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
Took a high speed between Philadelphia and Newark, NJ. Got a deal for less than $30. It was a great ride at 120mph. Wish we had more of that.
120mph is not high speed though. It is 10mph below where the Shinkansen (130 mph) was (1964–1986) 37 years ago. Since 2014, Shinkansen trains run up to 200 mph on the Tōhoku Shinkansen.
if you think the bumpy Acela Express is a great ride you should try the Shinkansen.
Don't let perfection be the enemy of good. Get people on trains that go faster than cars and there will be more demand for more and faster trains.
It’s high speed for the US. It was a comfotrable ride. It wasn’t intended to be a comparison to other countries.
This is a race to the bottom. The rest of the world exists and lagging in infrastructure has practical impacts including apparently having no frame of reference to how harsh and noisy "high speed" trains are in the US.
You realize that we can understand there are better ways to do things and still enjoy the improvements you do have, right? Part of the reason we’re having this discussion at all is improving the system.
I know. I have been looking forward to the new Avelia Liberty for years, but without dedicated tracks the service will continue to be unreliable and unpleasant. It is not like it is cheap.
What's the point that you're trying to make?
American trains suck nananabooboo?
Great talk lol
It's still faster than 55 mph though
May as well define 80mph as high speed rail and have a massive network with the stroke of a pen.
Can’t do that. Acela doesn’t achieve that as an average speed Boston —> NYC
Shinkansen was doing a top speed of 130 mph. At that time, the Hikari express service was making an average speed of 80 mph. Acela has a top speed of 150 mph and an average speed of 67 mph, comparable to the initial average speed of the Shinkansen Kodama (64 mph). It's definitely not great by today's standards, but Acela is essentially equivalent to the initial operating standards of Shinkansen (by average speed. Ride quality, reliability, etc. probably don't compare as favorably thanks to the aging infrastructure of the NEC). People making unfair comparisons against American train service are well intentioned in pointing out that we need to do better and to modernize, but can make train travel appear less viable than it actually is in today's conditions by doing so
The Kodama and Hikari have more frequent stops. The Nozomi is more comparable to the Acela Express in number of stops.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodama_(train)
The numbers alone don't tell you the full story. The difference in punctuality, ride quality, and reliability has to be experienced. This video of a high speed in China shows what I mean, and if anything the Japanese are at it.