Yes, better than in France and Germany. That's the US train service.
Definitely. Also, China does not exist.
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This is an obviously bullshit list made by a low-paid intern
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If you mess around with statistics, you might get high numbers from the U.S. in terms of amount of freight carried, as U.S. Class 1 railroads do indeed carry a great deal of freight. However, it tends to be bulk freight, so you get a lot of wheat, corn, coal, gravel, and the like.
The argument is fundamentally dumb as hell, because the Soviet Union had some of the most advanced and used rail-networks on the planet, and they were literally build in the biggest country to have ever existed.
The argument is fundamentally dumb as hell, because the United States had one of the most advanced and used rail-networks on the planet for a long long time. We literally already had one and it worked great and that was with fucking steam trains and dudes laying track with big hammers. It’d be easier to do now than it was then!
Oh boy if you think that argument is pervasive in the US, just try advocating for rail in Canada :sadness: Some hardliner social democrat I know explained to me how impossible it was with our size, even though a huge percentage of the population live in the Windsor-Montreal corridor.
You can take trains between Lisbon and Moscow, but not a high speed train. You'll have to transfer between several low speed trains, but there are a few high szeed segments.
Europe is quite a bit behind China in terms of high speed rail and freight rail, actually. Because Europe is not one country, there's an absolute mess of different railway standards, including different gauges, electrification systems, signalling systems, and manual couplers that are inefficient. For example, that trip from Lisbon to Moscow would require at least 3 gauge changes along the way. China has one main rail gauge and one uniform system, allowing wagons full of freight to ride on one railway network all the way from Xinjiang to Beijing.
"I dunno, according to these numbers the american rail is already in the top 12. Maybe we should just get more highways? :thinking-about-it:"
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Definition: The Quality of railroad infrastructure indicator is one of the components of the Global Competitiveness Index published annually by the World Economic Forum (WEF). It represents an assessment of the quality of the railroad system in a given country based on data from the WEF Executive Opinion Survey, a long-running and extensive survey tapping the opinions of over 14,000 business leaders in 144 countries. The score for railroad infrastrucutre quality is based on only one question. The respondents are asked to rate the railroads in their country of operation on a scale from 1 (underdeveloped) to 7 (extensive and efficient by international standards). The individual responses are aggregated to produce a country score.
it’s just vibes
And those "business leaders" are probably exclusively thinking of freight rail and how cheap it is for them to ship freight on it for their company, since they never actually ride trains.
Makes sense. The passenger rail network in germany is at the exact state where it's a mess but still gets used by most people regardless of economic standing. That'd definitely colour perception
Oh good, I trust the opinions of business leaders on rail efficiency
And to be a little catty about the empty speculation that always pops up in this type of thread when the answer is just 1 search away:
Quite a few comrades always keep their eyes shut and talk nonsense, and for a Communist that is disgraceful.
- Mao, Oppose Book Worship
Um excuse me, California has been building high speed rail the last twenty years and it’s billions over budget. They haven’t finished one segment but it’s on its way.
OK I will defend the CA HSR. It's taking comically long (was approved in 2009, won't be done until like 2035) but it will actually get done; it's not total vaporware. The part through the Central Valley is nearly done and should be up and running soon IIRC.
My hunch is that California dems are just extremely reluctant they have to follow through on this, so they are trying almost every poison pill under the sun to try to get people to cancel it.
In about 5 years, they will be explicitly begging voters to make them stop.
Yeah a lot of the state representatives from LA or SF wanted to cancel this to focus on local transit in this areas. I think that's how we got this compromise where they only started construction in the Central Valley
Construction hasn't been going going for 10 years and most of the difficulty has been acquiring land.
"U.S. railroad companies chose to switch to diesel over electric locomotives because of diesel's much lower up-front costs, even though electric systems cost significantly less to operate and to maintain than diesel systems." :porky-happy:
It’s fucking baffling to me how capitalists are so bad at capitalism. Think ahead motherfuckers I’m begging
Looks like a clickbait site funded by pay-per-impression advertising. They have no incentive to get it right
it also only goes "high speed" for like... a comically short period of time.
Denmark has execellent train-service, as long as you don't count anything resembling rural areas. like the trainservices to and from copenhagen are fucking excellent, and anything that doesn't go near copenhagen is left to kind of rot. You notice the stark difference instantly, where as soon as you leave the greater copenhagen area, you suddenly have train service every 1-2 hours, rather than every 5-15 minutes.
you suddenly have train service every 1-2 hours, rather than every 5-15 minutes.
I get what you're saying, but as an American this is like hearing someone in Hawaii say "the weather was miserable here today, it got all the way down to 66°F / 19°C"
Goddamn even going from the suburbs to a MAJOR us city, like a 25 mile trip, the train only comes every 2 hours outside of like 8 to 10AM, and 4 to 6PM on weekdays.
In America you’re lucky to have train service every 1-2 DAYS if you even have a passenger terminal, which basically only major cities do.
For me to take a train to visit my parents, I would have to drive 2 hours, and catch a train that only goes twice a week. When they pick me up we’d then have to drive an hour and a half to their house. That train costs more than it costs to fly there from my city’s tiny regional airport, and normally I’ll drive 2 hours to one of the big cities to fly because it’ll be significantly less. Also that 4 hours of driving just between homes and train stations is half the length of the drive straight to my parents house.
I live in a city of nearly 200k, directly on the route between one of the largest cities in the country and 3 of the other ones. It’s fucking embarrassing that we don’t have passenger rail. And we used to! If I want to have a nice afternoon, I can go down to Depot Park which used to be a fucking train station. Now it’s shitty shops and like 200ft of tracks still there for the aesthetics.
China and India? :modCheck:
<1% rail electrification is true efficiency
Source: WEF :frothingfash: but isn't WEF Chinese COMMUNIST MARXIST conspiracy? They're hiding the true motives!
