, China, and Greece.
they can go up to 250km/h
according to wikipedia even the americans have a few! thought with their infrastructure i doubt they get used much
In my experience in both Portugal and the UK is that they never do.
Only train I know of in the UK that actually goes that fast in practice is the Eurostar service (that goes through the Channel Tunnel) and that's not a pendolino. A number of long distance trains services in the UK are done by pendolino trains, but the rail track is not good enough for them to go at 250km/h.
In Portugal the Alfa train that goes between Lisbon and Porto and which is a pendolino train does up to 220km/h, but the average speed between both cities is a lot less than that (around 180km/h, if I remember it correctly). No other train there goes even that fast.
Only time I ever went that fast (faster, even) in a train in Europe was with the Thalys (basically the Belgian TGV) from Brussels to Paris and back and that's not a pendolino train.
You see, whilst that tech is indeed capable of a top speed of 250km/h, actual stretches of rail line capable of safely supporting it are pretty rare.
Sometimes they go that speed around Mannheim/Frankfurt/Köln... If they go at all... And they don't get stuck behind another train... Or surprise bauarbeiten...
I, European, have temporarily moved further away from work and I'm close to a train station... I'd like to take the train, but it turns a 50 minute motorbike ride to a 1h40 train+bus one. I wouldn't be driving but that's almost 2 hours more of commute per day...
It depends on how comfortable the transit is. If you can use the time in transit to do organizational stuff or relax, it might still be worth the additional time investment in comparison to a nerve-wracking experience on the average road.
It's time away from home though, the place most people best relax after work. Commuting on public transit can be pleasant at times but it's still two hours less time for other stuff
I'd much rather spend 30 minutes on public transport than in a car. This is a real tradeoff many places I've lived in Europe, particularly when considering you need to find parking for the car.
I've had commutes in the US where it was either 30 minutes by car or 90 minutes by public transport. At that point it's not really a choice, you're going to go by car.
I live about an hour south of Stockholm. A lot of companies I'd commute to would be in Stockholm. Thus, the times I've gone to my office in Stockholm, my commute looks something like this
20 minute walk to station
5-15 minute wait for train
50-60 minute train ride
5 minute walk from commuter train to tubes
~0-5 minute wait for tube
10 minute walk to office
That's usually between 1:30 to 1:50 commute, one way. All in all, 3-3½ hours of commute round-trip. It's stressful, with a lot of moving parts. I'm glad I can work from home for now, because my commute is however long it takes me to drag myself into clothes and get in my chair.
It's a lot more environmentally friendly, and most importantly to me, something I can handle without breaking down mentally. I'm ostensibly a functioning member of society because of the ability to work from home, and I'll fight for the ability to continue to do so.
Which is why all commuting should be paid. I'm not travelling to work just for funsies, it's purely for the sake of work, and so it should be compensated.
Plenty of jobs can also be done remotely, and not offering that as an option to workers should be penalised, particularly if a commuter has to take transit to get there. In a day and age where we should be minimising our emissions, forcing people to commute just isn't right.
The issue here is that paying for commute incentivized longer commutes. I'd rather prioritize chaper living conditions in the area where workers are needed.
It's not like the company doesn't have a say in this. They hire people closer to them, or offer WFH where a commute isn't part of it. My company does pay for my commute. I'm WFH, but when I have to travel for work, it goes on the company credit card.
Yes, there will be cases where a commute is absolutely necessary, but you can always evaluate these things on a case by case basis.
Plus it's ultimately time that the worker is giving up. I'll take my current no commute over commute with reimbursement any day.
I agree, but there are countries (like Austria where i live) which incentivizes long commutes by financial benefits - its called "Pendlerpauschale", meaning a general payment for people having to drive a longer commute.
In my opinion, the only thing they are paying for is a more dispersed suburbian area and a big load of CO2 emissions, while sealing a shitton of earth in the suburbs.
To be fair, company housing can be beneficial to both sides IF IT IS PLANNED AND EXECUTED AS SUCH.
in reality, companies use such arrangements to abuse their workers even more.
I'd advocate for anyone pushing for controlled company housing, when they don't get away with cutting corners everywhere and if our society ever realizes that this arrangement might be beneficial for both sides if stringently regulated.
I get compensation in taxes and as a paid sum by the company. It's based on kilometers. The taxation thing is based on kilometers and the cheapest available option
I've a friend who works as a truck driver, and does get compensation for how long he has to drive to get to work. It's also tax credits. As someone who doesn't drive but instead would rely on public transport, I wouldn't get compensated.
Honestly I think that's pretty bunk, why does the public fund people having to commute by car? It's something the company should pay the worker for because it's technically work they're doing for the sake of the company.
Here you gotta fill out specific criteria to be compensated (in taxes) for driving your own car. Otherwise you'll be compensated based on the cheapest possible mode of transport (train and bus, almost always)
Making more living space available in the city where you don't need a car would be more beneficial. it would prevent sealing land in the suburbs, prevent CO2 emissions for travel, and in general improve efficiency of public transport.
Unless you live in a densely populated area and the trains are packed to the max during commute hours ... not too uncommon having to stand, unfortunately :(
Yeah, lucked out there unfortunately, even a car is the better option it seems.
For years I had the luxury of train + subway to work, it was bliss because the train was the long part of the commute and it was quite good, and the subway was crowded but fairly short and very frequent.
Long urban bus routes suck in general, especially if there are no dedicated bus lanes.
This doesn't exclude the possibility of using the commute time for things that are good for you, which is very much more likely in public transport in comparison to driving yourself. I use every commute for playing on my steam deck, which keeps me calm even if the transport is fully stacked.
I could but its already a pretty good bike. Got some nice tyres and pannier bags for it recently, probably getting close to the point of accessories costing more than the bike.
A small bag for phone and keys could be a nice thing to get next. Also slowly acquiring more bike maintenance tools too.
Maybe, but I have limited space and don't really want to work more hours just to pay for more space to store things. I could use that time to ride my bike to the beach instead.
I love train travel. Even the delays people always rag on DB is really not that bad. It could be better yes, but not having to drive everywhere is so nice.
However I do often miss the small conviences of a car. Going to the store and traveling in bad weather were much easier, and yes I'm aware you can have a car here too I just won't be getting one.
Although I must admit I do miss a good road trip too. Where the journey is part of the trip. It's much easier to find something spontaneously while driving and stop to enjoy it.
Overall though not having to drive and being able to relax makes train travel the best
Even the delays people always rag on DB is really not that bad
No, it is. Go to the UK or Spain and try their trains there. Miles better. Delays of maybe a few minutes on average.
It spills over too. People avoid getting the Eurostar to Germany because although the UK-France connection is solid, anything after that is just a big fat question mark.
Hell even getting a train to the airport in Germany comes with a huge time risk. You just don't get that stress-inducing level of planning uncertainty in other developed countries with train systems as you do with the DB
Even the delays people always rag on DB is really not that bad. It could be better yes, but not having to drive everywhere is so nice.
Lmao.
Try going on a inter-metro train (usually designated as MEX) and have it not be delayed by >10min during day time.
My best record was 1h30min.
Meanwhile the DB navigator app says nothing about delays or cancelled trains and marks the route as done.
It's can't be that hard to get the GPS location of a train, can it?
Conspiracy theory: Germany is surrounded by countries doing quite well with their trains. Germany has the strongest car industry in Europe. Thus Deutsche bahn executives must be payed off by the German car industry to keep the trains run bad.
No it is the politicians. Germany used to have a reliable train system. There are a number of issues though. First of all Germany uses trains for freight in a significant way. Then since the 90s they gave some control over regional trains to the states, who then increased the number of trains, because that was popular. They also added high speed trains to the system, which is great but when they are run alongside slower regional and freight trains, they need to overtake them, which lowers a railways capacity.
That all combines to Germany having way too many trains on its tracks, which creates traffic jams. The solution is pretty obviously to build more tracks and at best more high speed lines to add capacity. However that is blocked by the car lobby.
I won't disagree with you on the DB app. Absolute dumpster fire. If they could accurately display their delays it would be so much better. They have so many trains running at major hubs people would find the next best train if they were honest and reported accurately. Nothing like watching an alternative train leave and then the app adds 10 more minutes to your delay.
Don't even get me started on trying to find a bus with DB navigator. Would it kill them to put the fucking stieg info on there? I've missed so many bused because of this.
Wouldnt kill them to put a direction triangle for viewing direction in the damn map like on google maps.
Fucking google maps is more accurate and better to navigate the routes than DB navigator. How??? They have literally all the data for the trains but google maps manages to make a better product ;-;
Just a side note here: MEX trains are a product for Baden-Württemberg (often designed with the bwegt brand in mind), which is not used anywhere else as far as I'm aware. They replaced the older RB trains that have become a rarer sight in BW.
You can always just don't plan and go from train to train and travel around europe, ofc this will not leave you easy access to smaller towns and villages, maybe if you also take your bike with you
BW, but I've traveled Berlin to Munich to Stuttgart with stops in between via regional rail with a D-ticket. So I'm most unfamiliar with the Northwestern parts of the country.
Trains were mostly on time, if late they seemed to average 10 minutes late, and a few times there were some very late trains. But between the major hubs it was usually possible to just take a different train. I feel like people don't give Germany enough credit for the sheer number of trains it has. You're running trains on lines every hour that other European countries would only have a train every 2 or 3 hours.
Although I'll admit the first place I lived was a small village and my daily commute relied on one train that was nearly 15 minutes late every day. I learned to adjust for it.
