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> I live in Tokyo now, but I'm from Valencia, Spain. I knew the train there was bad when the local subway network, called "metrovalencia", was known locally as "metrovalenshit

I’m sure your experience of your own hometown is accurate, but as a person who’s visited Valencia a few times I’ve found the transport to be excellent: my whole family used the metro to get around without any hitches, and we were always surprised by how clean, quiet and efficient it was.

The train between Valencia and Alicante was like boarding a luxurious airplane: an attendant ushered us on and came around with a food trolley. The ride was smooth and almost silent, and the ticket price included small extras like a free pair of headphones for listening to the onboard radio. This was all just regular economy.

I think it may be a national characteristic to rundown your own country, as my family background is also Spanish and all my relatives always say Spain is a ‘mierda’ (shit) and speak lyrically about how wonderful everything must be in my current country (Sweden), but in fact the last few weeks the train service here in Sweden has been sporadic and continuously interrupted by various problems, as it often is both summer and winter. A Swede will rarely admit this to outsiders though.

So I’m willing to give this initiative a very enthusiastic welcome, instead of instantly dismissing it as a gimmick, or gloomily bound to fail.

Oh no I'm very happy for this initiative! My comment was not about the initiative, but about the corruption, incompetence and delays that plague the Spanish train systems. At least now it's free so that's great news! See in my other comment, they had to force airlines to make planes more expensive because people were using planes instead of the Madrid <=> Valencia train.

Also I'm comparing it to Tokyo, which as others comment is a bit unfair since it's basically the best train network in the world.

you should also try the LA metro for how bad a transit network can be under poor management and corrupt city government. we have some of the best weather in the world, where multi-modal transportation is imminently viable, and yet we've built for cars and sprawl instead.

i remember in tokyo that train headways during rush hour is as little as 90 seconds. and it's punctual as hell. in LA, we're lucky if we get down to 10 minutes, plus or minus 20 minutes. LA is not quite as big or rich as tokyo, but it's on a similar scale, yet we have an order of magnitude worse public transit. it's so frustrating.

We have enjoyed riding metros in Mexico City and Guadalajara, and everywhere more prosperous where we have been, and were eager to try out the LA metro last February. NEVER AGAIN!

The smell alone is sufficient, but the headways, good lord. Spotted several sets of foreign tourists just as astoundingly bewildered as we were.

So we rode buses. Good god. Never again. Sorry LA. You suck. No, I don't enjoy driving in LA gridlock (done it many times). What an apex cultural disaster.

I have to admit the transit was really cheap. I'd pay double for Paris's transit in a heartbeat.

it's infuriating. LA would be 17th by GDP in the world if it were a country. for comparison, tokyo would be 10th (if it were a country) and mexico is 16th. we have perfect weather for 8 months out of the year, and for the other four, it's a bit hot or a bit cold, but humidity is mild and we never get snow.

yet, we can't have world-class transit because it's only for poor people. the only reason we're building any transit right now is because the olympics are coming here in 2028 and the rich folks sponsoring it can't deign to be embarrassed by the dearth of viable transit here.

You make it sound that your experience visiting a few times to Valencia is more relevant overall than someone else's that lived there for decades, 7 days a week. As a local, you have more chances to see the big picture and all the problems that appear from time to time, that are invisible to the occasional tourist.

I am a swiss expat living in Sweden and I can confirm the trains are terrible over here. They are rarely on time, cancelations are very common and incidents can deadlock an entire region. I had to take cabs a few times at the last minute after cancelations to not miss a flight. Let just say things are quite different in Switzerland.

The only thing swedes do right in trains is that they are very civil, make it easy for bikes, strollers and old people to use them, but that's about it.

I don't want to invalidate your experience, but as a frequent public transport user here in CZ and an avid tourist who uses public transport abroad, I notice that the tourist experience tends to be a lot better for many reasons.

First, tourists frequent certain routes that aren't the same as routes for daily commuters. They tend to be much shorter.

Second, tourists rarely travel around in the rush hour and delays are not as crucial for them. You aren't under such a tight time budget when on holiday, unless you need to catch a plane or so. (And most people take a taxi to the airport, given that they travel with baggage.) On the other hand, even a 15 minute delay experienced four days out of five during an average work week gets old fast.

Third, tourists tend to visit cities in periods of good weather, when long waiting etc. isn't very arduous.

The real resiliency or fragility of any system tends to show under stress, and the most stress that a public transport system can be in is in the rush hour under inclement weather conditions (heavy snow, wind causing trees to fall on the track, freezing temperatures etc.), 30 km from the city centre.

