I'm sad that you guys have public transit and we have....a bus. That runs sometimes. To a few places...
It's really sad that in a metro area of 1.7 million people, we have jack-all for mass transit. The best thing going is the trolleys in downtown Raleigh for people to use for bar-hopping. We actually have a very nice Amtrak station almost within walking distance of our house. I was excited about the idea of hopping a train and taking the family for a day trip to another city. Then I saw the prices and the timetables.
It's over $100 round-trip to take 2 adults and two kids (one of whom rides free) to the next main metro area (Greensboro) about 80 miles away. Takes the same amount of time to drive there and back, at half the cost in terms of a tank of gas. This is why Amtrak is epic fail outside of the Northeast corridor. There's just no absolutely no incentive to ride an inter-city train in the US other than novelty (again, with the exception of the Northeast corridor, where traffic is insane enough that riding a train actually does save you time and a lot of stress).
I just don't understand why we suck so hard at this. I know the "we're such a big country and so spread out" argument. Bullshit. I took an overnight train from Beijing to Shanghai for about $50. In a sleeper car with meal service, no less. When I was in Beijing, you never had to walk more than half a mile to get to a bus stop or subway station. And you could get from that point to pretty much within half a mile of whatever your destination was through the mass transit system. You might have to swap buses a few times, but they were so cheap and easy that it really didn't pose an issue.
Prague has a great subway and bus system -- even if the bus drivers are terrifying with the way they hurtle down narrow medieval streets at full speed, and the subway trains are mostly Russian-made holdovers from the Communist days. And the national rail system was cheap and effective. Day trip to Plzen or Brno? No problem.
Adelaide had a good bus system, although I rarely used it. That was my first trip abroad and mass transit was so mystifying to me that I chose to walk a couple of miles each way to go downtown, rather than try to navigate the bus system.
Even in the US, there are places that get it right. San Francisco had a pretty good system from what I saw. NYC does a good job. The DC Metro has been pretty good in the past. I don't understand why we can't get the people behind those municipal systems to come up with a national system that works.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9715335 times)