No train delay has ever compared to getting stuck in Atlanta traffic for 4 hours. It should on average take 1 hour to drive through Atlanta. I've yet to have a train delayed by 3 hrs
Man, I tried to do public transport to work. I was in the best situation. I lived walking distance to the light rail, my office was on the other side of town, within walking disance to the light rail.
leave at 7:30, walk to the rail by 7:50, not bad
buy a ticket on the automated machine and wait, assuming 1 of the 3 machines was working. 50:50 honestly.
trains come every 15, except they don't.
On a good day, the train would be there by 8, on a bad day, maybe 8:30
Ride it for 20 minutes, 4 stops, until I need to switch trains.
Get off train 1, buy a ticket if the machines there work, god forbid there's no ticket on the first run and a train already there, i'll be waiting for another train.
train 2 shows, on a good day, 30 more minutes to my work stop, on a bad day, 45.
i hop off at my stop, walk 15m to the office.
I'm at the office between 9:30 and 9:45. If it's hot i'm covered in sweat. If it's cold i'm freezing.
Luckily my job DGAF what time we show up.
2h there, 2h back.
except after 7:30pm, trains go to every 30 minutes, which means maybe every 45.
If there's an accident, a bus bridge will easily make that one way trip 4 hours.
If I drive, I'm there in 27 minutes.
3.5 hours a day to take public transport here for a 30m drive.
We're not clusters of towns with jobs where everything is near transport and even when things are close our trains are slow an full of homeless trying to stay warm in the winter. I would have loved to hell to get rid of one of the cars. but giving up 1/4 of my family time on a job that already wants 10 hours a day wasn't negotiable.
Also light rail is not that fast. So if you have to wait a long time, you are probably better off riding a bicycle. Obviously infrastructure permitting. Your description sounds like that should be possible in a bit more then an hour, but I have obviously no idea where you live and your work is, so can not honestly judge. Just wanted to throw that out there.
No digital tickets when I was doing it (5 years ago). It's a major metro, but the government here doesn't take it seriously; they treat it as poor transport.
Can't bike through the center of the city safely, no bike lanes. Many streets north and south of the city don't even have shoulders.
40km each way, average summer temps in the 30's
To bike, I'd need to move closer to work, I'd still sweat my ass off and show up stinky. Also, I can't be sure I'd get employment near there if anything happened. Needing to sell my house everytime I change jobs seems like a rough time.
We're just not architected for it. Busses take even longer and are more unpredictable.
It's not that far off though. I travel a lot across Switzerland by train and either I'm working in the train if it's a commute to work or I'll drink wine, beer or eat in the train restaurant. Worst travel experience is when I watch a series on my phone or computer since it is kind of "lost time".
Traveling in a train is not just waiting, you can almost always do something. Either productive, fun or that you would need to do anyway
One of my former bosses commuted an hour each way by train every day, and he used the commute time to write a series of novels. He left after the second one was published. We were all cursing ourselves for living too close to work, lol.
Yeah but can they do it while knowing that one tenth of a percent of their population has increased their wealth at a rate ten times more than the top 90% of earners in their society? Didn't think so. Take that, losers!
E: If you mean the 10 minute one then yes I could easily do that with a bike (electric doubly so ) and the public transit there is great (usually, now there's a train stoppage) but I work in heavy construction and need a car to not only get to work but to move around equipment, go to this and that construction site during the day etc.
Otherwise I'd do the commute by train/bike for sure
Yeah i meant the short commute. Ofc, with more context a car does make most sense in your position. I struggle with the multiple sites of my job aswel, making it hard to go by bike everytime. Luckily that doesnt happen every day for me and it is planned so i know when i need to go by car and when i can go by bike. But getting a cargobike did mean many less car rides. Because i get to drop off the kids by bike on my way to work. And i enjoy those commutes so much more.
Yeah but some trains come every two hours like the commuter rail. So like wait two hours for a train or be in traffic for three hours and then and then that's not even taking into account the travel time which could be up to another two hours. ..... There's no fuckin' winning
What could take an hour on a good traffic day can be a four hour total trip by public transportation.
If your commuter rail in a major city comes only every two hours your system is simply bad. I commute a good distance and there is a fast train every 30 min, from early morning to late night, every day. Frequency gets only worse to places that are already outside of reasonable commuting distance and even then there is usually a train every 60 min.
Not the person you're replying to, but if you happen to miss a train or it gets cancelled you generally are already at the train station. Depending on travel time and conditions it might be safer or more convenient to wait at the station, even if it's for two hours.
I've never had to wait for a next train for longer than 30 minutes (maybe once it was an hour because it was a very small train station and during the weekend), but I live in a place with a pretty dense railway network and have mostly lived near one of the biggest routes.
the local trains are the most convenient the Orange, Blue, Red and Green with delays up to about 20 minutes but a lot of people tend to wait for an Uber (again someone with a car) if it's over 20 minutes of a wait.
Commuter Rail depending on your arrival station and your destination station, your wait time can be 2 hours okay yeah if you miss a train you're waiting the 2 hours but I gave an example below of a short shopping trip where you're fucking yourself taking the commuter rail out to a dispensary that can be an hour and a half round trip by car vs 4 a 4 hour round trip by public transportation/the equivalent to a flight to Denver.
LIke doing groceries by public transportation sucks too, I usually call an uber, again the person with a car and a personal storage area where you can load up your own shit.
You can't attach a camper to a bus and go to Maine, right? You can actually have like freedom to do shit and experience life when you have a car. You can take public transportation for fun and make it something to do for fun when you have a car. You still appreciate it, it just doesn't suck to be an individual. Again, this is coming from the 16 years of doing it and i'm just good on it.
I don't even drive, I don't even own a car yet, I'm still biking and using the T, my back fucking hurts at 33 and I'm really sick of it. After a while you start questioning a lot of things but I won't lie I love biking and I end up always being thrown that bone by nature and life and having those moments where my music syncs to my surroundings and/or everything feels perfect like I'm the only one on the planet or just everything has that, "it's for me," feeling and for that i truly don't hate being a cyclist. and there are times on public transportation where i get to see crazy shit happen, like the last time on the orange line there were two boneheads jumping back and fourth between moving carts after they opened the door between the two, I don't 100% hate public transportation it's just over time you start to need to get around a little easier is all
It's not that i absolutely fucking hate it it's unreliable for absolute needs. Like doctors appointments, getting to work, getting groceries, getting cannabis from the dispensary that has the strain that actually helps. If my mom was taken to the hospital that's an all day affair for me to get there by public transportation, she could die by the time I get there, if I drove it's less than 45 mins away.
Commuter rail usually comes more frequently than that, no? And if you know when it comes and it’s not two hours late then you’re waiting around for it unless you’re way too fuckin’ early.
it's quicker for the city but if you're going into Woburn for a dispensary run, that takes less than 10 mins to perform the transaction (saying for the sake of actual example that I've been in, the dispo workers are the best and I didn't mean they're slow) and takes 10 mins to walk there from the CR stop, that's less than 40 mins away by driving so lets say about an 80 minute round trip, that's an hour and twenty minutes round trip. If I take the commuter rail that's 20 minutes to the city using the local train , the 15 minute wait at North Station (because YOU DO want to be early for the commuter rail and that's if you know your schedule and you know you're gonna make it, sometimes there's games and you lose out waiting at the fare gate lines), and about an hour and a half there and then a two hour wait after the short shopping trip.
So to put it into perspective: That's half your day wasted for what could be an hour and a half there and back. Traffic with driving could maybe add about 25 minutes but the amount of time I use on a single dispensary run to Woburn and back using the local train and the cr, I could take a plane to Denver, not even kidding about that, I just used Google Maps and double checked that flight time.
Ok? Really just sounds like the commuter rail could come more often which is a very easy fix. Public transit is pretty much only ever bad because governments won’t fund it, car-centric infrastructure is highly propritized and its peak is still trash.
Traffic is bad enough here, adding the million people who use just the metro per day to that would be the end of it all, and that’s not to mention our bike network and ability to walk to so many things. We upgrading our commuter rail to a proper high-frequency, dual-direction light rail system that will connect much of the island that has never been properly served. It’s gunna pop the hell off.
It's cause of where it goes that it takes so long. The cr uses so much power you hear the full capacity kick in when they come into the station and everything vibrates, they're the most powerful and they're the fastest trains we have in my state.
Some Americans' commutes, possibly. I have known people to inflict this sort of thing on themselves and I don't see the appeal.
I live in an area where the public transit is notoriously dysfunctional, but my commute is about five minutes by motorcycle. Maybe as much as seven on some days if the traffic lights aren't cooperating with me. On the weekends I ride up to the mountains and enjoy plenty of freedom.
Hell, if you nerds would buy more knives from me I could quit my day job and not have to go anywhere. Think of the carbon savings!
Not our Swiss trains in the alps, that's for sure. It's too curvy in our rail network. Swiss trains are somewhat famous for going slow relative to neighboring countries' trains.
The point is that things don't have to be so bad; places with probably less demand run more trains, you just have to force the train companies to invest in infrastructure instead of stock buybacks.
Edit: 1 is Guangzhou South, 2 is one of the stations in Shenzhen, 3 is a subway station in Shenzhen (I think, it might have been Hong Kong?), 4 is Tianjin, I think, I don't remember.
Looks very impressive, but also pretty airport-like. I think I prefer the look of Frankfurt or Zürich, which operate on a similar scale (all three at around 170 million passengers a year).
Of course there is way different railway history behind those. Making it look retro would also have been weird for Guangzhou South I would think.
I've had to sleep in my car in a midwestern winter. If I hadn't been in school and expecting to find a place to stay I probably would've headed out to the west coast too. Milder seasons are extremely valuable in such situations.