So those are precisely the conditions that tourists tend not to encounter during their holidays, and form an inadequately rosy overall picture as a result.

One thing that I have noticed about Spanish natives in my five years of living in Spain, is this frequent comparison with every other richer country.

By almost every measure, life in Spain is great. Public transport is great, but you compare it with Japan which is the best in the world. Security is great, but you compare it with Luxembourg. Unemployment and salaries are... OK, above average at least, but you compare it with Germany.

Spain has issues, but every other country does too. There's a reason "eramos felices y no lo sabiamos" is a Spanish expression... I really wish people here would appreciate how good they have it.

You are mixing being happy with being in a country with great economy/salary/transport/etc.

e.g. the job situation is ridiculously bad, and that's not a "compare" thing, it just is. I've seen people break down crying in class in my degree that hated it and studied it only because it's one of the few that you were kinda promised employment when you finished. Many friends all around Europe, or jobless for long stretchs of time, depending on their family.

I have similar anecdotes for how transportation or security can be troublesome in Spain.

Sure you can be happy with little, as Spaniards normally do, but that doesn't mean everything is great or we shouldn't try to do better. How do we improve if we don't see the problems within?

Well, in fairness, I think just about every rail line on this planet pales in comparison to the reliability and quality of Tokyo rail operations.

The Swiss are probably in contention.

True, I'm just saying that while I knew other cities/countries were better, but I didn't really know how many orders of magnitude better until I lived in Tokyo. It wasn't until I left the pond that I learned that there was not only a lake, but an ocean.

Most countries are going to be bad when compared to Japan. Japan is also the third largest economy.

Yeah I’m in the USA just jealous that they have trains in Spain.

Interstate is marvelous.

US is too big and too sparsely populated both on a large scale and small scale for trains like Europe, Japan and China.

There's a part where no one talk about, and that's the infrastructure within the city are not conducive to trains. People get to a train station and they need to get around and unless you're talking about New York they really just need another car.

This in comparison to European and Asian cities where your friend can just post you an address and you can use public transit all the way to the last block.

There are parts of the US, namely the parts where a majority of people live, that are densely-populated enough for trains.

You didn't read the local scale problem did you? New England is as populated as Europe but that's moot because you still need a car when you get to the station because suburbia.

In European cities you have bus service in trackless suburbia. Tracks are always better but need bus service in addition as practically you won't be building tracks everywhere.

It's a catch 22. The excuse for not building proper transit is sprawl and the excuse for sprawl is not having proper transit. Sprawl always wins in the US.

It's a very short sighted excuse to use for not building transit. Sure if you don't have a land-use plan, but then why build the transit in the first place. These things always go hand-in-hand; many towns started as a train station.

US is big is a silly way to reject trains. So are China and India. Both have extensive train networks that allow people to take a train instead of long road trips. The trains are packed. Mobility is super high and abundantly available. Quality may differ but it's improving because people want it. Either way, it keeps cars off the road leading to less pollution, less metal junk and less inflation.

US land is amazingly well suited for HSR and cities are well suited for subways. We also have the money. The only problem is political.

Then again, at least the comparison with India doesn't work given the massive gulf in costs, safety standards and historical context (India's railway network being inherited from when it was a colony and there were less ethical 'restraints' on how to control costs).

The US has a massive setup cost problem, any significant infrastructure project takes years of regulatory hurdles and then legal challenges as competitors and NIMBYs try everything they can to slow things down.

Thus ending up being way more expensive than countries where they still have slums to ruthlessly tear down or land to seize from small-time farmers to make room for new infrastructure (not to imply that the way it works in the US is much better).

> The US has a massive setup cost problem, any significant infrastructure project takes years of regulatory hurdles and then legal challenges as competitors and NIMBYs try everything they can to slow things down.

This is exactly what I meant by political problems.

> Thus ending up being way more expensive than countries where they still have slums to ruthlessly tear down or land to seize from small-time farmers to make room for new infrastructure (not to imply that the way it works in the US is much better).

India razed slums and farms for trains, the US razed forests and farms for interstates. It's the same thing. Slums in India have a land value to them. The government doesn't get that land for free. Just pay out property owners market value+20% for infrastructure and build the thing that is so direly needed.

Why would I want me and my family on a packed train with our luggage and gear rather than in our comfortable, climate controlled, and spacious vehicle? Who would seriously vote for that?

