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Portugal is in America 😂😂😂😂😂 and it’s gotten way worse since the pandemic
american trains look better and nobody will ever pry that fact from my cold dead hands.
Have you seen the trains in the Netherlands?
can’t say i have, but im assuming it’s safe to say they look pretty boring.
Based on what do you think it’s safe to say that?
You clearly need to look at more train pictures
I am sure there are magnificent american trains but some american trains are probably ugly too
My point is: beauty is not bound by borders and there is so much out thereall the euro trains look like futuristic renders of trains, american trains make me feel happy.
euro trains will simply never compare, also the E bell goes hard, and you will never take that away from me.
ah yes when you get to the station and the announcements say “the next train to so-and-so has been cancelled, sorry for the inconvenience” Always a fun day
Most of my country doesn’t have trains. The only train on time goes to the airport, yes THE airport. Everything else is buss for train. And I purposely didn’t mention the country but everyone from here knows it when they read buss for train.
I think you may have Europe confused with Japan.
Deutsche Bahn will definitely proof that public transit in the EU isn’t necessarily…. there? Working? …
It’s definitely better than nothing but it doesn’t feel better than nothing.
Germany’s known for having terrible rail. Probably on account of BMW lobbying.
Really? As an American who had never ridden a train before, I was impressed by Germany’s public transit. I remember wishing we had such systems everywhere over here.
Honestly though, I’d prefer high speed mag-lev systems that run like clockwork.
Germany’s known for poor rail, America’s known for no rail.
BMW, VW and Mercedes. The German Bundesbahn was perfect then the CDU, CSU and FDP killed it due to lobbyism. Now, the politicians suck the cocks of the CEOs of the mentioned companies. SPD and Grüne always say that the Deutsche Bahn needs more money, but they had the chance between 98 and 05. Did they change something? No there was not enough money according to them.
Not even the biggest thing that beautiful trio ruined. Their lobbying and Mutti Merkel’s politics were the main contributors to the Hungary problem. So if you want to know why common defense policies get vetoed or why is the Ukraine response is a shitshow, the root cause is that VW needed cheap exploitable workers.
Big Money Wasted
As an American, I don’t have access to trains, buses, bike lanes, sidewalks or even a shoulder on the road. The last time I tried to walk home from the tire shop two miles away, three people stopped to offer me a ride because it is that dangerous. I live inside the 275 loop that runs around Cincinnati.
I did this math recently. To walk to work would take me either a 2 hour walk, a 17 minute drive, or a 45 minute bus ride.
I live in Utrecht, one of The Netherlands’ larger cities. I don’t even have a car anymore. I can reach any place in the city by cycling in 15min max. Planning a trip with Google maps often shows cycling to be as fast or even faster than by car. Amsterdam by train is 30min, train leaves every 10min. I can take my bike in the train or take a public transportation bike from any train station. Cars are stupid.
I lived a year in Nijmegen when I was younger, and later another year in Duesseldorf, so what you’re describing isn’t foreign to me. But where I live now there are no options other than car. If you don’t own one you need a friend with one or an Uber.
Damn, that sucks. I never have to worry about traffic, I have no time delay when traveling during rush hour by bike. More people on bikes means less cars, less traffic jams. I don’t understand why other countries move away from cars, there are only benifits and no downsides switching to a stronger public transit and cycling infrastructure. It unclugs traffic so businesses have faster travel times, there are less accidents, the city is cleaner, there is more room to build as there is less need for parking space, road maintenance is cheaper, the cities get a better feeling for being in as people are invited to be in the streets instead of their cars. There’s more room for greenery, which has a mental benifit as well as rainwater management. Kids can play on the streets safely again instead. It’s not hard to do. Rotterdam was rebuilt after the second world war when it was wiped from the map by German bombing. They built it up like American cities, completely car focused. They completely changed it to bike friendly because of accidents and clogging, making a very shitty city a very nice one.
How easy is it for you to take your bike on the train in that area? I was visiting Utrecht recently and was really surprised they only allowed 2-3 bikes on the entire train (off peak hours too).
I avoid rush hour because people are annoying. I usually have no issue with bringing my bike, most of the times there are a few bike areas on each train and when it’s 5 instead of 3 while people can still pass the hallway no one would care about it. But it’s just as easy to use a bike from NS (national railway), they are at every station and it’s cheap. A folding bike is free to take by train, I might buy an electric one in the future.
Yeah, my “Public Transit” option on google maps is entirely greyed out. This is my daily commute to work:
It’s always entertaining to see the Europeans go “lol just ditch your car, it has to start somewhere” like it wouldn’t require me to move my entire family across town, (and pay 3x as much rent to live in the city…) Like I don’t even have the option of taking public transit, because there are no connecting lines between my home and my job. Literally none. The nearest bus stop is almost as far away as my job, and it’s in the opposite direction.
And to be clear, that 2+ hour walk would be on a highway with no sidewalk. I’d be dead on day 1. If I wanted to avoid the highway, the walk would be closer to 4.5 hours; The highway is the only direct path.
require me to move my entire family across town, (and pay 3x as much rent to live in the city…)
(I’m an American BTW.)
That’s so sad that it’s just greyed out lol. Even google maps is like, nah you’re fucked dude
To be fair, Google Maps sucks ass in this regard. If you ever visit Europe, never EVER trust it for public transit information. Always look on the native apps and websites. Google Maps regularly offers me routes that either don’t exist anymore, not at that time or day of the week, unnecessarily require a group taxi somewhere or are simply extremely inefficient. Instead of a 95min travel it wanted me to go for a route that took 145 minutes the last time (luckily I knew it was bullshit).
Even FOSS apps that may acquire travel data through rather novel means will provide more accurate information than the billions of dollars available to Googles car heads.
It actually found some useful routes in Scotland that the bus website couldn’t tell you about - e.g. where there’s no direct route somewhere, but you can go to a place near the junction of some routes and wait for a bus in the other direction.
Transit outside the actual city, of any kind, is pretty abysmal.
funny but inaccurate
i live in vienna. the train comes so often, nobody bothers to check the schedule anymore. just wait 2 mins, enter, go.
Same in Paris.
“What do you mean I have to wait 4 minutes for the next metro?”
Meanwhile in Belgium,
“I don’t know where or when will I end up after I board the bus back home from work”
American here - I recently started taking the train to go to work! Previously I couldn’t due to no trains scheduled for the return home trip after my shift was over, but after getting a new schedule, I got on board the train! So far in the past two months, I’ve already had a few instances of the train being delayed or missing it entirely. One day, the train was delayed by 30 minutes and stated they would be held for an unknown amount of time to put out a fire on the tracks at a station ahead - drove into work that day. Another day, the train was delayed by 5 minutes. Outside of that, I was late to the train by like 5 minutes and it left without me (still adjusting to early morning schedule).
So far, I like taking the train much more than driving the car.
I’m Polish but I also made the switch to use public transport instead of my car, even though it’s not the cheapest once you’re not a student anymore. I feel better though knowing how much fuel I save by not driving in traffic for 1.5h 4 days a week. The other thing is that the money goes to the city so I will likely benefit from it in some way
And you also get a little bit of time to yourself! I use it to study for certs.
True, although this aspect is actually an area where I prefer driving. I find it relaxing to zone out my thoughts and just focus on what’s ahead of me with my favorite music. Depending on time of day, trains here are a bit tough to study in due to how many people there are
I owned a car in Toronto. I still took the train DT. Driving DT literally was longer then the train.
Of course the trains leave without you if you are 5 min late.
It will leave without you if you are 30 seconds late. Hell, it will even leave if you are 5 seconds late unless they see you running and are feeling extra nice.
Never said it shouldn’t! Just means it’s running on time. Like I said, I’m still adjusting to the early schedule.
You haven’t seen Croatian rail then ;)
You clearly havent heard of swedish trains.
The railroad here is a bad joke at this point, mainly due to shutting down the organization that was responsible for maintainence and shoving it into another agency that has no clue. As a bonus the new agency doesn’t even do the repair work themselves but hires contractors at the lowest bidder. So stuff breaks constantly, which causes delays.
At this point just getting the rail network to “normal” standards would cost billions. Let alone expanding it to cope with current traffic levels.
To be fair, most higher density areas in Sweden have fairly good infrastructure for public transit. The national railways are a disgrace, but that mostly affects long distance travel. Mostly. Short to medium distance commute works fairly well everywhere I’ve tried it.
[cries in Swedish]
Scandinavia has more in common with Canada when it comes to public transportation
Canada has high speed trains?
Their trains break down a lot and it’s a bigger joke
I am here to represent the germans. The country where the only thing we agree about is, how fucking shit our trains are
I havent seen one company where “train didn’t come” isn’t a valid excuse for bring late. Like, no further questions.
I was late for a hair appointment because I missed the bus, and I swear they wrote it down in my file because every time I went back, for the next year they were like “So… Did you come by bus today?”
Also yeah no problem if your train doesn’t come once - but if it happens more than once it’s going to reflect badly even though it’s out of your control. You’ll start to get the comments “You should take the earlier one!” I travelled by bus with 2 transfers to college and it was ROUGH.
I used it every time it happened, very rarely when I just slept in. My boss also came by S-Bahn so he was late from time to time as well. Of course if we had an important meeting or a customer appointment we came in a whole hour early, to compensate for 3 train failures, which never happened. But if you came 20 minutes late on a regular Tuesday nobody cared that much (boring office IT job).
There’s a classic that Irish rail used to pull out of their bag of shite excuses until they got slagged to death over it:
Leaves on the track.
No joke. C’mon now lads. In fairness though the train service in Dublin and inter-city is pretty reliable and reasonable.
My understanding is that leaves contain some compound(s) that, when wet and under the extremely high pressures that train wheels provide, becomes one of the most effective lubricants we know about. In other words, the brakes literally won’t do anything because you’ll slip-n-slide your way at the same speed you were going before.
Sounds like the Irish version of the german winter chaos. The very moment the first snowflake drops it’s total chaos, trains being terminated left and right due to an old railway switch that still saw Adolf freezing shut again.
Me When My metro train (Santiago) doesn’t immediately arrive as soon as i touch the platform.
It’s funny, but after traveling around Europe, I’ve learned one important lesson: avoid booking flights with short layovers! If the transfer time is less than 3-4 hours, you’re playing a risky game. Delays happen more often than you’d think, and in some cases, flights get pushed to the next day due to ‘bad weather’ (or other mysterious reasons). Better to have a buffer than to get stuck at the airport overnight!