There's also a thing I've heard of with more conservative states shipping some of their homeless to the coasts so as to not have to deal with them themselves
It’s very real. Where I live I think I’ve only seen someone try to clean my windshield maybe twice. But seeing people beg on intersection corners is a very common sight. There’s whole tent cities out here. The solution? Obviously it’s to criminalize begging and post signs everywhere that say “Be part of the solution, say no to panhandlers” as if that solves anything. The ‘ol ignore it and maybe it’ll go away approach.
I also see a lot of people selling flowers, or occasionally candy apples at intersections as well.
However, it's the only comfortable seat I own, so I don't mind it.
Trains where I am suck because the seats are too small, and no matter how little space there is next to me in a train seat, some fat guy always sits there. Usually right after he's eaten a meal of nothing but raw garlic.
Being Canadian in what is one of our larger (not major to be clear like 150k people) cities, when I went to the office it took 10ish mins. I moved a bit so had varying times. I work from home now so doesn't really matter.
That said I love listening to audiobooks in the car. My android phone has been odd for connecting but working lately so I just continue on whichever book I'm listening to, for about 3mins to the store. I don't go far heh. Bit longer if I drive closer to the office for a car wash every few weeks.
Meanwhile I do a delivery job and blare Free bird while going 90 in my 01 Tacoma. If it makes it any better it only goes 90 on gods forsaken desert roads while Free bird is playing, I got it to accelerate so fast the front lifted up last time
This is sort of overblown. In very few situations will you wait in traffic for 3 hours. There are plenty of roads that flow with only minor traffic delays outside of the big cities.
Uh, it's like comparing the best life you could have in Western Europe with the worst life you could have in American suburbs.
It's no different from comparing an American surgeon earning 400k yearly in Manhattan to a person surviving in Belarus or Albania. Same bias but flipped in opposite direction.
Both comparisons would be unfair.
I am not saying life is worse in the EU than in the US, but there are many better ways to argue that more logically using data.
See, what you’re not getting is that the average US experience is just incredibly fucking mid. I live in Canada, specifically Montréal because the rest of the country is very much like the US. Cars are the only way to get around, you can’t even safely and confidently ride a bicycle in most North American cities.
The best the US has to offer is worse than pretty good but not the best in the EU. The worst the EU has to offer is nowhere near as bad as a fairly common, even if not universal, experience in the states.
Nothing from of either of our comments even fuckin’ matters though because this post is specifically calling out the people who think sitting in traffic “freedom” but 15 minute cities are tyrannical overreach.
Taking a train to work isn't a luxury only afforded to the 1%, not only are they a better experience, trains are cheaper than driving in most of the world.
Ikr. People aspire to get cars so they don't have to take the fucking stupid ass unreliable public transportation. Back in my day the only people who relied on public transportation were poor people, retards and immigrants but I guess with the mental health crisis and the economy tanking, we're all poor retards.
If you have good Karma, you don't even need to work. That's how Jesus fed those people with the fish and loaves. He kept giving them away and the equivalent would keep returning to him with interest. You can't just throw shit away though. This type of magick is dependent on intention-setting, as it is our intention we have direct control of, which then determines how we entangle ourselves with Karma.
If you don't understand that, in the fourth jhana of meditation, you can observe for yourself how your inner AND outer world are procedurally generated based on how you entangle yourself with this singular stream of symbols, and how you set your intention determines the way you are entangled with each symbol, which is what determines the parameters for your reality to spawn.
The world is an illusion. Both the Buddha and Jesus said this in their own words. What Jesus called his Father the Buddhists call the Ālaya-vijñāna, or storehouse consciousness. I use the term Server, and each of us individuals are a Client, and all other monadic entities growing/budding off the Server are what make up the Holy Internet, and this is what a Roman Dodecahedron is meant to teach as it is a pedagogical object to illustrate Indra's Net as a diagram in a textbook would.
And I will preach at Wendy's before sucking off the Mexican man who works there and gives me extra fries, unless he's got a family. Don't wanna be a homewrecker with what this mouth can do.
In Japan, kindergarteners are required to get to school using public transit, alone. They wear bright yellow hats so everyone can see them/knows where they're going if they look like they need help.
Op, and this thread isn't mocking the person imprisoned by a Honda Accord for not simply taking a 200mph train through the Alps while sipping a glass of wine to get to work, its mocking them and you for not understanding how bad things are and defending such a terrible system. Better things are possible, but it requires systemic change, nobody expects tragicinfo to personally build a high-speed rail network.
So can uninformed brave keyboard warriors, squabbling for internet likes. Put your child on your motorcycle and take them to school if you're so anti-car.
I see children on motorbikes every day here in vietnam, its how people get their kids to school.
Under 14-16 the parents or older brother drops the kids off, sometimes you see a mom with 2 kids between her legs and 1 one the back. Around that age they tend to get electric scooters and drive themselves and maybe 1-2 friends. At 16 they can get a 49cc bike, but a lot illegally ride a 110cc.
Its not possible in America because we designed everything around cars. Look outside your bubble, things don't have to be so bad.
I'm not even sure there are any trains going 320 km/h anywhere in the alps. AFAIK the highest speeds in that region are around 200 km/h, maybe 230 km/h.
I heard that when they built the Lötschberg train tunnel to connect the upper Wallis area with Thun and Bern, people started commuting through there. Visp-Thun is only half an hour and Visp-Bern is only an hour now. But yeah I still don't think it's that many.
Also Swiss trains don't run that fast, it's more like 155 mph in the Lötschberg.
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If you saw how expensive and shitty our trains are you'd pick the accord too
It doesn't have to be that way. Soft Sleeper trains in China are quite nice and like 10USD/100 miles.
Yes it does, sadly. Our trains are basically set up to fail. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN7e38Q7e1U
Wait you just posted a video about how the system was intentionally designed to fail.
If it can intentionally be designed to fail then it can be redesigned to succeed. There is no reason it has to be the way it is
There are billions of dollars aligned against fixing the problem though so its going to look bad on paper to start fixing things, at least at first. You'd need to fix the political system to allow that kind of multi election cycle thinking to exist.
Yeah, but money has lost elections before.
It’s not money controlling the issues. It’s hatred of minorities and mistrust of the government (that people voted in), as well as of course a slew of other issues. But it starts with mentalities, not dollars.
Wait 'til you hear about the ice cream machines at McDonald's
Probably an intenet myth. But I have somewhere in my memory, that the machines are hard to clean. So enployees mark them out of order to not have to clean them.
Urban Legend. Probably.
No, it is a real phenomenon
It doesn't happen to ice cream machines at other fast food franchises nearly as frequently, and the machines at McDonald's give unhelpful error codes and are generally designed to require pricey field technician visits (that are helpfully provided by the manufacturer) to resolve.
There was a third party device that was created to get around the error code issue, providing actual details of what was wrong and saving franchise owners thousands of dollars. So naturally the manufacturer sued the creator and petitioned McD's corporate to disallow its use.
TIL. Thanks for the reply.
In theory yes, but there's far too much vested interest in seeing that our trains fail.
It doesn’t have to be that way but it currently is, and that’s why Americans don’t take trains. Have you seen Amtrak? It’s like an 1800’s coal train; the LA Metro (light rail) is great if you want to get stabbed by a tweaker on the way to work.
I used to take Amtrak between Philly and DC. It took about 2 hours which is a bit shorter than driving if you're lucky enough to not hit major traffic. The problem was that if it rained you had water pouring into the car from multiple spots in the ceiling. Just an amazing thing to see in 200-year-old technology. Even Amish buggies don't leak like that.
I thought about taking the Acela on that route once. Cost 4X as much and shaved a whopping 10 minutes off the time.
I do not understand Amtrak at all. The Keystone has been the absolute best thing about moving back east for me. $25 to Manhattan, grab a bagel, see a show, $25 home. And the Keystone is the crappy commuter train, the Pennsylvanian is way nicer. I've done it tons of times and it's only been late once, and no leaks on the rain.
Getting to DC costs hundreds each way and isn't any faster than driving. I'm better off buying a ticket to Baltimore and then taking the $7 commuter to DC...
Omg, the soft sleepers. Took them all over China. Hangzhou, yinchuan, chengdu, kunming. Once completely fucked up with language and took a slow train hard seat to Xian from Beijing. More than 24hrs over May Day/labor week. People were crawling in the windows in the middle of a field. Cannot recommend that.
Was it just absolutely packed and the window was the only way to make it inside? Maybe you ended up spending hours pressed against other people? Not sure if folks would be motivated to try to board without a ticket
Yes. Climbing in the windows and sitting in the aisle. I went to the bathroom once. It was like those puzzles with one piece missing, including those standing in the bathroom.
Perfect visual :D
What's that adjusted for income?
Somewhere between 40 and 100 USD depending on location.
But as wages increase and the market is able to bear higher prices, its unlikely to increase to those prices, since the rail network isn't run for profit.
Prices will still go up as labor costs increase, just not as much as they could, similar to rent and food.
There are of course far cheaper options such as hard sleepers, soft seats, and hard seats, which pack 6 beds per birth, 8 seats, or ~12 seats respectively, and also a more expensive option on some trains that's 2 beds per berth.
Intrigued by the different options. I can search images of each of the four seating option types to compare… I am curious if you might find it a good use of your time to share photos of each of the options as you remember them, maybe with little annotation wherever is relevant?
Also quickly in my defense, the soft sleeper Wikipedia article features a hallway photo instead of a bed photo. :)
Sorry, I don't have pictures I took myself that show the layout, but the app has examples. I think the top business class pic is actually Premium Business Class.
Theres a few other layouts, but you get the gist.
::: spoiler spoiler High speed from Beijing to Shanghai:
And for slow trains: :::
Most slow trains have a dining car in my experience.
Put a smile right on my face, a hundred pics & all better than web image search results :D asked the right alcoholicorn
So - And then there’s standing!
Great look into all those options, American Amtrak has a fraction I think
No problem, I would have taken pictures myself if I expected anyone to care. Maybe when I return in 3-4 months.
Unrelated, here's a simulator at a train museum in Tokyo.
At least you recognize that the system is forcing you to make that choice, and not your "individual freedom".
Its really mixed tbh. Some make sense others cost a lot.
Expensive? Sure. Shitty? Not so much. I like our trains, at least the major lines.
No... No I wouldn't. At least if you're from Europe. Been a lot of places and theyre all nice.
I drive my car to work so I can afford a car so I can drive to work so I can afford a car
That's nearly a line in Metric - Handshake
There’s also some great movies about American poverty, and it feels like there’s always a scene where car trouble of some kind tips their life into an immediate downward spiral. They need it to get to work to sustain everything else, making one traffic stop the moment of despair.
The one I really appreciated, as heart wrenching as it was, is called Straw.
The worst part is that scenario you mention is a real thing that can happen and does happen to a lot of people in the US. You should see some of the cars in my deep red no-vehicle-inspection state. I once witnessed a car running on four donut spares, one headlight, and one taillight. And probably no insurance. The alternative is possibly losing a job and becoming homeless.
Too real. Barely avoided that trap once myself.
This is why rednecks are always shadetree mechanics of some stripe or another. Me too. I grew up poor, so I got real good at working on cars.
While that’s an excellent life skill, in Straw, the “car trouble” amounted to being harassed by a racist cop and having her license suspended.
In many cases the penalty is genuinely the driver’s fault, but it’s easy to happen when they’re always driving and always stressed.
I believe 20% of household spending in the US was for cars. So people could seriously work a day less every week, if they got rid of their car.
Really I wish I could live without one. Ive decided on harm reduction instead.
I learned something weird about cars and money and such just this last week. I got tired of working on a truck just to spend more money dumping fuel in it, and I took what I considered the nuclear option. I traded the truck in. On a used 2nd generation Nissan Leaf.
The car wasn't expensive. I could easily afford it. But as I was working on the required financial gymnastics to fit a car payment in my budget, I saw that the truck has been using $200 of gas every month. And the auto insurance dropped by about $100 each month. The car payment is $200. It costs something like 70 cents to charge it after my commute.
The silly car isn't cheap. It's free. And its so quiet and smooth, no wonder people get evangelical about their EV's.
If you don't count maintenance and insurance, parking, etc. Add those and it's once again expensive.
I don't understand your argument.
The truck I traded in had those same costs
And it got 15 mpg.
And the tires cost more.
And the insurance was twice as expensive.
And it needed oil changes
And it needed transmission fluid changes.
Sure its more expensive than owning no car at all. Owning no car at all just isn't an option for a lot of people in the US. So instead of spending money on tires/brakes/insurance/fuel/oil/fluids/tires for an F150, I'm paying for tires/insurance for a dorky little EV. And I have an extra ~$400 in my budget.
The car is not free. The car is still expensive. Even if it is a necessary expense. Even if it's cheaper than the truck.
So its hair splitting then.
No, it's talking about how cars are expensive, not free.
Have you looked at a depreciation curve? For newish vehicles, the biggest "expense" is depreciation. Its higher for luxury cars and EVs than trucks.
Yeah, but I didn't buy a new ev...
Correct, so you dodged the 25-35% cost of driving out of the lot, but unless its so old the resale value is like 5-10% of the og cost, depreciation is still going to be your greatest loss, likely 10-20% per year. Thats a few thousand dollars.
I got a shiny car. I like shiny things lol. That's all it's got going for it. I would rather be drunk on a train haha
This reminds me of when my parents made me get a job to pay for auto insurance at 16, though I didn't have a car or plan to get one right away. Their rates would go way up unless I had a separate plan, so I had to get one. And then I needed to get a car to get to a job, so I had to spend everything I had saved up as a kid to get a barely functioning car and insure it. I will say that it was sadly a good intro into life as soon to be adult in America.
like an american would drive a vehicle as small as an accord
This made me laugh because I do indeed drive an Accord. I hate that sedan’s seem like they’re dying.
think about how I feel, with wagons pretty much already dead for the past decade
They're still popular here in Europe. My last car was a wagon.
I'm still grieving horsedrawn carriages. 😔
Plenty of Accords in the US. It's a pretty popular car over here.
for the poors, maybe /s
Having taken the bus to work for two years now, I have to say.. The complete and utter lack of responsibility has been liberating. Like, sure.. There's still some stigma there where I feel kind of poor or something standing in my uniform at the bus stop while cars whiz past me, but I only spend $70 CAD /mo on my commute, and it I want, I can travel anywhere in the city using that same pass. That's pretty reasonable.
Plus, as someone actively engaged in nature-based spirituality, it feels kind of nice knowing that I'm traveling a bit more responsibly than I would have with our vehicle.
I feel you friend, I'm the same way. I've told so many people that and they are so carbrained that they refuse to understand anything beyond time to get there. Yes my bus takes about 10-20% longer, and they immediately augh at me for being a fool, such a fooly fool.
But my ride is mine. I read a book, I think about other things, my time is mine. It's not worried if the asshole will cut me off, the heightened blood pressure, the anger, the worried if I'm in an okay parking spot. None of that exists. I'll gladly take 45 minutes on the bus over 30 minutes of stressful driving.
god, I wish. bus routes here are generally 3x longer at minimum
last route I checked against a 22min drive was 90min by bus
Yeah, I can tolerate up to 2x the length of the drive, above that is where I start to get annoyed. I know transfers happen, and they are unavoidable, but a well oiled system keeps them to a minimum and keeps bus routes direct.
Where I live, and for the places I want to go, typical travel times are:
Or:
And, that's if it's a good time of day for transit. If I'm coming back home near 11pm the transit option can be essentially the same as walking. If I have the option to leave at 11:15 so I can arrive 5 minutes before the bus instead of leaving at 11:00 and waiting 20 minutes for the bus, and the bus is on time, and the bus I'm supposed to connect to is on time, then the bus option can be noticeably faster than walking. But, if the first bus is running late (which happens all the time) it can mean missing the next connection, and walking is actually faster than taking the bus, even if it's a walk of more than an hour.
So, needless to say, I bike whenever the weather permits. But, unfortunately, winter is awful here, the bike lanes and trails aren't plowed in the winter, so biking for roughly half the year isn't a real option.
I would love to have this opportunity because I fucking hate maintenance on my car. As soon as my car senses my bank account reaching a certain threshold it decides that the starter should die the next weekend.
Yes but at least Trump is saving me money with the Freedom Fuel Network™
proceeds to pay >$100 to fill up the emotional support truck
/S massive giant /s since there are idiots who really think this, even after the Iran war erupted
I'm going to start calling them this now. It's perfect. Thank you. I usually call them Compensators or "Ferd F-Teen Thousands"
You just grew a 3rd ball.
I love picnicface.
does your truck have chest hair upholstery and an extra beard on deck?
You just grew yourself a 4th ball.
it's wild to me that americans don't use propane as a car fuel
It's wilder that we don't use gasoline in our barbecue grills.
Hank, you use real charcoal or it's off to jail with you!
We tried it pretty well back in the 1970s. It was not uncommon to see LP powered conversions on the road. People even experimented with wood gas systems. The problem with LP, at least where I lived, was those engines didn't start well in cold weather. And the second issue was regulations required fueling stations to have someone(s) trained and dedicated to doing those refills. It was deemed not safe to let the common man, (you know morons), do that. That added to the cost. And finally, with an LP tank in your car, you could be driving around with a possible bomb or at least a BLVE under your ass. Which is not safe for those around you.
Sometimes to day you will still see LP powered delivery vans rolling down the road. So it hasn't totally gone away.
if liquid lpg is injected, not gas then it can start on lpg only no problem. this kind of thing appeared later so maybe it was not available at that time, and there are cars that use lpg as only fuel. most of cars just carry extra container for lpg and leave gasoline tank as is, and it works as backup
Could have sworn I remembered a video of a sedan, maybe in Russia, that had allegedly been converted to run on something like propane and the tanks were stored in the trunk. Sure this was more affordable than regular vehicle fuel, but when it got rear-ended… it exploded!
YouTube isn’t full of these videos by any means so maybe it’s safer than I thought?
it's very common in turkey italy mexico and a couple other countries that sell lpg (propane-butane mix) at lower prices than gasoline, nothing explodes these tanks need to be certified (varies by country) and gasoline is already flammable so nbd
in a city where i live most of taxis are hybrids modified to run on lpg so it has to be both safe and durable
Propane-butane, interesting!
Oh good
its a mix that varies by season because in winter higher pressure at the same temperature is needed, and in summer the opposite. and also in winter gasoline has a little butane dissolved, because it's cheaper and has high octane number, and makes engine startup easier. its a bit complicated but it works
Ah!
