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0 pointsjrockway9y ago0 comments

The car turns out to be pretty useful for traveling long distanecs. I've both driven from NYC to Montreal and taken the train. The train takes 12 hours. Driving takes 6 hours.

Now, if you happen to be traveling on a route that 400,000 other people travel every day, trains might win. Tokyo to Kyoto is a 2h 19m train ride, while the drive is 6 hours.

Europe does a little better than the US, but not as well as Japan. Paris-Frankfurt is 4h by train, 6 hours driving.

(Everything is always 6 hours apparently!)

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5 comments · 3 top-level

Drup9y ago· 2 in thread

According to the internet, NYC-Montreal by car is 595 km Paris-Marseille, in france, by car is 774.92km

Paris-Marseille in train is 3h17. The trains are comfortable, you arrive in the middle of the city and you don't have to park.

Conclusion: get yourself a better train network.

Edit: Just saw you took paris-frankfurt as an example, which seems to be a particularly poorly optimized route. :/

Bartweiss9y ago

Comparing an American highway map to a train map is telling.

The highways are a neat, practical grid, and we cut the landscape to enable that. The traintracks, coming later, had to circumvent both natural features and the highways occupying the best routes. Plus, without a culture of train travel, express routes are pricy and most trains stop constantly to fill up and scrape together a profit. Worse, even our express trains simply have slow top speeds.

The one thing I'm proud of is our train system for freight, which is actually quite efficient.

jrockwayOP9y ago

The rail system predates the interstate highway system by almost a century. The reality is that the highway system was built by the government, and the rail system was built by private companies. The government had better planning tools than the private companies (eminent domain), and ended up with a better system.

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Retric9y ago

Something to consider that 12 hour train ride is ~20x safer than a 6 hour car ride.

  CARS/LIGHT TRUCKS: 7.28 fatalities per billion passenger miles
  COMMUTER/LONG-HAUL TRAINS: 0.43 fatalities per billion  passenger miles
  BUSES: 0.11 deaths per billion passenger miles
  AVIATION: 0.07 deaths per billion passenger miles

Granted, trading an extra ~0.002% chance of death for 6 hours is not something most people think about. But, 0.002% * ~60 * 365 * 24 = ~10 hours of life lost on average.

ghaff9y ago

A few city pairs on the northeast corridor are marginally more time-efficient by train, especially with the (more expensive) Acela. The train is maybe 1-2 hours faster between Boston and NYC or Boston and DC.

(And that corridor is pretty miserable to drive for the most part.)

But that's about it in the US [for non-commuter rail].

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