- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.skoops.social/post/727
crossposted: https://lemmy.skoops.social/post/665
Oh boy…
You must log in or register to comment.
You can go from France to Germany by tram in 20 minutes tho. (If you live in Strasbourg of course)
There is also the Saarbrücken tram train, which goes to France.
45 minutes to fly, but god help you if you check luggage, might as well be all day at that point.
Luggage doesn’t matter.
Gotta leave the house 2 hours before the 2 hours before your flight. Then board, Then fly. Then disembark.If flight is noon, you leave the house at 8 to be at the airport for 10. Then security theatre (remove your shoes, you’re going to the LaNd Of TeH FrEe!!!).
If you’re lucky, you’re hailing a cab at JFK at 1:30pm.
That’s your “45 minute flight”. 6 hours, if you’re lucky.
Putting transit time to the airport is a bit unfair. Depends on how far you live from the airport.
Airports are almost never in the city center.
Train stations are in the city center, plus in Europe they’re always connected to the rest of the public transportation network, which generally means the subway.
If you live within the urban area getting to the train station is invariably a shorter trip, if you live outside it depends if you’re lucky enough to live nearest the side of the city were the airport is or not.
My own experience when living in London before Brexit is that for example to go to Paris, even when I lived just outside the Greater London area and on the side of the city with an airport (London Stansead), door-to-door going to Paris by flying didn’t end up being any faster than taking the Eurostar train from St. Pancreas and even back then you had to go through passport control for the train because the UK was never in the Schengen Area so taking the train didn’t shave of that time.
Part of the problem is that peripheral airports aren’t anywhere as well connected to the public transportation network as city center train stations are, so often the best way to get there is by car, by which point you’re either doing an Uber or Taxi to it (which if you’re outside the city is actually a bit of an expense) or you take your own car but then you have to park it which unless you’re doing a daytrip or such means longer term parking areas, which are further away from the actual boarding gates, and all that shit adds up. And then on the other side you have the exact same problems but in reverse order, so you “pay” the overheads of having to go through an airport twice each way when you fly.
Fair. It depends on the city too many do have transit to the Airport or are working on expanding out that way.
A couple of main airports are indeed well connected to the public transit network (for example Amsterdam Schiphol has a train station under the airport connected to the main train line and it takes about 15 minutes to get to Amsterdam Centraal Station on a regular commuter train).
However I was talking about the peripheral airports, which are at best on a train line which doesn’t have many options (such as London Gatwick) or at far end of a subway line as peripheral airports are the ones that could potentially be faster to use for somebody living outside a main city (which, as I mentioned above, in my own experience was not the case).
Don’t forget that train stations tend to be in the city centre while the airport is 30-60 minutes outside in a field somewhere, so travel time is much reduced.
Add in 2 hours of traffic between JFK and anywhere you want to get to. Or try your luck with La Guardia!
I actually prefer La Guardia. When I was regularly staying in Brooklyn it was like a 30 minute cab ride from the airport.
I’ve only ever travelled to Germany from France via train. I wouldn’t bother flying,that’s waaay to much of an effort
Ok sure, but that’s going the other way. According to that guy travelling by train to France from Germany isn’t physically possible.
Only if you cannot decide which of the hundreds of passenger trains crossing that border every day to take. IIRC there are over 20 trains a day from Berlin to Paris.
Not to mention a french city named Strasbourg.
Good point well made
In the US people will argue it’s quicker to fly or drive than take the train then show up 2 hours early to be sure to make it through check-in and TSA security to be sure to make their flight on time. Then waste another hour waiting for luggage
Not to mention you’re lucky if you don’t have to take a connecting flight to get where you’re going, which adds a few more hours at least. But at least it gives you more opportunities to eat that delicious, healthy and inexpensive airport food!
deleted by creator
The problem is that the railways are prioritized for freight traffic first
This is de facto true. But, the law is that passenger traffic gets priority. It’s just not enforced because the companies have more power than the government is willing to spend on this issue.
deleted by creator
Only a car take me ro point A to point B
Only if you mean that point B is the gigantic parking lot where you still have to walk 15 minutes to the Walmart.
It would be true. Trains are next to non-existent in the US.
I live near Acela, which is not high speed, not cheap, and does not have enough capacity but is also the only part of the US with convenient intercity rail. I would never fly or drive when I can take this train, but outside of Acela ……
Lol I used to take Amtrak back and forth between Philly and DC. Once I decided to check out if an Acela ticket would be worth it - it was like three times the price and got there a whopping 10 minutes sooner.
