cross-posted from: https://lemmy.skoops.social/post/727
crossposted: https://lemmy.skoops.social/post/665
Oh boy...
I’d love to hop on a train for a trip like that. So much more relaxing.
Let's just pretend the environmental impact is a negligible factor to save like 35 minutes on a 5-6 hour trip. Toronto - NYC, one way or another (have this guy ever been to an airport?).
Biggest city in the US to biggest city in Canada, at a distance where high speed rail could be the best choice of it existed …
Even as someone who really wants to take the train, that’s not under consideration
I'm someone who prefers to drive because I don't like people much and flying is now a miserable experience, but yes, when you tally up all the time it takes to go to the airport, park, go through security, and then fly (especially if there's a layover tacked on), you really don't save much time in the end.
If I were a European and train service was more feasible, I'd go that route. It's really only a convenient option on the East Coast here.
To me, flying is just not worth it.
Many short distance flights are business related but as someone who was working in an international corporation I can tell you there's plenty of business monkeys who fly simply for the prestige of it. They fly to attend meetings that could've been an email or a call just so they can pretend they're hot shit.
Massively disappointing.
I like getting the train. First class is often similar or cheaper than the flight, it's better for the environment, it's easy to get up and walk around, and you get 4 hours of work done (instead of 2 hours of queuing, 1 hour of flying, 1 hour of queuing/waiting).
I find companies are as happy to pay a train fair as they are a flight.
And airports commonly need trains/busses/taxis to get to/from anyway.
I'd rather arrive in the city center than the outskirts
I mean, it depends a bit. Toulouse to Rostock would be an annoying train ride. But Düsseldorf or Frankfurt to Paris would be kind of stupid to fly.
Having done both the flying and the high speed in a few routes in Europe, the overhead of flying is so much that for anything within about 1000km distance a high speed train is faster, especially because both the origin and the destination train stations are pretty much in the city center and have direct connections to the subway network so you almost always save time and hassle in just getting to the station from your actual origin and from the destination station to your actual destination on the other side, compared to an airport. This is especially so for budget airlines as they tend to use even more peripheric airports.
Further, within the Schengen space in the EU there is no kind of passport or security control, so in most of Europe you literally just walk into a train that happens to go to another country in just the same way as you walk into a train that happens to go to the next city over.
Even for larger distances when the whole trip door-to-door takes an extra hour or two due to doing it by train rather than flying, it's often worth it because the train is way more comfortable, with plenty of room and you can just get up whenever and go for a walk to the restaurant carriage and get yourself a drink or a light meal.
But yeah, beyond a certain point the train is not worth it anymore. For example Lisbon - Paris by high speed train would be around 6h on a straight line (if you could, which you can't because of the Golf Of Biscay) at 250 km/h whilst the flight is 3h, but of course, trains in Portugal being shit outside short commuter lines around the 2 major cities and the North-South axis, there isn't actually a high speed train to Paris or even to anywhere in Spain or even inside the country (fast trains at best, not high speed ones), so you have to take the train and a bus to the nearest point in Spain with a high speed train connection to Madrid and from there to Paris, so you're lucky if you do the whole trip in 17h.
This...planes are only faster on paper. Still gotta deal with check-in, security, boarding, un boarding, and getting to/from the airport at both sides.
I used to live in RI and worked like a 10 minute walk from PVD with a job that would do a lot of travel. I would always take the train to NYC. Way more convenient and faster to directly to Midtown Manhattan.
DC was iffy. Nowadays I'd probably take the train, (if only because DCA is a shitshow...though I do enjoy the view during takeoff/approach...can usually see most of the sights and some are more impressive from above (Pentagon, Arlington Cemetery, etc))...but I don't travel for work anymore.
The world will progress out of sheer spite for Americans and I wouldn't have it any other way
Would fit really well in [email protected]
TGV: Am I a joke to you??
I travelled with high speed trains from Germany to Barcelona via some French cities. Not fucking over the climate because I want to have a good time is the least I can do.
You can go from France to Germany by tram in 20 minutes tho. (If you live in Strasbourg of course)
If you're close enough, you can walk.
ETA I'd expect there are fast rails from Berlin to Paris, and if not, why not?
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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.
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: