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Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

I always found the dutch railway system remarkable. It just works, you can easily just live one city away and work in another. Not having to drag around a car with you can be extremely nice.

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And you can pay for ALL public transit in the WHOLE COUNTRY with one card. Meanwhile in the U.S. we struggle to do that even in one city - I'm looking at you, New York!

(Yes I have a MetroCard, which already has the worst form factor among all transit cards in the world, and why I can't pay for LIRR, Metro-North or NJ Transit with it is beyond me)

At least NYC is finally fixing that with Omny. Full rollout won't be for a few years but it'll support the entire regional transit system like Clipper in the Bay Area does.

https://omny.info/

It’s also worth noting that it will support standard NFC payments, so you don’t even need a separate card; standard contactless cards or mobile pay will do.

For what it's worth, the standard travelcard in Denmark also supports this (Rejsekort).

You can also travel to Malmö in Sweden using it.

And you can check in and out in exactly one machine in one station, Malmö C. But not at any of the other stations that might be convenient like Hyllie or especially Trianglen.

Not just travel, with that one card you can use the bike storage facilities, rent a bike, get a cab, rent a car, pay for parking and get access to lounges.

Why not simply accept contact-less payment from mobile phones via something like NFC? And use the stupid metro-only cards as a backup? Speaking from a US perspective...

That would make the most sense but you'd probably have to set up your own payment network as the major ones charge 30 cents per transaction which makes it uneconomical for small fares.

If a lot of metro's already use their own contactless systems, I don't see why they couldn't release an app that does the same thing.

Go figure, the MTA in NYC is doing just that:

https://new.mta.info/system_modernization/omny

I concur, and I'm Dutch. The Dutch have a habit of complaining about the trains here, not realizing how it's, well, better than nearly anywhere else. Look at a railway map of the country, the complexity is more akin to that of a big city's metro network than that of most countries. There's trains everywhere and they go all the time. And then people have the audacity to complain if they have a 20 minute delay once in a while.

I do think it's ridiculous, however, than driving somewhere by car is cheaper than going the same distance by train once you're 2+ people in the car. I don't understand it. How can't trains be more economical? Is it just that the roads are more expensive to build and maintain than the tax we pay for it (via fuel taxes and road taxes and the likes).

I'm not Dutch, but moved here around 18 months ago and the rail system is one of my favourite things. City to city is one thing, but many many small villages are linked by slower trains. Sometimes I've caught trains to small villages to do an NS walk and it reminds me a lot of Japan.

The fact that I can consider moving to Rotterdam or Den Haag and continue working at my job in Amsterdam is really something.

EDIT: sometimes traveling by car is cheaper even with _one_ person in the car, if you don't have the 40% discount. I guess that's the biggest downside.

> I do think it's ridiculous, however, than driving somewhere by car is cheaper than going the same distance by train once you're 2+ people in the car.

A prerequisite for this is often already owning the car and not incorporating the ownership costs into the cost analysis, I think. (Which does in practice means it's cheaper for practically everyone. That said, I think for many people hiring a car when needed and using public transport most of the time would actually be the cheaper option. For some value of "many".)

I was just there and it was amazing! Especially the OV-fiets, which are bicycles that you can rent at train stations. You bike to your local station, take a train somewhere, and then for €3.85 you can have a bike for 24 hours, wherever you are. And of course it's so easy to get around thanks to the great bicycle infrastructure. It makes so much sense that, after experiencing it, you just can't figure out how everywhere else went so wrong.

It really is underappreciated. (Well, the OV-fiets is nearly universally revered, but people just love complaining about the trains. It's far from perfect, but it's really pretty great, for many routes even compared to travelling by car.)

Whenever a lot of people somewhere complain about the trains that at least suggests the rail network is good enough that a lot of people use it enough to care.

But it's only possible at the very high urbanisation/population density of the Netherlands, which in turn is only possible with very strict zoning - and more importantly, strong popular support for it. It's just not politically feasible (i.e., wanted by the people) elsewhere.

> you just can't figure out how everywhere else went so wrong

My thoughts exactly. After having lived there for a short while, it's just mind blowing how well this works, and yet nobody else seems to be doing it (with some exceptions like Denmark or certain German cities etc.).

The issue is passenger rail in the Netherlands is heavily optimized for Randstad commuters. People in turn (if they can afford it) optimize their lives around the (major) train stations. Having lived there and in a major French city, I'd choose the French city everyday. France has much faster (and cheaper!) long distance services, and the agglomerations generally more metro/lightrail (which the Netherlands has very little).

The Dutch per capita also outspend the rest of the world on roads, because that's what the other half of the country uses. I live for instance 35km from my work in Amsterdam: public transport is just under two hours and by car 25minutes, up to an hour in heavy traffic.

Nowadays between Amsterdam and Utrecht, there are trains every 10 minutes.

Well, there are six intercity trains per direction each hour to Amsterdam Central, four to Amsterdam South (will be upped to six in a few years), and up to four commuting services. So you could even say there’s a train every 4.3 minutes.

Actually this holds all they way down to Eindhoven, which is pretty damn cool.

To be fair, the Netherlands is tiny: Amsterdam to Rotterdam is only 60 km (~37 mi) apart. There are plenty of Americans who live that far away from their work city and commute in by car.

That's not the Netherlands being tiny. It's the US being ridiculously huge and sparsely populated.

Sparsity isn't an issue, the are plenty of people in boswash. The issue is sprawl and suburbanization. Pre-WW2 US was much better for trains, despite having fewer people in the same overall area - just better concentrated.

> The issue is sprawl and suburbanization

Which itself is also not really the issue, but for the last 20+ years or so, is just a symptom of US cities being openly hostile against most people (whether due to high costs, monopolized land, lack of housing, lack of reasonable transportation infrastructure, lack of education infrastructure, etc).

I just checked https://www.ns.nl/en (e.g. enter Amsterdam > Utrecht) and I am stunned by how beautiful and, at the same time, detailed the information is presented. They show punctuality statistics and even the type of rolling stock (including a graphic).

If you look closely at the graphic you can see where the first and second class compartments are situated. The number of passenger cars is also important as you can use the signs on the platform to predict where the train will come to a stop.

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