The Acela is worth it going to NYC and further north. Every town in Connecticut apparently still has an Amtrak stop (which is cool, but goddamn). Compare the travel times of the Acela and Amtrak between DC and Boston.
Yeah, a lot of people don’t realize that there are major cities in the US without passenger trains. Not just lacking inter-city rail, trams, etc., but literally no train stations for people.
Columbus, Ohio has a metro area of 2.1mill people. And if they want to take the train to NYC, they first have to take a three hour bus ride to Cincinnati. As they tore down their last passenger train station over forty years ago.
Does Cincinnati still have its one train a day at 2am or some other ungodly hour? Or are they on the “three trains a week” schedule?
I’m inside the 275 loop in Cincinnati but can’t get downtown without getting a ride in a car to a bus station. At that point, might as well just use the car to get downtown. Or to wherever else I’m going. Train travel is WAY too slow in the US. I’ve never had a vacation longer than a week, I’d barely be arriving at anywhere interesting and I would already be due back at work.
I think it’s daily now but yes, still at like 3am. Used to be a few times a week.
You can thank John Kasich for that. IIRC DeWine’s admin is doing a feasibility study of doing the “Three C” route Obama tried to fund
a three hour bus ride to Cincinnati
I was about to call you out for this, until I remembered the six hour bus rides I used to have to take from Columbus to Akron when I was in college (less than two hours by car, natch).
And that’s just the people who live nearby. For the 1mill people who live outside the city proper, there’s probably another hour or two of travel and wait before the bus sets off.
Yeah, I’ve been using trains for travel in the northeast lately.
It’s less travel time, there’s no ridiculous security theater, and I don’t get these nickel and dime charges for checked bags.
I did enjoy taking Amtrak between Philly and DC a few years ago - as long it wasn’t raining, that is.
I’m fairly resilient to uncomfortable travel unless it’s actively painful like ear popping sometimes, so I usually just choose on price and speed most of the time.
Don’t forget the 45m-1hr travel time to and from airports.
And if you live in New York good luck with that. It’s more likely you’re going to have a 2-hour travel time to the airport.
I was so pissed that the only affordable option to get to Bushwick from the airport was a shitty bus that ran late and was packed.
BUILD A TRAIN TO YOUR GODDAMN INTERNATIONAL TRANSIT HUBS
I’m sure the US will make train travel the same grueling experience as they made air travel
Yeah I took the train from Chicago to Springfield, and was shocked that I had to go through security and also present the same credit card that I used to buy the ticket. In Europe I literally just get on the train most times…
Wait till this guy finds out you can take a train from France to England.
It’s going to blow his mind
“Trains don’t float, IDIOT”
- Greg, probably
I love the multiple layers to it. Obviously European travel is not what he believes it to be, but neither is American airplane travel, and he must know that, but he’s so desperate to pretend otherwise.
I’ve been in Germany two years and gone to France three times by train.
I honestly don’t think people appreciate public transit enough. Trains are the fucking bomb and if people could make trains and trams and buses a priority I think the world would be a remarkably more fun and enjoyable experience.
Vote for the political parties, even at and especially the local level, that want to put more money into public infrastructure focused around public transit. Cars and planes have their places, but they should never be the priority when city planning and a strong country is one connected by high speed rail and convenient, reliable public transit.
It’s the other way round. Individualism prevents communism. People drive cars to prevent them from voting for those parties.
Downvoters, do you think all that bad urban planning is incompetence of the specialists while every comment section is filled with geniuses who for some reason are enlightened about public transport but never in the position of power to bring it to life?
It’s the other way round. Individualism prevents communism
Is that supoosed to be a good thing or a bad thing ?
Downvoters, do you think all that bad urban planning is incompetence of the specialists
No, they’re just narrowly constrained as to what they can do eg. They cant knock back a Cosc-Co because there’s no train station so, you end up with a sprawling shit hole as de facto
A good follow on Mastodon who’s an actual traffic expert and teaches it
A good read
https://bookwyrm.social/book/1907724/s/killed-by-a-traffic-engineer
Is that supoosed to be a good thing or a bad thing ?
I don’t judge. I just care about the mechanisms.
No, they’re just narrowly constrained as to what they can do
It’s turtles all the way down. At some point, somebody makes a decision against public transport.
A good follow on Mastodon who’s an actual traffic expert
Thanks for the link. Frustrating content but good.
