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I normally live in Europe. At the moment I'm in Baltimore. The city's downtown area (around the inner harbor) is perfectly walkable. Nearby DC is also perfectly walkable, while driving is a nightmare. These two cities should be well connected by rail but they're not. People would drive to a parking lot beside a metro station and get into the city that way.

Two cities can only be linked effectively by rail when there aren't stops between them. That's impossible in America, where suburban areas are the political battlegrounds while cities are single-party fiefdoms.

Washington-Baltimore is actually a very good connection by rail--you'll have a train at least once an hour--except that the station for Baltimore is in the wrong location. Baltimore Penn Station is located far to the north of the city, well outside the Inner Harbor that's going to be the center of tourism and visitors.

What happened is that, historically, Baltimore-Washington was mainly served by the B&O, whose Baltimore station would have been right next to Inner Harbor (Camden Yards is essentially built on old railroad property). When passenger service was consolidated into Amtrak, the Northeast Corridor instead chose to use Pennsylvania Railroad trackage instead of B&O from DC to NYC, and the freight trackage in the corridor consolidated onto the B&O tracks instead. The resulting residual commuter rail line has the standard commuter rail/freight rail politics going on that limits the number of trains that can transit the route.

Neither the metro or the lightrail reaches Penn. I don't know who designed the routes. Better connections between DC and BWI would better link the cities but they can't even maintain a bus line. Meanwhile, there's a billion dollar for the Silver line...

You’re wrong about the Baltimore light rail not reaching Penn Station. See the Camden Yards - Penn Station light rail line, it runs a few times/hour. https://www.mta.maryland.gov/schedule

Half a mile walk is not what I'd calling reaching. You can't even see Penn from the light-rail stop.

Sounds like you're referring to the University of Baltimore/MICA light rail stop[0], where you have to get off if heading south or heading north but not on the Penn line, to catch the 'Penn Station - Camden Yards' line. I mean, it's in the name of the light rail line...it lets you off right at the station[1].

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/place/University+of+Baltimore+-+...

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Penn+Station/@39.3071436,-...

Oh, my bad. I don't know how I managed to live a year in the city and not know about the second line. I've only ridden the BWI/Hunt Valley trains.

The real criticism of the light rail is that there's really _only_ one line, north to south. And the (part subway) metro train serves a similar route, NW to east side of downtown.[0]

99% of all the light rail "lines" ride the same track. The Penn-Camden "line" veers off the main tracks right at that Mt Royal stop (MICA/UB), and only goes to Penn, then back to the main line at Mt Royal, then headed to Camden Yards. It's probably the least common "line" to see.

[0] http://www.urbanrail.net/am/balt/baltimore.htm

> Washington-Baltimore is actually a very good connection by rail--you'll have a train at least once an hour

That's really not a lot, especially between major cities.

For comparison, in the UK there are around 8 trains per hour during peak times between London and Cambridge (around twice the distance of DC-Baltimore). I'd imagine there are cities that have even more per hour in central Europe.

Although according to Google Washington DC has 700,000 people and Baltimore 600,000. Probably a more realistic comparison would be Bristol and Southampton/Portsmouth where there is realistically 1 train an hour (technically 2, but the second one has a change and runs 8 minutes after the first one).

Comparing trains from London is not really fair because virtually every train in the south ends up in London eventually. Somewhat tragically, I once tried to take a train from Watford to visit Hatfield House, some 14 miles away. I think it took me 3 hours getting in and out of London :-)

>Washington DC has 700,000 people and Baltimore 600,000

You really have to look at the metro population.

London has a population of over 8 million and 14 million for the metro population. I was trying to pick something that had even close to a similar population density of of Washington Baltimore in the UK. Comparing to London is like comparing to NYC.

> Although according to Google Washington DC has 700,000 people and Baltimore 600,000. Probably a more realistic comparison would be Bristol and Southampton/Portsmouth where there is realistically 1 train an hour (technically 2, but the second one has a change and runs 8 minutes after the first one).

OTOH between Macon (pop 34000) and Lyon (pop 500000) there is up to 4 trains / hour at commute times (1 an hour otherwise), over a slightly longer distance.

that's a story and a half you could tell. No buses? And I wonder why blablacar hasn't taken off in the UK

Part of the problem with starting that here is that many railroads have to just stop roads dead for 5-10 minutes every time they go by. Even if it's a fast train and it's 2-4 minutes, that would cause a crazy traffic increase here, because you've just lost between 27 and 53% of your roads' capacity.

In a high traffic area, you'd just use bridges and tunnels. Level crossings in central Europe are usually only on minor roads in smaller towns.

London and Cambridge are exceptional cities for political and economic reasons, so that’s not a good comparison.

Plus, the connection ends around 9pm every night.

