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this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
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I want trains so people can have cross country road trips on the weekend and not have to stay in their small hometown for the rest of their lives
I lived in Connecticut. I used to live in a city outside the capital, with transport available all the time. Then I moved to the sticks, 50 miles away. Same state, just the most rural part.
In a group I did, they showed a woman being a success story from the program. In the video, she was using our bus systems in rhe cities. 4/5 people chirped up and aggreed, "hey we don't have busses in Connecticut this video is fake". I was like, no yeah, we have busses, just not here.
So many people I met in that area, are born, live, work, retire, and die, without ever stepping foot out of their county.
It's sad.
to be fair, public transit doesn't cover even close to the majority of any non-east coast state
No, sorry, only cities can have trains, because traditional wisdom™©®¹ says the physics of trains literally stop working outside cities.
If you tried to do something like that, youvwoukd risk damaging the fundamental laws of reality! Imagine if, like, the weak force or gravity or the ability for oxygen to form ionic bonds just got suddenly 30% weaker. You train people are such blind mad zealots, that you would risk this.
¹a Chrysler brand!
This is even funnier to me because where I'm from, trains in cities aren't really a big thing, but trains BETWEEN cities very much are.
This map is outdated as the Lelle-Pärnu route isn't currently serviced, and missing some stops, but this is our railway map:
Tartu has 2 stations as far as I know, Tallinn has multiple, the other places the train stops are all small enough that only one station exists. Entire point of it is to get people into and out of the cities. In the cities we have buses and (only in Tallinn) trams, used to also have trolleys. But only the capital, Tallinn, is a place where you would take a train from one station to another within the city itself.
Most of these places are villages and small towns. The population of Puka is like 500. Orava is around 200.
Now we just need the Tartu-Viljandi-Pärnu route and maybe a Narva-Tartu route, as both would be used by a lot of students (Tartu is a university city), but unfortunately geography doesn't favour my idea, there's protected wetlands between Pärnu and Viljandi as well as between Tartu and Viljandi
This is one place where a difference is scale. In the US we always complain about the lack of trains and that is certainly a problem.
However several major cities have commuter rail lines that may be analogous. Google tells me the area served by my city’s commuter rail isn’t much smaller - the longest line runs about 60 miles and has dozens of stops in many smaller towns (nothing like you’re describing though). We even have lines running to nearby small cities. However the system is designed for commuting to the major city and is limited outside that use.
The comparison here in the us is that most cities still don’t have commuter rail system (but that is changing!) and we only have 2 practical intercity lines covering a tiny portion of our country
Sorry...what? Which argument are you making here?
I was probably arguing both sides 😁
While it’s true we have almost no rail from the perspective of the entire country, we do have a handful of commuter rail systems that seem like a similar scale between cities and towns across metro regions. It’s not nothing
And of course our one “fast-ish” intercity line
And of course I recognize the irony of saying a country the size and population of the US is comparable to a much smaller country
It's not nothing but it's absolutely not enough to make rail anyones primary mode of transit unless they live there.
That's a problem.
I’m firmly in the camp of “if you build it, they will come”. Intercity rail in the northeast corridor has been a huge success, generating profits to fund the rest of the system. It’s somewhat self-reinforcing: most of Amtrak is impractical, inconvenient, useless so of course no one will use it. But NEC, especially Acela, proves that people will use intercity rail if it’s actually useful. They will prefer it.
Continued investment, continued expansion, will make it available to more people to become a primary means of transport.
We start with places it will best work where people want it, then connect and expand, take advantage of the network affect. But it’s all politics. Politicians need to make it happen. We don’t actually need more money but the wisdom to rebalance the excess car transportation investments
Do they? Feel like we can't count on that.
You monster, risking the basic laws of reality for simple convenient transport!