Are you familiar with the way California has winter and summer blends? I think it’s a slightly different principle, focused on being environmentally friendly in the summer when it shouldn’t be too hard for engines to start.
every country has these seasonal changes (except those near equator) both for gasoline diesel and lpg and this is before we get into renewable components
gasoline and lpg are changed for the same reason, it is to keep vapor pressure at the same temperature lower in summer and higher in winter. too low and it's hard to start, too high and volatile components bubble out = gasoline degrades and makes smog in the city. diesel is more complicated because it gels out at lower temperatures but how exactly this happens depending on several things, and mitigations are different
We use bald eagle urine instead
Some of those Americans are washing their gas station sandwiches down with gas station wine too.
You might be joking but I saw a guy a few years back in an old SUV drinking the last remnant of wine out of the bag from some box wine on the highway.
A gas station that does not sell beer and ammunition is not some place I will buy gas from!
and gas station dick pills
gas station NACHOs.
I like four-bangers, I like short shifters, I like si's, subarus, lancers, pop pop pop on the downshift, stomp click click vrooom.
Do I get stuck in traffic sometimes? Ehh, once a week maybe.
Would I give it all up for the betterment of humanity as a whole, and hang my childhood on the memory rack forever?
...yeah. The irony of that, though is that being American and living in the rural south gotta throw the glowies a bone every now and then It's barely even considerable, at all. There is no bus route. There is no train. There's no carpool, I work third with one other person who lives on the other side of the city.
So, if I have to drive, and my preferance is 32mpg little cars, and for now... I have to, and I enjoy it,...
then I'm gonna.
Unsarcastically, the world needs more people like you.
There's a few on this board who would disagree, lmao, but thanks. Man's gotta live in the world he's given, not stamp his foot and demand it bend for him. I wasn't the first here, I won't be the last.
I read this entire post as if it was country music and I regret nothing.
Making superior options for long distance travel, commuting, and random short-distance trips doesn't mean cars go away, it means the 98% of people who aren't into cars get off the road for the rest of us.
Depends on who you talk to. Seems the more rabid members of fuckcars want to ban cars completely, and jail anyone who resists lol
I, unfortunately, have to commute 35 miles one way, usually on my Honda motorcycle. I wish we had any semblence of mass transit at all. But we do not.
I am not brave enough to ride
Riding is best learned with the appropriate amount of respect, a motorcycle safety foundation certified riding course, and lots and lots and lots of practice.
Or you can just hop on a bike for the first time in SEA, where even children and grandmas ride, and its treated with the same cultural reverence as a minivan.
Honestly, traffic in most India and SEA makes me really really not want to get anything that can fall over.
India is tough, but everyone goes slow in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Indonesia so most accidents are relatively minor. Lotta people texting with phone in hand while riding. They're cracking down on drunk driving at least.
I see the fun in it but man do I not trust other vehicles on the road even in my own car half the time
I don't blame you. I hope I didn't sound like I was minimizing your concerns. Motorcycles are absolutely more inherently dangerous, especially for the rider, than cars. Not only are motorcycles harder to see, but sometimes just being around them seems to [occasionally] make other drivers act dumber for some reason. You have no cushion around you like you would with a car. You have to put a lot more effort into being visible, thinking ahead, and anticipating danger zones. If you're in an accident, you don't have the luxury of four walls, a seatbelt, and airbags.
Then there's the "physics" which are very different from the physics of a four wheeled vehicle. You not only have to understand those, you also have to basically beat your own instincts out of yourself so you automatically respond correctly when you do inevitabely find yourself in an emergency situation.
Statistically, the majority of motorcycle wrecks occur at speeds under 30 mph (~48 kph). Usually because someone didn't see the rider and/or the rider either wasn't aware of or didn't know how to apply the appropriate technique. As a rider, you will be much safer with proper training and safety gear. But you will never be as safe as in a passenger vehicle. I don't blame people who look at motorcycles and go "Nope. Hard pass." at all.
"oh fu-"
I've had my spills on mopeds as a teenager, having them at 55mph -- ehhhh.
Mine is only 15-20 minutes. But recently leadership gave an employee at a different office an award for something else. The guy had to give an impromptu speech about it. He mentioned the usual stuff but then commented on how his commute was an extra hour compared to his previous job, but “so worth it”. I wanted to reach through the screen.
As a german: Are those 200mph trains in a room with me?
No they got delayed, then cancelled
they can go up to 250km/h
according to wikipedia even the americans have a few! thought with their infrastructure i doubt they get used much
German made Siemens and French made Alstom can reach 400 and routinely go 300.
"can"
In my experience in both Portugal and the UK is that they never do.
Only train I know of in the UK that actually goes that fast in practice is the Eurostar service (that goes through the Channel Tunnel) and that's not a pendolino. A number of long distance trains services in the UK are done by pendolino trains, but the rail track is not good enough for them to go at 250km/h.
In Portugal the Alfa train that goes between Lisbon and Porto and which is a pendolino train does up to 220km/h, but the average speed between both cities is a lot less than that (around 180km/h, if I remember it correctly). No other train there goes even that fast.
Only time I ever went that fast (faster, even) in a train in Europe was with the Thalys (basically the Belgian TGV) from Brussels to Paris and back and that's not a pendolino train.
You see, whilst that tech is indeed capable of a top speed of 250km/h, actual stretches of rail line capable of safely supporting it are pretty rare.
They said Alps, they meant the Swiss, maybe the French.
Definitely French, the Swiss trains are very reliable but generally not fast.
Sometimes they go that speed around Mannheim/Frankfurt/Köln... If they go at all... And they don't get stuck behind another train... Or surprise bauarbeiten...
some of us live 5 min from the beach
but who has real time when working 5 jobs
beach hobo looks better every year
I, European, have temporarily moved further away from work and I'm close to a train station... I'd like to take the train, but it turns a 50 minute motorbike ride to a 1h40 train+bus one. I wouldn't be driving but that's almost 2 hours more of commute per day...
It depends on how comfortable the transit is. If you can use the time in transit to do organizational stuff or relax, it might still be worth the additional time investment in comparison to a nerve-wracking experience on the average road.
It's time away from home though, the place most people best relax after work. Commuting on public transit can be pleasant at times but it's still two hours less time for other stuff
Not just that but I also have shit to do
That too, I'm on the same boat
I'd much rather spend 30 minutes on public transport than in a car. This is a real tradeoff many places I've lived in Europe, particularly when considering you need to find parking for the car.
I've had commutes in the US where it was either 30 minutes by car or 90 minutes by public transport. At that point it's not really a choice, you're going to go by car.
This can easily be the case in Europe as well.
I live about an hour south of Stockholm. A lot of companies I'd commute to would be in Stockholm. Thus, the times I've gone to my office in Stockholm, my commute looks something like this
That's usually between 1:30 to 1:50 commute, one way. All in all, 3-3½ hours of commute round-trip. It's stressful, with a lot of moving parts. I'm glad I can work from home for now, because my commute is however long it takes me to drag myself into clothes and get in my chair.
It's a lot more environmentally friendly, and most importantly to me, something I can handle without breaking down mentally. I'm ostensibly a functioning member of society because of the ability to work from home, and I'll fight for the ability to continue to do so.
If I had the same time and worked a different job, it would be a no brainer
Which is why all commuting should be paid. I'm not travelling to work just for funsies, it's purely for the sake of work, and so it should be compensated.
Plenty of jobs can also be done remotely, and not offering that as an option to workers should be penalised, particularly if a commuter has to take transit to get there. In a day and age where we should be minimising our emissions, forcing people to commute just isn't right.
The issue here is that paying for commute incentivized longer commutes. I'd rather prioritize chaper living conditions in the area where workers are needed.
It's not like the company doesn't have a say in this. They hire people closer to them, or offer WFH where a commute isn't part of it. My company does pay for my commute. I'm WFH, but when I have to travel for work, it goes on the company credit card.
Yes, there will be cases where a commute is absolutely necessary, but you can always evaluate these things on a case by case basis.
Plus it's ultimately time that the worker is giving up. I'll take my current no commute over commute with reimbursement any day.
I agree, but there are countries (like Austria where i live) which incentivizes long commutes by financial benefits - its called "Pendlerpauschale", meaning a general payment for people having to drive a longer commute.
In my opinion, the only thing they are paying for is a more dispersed suburbian area and a big load of CO2 emissions, while sealing a shitton of earth in the suburbs.
Company housing it is!
To be fair, company housing can be beneficial to both sides IF IT IS PLANNED AND EXECUTED AS SUCH.
in reality, companies use such arrangements to abuse their workers even more.
I'd advocate for anyone pushing for controlled company housing, when they don't get away with cutting corners everywhere and if our society ever realizes that this arrangement might be beneficial for both sides if stringently regulated.
Then you don't want company housing. You want government housing. Which can have its own issues.
I get compensation in taxes and as a paid sum by the company. It's based on kilometers. The taxation thing is based on kilometers and the cheapest available option
I've a friend who works as a truck driver, and does get compensation for how long he has to drive to get to work. It's also tax credits. As someone who doesn't drive but instead would rely on public transport, I wouldn't get compensated.
Honestly I think that's pretty bunk, why does the public fund people having to commute by car? It's something the company should pay the worker for because it's technically work they're doing for the sake of the company.
I fully agree, it's one of the small pieces where profits get privatized but costs get socialized.
Here you gotta fill out specific criteria to be compensated (in taxes) for driving your own car. Otherwise you'll be compensated based on the cheapest possible mode of transport (train and bus, almost always)
Making more living space available in the city where you don't need a car would be more beneficial. it would prevent sealing land in the suburbs, prevent CO2 emissions for travel, and in general improve efficiency of public transport.
Another point is that they mentioned motorbike.
Presumably, if done by car the trip would take much longer due to traffic, and be a lot more expensive because of gas+tolls.
Also, come winter, a nearly 2h drive in piss poor weather is a miserable experience.