I don't know this area at all, but apparently there is a commuter rail service (as mentioned) from Camden Yards, which still has a station, to Washington. But it takes an hour and a quarter, where the Amtrak train takes 45 minutes.

This is depressingly familiar situation in the UK too (not sure about the rest of Europe). Usually, it's not politics that prevent more useful connections being made, but a lack of investment to do the necessary small bits of engineering.

Tokyo-Kyoto runs every twenty minutes, Berlin-Hamburg every 30.

Baltimore resident who commutes by train here. There's actually a line that goes to DC right by inner harbor- the Camden Line as opposed to Penn Line at Penn station.

As a consequence trains from Baltimore run a bit more often then once an hour - though I don't take Camden Line (It's for losers) so I don't know what the overlap is exactly.

> I don't take Camden Line (It's for losers)

Why is this? Full of tourists?

Oh, who knows. I've always thought that because the line is shared with freight rail - CSX - and it seems like it gets delayed more.

Didn't the US car companies actively lobby against and destroy the budding streetcar transport in most cities? I admit its not exactly rail, but you do have trams / streetcars in many European cities too - like Amsterdam. I would think they would be a much preferred public transport option than everyone driving their own car.

Culture is not something which happens automatically - sometimes its driven by corporates, and the stronger the incentives for the corporates, the harder to resist, until the only one capable of doing so is the government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

This is a rather popular lie that ignores the facts on the ground at the time. No, the US car companies did not lobby against or destroy the streetcar industry, the growth of the suburb and government policies that promoted such growth managed to do that all on their own. The auto manufacturers just set themselves up to take advantage of this decline and the shifting of subsidies to road construction.

In this case culture (the shifting demographics that led to the initial growth of the suburb and the self-perpetuating cultural enshrinement of same) is what led and government/corporations followed.

With all due respect - I don't understand this. Why would suburban growth not work with tram / local train lines that could be extended? It worked in London - one of the largest cities in the world which had to plan way ahead of time due to its historically narrow streets. I've lived in suburban London for >7 years, and frankly the only time I really needed to use the car was only to haul grocery home. Almost any other travel (including to work) was always achievable with the tube/bus - some combination of these.

What the ground truth was then isn't recorded in history. There are post-facto interpretations. I would argue if the incentives were laid correctly, there was no reason for suburbanism to necessarily lead to growth in automobile consumption.

The US motor companies had a massive clout. Given a choice back then (and the big roads due to the post-war expansion) it possibly made it easy to convince people that a car was a superior and more personal form of travel (think pre-ubiquitous air-conditioning). That's when you need government to think ahead, especially at the local level.

A couple of things.

1. A lot of existing big cities post-WWII did, in fact, grow commuter rail out to the expanding suburbs. If you live in the suburbs (say Westchester County in NY) and work at a bank in Manhattan, there is pretty good rail service.

2. But, a lot of the suburban expansion also included companies locating out in the suburbs. For a variety of reasons (including "white flight") a lot of cities became unpopular places for professionals to live so it made sense to locate companies where the people were. NYC almost went bankrupt. Boston was losing population into the 90s. So, for a significant period of time, you had a lot of people dispersed around suburbs (and still do) and that's hard to accommodate with transit.

In Boston, for example, there was not a single major tech employer in the city by the mid 90s or so--when Teradyne moved out--all the "Route 128" companies and others were in the suburbs/exurbs. (I would bet that, at least leaving out biotech/pharma, most tech employment in the Boston area is still in the suburbs--as indeed it is in the Bay Area.)

OK - interesting to know indeed. Thanks for the insights!

Which government policies promoted the growth of the suburbs, out of curiosity?

A variety of both direct and indirect things. Low interest rates for home purchases, especially veterans (GI Bill). Road construction especially the interstate highway system. Low-cost suburban development, e.g. Levittown. The fact that there was lots of land to build suburbs on.

> European cities are far more walkable and accessible without a car.

A really weird experience I had while visiting CA (SSF specifically) was seeing a fast food place - I think it was Wendy's? - that wasn't reachable by foot in any clear way. Similarly there wasn't any obvious sidewalks or bike lanes on the highway between Brisbane and SSF, and while that _is_ as 2km walk, I'd still expect it to be _possible_.

I mean, I've been there for a week, and I'm sure it's possible to work things like that out if you live there longer. Maybe there's an entrance to the county park I didn't notice, or I don't know, a tunnel. But where I live, walking is far more intuitive than that. A tram might help, but it won't solve it.

I currently live in Austin and the general infrastructure here is atrocious. There are many places that are inaccessible as you've mentioned by walking and biking in America is incredibly dangerous.