I’m grateful to live in a country where having a vehicle is normal and not just for the wealthy class. I’m happy to not be packed onto public transit if I want to take the family to the beach or go hiking or something.

> Why would I want me and my family on a packed train with our luggage and gear rather than in our comfortable, climate controlled, and spacious vehicle? Who would seriously vote for that?

You don't need to. It's not like those countries with extensive train networks don't have cars and interstate highways. They do and people use them. The point is that in those countries, cheap options exist for all income brackets and all use cases.

In America, it's a car or bust.

Poor people in America have cars generally speaking. In the USA our idea of poor is very far from what those countries consider poor to be. Our poor are solidly middle class by their standards.

> Poor people in America have cars generally speaking.

And are you saying poor people in America wouldn't want a cheaper mode of transportation as an option?

I think the poor people are generally happy with the situation except for gas prices. Poor people would like cheaper gas prices.

I'm afraid my experience with poor people has been very different. You should go visit some poor people in a suburb and hear their conversations - "I need to do an oil change but I can't spare the $100. I wish I had a ride to the grocery store"

In most other countries you don't need "a ride to the grocery store", that's also a very American-centric problem.

The Yamanote Line doesn't run through the countryside. You could just build it around LA, and then build dense housing near stations once people don't need cars...

> build dense housing near stations once people don't need cars

Ship has sailed, it usually works in the reverse. People aren't coming back from suburbia because there's stations where they don't need cars.

I live in the burbs currently (3 minutes from a train station and convenience store). This station has a decently sized parking lot and people who want to have yards can always find parking there.

That does not say much about Spain. It's a failure of the US.

The UK is the fifth largest and almost every public service is a complete omnishambles.

I suggest dealing with the US healthcare system, or try taking public transportation in literally any city in the US and compare it to London.

Sure, then let's compare NYC to London:

The train in NYC runs 24 hours a day 7 days a week. The London Tube stops at midnight.

The train in NYC is much much cheaper, it's $2.75 to go anywhere on its almost 400km of track. London's Tube has zone-based pricing.

The NYC subway cars are all air-conditioned.

The NYC subway cars are far roomier than the Tube.

NYCs subway is "cut and cover" and so the stations aren't nearly as deep and quicker to get in and out of.

Yeah but our trains are filthy and full of derelict and deranged people. I love the Subway but the Tube has a lot going for it.

For what it is worth, the tube does not entirely shut at midnight: https://tfl.gov.uk/campaign/tube-improvements/what-we-are-do... The equivalent cut-and-cover lines have Aircon and are roomy (they are now also entirely walk-through carriages https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/Bombardi...). The deep-level lines though are often uncooled.

Public transport in London is notoriously expensive though it is true.

One major failing of the NYC subway in my mind is the near total lack of signage. There is like one map per carriage (which is often hidden behind people standing or sitting), and the platforms have almost no signage or maps or directions. You look out the window to see where you are when you pull into a station and there are no signs. Perhaps there is a single letter initial every 30 meters or so... WTF? At least in London the station name is repeated all the way along the platform (along with route maps and network maps and colour-coded signs to other lines etc), there are like 8 maps in every carriage at above-head-height so you can see it over people etc.

The express routes in NYC subway are awesome and I wish London had those

The US healthcare system is not a public service. Nor are the trains in Tokyo.

The US government spends about as large a percentage of GDP on healthcare as the UK does. It's just that in the US we double-dip for asking the users of healthcare to pay the same amount again.

Many train lines in Japan are funded in a public-private mix.

I don't want to overstate this too much, I dislike the JR privatisation (including a part where a lot of the public-era debt ended up in the gov't's hand), and all the train companies here do a combo of offering the train service and doing loads of real estate offerings at each station (making them very successful organizations overall). But I believe that we would see much less train coverage without continued gov't financing in these projects.

Here is an article (from '97, granted) talking about how the gov't sets up things like interest-free loans for developing new lines. https://www.ejrcf.or.jp/jrtr/jrtr11/pdf/f14_ono.pdf

Why is this a problem though? It seems to be working out very well in Japan. Regardless of where the debt ends up, it seems like the people benefit.

In both cases the people benefit, but in one the people benefit and it's still public property, whereas in the other the public goods were sold to business people and the business people are now getting a cut. [0]

If somebody is making money off of a transaction, that money is coming from somewhere. At the margins that is fine but when we're talking about 10s of billions of dollars it just looks like a handout from the general public to people who had enough money to invest in a transportation corporation during its privatisation.