On a train, you can sleep all that time!
Unless you live in a densely populated area and the trains are packed to the max during commute hours ... not too uncommon having to stand, unfortunately :(
even when standing, my noise cancelling headphones and my steam deck are helping me to blend out the insanity of society lol
The same route by car takes between 10 and 30 minutes longer, depending on traffic, it's a road where overtakes can be difficult in a car.
The train trip can be fairly comfortable, the bus part is... Bad.
Yeah, lucked out there unfortunately, even a car is the better option it seems.
For years I had the luxury of train + subway to work, it was bliss because the train was the long part of the commute and it was quite good, and the subway was crowded but fairly short and very frequent.
Long urban bus routes suck in general, especially if there are no dedicated bus lanes.
Science says that time is the deciding factor of what you find an acceptable commute, and not the level of comfort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marchetti's_constant
This doesn't exclude the possibility of using the commute time for things that are good for you, which is very much more likely in public transport in comparison to driving yourself. I use every commute for playing on my steam deck, which keeps me calm even if the transport is fully stacked.
My commute: cycle down an old railway line, occasionally going through a tree tunnel.
Not sure how a car loan would give me any freedom I don't already have.
the car loan wouldnt be freedom, it would be like a ball and chain.
You could get a nicer bike?
I could but its already a pretty good bike. Got some nice tyres and pannier bags for it recently, probably getting close to the point of accessories costing more than the bike.
A small bag for phone and keys could be a nice thing to get next. Also slowly acquiring more bike maintenance tools too.
You could always get more bikes for different purposes. You can never have too many bikes
Maybe, but I have limited space and don't really want to work more hours just to pay for more space to store things. I could use that time to ride my bike to the beach instead.
I live in Germany currently and am from the US.
I love train travel. Even the delays people always rag on DB is really not that bad. It could be better yes, but not having to drive everywhere is so nice.
However I do often miss the small conviences of a car. Going to the store and traveling in bad weather were much easier, and yes I'm aware you can have a car here too I just won't be getting one.
Although I must admit I do miss a good road trip too. Where the journey is part of the trip. It's much easier to find something spontaneously while driving and stop to enjoy it.
Overall though not having to drive and being able to relax makes train travel the best
No, it is. Go to the UK or Spain and try their trains there. Miles better. Delays of maybe a few minutes on average.
It spills over too. People avoid getting the Eurostar to Germany because although the UK-France connection is solid, anything after that is just a big fat question mark.
Hell even getting a train to the airport in Germany comes with a huge time risk. You just don't get that stress-inducing level of planning uncertainty in other developed countries with train systems as you do with the DB
The best way to get from the Netherlands to Germany by train is to take the train to the border, taxi/über across the border, then back on the train.
I thought the UK trains were trash and over priced because Thatcher privatized them?
they are trash and they are over priced, but they run predictably. You can bank on making a flight at the airport by taking the train
Lmao.
Try going on a inter-metro train (usually designated as MEX) and have it not be delayed by >10min during day time.
My best record was 1h30min.
Meanwhile the DB navigator app says nothing about delays or cancelled trains and marks the route as done.
It's can't be that hard to get the GPS location of a train, can it?
Conspiracy theory: Germany is surrounded by countries doing quite well with their trains. Germany has the strongest car industry in Europe. Thus Deutsche bahn executives must be payed off by the German car industry to keep the trains run bad.
No conspiracy.
The car lobby heavily subsidizes the politicians to not inveat into railway. I am quite sure about that.
No it is the politicians. Germany used to have a reliable train system. There are a number of issues though. First of all Germany uses trains for freight in a significant way. Then since the 90s they gave some control over regional trains to the states, who then increased the number of trains, because that was popular. They also added high speed trains to the system, which is great but when they are run alongside slower regional and freight trains, they need to overtake them, which lowers a railways capacity.
That all combines to Germany having way too many trains on its tracks, which creates traffic jams. The solution is pretty obviously to build more tracks and at best more high speed lines to add capacity. However that is blocked by the car lobby.
I won't disagree with you on the DB app. Absolute dumpster fire. If they could accurately display their delays it would be so much better. They have so many trains running at major hubs people would find the next best train if they were honest and reported accurately. Nothing like watching an alternative train leave and then the app adds 10 more minutes to your delay.
Don't even get me started on trying to find a bus with DB navigator. Would it kill them to put the fucking stieg info on there? I've missed so many bused because of this.
Wouldnt kill them to put a direction triangle for viewing direction in the damn map like on google maps.
Fucking google maps is more accurate and better to navigate the routes than DB navigator. How??? They have literally all the data for the trains but google maps manages to make a better product ;-;
Just a side note here: MEX trains are a product for Baden-Württemberg (often designed with the bwegt brand in mind), which is not used anywhere else as far as I'm aware. They replaced the older RB trains that have become a rarer sight in BW.
Can't you still rent a car for a trip?
Yes, but it's much harder to justify the cost with the significantly cheaper train travel.
Plus driving here feels different. My guess is it's the population density.
You can always just don't plan and go from train to train and travel around europe, ofc this will not leave you easy access to smaller towns and villages, maybe if you also take your bike with you
Are you in Bavaria?
In Northern Germany I heard that you need a car and no one takes trains because they're always late.
BW, but I've traveled Berlin to Munich to Stuttgart with stops in between via regional rail with a D-ticket. So I'm most unfamiliar with the Northwestern parts of the country.
Trains were mostly on time, if late they seemed to average 10 minutes late, and a few times there were some very late trains. But between the major hubs it was usually possible to just take a different train. I feel like people don't give Germany enough credit for the sheer number of trains it has. You're running trains on lines every hour that other European countries would only have a train every 2 or 3 hours.
Although I'll admit the first place I lived was a small village and my daily commute relied on one train that was nearly 15 minutes late every day. I learned to adjust for it.
No train delay has ever compared to getting stuck in Atlanta traffic for 4 hours. It should on average take 1 hour to drive through Atlanta. I've yet to have a train delayed by 3 hrs
Hamburg main stations is the second busiest in the EU.....
Man, I tried to do public transport to work. I was in the best situation. I lived walking distance to the light rail, my office was on the other side of town, within walking disance to the light rail.
leave at 7:30, walk to the rail by 7:50, not bad buy a ticket on the automated machine and wait, assuming 1 of the 3 machines was working. 50:50 honestly. trains come every 15, except they don't.
On a good day, the train would be there by 8, on a bad day, maybe 8:30 Ride it for 20 minutes, 4 stops, until I need to switch trains. Get off train 1, buy a ticket if the machines there work, god forbid there's no ticket on the first run and a train already there, i'll be waiting for another train. train 2 shows, on a good day, 30 more minutes to my work stop, on a bad day, 45. i hop off at my stop, walk 15m to the office. I'm at the office between 9:30 and 9:45. If it's hot i'm covered in sweat. If it's cold i'm freezing. Luckily my job DGAF what time we show up.
2h there, 2h back.
except after 7:30pm, trains go to every 30 minutes, which means maybe every 45.
If there's an accident, a bus bridge will easily make that one way trip 4 hours.
If I drive, I'm there in 27 minutes.
3.5 hours a day to take public transport here for a 30m drive.
We're not clusters of towns with jobs where everything is near transport and even when things are close our trains are slow an full of homeless trying to stay warm in the winter. I would have loved to hell to get rid of one of the cars. but giving up 1/4 of my family time on a job that already wants 10 hours a day wasn't negotiable.
I really wish it was a reasonable option. The only wine on the train near me is in a paper bag and the guy drinking it smells like old cheese :)
My metro bus isn't as bad, but i'm 5 miles from the nearest station and there's no place to lock up a bike. and I'm suburbs, still not rural.
Do you not have digital tickets of some form?
Also light rail is not that fast. So if you have to wait a long time, you are probably better off riding a bicycle. Obviously infrastructure permitting. Your description sounds like that should be possible in a bit more then an hour, but I have obviously no idea where you live and your work is, so can not honestly judge. Just wanted to throw that out there.
No digital tickets when I was doing it (5 years ago). It's a major metro, but the government here doesn't take it seriously; they treat it as poor transport.
Can't bike through the center of the city safely, no bike lanes. Many streets north and south of the city don't even have shoulders.
40km each way, average summer temps in the 30's
To bike, I'd need to move closer to work, I'd still sweat my ass off and show up stinky. Also, I can't be sure I'd get employment near there if anything happened. Needing to sell my house everytime I change jobs seems like a rough time.
We're just not architected for it. Busses take even longer and are more unpredictable.
Yeah cause everywhere they go is in the Swiss Alps with wine. Not a single European has a shitty commute. This is grass is greener at its finest.
This is obviously an exaggerated example for dramatic effect.
It's not that far off though. I travel a lot across Switzerland by train and either I'm working in the train if it's a commute to work or I'll drink wine, beer or eat in the train restaurant. Worst travel experience is when I watch a series on my phone or computer since it is kind of "lost time".
Traveling in a train is not just waiting, you can almost always do something. Either productive, fun or that you would need to do anyway
One of my former bosses commuted an hour each way by train every day, and he used the commute time to write a series of novels. He left after the second one was published. We were all cursing ourselves for living too close to work, lol.
Yeah but can they do it while knowing that one tenth of a percent of their population has increased their wealth at a rate ten times more than the top 90% of earners in their society? Didn't think so. Take that, losers!
Me, as a European having to drive 55 minutes to work, with our fuel prices: 😭
Luckily my work isn't so far away now, it's only 10 minute drive. Could use public transit but it's not a very feasible option for me
Dunno about safety on your roads, but a 16 km commute is an e-bike no brainer in the NL.
