this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
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Fast trains so that you can be restricted in exactly when you can visit and still pay for it. And then have to walk the rest of the distance from the train station to her house. There is so many flaws people just ~~fail~~ refuse to see.
Cars are even more restricted in travel time. Unlike trains, which typically come multiple times an hour, car travel has to be planned around rush hour and gridlock.
Honestly, I don’t even know how we can be debating this. Car dependence is a dead end. Cars don’t scale because a linear increase in drivers requires a non-linear increase in surface area. Car dependence makes it impossible to meet our climate goals. These catastrophic failures are so much worse than needing to walk a few blocks. There are so many flaws that car people just ~~fail~~ refuse to see.
Trains go from nowhere near where I live, to nowhere near anywhere I want to go, then cost just as much as a car (Yes I did the sums).
To use trains not only do I have to use my car I also have to pay for parking. May as well drive wherever I want to go.
Of course traffic jams are real. That's why wherever possible I either go on the motorbike or shop on Amazon instead.
Even the Netherlands or Japan have many places where only travel by car makes sense. We will always need some cars. Maybe your situation is like that. But your personal situation doesn’t dictate whether or not it makes sense for society to build a lot more trains, which is what we’re talking about.
Also, describing how much less convenient trains are for you presently than driving is kind of missing the point. Everyone already agrees that train lines don’t exist to service many places. We’re not talking about what exists now, but how things should change.