Counterfactuals are not resolvable though, but I think we can look at how this stuff was built out and decide if there are structures to do it without having to just let go of democratic control of vital infrastructure.

[0]: yes I understand that there's a universe where the public-run version just falls apart and doesn't exist.

Agreed. Spain is leading the world here. It's frankly embarrassing given our population density, love or railways and history (inventing them), we have "Railtrack" plus a dozen foreign-owned totally rubbish train companies. We are more concerned with ticket barriers, CCTV cameras and Orwellian tracking of passengers than getting people from A to B so the economy can prosper with the smallest environmental harm.

Spain invented the railway?

He's talking about Britain, compared to Spain.

On the topic at hand, though: Scotland has recently introduced free bus travel for resident under 25s, which is really useful. When I was that age I'd always take the bus over to Glasgow, because it was cheaper than the train. Between long-distance and local bus services, my teens can get most places in Scotland reasonably easily. And even down to Berwick or Carlisle, although they'd need to pay to go any further into England.

> omnishambles

TIL this amusing combo, thanks! The Wikipedia entry is helpful [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnishambles

Spain has the 2nd largest high speed train network of the world, only after China (and only in the last few years, it was #1 before). So I don't think it's a problem of investment, it's a problem of how well you maintain things, if you overbuild and then cannot finish or maintain it then it's a problem that has little to do with economy.

Another example of high speed train, they forced flight companies to make the Valencia <=> Madrid flights more expensive because people preferred going by plane than by train (faster, easier, way cheaper). Yup, instead of making the train better or cheaper, just force the private companies to be worse so the public infra can compete. Why was it so expensive? Because of it being many times overbudget? Why? Because everyone was taking money.

Fair enough. I should have also add that Japan is an engineering powerhouse.

As a Spaniard, I think that's highly suspicious of being one of those internal internal consumption narratives of how bad everything is.

Do you have any proof of that scheme you're mentioning? I say this because, believe it or not, one of the things that Spain does right is building infrastructure on a budget. There has been corruption cases and places when it has been horrid, but in general is well managed.

You'd be surprised how bad it is in many other countries deemed better by your average spaniard. In terms of cost overruns, time, and all kinds of nasty shit.

Flying is artificially cheap to the point the ticket prices make no sense. It's massively subsidized, so it's not really fair to compare it with the train.

Anyways, I have to hard disagree on flying being faster and easier than going by train. Flying is a pretty horrendous experience in comparison, and if you account for the time spent in the airport and getting to it it's not faster either.

Shouldn't the national high speed rail be at least as subsidized as private flight companies?

This particular flight I'm discussing it's more convenient. Getting to the high speed train station is tricky (there's no subway there!), you have to go to the closest one and then walk 10-15 min, which is just slightly faster but harder.

Let's see times:

• Train: 15 min to the station + 15 min early + 1.5h in the train + 15 min in destination = 2h15min

• Plane: 30 min to the station + 30 min early + 30 min flight + 30 min at destination = 2h

(this is domestic flying where you normally just walk in fairly straightforward)

You overestimate the speed of the train (30 minutes of flight = 3h by train) but underestimate the time it takes to fly.

I live in London and my closest train station is 10 minutes by foot, the closest airport is 1h by car or 2h by public transport. Also I tend to arrive 2h before departure, so flying burns at least 4h before even sitting in the plane and maybe as many hours when you land. It's a whole day affair. Domestic flights aren't any better. You save maybe 10 minutes not queueing for passport control.

Flight is terrible unless it's intercontinental. But most prefer the plane because it's vastly cheaper.

No, this is high speed train so it's shorter. My numbers were off both by 20min though, I searched harder numbers and the flight is 53 min while the train is 1h50min, but luckily that doesn't change my overall comparison.

You live in London as you said. That's a totally different experience from a local domestic smaller airport in Spain. Budgeting 30min for a domestic flight (no traffic, no check in, no passport, 2-3 min walk to any gate, literally just the security check) is enough, if you want to be extra careful sure plan to arrive 1h early, but every time I've regretted it since then I had 50 min to wait.

I recently did Madrid-Granada and back via train, it was a great experience.

I recently rode the metros in Barcelona, NY, Paris, and London and the ones in Barcelona, Spain were the best and highest quality subways I have ever ridden. No comment on the ones in Valencia but it seems odd that there would be such a difference within the same country.

Apples to oranges, I am sorry to put it so bluntly. I agree we should strive for better transportation and services overall, but comparing Tokyo with Valencia?

The metro tunnels were fixed and the new line actually opened last month!