Most cities in the US are simply not equipped to deal with any sort of large population growth due to the incredibly bad infrastructure we have in place and zero motivation to improve it.

That seems very true to me. As an anecdotical data point: I lived in Munich for over 30 years, and never drove. Did not even have a driver's license.

I then moved to the Bay Area, and now I'm driving everywhere.

Even to towns that I could actually reach with BART (which are not many), I would then face the problem, as you laid out yourself, to actually get around there.

Excuse my ignorance, but my foreigner layman's opinion is that your cities ain't broke, the US is the richest nation on Earth. Y'all just need to tax better and spend wiser.

Part of it is the US has a lot of land. Japan is one of the more extreme examples but they have ~8.7x people per unit of land. That makes a big difference on the kind of buildings and transportation you build.

But isn't a railroad much cheaper to build and maintain, than a highway of the same capacity?

No, because rail has fixed routes but everywhere in the road network is connected to everything else.

Everything on the rail network is also connected to everything else.

Hardly, especially not in the US where the track is not owned by a neutral party.

Yep, rail road is hard to scale down, so it's very expensive to connect every single home to rail road.

Also, rail roads are not walkable, so they cannot be shared with pedestrians, so this limitation forces create two separate roads: one for pedestrians, bicycles, cars, etc., and second one for rail transport. Trams can be mixed with regular road traffic, but trams cannot use regular rail roads because of different construction of rail road.

Also, rail roads are prone to Single Point of Failure problems. To prevent SPF, multiple redundant routes must be built, with lot of expensive junctions between them.

Also, you must schedule your travel.

So, we need something which 1) can be shared with regular road traffic like trams, 2) can deliver loads of cargo efficiently like rail or metro, 3) can be connected to every house like regular road, 4) can be navigated by any car at any time of day or night, 5) be cheaper than regular road for road, cart, maintenance, recycling, 6) can provide power to carts, 7) can provide navigation and scheduling service to carts, 8) be with low delay (fast).

Regular road is 1,3,4,±8. Uber is 1,3,4,5,7,8. Aero-taxi is 1,3,4,±5,7,8. Trams is 1,2,6,7. Metro is 2,6,7. Rail is 2,5,6,7.

Edit: Tram-train is 1,2,5,6,7.

> but trams cannot use regular rail roads because of different construction of rail road.

Actually, they can. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tram-train

Here’s the thing, you could say the same for many small or population dense countries, this is because Japan is population dense but most of the population still live in very concentrated areas, Osaka, Tokyo etc.

One begs to ask the question, Why do Americans need to live so sprawled out? I think the difference is not just one of geography, it’s cultural. It makes sense for Japanese to live in close quarters and there are benefits and negatives for doing so.

Look at France, Germany, Belgium, UK Etc they’re allrelatively population dense countrirs with far more hopeless train networks.

The richest americans are very rich, yes. Most americans aren't rich.

Which is better than the alternative of nobody being rich.

Sorry, but what?

You prefer everyone being poor?

False dichotomy.

Please elaborate. If everyone is a millionaire, nobody is. Thus, it's impossible for everybody to be rich. The alternative to some people being rich is nobody being rich. If nobody is rich, everyone is poor.

Interestingly, the cities are in part broke due to the infrastructure cost of maintaining sprawl — which only cars make possible.

Also gas taxes in the US are far lower than in much of Europe. Gas tax is 5.9x higher in Germany than in my state of NC, for example. Gas tax is what funds a lot of infrastructure development.

The purpose of gas tax is not bound to infrastructure developement. Germany may spend gas tax money for arbitary purposes.

https://www.energie-lexikon.info/energiesteuer.html

Germany may spend anytax for arbitrary purposes though.

At the dawn of the age of rail, Germany had double the US population in an area about the size of Montana. There were a lot of people who wanted to move around way before cars were a factor, so you see much, much better rail systems in Europe.

Probably a bigger factor is that, in the early 1940s, virtually the entire infrastructure of Europe was destroyed. In March 1945, there were no operational bridges across the entire length of the Rhine river. All of that infrastructure was rebuilt in the late 1940s and the 1950s to then-modern high speed standards; by contrast, the US has to make do with infrastructure upgraded at great cost around the 1910s.

Europe also had a big military imperative to build railways pre-WW1: Trains let you move your forces faster, so you can build up a concentration of forces in one location to attack or reinforce a defensive line.

So no state in continental Europe wanted to be on the losing side of a railway gap.

This is probably a much bigger factor than usually thought. Military necessity will trump budget constrictions and property rights. Railways pre WW1, roads during and after WW2 and in preparation for the Cold War.

Before WWII Great Britain, Germany, and France all had about twice the rail they have now . After the war, cars and trucking made a big difference and system length decreased fairly steadily as a result because lots of track got rebuilt as roads.