Comment by null_object | Hacker News Reader

Comment by null_object | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com