I love traveling by train, but in Poland it’s so fucked I have to either drive or waste days just to get somewhere. They just deleted train I could use to get to Warsaw in about 5h, now it’s extra transfer, almost 7 hours, and I have to do it a day earlier, so extra night in a hotel vs 4,5h drive. The same with Berlin, I’d love to just ride a train, it’s less than 4 hours drive vs 6,5 hour train ride (which is fine, I can go with that), price of the single ticket is more than gas for my car, so twice as much for two person – I could live with that, but the transfer time is under 30 minutes, which with notoriously unreliable trains means I would probably miss the connection and lost all my bookings (or just tried to go back with train/bus just to my village (already losing ~80€ for the tickets), and then grab a car.
I’m not familiar with Poland’s political or train situation, but these problems are fixable. Vote for progressives, make it a priority, we need to start taking power back from the inept and corrupt and start fixing problems again.
I’m sorry your trains aren’t good. Everyone deserves good trains.
I took a train through germany just last week.
I have my beef with the DB, but their ICE trains paired with SNCF are nothing to complain about
I took an ICE last week between Strasbourg and Paris. It was ok overall but there was a big lack of storage for luggages compared to a TGV.
ok overall
That’s a huge compliment for the DB. The fact that they can run the bare minimum services at all between cities within reasonable time frames genuinely amazes me.
For anybody wondering, why DB being able to meet minimum service is so incredible, it is rather simple. Both passenger and freight demand in Germany have grown over the last decades. However the government did rarely invest in new track or even repairs of old railway infrastructure. Basically Germany needs a high speed rail network parallel to the exisiting slower lines to meet demand, as well as some additional freight lines. Without that DB has no chance in hell to actually be a good rail provider.
So the fact that they can somewhat meet demand is an incredible achievement by DB.
I mean I was just ragging on their absolute gobshite regional services, but yeah fair point
The regional service sucks to a large part due to a lack of capacity on German main lines. Regional trains and freight trains run at about the same speed, which is great for capacity. However high speed trains are faster and therefore need to overtake them. You need to plan for that, which require additional capacity. In other words, when you take ICE trains of the old main lines, you massivly improve regional rail as well.
Once you expirenced an SNCF+ICE connection taking 5 hours instead of the planned 2h you will have something to complain about. I love shitting on DB as much as the next one, but they are worlds better than the SNCF. I’d rather fly than deal with French trains.
I took a train from Brussels to London. JFC.
Yeah, if you take it from Amsterdam to London, it’s comparable to Toronto => NYC.
I just took the train from Switzerland to Italy. Can confirm, people do it.
Just took the train from Frankfurt to Strasbourg.
Utterly depressing how this planet is predominantly populated by absolute morons with all the zeal and confidence of the best among us.
Having done both the flying and the high speed in a few routes in Europe, the overhead of flying is so much that for anything within about 1000km distance a high speed train is faster, especially because both the origin and the destination train stations are pretty much in the city center and have direct connections to the subway network so you almost always save time and hassle in just getting to the station from your actual origin and from the destination station to your actual destination on the other side, compared to an airport. This is especially so for budget airlines as they tend to use even more peripheric airports.
Further, within the Schengen space in the EU there is no kind of passport or security control, so in most of Europe you literally just walk into a train that happens to go to another country in just the same way as you walk into a train that happens to go to the next city over.
Even for larger distances when the whole trip door-to-door takes an extra hour or two due to doing it by train rather than flying, it’s often worth it because the train is way more comfortable, with plenty of room and you can just get up whenever and go for a walk to the restaurant carriage and get yourself a drink or a light meal.
But yeah, beyond a certain point the train is not worth it anymore. For example Lisbon - Paris by high speed train would be around 6h on a straight line (if you could, which you can’t because of the Golf Of Biscay) at 250 km/h whilst the flight is 3h, but of course, trains in Portugal being shit outside short commuter lines around the 2 major cities and the North-South axis, there isn’t actually a high speed train to Paris or even to anywhere in Spain or even inside the country (fast trains at best, not high speed ones), so you have to take the train and a bus to the nearest point in Spain with a high speed train connection to Madrid and from there to Paris, so you’re lucky if you do the whole trip in 17h.
This…planes are only faster on paper. Still gotta deal with check-in, security, boarding, un boarding, and getting to/from the airport at both sides.
I used to live in RI and worked like a 10 minute walk from PVD with a job that would do a lot of travel. I would always take the train to NYC. Way more convenient and faster to directly to Midtown Manhattan.
DC was iffy. Nowadays I’d probably take the train, (if only because DCA is a shitshow…though I do enjoy the view during takeoff/approach…can usually see most of the sights and some are more impressive from above (Pentagon, Arlington Cemetery, etc))…but I don’t travel for work anymore.
Cant wait for the Munich - Rome, Munich- Milano train line :3
