Americans can't do high speed rail because we have aircraft, automobile, and petroleum industries who don't want us to.
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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I kind of like the thought of me pissing in the train and it travelling 300+ kph sideways and 9.8 m/s² downwards
Doesn't Europe have an extensive passenger train network?
Also, I recently rode on Amtrak for a long trip from Columbia, SC to Baltimore, MD. This was my first time on any kind of train other than a subway or metro line. It had its drawbacks (incredibly long travel time and delays), but I always felt safe, and I had a lot more room than I would have had on any flight. The major drawbacks where the seats were somewhat uncomfortable and things like that are largely due to the fact that the cars were pretty old, and not inherent to train travel if it was properly maintained. The cost was much less, and the free parking was such a great bonus.
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Americans can't do trains because it requires public infrastructure (rails), which apparently we are allergic to.
It's literally socialism!
it requires cooperation with the project across all of these counties that the railway runs through. and they're all corrupt or subject to democracy or whatever
I've read articles in the past about high speed trains and/or just new train lines in general would get held up by little towns who didn't want to lose the commuter traffic since it was the only thing keeping them afloat. There are too many towns that exist literally just to serve motorists and now nobody wants to get rid of them.
Anybody who is making money off existing transportation is going to be against public transportation. Cab companies lobby against rail everywhere, from city to burbs or airport to downtown. Trucking, for obvious reasons. Passenger rail can carry cargo at night. And of course anybody selling fuel to the mass of cars, the petro industry.
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No turbulence while taking a piss or shit
Train bathrooms seem specifically designed to discourage using the bathroom while riding a train.
Also I had a laptop die from the constant vibrations destroying the hard disk drive.
Also I had a laptop die from the constant vibrations destroying the hard disk drive.
Well, that's pretty much an issue of the past now.
It was last year.
This seems highly unlikely. Modern HDDs are extremely resilient.
But I don't know the details of your situation, obviously, and it's not impossible.
What, like the head crashed by sheer coincidence, after eight hours of rattling?
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And at least the laptops I had with spinning drives had vibration dampening.
Ok, but it's rather specific case if you were still using a laptop with an HDD last year.
There are still a few use cases... mainly price. A 4TB 2.5" HDD can be had for less than a bottom-of-the-barrel 2TB NVME.
But I would definitely hesitate to bring spinning drives on a bumpy ride.
Spinning drives have a no place in a laptop. In a desktop at home, sure.
Absolutely no reason to put one in a new laptop.
But not all computers are new.
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Dane here. While I love trains, they are a) more expensive than flying in almost every long distance scenario, and b) take much longer. We are trialling sleeping trains but reception is mixed and capacity limited. People don't like to waste an extra 2-4 days of their vacation on travel. Especially if they're paying more for that privilege. I should note that this isn't an issue of imbalanced subsidies. The EU subsidises air travel (in many ways) to the tune of around €30–40 billion annually depending on what you include and what you consider to be a "subsidy." Using similar criteria, rail is subsidised to the tune of €40–75 billion per year. So rail gets a lot more investment despite it serving 16% fewer travel kilometers per year in the EU than air travel.
The thing is, if even we can't make it cheaper and faster despite our relatively high population densities and high rail subsidies, I fear the case is much harder still in the U.S. My personal position is that trains are excellent commuter alternatives, and should be liberally built and subsidised in all dense cities. For longer travel, there is no substitute for airoplanes.
Why would Americans care about trains when they're gonna be a billionaire any day now and have their own private jet?
/s
They'll only be a billionaire if they pull themselves up by their bootstraps.