Well, yeah. Again, to me, this seems very american, isn't it? In most cases, here you would go by train, and you can drive if needed. It's just that most people would not. Making roads bigger and better helps, but is not going to change that.
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As one who has traveled in both countries… The scale is such that trains (even if we had better than we do; even if they were as good as when we had the best in the world) can’t cover the functional distances. Esp not if what you need is ten bales of hay at 50KG each, to your door.
sep 1, 2025, 6:52 am • 8 0 • view
Something I notice as a regular train-user... places *not* serviced by the network tend to drop out of my sight, because the threshold to change modes is quite high. While for regular car-users, the mysteries of schedules and ticket-acquisition need their own learning.
sep 1, 2025, 8:13 am • 3 0 • view
The former is a tale as old as main routes of travel. My travelling companion recalls when the village she lived in was given a bypass. Village life didn’t change much, but a lot of the motorway support services between “here and there” went away.
sep 1, 2025, 1:59 pm • 2 0 • view
Rte 66 has the same problem, each time I travel the length of 40 (this is the 4th time) the number of places which used to be there because of traffic is fewer; and yet there are new nodes of support; based on how much less often travellers need such support.
sep 1, 2025, 1:59 pm • 1 0 • view
And places like Winslow have managed to find ways to mine nostalgia to create a minor economy in tourism. Which isn’t what it was when I-40 wasn’t limiting where folks could/did stop, but keeps it from becoming a ghost town.
sep 1, 2025, 1:59 pm • 1 0 • view
Maybe to put it this way: wanting an option to be able to drive 4000 miles and needing it are very different things. Wanting it daily(ish) is strange, and the reasons for it seem very "american". Also - I do not think you can fit more than a bail into the car the original topic mentioned!
sep 1, 2025, 11:42 am • 0 0 • view
The original post to which I replied said nothing about why one travelled 1000km by car, only that no one in their right mind did it by car, because there should be trains. To which I still say the scale of the US makes that not true; even if all one is doing is moving oneself.
sep 1, 2025, 2:08 pm • 2 0 • view
I think that post hit all the wrong buttons, and I apologise for that! What I meant was something that I would tell a friend here, in UA, like "just take the bloody train and stop this nonsense about driving". Should have worded that differently, my bad!
sep 1, 2025, 2:55 pm • 0 0 • view
I still think this is very "american", and it does not make sense to me there are basically no trains roaming this vastness. I get it there are reasons, and challenges, but at least some of them seem... cultural? Denial? "We do not need trains! This is the way!".
sep 1, 2025, 2:58 pm • 0 0 • view
Again, there are reasons why you may need to haul hay bails through the sticks. They are valid here as well! What is not sensible though is to look at extreme ranges for general use. Like daily or weekly commute, that kind of thing, because you have that covered.
sep 1, 2025, 3:01 pm • 0 0 • view
And better trains won’t fix that if you live 300 miles from a practical location for a train station. Which tens of millions of Americans do. In short, your viewpoint is at least as parochial as you think Americans who say, “scale matters” is.
sep 1, 2025, 6:53 am • 6 0 • view
And that is the problem. The US train network has been in decline since the 50s, to the point where it's now largely ineffective as a comprehensive transportation system. In Europe, there has been a resurgence in rail use, with freight now realising the cost benefits of shifting from road to rail.
sep 1, 2025, 8:06 am • 3 0 • view
None of which I denied; but I also know that the sheer scale of the US, and need for people and goods to reach places sparsely populated, means even if the rails were as good as they were at their best, people and goods would still need roads. Wells Fargo didn’t start with banks.
sep 1, 2025, 1:53 pm • 3 0 • view
Wells Fargo started because trains, in their heyday, weren’t able to meet the need to get people/goods everywhere they needed to be; by hundreds of miles. That need still exists; and cars made it affordable for smaller than companies to do.
sep 1, 2025, 1:53 pm • 2 0 • view
Most people in the US live near the coast or the Great Lakes; connect them up, as that is all you need.
sep 1, 2025, 2:22 pm • 0 0 • view
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that maybe "500KG of hay 300 miles" is not a sufficiently common use case to be worth discarding passenger rail for
sep 1, 2025, 1:09 pm • 1 0 • view
Oddly, giant trucks suited to this task are so popular that the big 3 US makers don't bother making sedans anymore.
sep 1, 2025, 3:00 pm • 2 0 • view
Very american! BTW, do these trucks transfer people? In vertical or horizontal stacks? I jest! Please do not take offense. My initial post was about americann-nes of the thing and about personal transport, not the trucking hauling and other heavy weight transporting. Which trains are good at as well
sep 1, 2025, 3:07 pm • 0 0 • view
1: We need more rail. 2: We esp need rail to nodes in the interior, but 3: The population density is such that most people will not be well served, because McAlester OK, (pop 18,000) is not going to generate enough traffic, on it’s own, to justify having regular local rail.
sep 1, 2025, 11:22 pm • 1 0 • view
And the surrounding couple of hundred square miles don’t have more than another 18,000 people, all in. And that’s the case for most of the US interior.
sep 1, 2025, 11:22 pm • 0 0 • view
Because the population is 500-20,000 people towns… and they are 40-50 miles between them. With a very evenly distributed family unit every 2-5 miles in all the rest of the space.
sep 1, 2025, 11:22 pm • 1 0 • view
Cheyenne Wyoming has a population about the size of Edinburgh, Scotland; 11 percent of which are all in Cheyenne. The rest are spread about the rest of the state in a fairly even distribution.
sep 1, 2025, 11:22 pm • 1 0 • view
Even if 20 percent of them want to travel, they will have to get several hundred miles to Cheyenne, to get a train to another train; and then get back to home again when they get home again.
sep 1, 2025, 11:22 pm • 0 0 • view
There are less than 600,000 people in Wyoming, 40 million in Ukraine.
sep 2, 2025, 6:43 am • 0 0 • view
So rail might be worth it, for longer trips, but for things less than a couple of days drive away, the inconvenience factor will militate against the cultural shift which would make driving unreasonable.
sep 1, 2025, 11:22 pm • 1 0 • view
Regretfully most of those trucks *can’t*. The frames are not made any stronger when the cabs are made larger, so the amount which can go in the bed is often no more than 750 lbs, and no passengers.
sep 1, 2025, 10:50 pm • 2 0 • view
I never said it was, and perhaps it wasn’t the best response to “no one in their right mind travels 1000km in a car” but the fact of the matter is US population is spread out enough that there is no practical way that everyone will be able to use passenger trains.
sep 1, 2025, 2:13 pm • 4 0 • view
And always has been. Which is why we had stagecoach lines, right up until we had automobiles; and why, even when rail service was still a thing (in the 1930) and roads were poor, there were people making those long drives, such that we had a Rte 66, and a US 101.
sep 1, 2025, 2:13 pm • 3 0 • view
“Some people are too spread out for rail to be practical” is something which is true of every place on earth, at every scale. Nonetheless: it would be quite feasible to build a US passenger rail network such that “why would you drive that?? Take a train!” was a normal response to most 1000km trips.
sep 1, 2025, 3:19 pm • 1 0 • view
China and the US are similar sizes. China has high-speed rail crossing the country. Technology isn't the problem. Political and public will is.
sep 1, 2025, 9:13 am • 9 0 • view
I didn’t say we couldn’t have high speed rail. I said competing needs matter. The other thing China has is density of population. You will note that there is large part of China which doesn’t have rail; and it’s the part which has the pop-density of all but the Coastal US.
sep 1, 2025, 2:04 pm • 4 0 • view
Should the US have a better rail network? Yes. Would that change the way people move about? Yes. Would it do away with US car culture? Probably not, if one is well away from the coasts; because Wyoming, or Oklahoma, are “thin on the ground” and would look more like Wester China, then central.
sep 1, 2025, 2:04 pm • 4 0 • view
You make it sound like people routinely transport bales of hay from Florida to Montana, and that's what the transport network should be designed around.
sep 1, 2025, 7:54 am • 1 0 • view
No. I know that people need things like hay, and that the distances across which they need it are non-trivial (having been one of those people), and pretending a network addressing that is inferior, a priori; is a form of ignorance.
sep 1, 2025, 1:49 pm • 4 0 • view