Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
view the rest of the comments
I took a train trip from Raleigh to DC earlier this year. It worked okay, but had big delays in both directions, and the seats were only a little bit bigger than economy flight seats, not super comfortable for 6'2" me. The Wifi was also out for most of the trip and that route takes you through a whole lot of cellular dead zones. Still hard to argue with a $105 round trip ticket though.
My understanding of the scheduling issues is that freight rail companies break regulation by overloading their trains and jumping the line over passenger rail.. Amtrak has been lobbying for the government to enforce existing laws to prevent it. I doubt that the incoming administration will do much to alleviate those pains though.
What we need to do is nationalize the tracks, charge fees to the freight trains, and give priority to passenger rail
We also need 4 sets of tracks everywhere, one for high speed in both direction and one for local traffic (frequent stops) in both directions
Honestly even just double tracking all of the mainlines where they aren't already double tracked would be game changing for throughput. Having the federal government handle maintence and dispatching would absolutely re-align values and greatly improve the passenger experience as it is though.
For context, Amtrak in the 90s and early 00s ran express freights and the big freight railroads hated competing with Amtrak because Amtrak generally did a pretty good job with it's freight services. So basically forcing the freight railroads to compete on more than just who owns what right of way would greatly improve both passenger and freight transport.
Personally I'd love to see a dollar for dollar requirement for all road improvements to spend an equal amount on public transit and pedestrian/cycleway improvements. "Oh you're spending 10 billion on this new highway interchange? Here's some bike path improvements and bus system improvements you could sink another 10 billion into to match"
I find them to be much larger, comparable to business class on an airplane. It's much, much easier for me to get work done on a laptop (or eat a meal) on an Amtrak train than on economy seats, or even economy plus seats. Plus having a lot more aisle space to walk around is huge.
The comment about seats is objectively false, I am not sure what this person is smoking lol
Commuter rail has bigger seats than international flights
Ohh rly? I am sorry you feel that way