Idk where do you see 16 km, because 55 minutes by car is (at least in Europe) 60-70 km...
I think they meant the 10 minute commute I have now. Makes more sense that way
My commute was around 65-70 kilometers
E: If you mean the 10 minute one then yes I could easily do that with a bike (electric doubly so ) and the public transit there is great (usually, now there's a train stoppage) but I work in heavy construction and need a car to not only get to work but to move around equipment, go to this and that construction site during the day etc.
Otherwise I'd do the commute by train/bike for sure
Yeah i meant the short commute. Ofc, with more context a car does make most sense in your position. I struggle with the multiple sites of my job aswel, making it hard to go by bike everytime. Luckily that doesnt happen every day for me and it is planned so i know when i need to go by car and when i can go by bike. But getting a cargobike did mean many less car rides. Because i get to drop off the kids by bike on my way to work. And i enjoy those commutes so much more.
I'm confused, how far is your work?
It used to be 55 minutes (65-70 kilometers) but now it's 10 minutes (dunno about the distance)
Drive a tank and simply drive over the Honda Accord blocking you 🤷♂️
American solution to American problems👍
Shooting the dog while doing so.
(Am I doing this right?)
Are you calling kolanki a cop?
If the Honda accord is good enough for Jesus it’s good enough for me
fun fact: the Honda accord was named after the Bible verse.
Okay it didn't, but it does come from PIE word for heart:
::: spoiler Etymology :::
Yeah but some trains come every two hours like the commuter rail. So like wait two hours for a train or be in traffic for three hours and then and then that's not even taking into account the travel time which could be up to another two hours. ..... There's no fuckin' winning
What could take an hour on a good traffic day can be a four hour total trip by public transportation.
If your commuter rail in a major city comes only every two hours your system is simply bad. I commute a good distance and there is a fast train every 30 min, from early morning to late night, every day. Frequency gets only worse to places that are already outside of reasonable commuting distance and even then there is usually a train every 60 min.
Why wouldn't you just leave 2 hours later and not wait at all in that situation?
Not the person you're replying to, but if you happen to miss a train or it gets cancelled you generally are already at the train station. Depending on travel time and conditions it might be safer or more convenient to wait at the station, even if it's for two hours.
I've never had to wait for a next train for longer than 30 minutes (maybe once it was an hour because it was a very small train station and during the weekend), but I live in a place with a pretty dense railway network and have mostly lived near one of the biggest routes.
the local trains are the most convenient the Orange, Blue, Red and Green with delays up to about 20 minutes but a lot of people tend to wait for an Uber (again someone with a car) if it's over 20 minutes of a wait.
Commuter Rail depending on your arrival station and your destination station, your wait time can be 2 hours okay yeah if you miss a train you're waiting the 2 hours but I gave an example below of a short shopping trip where you're fucking yourself taking the commuter rail out to a dispensary that can be an hour and a half round trip by car vs 4 a 4 hour round trip by public transportation/the equivalent to a flight to Denver.
LIke doing groceries by public transportation sucks too, I usually call an uber, again the person with a car and a personal storage area where you can load up your own shit.
You can't attach a camper to a bus and go to Maine, right? You can actually have like freedom to do shit and experience life when you have a car. You can take public transportation for fun and make it something to do for fun when you have a car. You still appreciate it, it just doesn't suck to be an individual. Again, this is coming from the 16 years of doing it and i'm just good on it.
I don't even drive, I don't even own a car yet, I'm still biking and using the T, my back fucking hurts at 33 and I'm really sick of it. After a while you start questioning a lot of things but I won't lie I love biking and I end up always being thrown that bone by nature and life and having those moments where my music syncs to my surroundings and/or everything feels perfect like I'm the only one on the planet or just everything has that, "it's for me," feeling and for that i truly don't hate being a cyclist. and there are times on public transportation where i get to see crazy shit happen, like the last time on the orange line there were two boneheads jumping back and fourth between moving carts after they opened the door between the two, I don't 100% hate public transportation it's just over time you start to need to get around a little easier is all
It's not that i absolutely fucking hate it it's unreliable for absolute needs. Like doctors appointments, getting to work, getting groceries, getting cannabis from the dispensary that has the strain that actually helps. If my mom was taken to the hospital that's an all day affair for me to get there by public transportation, she could die by the time I get there, if I drove it's less than 45 mins away.
Commuter rail usually comes more frequently than that, no? And if you know when it comes and it’s not two hours late then you’re waiting around for it unless you’re way too fuckin’ early.
it's quicker for the city but if you're going into Woburn for a dispensary run, that takes less than 10 mins to perform the transaction (saying for the sake of actual example that I've been in, the dispo workers are the best and I didn't mean they're slow) and takes 10 mins to walk there from the CR stop, that's less than 40 mins away by driving so lets say about an 80 minute round trip, that's an hour and twenty minutes round trip. If I take the commuter rail that's 20 minutes to the city using the local train , the 15 minute wait at North Station (because YOU DO want to be early for the commuter rail and that's if you know your schedule and you know you're gonna make it, sometimes there's games and you lose out waiting at the fare gate lines), and about an hour and a half there and then a two hour wait after the short shopping trip.
So to put it into perspective: That's half your day wasted for what could be an hour and a half there and back. Traffic with driving could maybe add about 25 minutes but the amount of time I use on a single dispensary run to Woburn and back using the local train and the cr, I could take a plane to Denver, not even kidding about that, I just used Google Maps and double checked that flight time.
Ok? Really just sounds like the commuter rail could come more often which is a very easy fix. Public transit is pretty much only ever bad because governments won’t fund it, car-centric infrastructure is highly propritized and its peak is still trash.
Traffic is bad enough here, adding the million people who use just the metro per day to that would be the end of it all, and that’s not to mention our bike network and ability to walk to so many things. We upgrading our commuter rail to a proper high-frequency, dual-direction light rail system that will connect much of the island that has never been properly served. It’s gunna pop the hell off.
Example
It's cause of where it goes that it takes so long. The cr uses so much power you hear the full capacity kick in when they come into the station and everything vibrates, they're the most powerful and they're the fastest trains we have in my state.
The main use of the cr, is to get out of the city which is why it takes so long. Purple line https://cdn.mbta.com/sites/default/files/2025-03/2025-03-24-commuter-rail-map-v.42f.pdf
And those of us in Japan
/ Though the winds are so high that our line partially will shut down a few times a year. It was elevated after the tsunami which led to a new issue.
Except at least a third of us are sick of that hell, but we still have to endure the same "find out" phase of the fafo cycle.
Also, why do lol use X and act like there not feeding the troll king
He’ll yeah. We need good mass trains it. Fuck my car and its mother.
Some Americans' commutes, possibly. I have known people to inflict this sort of thing on themselves and I don't see the appeal.
I live in an area where the public transit is notoriously dysfunctional, but my commute is about five minutes by motorcycle. Maybe as much as seven on some days if the traffic lights aren't cooperating with me. On the weekends I ride up to the mountains and enjoy plenty of freedom.
Hell, if you nerds would buy more knives from me I could quit my day job and not have to go anywhere. Think of the carbon savings!
Cutco?
www.flightlessforge.com.
What train goes 200 mph in Europe?
200 mph (320 km/h)
That's not a theoretical vmax, its regular speed day to day
Yeah, vmax on record is 574 km/h.
Damn yall be living in the future. Here in Croatia 80 km/h is like average might go 100+ but no where near 200 km/h
None, they only go 322 km/h
In Spain, for example, AVEs
Not our Swiss trains in the alps, that's for sure. It's too curvy in our rail network. Swiss trains are somewhat famous for going slow relative to neighboring countries' trains.
But I can't speak with confidence for the trains going through French, Italian, German and Austrian areas of the Alps (the Alps stretch further that one might expect).
X repost, downvote this shit
I’ll take the backroads in my dumb little fartbox. It will take twice as long and I’ll hear banjos the entire time but at least I’ll have fun.
Oh, and my car won’t leave without me.
I'm not gonna try and take any of that away from you, but I'm pretty sure fartbox is slang for butthole?
Or hoopty, a junky vehicle.
If you miss your train just catch the next one, it'll be here in like 10 minutes.
I wish that would be true
Even in farm country in Japan, some lines run little 3 car trains every 15 minutes. 100 year old, single track, that splits at stations so trains can go by eachother. You can even take your bicycle on the train. The stations are mostly unmanned.
How does the situation in farm country Japan matter to me when I miss my train and have to wait 1 or 2 hours for the next one?
Happy for those that get to use those trains, but thats just not a universal train experience
The point is that things don't have to be so bad; places with probably less demand run more trains, you just have to force the train companies to invest in infrastructure instead of stock buybacks.
Americans will be shocked by the infrastructure when they to go to China.
Not that they ever will because according to US propaganda news, it's a total third world country hell hole, worse than North Korea.
Who wouldn't be shocked?
Edit: 1 is Guangzhou South, 2 is one of the stations in Shenzhen, 3 is a subway station in Shenzhen (I think, it might have been Hong Kong?), 4 is Tianjin, I think, I don't remember.
If anyone's wondering that's Guangzhou South.
Looks very impressive, but also pretty airport-like. I think I prefer the look of Frankfurt or Zürich, which operate on a similar scale (all three at around 170 million passengers a year).
Of course there is way different railway history behind those. Making it look retro would also have been weird for Guangzhou South I would think.
There are some amazing airports in China. Chengdu Tianfu International Airport or Beijing Facing are state of art and great design.
I edited it to include locations.
