Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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I'm an American who was lucky enough to live in Berlin for a couple of years. The thing I miss the most is functional public transit, it makes life so much less stressful.
I'm an American who lived in a small city in Japan for a while. The city only had two small railroad stations, and so most people owned cars. Or at least most working adults that I knew owned cars.
HOWEVER, for day-to-day getting around, people rode bicycles, and if that wasn't an option, then they took the bus. I think their cars were more for getting groceries and for driving their kids around. I'm not completely sure. But you absolutely didn't need a car.
And if you wanted to travel a big distance to go to another city? Train or bus. I think their highways were all toll roads, and so it was cheaper to take the bus.
Like you said, it was just so "functional". If you went out in the city in the middle of the work day, you'd see all of these ancient people going around doing their daily business in the city. In America, those same people would be trapped in their houses or forced into segregated senior living because they're too old to drive. You don't see them in America, because we discriminate against them.
I will truly never understand why older people hate public transportation so much, they would benefit the most!
It's not the age, it's who they are.
Yeah, that tracks.
Being from another country with semi-good public transit, Berlin is a fucking epic place. I can get around city fast and most of the time I have options to choose on how I want to get from point A to B.
Also, hate how people like to dunk on German railroad comparing it to Japan. They fail to realize that German railroad also serves many countries in EU while Japan serves only to itself. It is much easier to plan out railways when your system is locked in one country.
As a German - a lot of our neighbours have significantly better rail. For some of them, delayed trains from Germany are a large cause of delay.
I like our train system, and use it a lot, but there is very significant room for improvement. According to the current statistic, 40% of long distance trains are late.
A lot of problems come from the half-aborted privatisation. The railway was turned into a public company, but the stock was never sold, so it's owned by the state, but still a AG (plc?) that tries to run a profit.
Other countries aren't the issue (and in fact switzerland mostly stopped allowing german trains into their network because they were the main reason for delays).
Japan has dedicated tracks for their shinkansen (and afaik for low speed passenger trains as well), whereas in germany ICE, IC, all regional trains, and freight trains share the same network. Different speeds on the same track lead to delays much faster as trains have to wait to be overtaken etc. The network is also operating above capacity (which has the obvious upside of better coverage/more frequent trains, but still we need more capacity). Many parts of the network are also simply old and have not been maintained well - we still have some manually operated signals ffs.
None of this is easy to fix and overall the railway network is still very good in an international comparison, but the neglect of the past 30 years is very obvious and has led to a lot of problems.
That's fine. Compare it to France or Italy then and it still comes out severely lacking.
But I've not had the pleasure of staying in Berlin long enough to become familiar with the transit. I'm sure it's spectacular.
No it doesn't. German ICE are a lot more affordable than French TGV. The price difference is really enortif you book a few weeks in advance. German ICE are more comfortable vehicles too, French TGV double deckers you're a sardine in a can. German ICE serve every big-ish city quite well, centre focused French TGV serves 1 city extremely well, many other smaller big-ish cities are served more poorly.
I truly loved it so much! Plus if you drink a little too much you can just nap on the ring for a lil bit!