> American trains tend to be much less frequent, slower, and less comfortable than most European trains.
Exception: the New York regional rail system. Its on-time stats are comparable to Switzerland.
We love to talk about subways and intercity high-speed rail. But in America, it doesn't make sense in most cases without subsidies. Drive-on / drive-off regional rail, on the other hand, trades pursim for pragmatism and could really work in our car-dependent metros.
> But in America, it doesn't make sense in most cases without subsidies
That's the point of public transit, and that's the case everywhere. Also that of roads; roads wouldn't exist without government subsidies because nobody wants to pay toll to exit their driveways.
Of course you'd need to reduce car dependency for any public transit system to make sense, and I don't think Americans care for that. For some reason, "15 minute towns" were turned into some kind of boogeymen to scare conservatives for a while during the last election cycle, which says a lot about the American approach to infrastructure design.
> you'd need to reduce car dependency for any public transit system to make sense, and I don't think Americans care for that
This is what I mean. To reduce car dependence given America's built infrastructure, demographics and geographic spread, you'd have to build such a massive amount of public transportation that I think--outside major metropolitan areas--it would be cheaper to stick to cars.
Most major American cities have terrible traffic and air quality problems already, which are only getting worse as cars get bigger and heavier (and electric cars can be worse). America might need thirty years of densification before some of the high speed rail boosters' ideas make sense, but congestion charging, better zoning rules, and gradual elimination of street parking coupled with improving bus and rail infrastructure made sense thirty years ago and made more sense today. Amsterdam didn't get to be a nice place to live through natural luck or some magic non-Americanness, it took fifty years of gradual improvements and rebuilding, and the fights about it in the '70s were just as bitter as the fights about transport in the US today.
Just quickly gonna shill that carsharing and motorcycles/scooters are a pretty good option as is home office/decentralized offices for many current commuters.
Carsharing doesn't really help with peak time traffic which is the biggest issue. Motorcycles/scooters/e-bikes can work if you can figure out the right incentives to get people to use them. If you can get employers to support working from home that would help hugely, but that's a big if.
Exception: the New York regional rail system. Its on-time stats are comparable to Switzerland.
We love to talk about subways and intercity high-speed rail. But in America, it doesn't make sense in most cases without subsidies. Drive-on / drive-off regional rail, on the other hand, trades pursim for pragmatism and could really work in our car-dependent metros.