cross-posted from: https://lemmy.skoops.social/post/727
crossposted: https://lemmy.skoops.social/post/665
Oh boy...
this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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One of the factors is that the US is surprisingly huge. It takes EU tourists by surprise that a quick jaunt from NYC to visit their friend in Chicago is several days by road (unless you drive like an American roadtripper for fourteen hours a day) moreover, there's just huge tracks of land featuring not-too-exciting vistas (unless you plan your road trip to feature pretty routes, in which case multiply the distance by 1.3), so for the short while that airlines were regulated and we weren't worried (yet) about the air-travel carbon footprint (Huge. Enormous. Colossal.) it made sense to fly everywhere in the US.
Now that it's insanely expensive and inconvenient to fly, and we shouldn't be doing it, it's time for the US to build HSR for realsies, if the automotive / fossil fuel industrial complex will let us.
The US isn't as huge as you seem to believe (or Europe not as small). Europe is not as square, so its land area is much smaller, but the distances are comparable.
A trip from Hamburg to Vienna is not that much shorter than a trip from NYC to Chicago, but it's easily done by train in Europe: Board the NJ491 at 8pm in Hamburg central station (in the city centre, no need to be there more than a few minutes before boarding), have a good nights sleep, get your breakfast served at your bed (in the comfort category), take a shower and arrive well rested in Vienna (city center, no need to wait for your luggage) at 10am the next day.
Admittedly, a lot of people do fly from Hamburg to Vienna as well, as it can be cheaper than the train due to tax exemptions for the airlines (not everything is perfect in Europe), or they just don't like sleeping in a train, but these trains are usually well utilised.
EDIT: The link to truesize doesn't seem to work correctly, here's what I meant to show:
Something I'm curious of is how many train companies exist in Europe that push for more rails.
In America, there's not that many train companies for people. Most are for commerce. There's also a lot of political backdoor stuff, like airlines getting priority, states not interested in funding it, counties having a voice about it all.
I was thinking about this when I went to Japan, and how Tokyo has MANY competing rail lines, and the population literally having factions over what company they prefer to ride over. Which sounds like a dream.
I can only talk for Germany:
Regional trains (in the 200km range) are usually commissioned by the municipalities and train companies then get paid for providing that service. Of course it depends on the route, but on average the municipalities pay around 50% of the cost and the other half is paid for by fares. They do that, because having a good train connection is good for the economy and lowers congestion, so they are obviously interested in having good tracks. There's a lot of smaller companies there, but the push comes from the municipalities. Also for one route there's usually one company to choose from, so no competition on the customer level.
Long Distance trains are for profit, but there are only very few companies competing with the state-owned DB Fernverkehr on a handful of routes.
So I don't think competition alone helps. The German rail network is in ruins btw. Maybe not in comparison to the US, but in comparison to the 1980s when there was no competition on the rail at all. The main reason for that is that we had incompetent carbrains as ministers of transportation for the majority of the last 30 years, leading to a massive underfunding.
That has slightly changed with the Ampel government in 2021 and we may hope that the new conservative minister keeps going in the same direction, as in times of war the rail network is valued even by conservatives. But fixing the errors of the past will take us at least a decade of construction work and delay.