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Comment by goodcanadian | Hacker News Reader

I absolutely hate this argument. In Europe, you take the train and there is literal farm land in between stations. While there are lots of small towns and villages close together in a way that you don't necessarily see in North America, the average density is considerably less than Los Angeles, for example. There is no good reason LA couldn't be crisscrossed by trains instead of by freeways.

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In similar vein, I've seen a lot of people use the same argument against high speed inter-city rail (ie cities in the US are far apart), yet the low density interior of China is connected by high speed rail all the way to Ürümqi.

Going coast-to-coast in the US on rail would take a long time, even with a bullet train, so it just wouldn't be competitive with airplanes.

However, going up and down the coasts would make perfect sense for HSR. Traveling from LA to SanFran, for instance, would be much better on a bullet train than an airplane, and the travel time would probably be similar (airplanes have lots of wasted overhead time). The northeast corridor would also be a great place for a bullet train (no, the Acela is not a bullet train). NY-Chicago or DC-Chicago would probably be a good route too.

The problem in the US is just a total lack of political will, and an idiotic aversion on the part of the populace to using trains.

This doesn't even seem to follow, in my experience, and their argument definitely makes sense to me as someone that's lived in an urban European city, an urban American city, and some American suburbs and traveled around all of these places extensively.

Why do trains work well in many European countries? When there's farmland between stations (or even between some bus stops in the city where I currently live), it means that because you normally want to go somewhere that's not farmland, you're very likely to want to go somewhere near a station. The density around specific points (train stations, bus/tram plazas, etc.) is particularly high which makes the last-mile or last-kilometer problem largely a non-issue.

If you build this in the LA metro area, it might serve the people who live very close to stations well, but everyone else who lives somewhere in the middle between two stations (which would be a higher percentage than people living in European farmland) would need to find a way to get home from the station.

I agree with you. In the case of LA metro area, it is just too spread city = badly designed.

If you imagine even fast public transport, to get from one side of LA to the other side, it would still require a lot of stops in the low population density areas. Let's say every stop would cost you 5 minutes which means that even a car could be faster than public transport.

There is no way every stop costs you 5 minutes, more like 1 minute. I am not a fan of buses because they are in the same traffic as cars plus they have to stop as you say. There are some mitigations like dedicated bus lanes that can swing the speed equation back in favour of buses. What you really want, however, is feeder buses taking people to the train, and it is easy to design a rail system that beats cars for speed in a city (basically any urban rail I've ever seen).

1 minute with the vehicle slowing down and speeding up again? If it is bus it goes to the bus stop, other cars have to allow it to go back to the main road.

Edit: 5 minutes would be way too much if I think about it again - you are right.

You don't have to allow cars to go on the same lanes as buses. In Europe it is very common with separate bus lanes.

You can have a distinction between local and express trains, where the express trains skip all the small stops

In practice, this is solved by having two layers of lines on the same tracks - one which stops everywhere and one express line connecting bigger stops.

Density would rapidly increase around stations if planning allowed for it. See all along the Skytrain in the Greater Vancouver area (British Columbia). For people in between or away from stations, you need good integration with the bus network. Anywhere where there is enough traffic to cause congestion has enough traffic to support good public transit which definitely covers most of LA.

> In Europe, you take the train and there is literal farm land in between stations.

This is quite literally my commute. On the way home, I depart from a central London station and after about 20 minutes, I'm passing through farms and rolling hills. This isn't even a cherry-picked example with a new high speed line, it is a line that is about 150 years old!

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