this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
277 points (97.9% liked)
Technology
57455 readers
5843 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I made a similar comment to this several days ago.
It takes 46 hours to go from Chicago to Seattle by train, and only 30 by car, for a difference of a whopping 16 hours. Even stopping to sleep for the night, you can get there faster driving. If you don’t get a sleeper, it’s decently cheap at like $120. But still, double the time isn’t appealing to most anyone, especially when actually comfortable accommodations for 2 days are wildly more expensive.
I’d love to travel by train, but it’s just too slow to be practical, even if you really don’t have much going on (if you have pets, for example, that extra week for travel can really get cumbersome). If it was equivalent time to driving (or faster would be great) I think you’d see a lot more people adopting it. Even if it doesn’t replace all the air travel, to just have it cut down cross-country driving would be great. Unfortunately that means a huge investment in rail infrastructure, and a lot of time, to bring the network up to speed.
It's pretty comparable to a car in medium distances. SF to LA is about 7 hours by car, maybe 10 hours by train. The extra time is well worth the benefit of being able to just relax the whole trip.