I do find Chinese architecture and design is often a little less inviting or more sterile than I'd like.
Ah I thought it was all the same location and stopped searching after the first 😁 thanks for the edit!
Good work, I wouldn't have been able to tell you which guangzhou station it was without looking up old receipts.
How about Shanghai Songjiang railway station?
Impressive, but not very warm.
I watch one British guy's videos from where he lives in China. You can actually rent fucking robot legs there that walk you around. Robot legs!
And when they're stopped at the lights, the desperate people knocking on their window hoping for some loose change
I've always wondered if that and the people coming to clean your windshield etc. are a real, common thing or just movie/tv show trope
It’s real in some parts of Los Angeles for sure.
I've often used about homeless people in Los Angeles. What's it about LA that they're associated with/have a large homeless population?
Or maybe it was San Francisco. I think one of those.
It's great weather to be homeless in.
I've had to sleep in my car in a midwestern winter. If I hadn't been in school and expecting to find a place to stay I probably would've headed out to the west coast too. Milder seasons are extremely valuable in such situations.
There's also a thing I've heard of with more conservative states shipping some of their homeless to the coasts so as to not have to deal with them themselves
It's real
I've seen poor bastards putting themselves in harm's way in moving traffic, desperate for some help
Damn that's rough
It’s very real. Where I live I think I’ve only seen someone try to clean my windshield maybe twice. But seeing people beg on intersection corners is a very common sight. There’s whole tent cities out here. The solution? Obviously it’s to criminalize begging and post signs everywhere that say “Be part of the solution, say no to panhandlers” as if that solves anything. The ‘ol ignore it and maybe it’ll go away approach.
I also see a lot of people selling flowers, or occasionally candy apples at intersections as well.
I mean, it was Jesus's vehicle of choice
Not a Honda Accord, but a Honda Ridgeline.
However, it's the only comfortable seat I own, so I don't mind it.
Trains where I am suck because the seats are too small, and no matter how little space there is next to me in a train seat, some fat guy always sits there. Usually right after he's eaten a meal of nothing but raw garlic.
On a related note, never trust your GPS on I-95 driving near Washington DC.
I drive a Ford Fiesta thank you very much. 😉
Being Canadian in what is one of our larger (not major to be clear like 150k people) cities, when I went to the office it took 10ish mins. I moved a bit so had varying times. I work from home now so doesn't really matter.
That said I love listening to audiobooks in the car. My android phone has been odd for connecting but working lately so I just continue on whichever book I'm listening to, for about 3mins to the store. I don't go far heh. Bit longer if I drive closer to the office for a car wash every few weeks.
Meanwhile I do a delivery job and blare Free bird while going 90 in my 01 Tacoma. If it makes it any better it only goes 90 on gods forsaken desert roads while Free bird is playing, I got it to accelerate so fast the front lifted up last time
This is sort of overblown. In very few situations will you wait in traffic for 3 hours. There are plenty of roads that flow with only minor traffic delays outside of the big cities.
Still need trains. Fast trains. Choo choo!
I can guarantee you depending on where you live this is absolutely normal
Live in Massachusetts anywhere outside the 90 belt and it will take you hours to get in to boston if your woek is there.
It's almost like a meme about all of Europe and America might be a tad too general.
Unless you're being transported somewhere as cattle, traveling for work is a choice.
Uh, it's like comparing the best life you could have in Western Europe with the worst life you could have in American suburbs.
It's no different from comparing an American surgeon earning 400k yearly in Manhattan to a person surviving in Belarus or Albania. Same bias but flipped in opposite direction.
Both comparisons would be unfair.
I am not saying life is worse in the EU than in the US, but there are many better ways to argue that more logically using data.
See, what you’re not getting is that the average US experience is just incredibly fucking mid. I live in Canada, specifically Montréal because the rest of the country is very much like the US. Cars are the only way to get around, you can’t even safely and confidently ride a bicycle in most North American cities.
The best the US has to offer is worse than pretty good but not the best in the EU. The worst the EU has to offer is nowhere near as bad as a fairly common, even if not universal, experience in the states.
Nothing from of either of our comments even fuckin’ matters though because this post is specifically calling out the people who think sitting in traffic “freedom” but 15 minute cities are tyrannical overreach.
Taking a train to work isn't a luxury only afforded to the 1%, not only are they a better experience, trains are cheaper than driving in most of the world.
“Best life” is when one has to commute to work by train?
Pretty sure it is about the Alps and the wine.
Didn't have wine every day when I went to school by train.
Fair enough, although I thought OP was talking about just general travel, while the guy I’m responding to made it about commuting.
Ikr. People aspire to get cars so they don't have to take the fucking stupid ass unreliable public transportation. Back in my day the only people who relied on public transportation were poor people, retards and immigrants but I guess with the mental health crisis and the economy tanking, we're all poor retards.
If you have good Karma, you don't even need to work. That's how Jesus fed those people with the fish and loaves. He kept giving them away and the equivalent would keep returning to him with interest. You can't just throw shit away though. This type of magick is dependent on intention-setting, as it is our intention we have direct control of, which then determines how we entangle ourselves with Karma.
If you don't understand that, in the fourth jhana of meditation, you can observe for yourself how your inner AND outer world are procedurally generated based on how you entangle yourself with this singular stream of symbols, and how you set your intention determines the way you are entangled with each symbol, which is what determines the parameters for your reality to spawn.
The world is an illusion. Both the Buddha and Jesus said this in their own words. What Jesus called his Father the Buddhists call the Ālaya-vijñāna, or storehouse consciousness. I use the term Server, and each of us individuals are a Client, and all other monadic entities growing/budding off the Server are what make up the Holy Internet, and this is what a Roman Dodecahedron is meant to teach as it is a pedagogical object to illustrate Indra's Net as a diagram in a textbook would.
And I will preach at Wendy's before sucking off the Mexican man who works there and gives me extra fries, unless he's got a family. Don't wanna be a homewrecker with what this mouth can do.
Do you not have school buses?
In Japan, kindergarteners are required to get to school using public transit, alone. They wear bright yellow hats so everyone can see them/knows where they're going if they look like they need help.
Op, and this thread isn't mocking the person imprisoned by a Honda Accord for not simply taking a 200mph train through the Alps while sipping a glass of wine to get to work, its mocking them and you for not understanding how bad things are and defending such a terrible system. Better things are possible, but it requires systemic change, nobody expects tragicinfo to personally build a high-speed rail network.
Yes, I think mocking working-class parents is a great way to get the point across. Bravo.
Working class parents can have ignorant, crab-bucket mentalities too.
So can uninformed brave keyboard warriors, squabbling for internet likes. Put your child on your motorcycle and take them to school if you're so anti-car.
I see children on motorbikes every day here in vietnam, its how people get their kids to school.
Under 14-16 the parents or older brother drops the kids off, sometimes you see a mom with 2 kids between her legs and 1 one the back. Around that age they tend to get electric scooters and drive themselves and maybe 1-2 friends. At 16 they can get a 49cc bike, but a lot illegally ride a 110cc.
Its not possible in America because we designed everything around cars. Look outside your bubble, things don't have to be so bad.
Just how bad is the European commute that they need to go through the alps at 200mph everyday?
You can have a 30 minute commute and still take a train through the alps if both your house and your job are in the alps.
I'm not even sure there are any trains going 320 km/h anywhere in the alps. AFAIK the highest speeds in that region are around 200 km/h, maybe 230 km/h.
I heard that when they built the Lötschberg train tunnel to connect the upper Wallis area with Thun and Bern, people started commuting through there. Visp-Thun is only half an hour and Visp-Bern is only an hour now. But yeah I still don't think it's that many.
Also Swiss trains don't run that fast, it's more like 155 mph in the Lötschberg.
Sorry boss I don't think Americans can really throw any shade on China for authoritarian overreach anymore.
Your guy just fired the people looking after postal vote rolls. I wonder how many of those families might get disappeared, memes or not.
He just launched his own personal brand of gas stations selling fuel he stole or extorted from whomever he's picked on recently.
You Europeans aren't very far behind with the amount of population surveillance you are adding to. What surveillance bill just got passed this week?
I don't think any of us can be throwing rocks around about freedom anymore.
Actually im in Australia but I acknowledge we are also heavily surveilled.
However, we do have free elections, we embrace, we respect bodily autonomy, and we don't have a tinpot dictator.
Until you don't. And surveillance is often a first step.
My original comment was, American's don't have much credibility when calling others authoritarian shit holes.
That applies just as well to your comment as the original commenter I responded to.
Consider it a warning that is probably too late.
Americans. SMH.
Do people in the US really get disappeared?
Yes. All the time. That's what ICE does.
Are ICE used against officials like that too?
Disappearing officials who use their positions to get rich would actually be pretty cool. Maybe we could disappear billionaires who get political too.
Where have you been for the last year? Trump is absolutely going to use ICE to discourage people on the postal voter list from voting.
I'm been in my country I guess? I'm just surprised if ICE is used against those officials
You might have misunderstood my comment.
Trump has fired the officials who were looking after the list of postal voters. They will appoint replacements who will hand over the list.
They will use ICE to intimidate people on the list into not voting.
Yes.
Yeah since the first trump administration
I'm not cheering on your downfall, I'm challenging you to engage in some introspection rather than whataboutism.
Sorry mate did you reply to the wrong comment? Not making much sense there.
Please don't breed
You're nowhere near as clever as you think you are
I can tell you I'm not imprisoned by my powerful, responsive Acura.
Lol I love The Onion.
You can tell some people either didn’t get the joke or watch the vid.
thanks for reminding me of this gem