I want trains so people can have cross country road trips on the weekend and not have to stay in their small hometown for the rest of their lives
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
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I lived in Connecticut. I used to live in a city outside the capital, with transport available all the time. Then I moved to the sticks, 50 miles away. Same state, just the most rural part.
In a group I did, they showed a woman being a success story from the program. In the video, she was using our bus systems in rhe cities. 4/5 people chirped up and aggreed, "hey we don't have busses in Connecticut this video is fake". I was like, no yeah, we have busses, just not here.
So many people I met in that area, are born, live, work, retire, and die, without ever stepping foot out of their county.
It's sad.
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No, sorry, only cities can have trains, because traditional wisdom™©®¹ says the physics of trains literally stop working outside cities.
If you tried to do something like that, youvwoukd risk damaging the fundamental laws of reality! Imagine if, like, the weak force or gravity or the ability for oxygen to form ionic bonds just got suddenly 30% weaker. You train people are such blind mad zealots, that you would risk this.
¹a Chrysler brand!
This is even funnier to me because where I'm from, trains in cities aren't really a big thing, but trains BETWEEN cities very much are.
This map is outdated as the Lelle-Pärnu route isn't currently serviced, and missing some stops, but this is our railway map:
Tartu has 2 stations as far as I know, Tallinn has multiple, the other places the train stops are all small enough that only one station exists. Entire point of it is to get people into and out of the cities. In the cities we have buses and (only in Tallinn) trams, used to also have trolleys. But only the capital, Tallinn, is a place where you would take a train from one station to another within the city itself.
Most of these places are villages and small towns. The population of Puka is like 500. Orava is around 200.
Now we just need the Tartu-Viljandi-Pärnu route and maybe a Narva-Tartu route, as both would be used by a lot of students (Tartu is a university city), but unfortunately geography doesn't favour my idea, there's protected wetlands between Pärnu and Viljandi as well as between Tartu and Viljandi
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honestly trains that are more affordable than airplanes is super exciting for me
Stupid school holidays ... now the trams only come every 7 minutes instead of 3.5.
I was gonna comment "fuck cars" but then I checked where I was.
Fuck cars.
I grew up with public transit, it was a nuisance when a bus went through every 15 minutes rather than 10.
I want a time machine to go back and yell at myself to appreciate it more, because ever since I left my hometown, I missed it.
Move to Italy
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Dirt cheap cost of living
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Housing prices like it's 1999
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Main line HSR that runs from Venice to Lyons and Milan to Reggio Calibre
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You are gonna love Tokyo.
It is going to be hard to do thing like this any time soon in the US & AU because of big oil
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Thing is that I live near a city that has this (ok not train travel that could replace plane travel) and I just want to be able to afford to live in it.
Wouldn't it be way easier to implement self driving on a rail system? The trains I take to work are frequently cancelled due to lack of operators.
Yes, there are plenty of driverless train networks around the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driverless_train_systems
Not really, because existing track would need to be retrofitted with all of the sensors and whatnot specific to automation. Then there would still need to be a large number of staff available to reroute trains when some run late or have issues, because trying to predict all of those situations is impossible.
Smaller rail systems are frequently automated, like light rail at airports and even some subway systems where minimal human oversight is enough to handle it when things don't work perfectly.
The shortage of operators has a lot more to do with intentionally trying to ruin rail by cutting funding and putting in barriers to working. There are a ton of people who would enjoy being operators if it paid well and was a reliable position.
We have a metro in Sydney that does this. It's usually pretty alright, but difficult to build and scale. The lines that actually go out of the city would never be able to achieve such things, the construction and setup alone is astronomical.
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--rural areas U.S.A has entered the chat-- We need those trains, the stations they serve, and last mile fully electric self-driving vehicles to get our older citizens to their doctor's appointments in the larger cities, and to and from the fancy train stations, and not have them be made to remember to reserve a seat 3-5 days in advance, and be waiting 45 minutes for a bus to show up to take them where they need to be and then another 45 to get back home. Also, last mile fully electric self-driving vehicles for round-trips to grocery stores around town, TIA.
Neighborhood electric vehicles are available. Rural USA can try electric buses. Increasing numbers of buses on routes will help. USA older folk are very un healthy. They are obese. Many are unable to walk in their own and need assistance. This is mostly unique to USA.
To be fair that's how it is in a lot of countries.
Honestly, I want both. I live in Germany and my city has pretty decent public transit. But there are still way too many cars in the city, most streets have parking spaces on both sides, leaving only a small sidewalk. I want people to not be dependent on owning cars anymore. I want personal cars in the city to be replaced by self-driving cabs that you can just order when you need them. Imagine how cool that would be. There would be centralized (underground??) self-driving car storages and if you need a car, you just order one via an app and they just come to wherever you are autonomously and drive you wherever you want to go. You could basically get rid of all public parking spaces, it would be awesome.
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God damn I’d love that. My country has been trying to build a ferry free west coast. A road from southern Norway, along the coast and up to Trondheim. Back in 2012 they decided to green-light the project, but it’s still being argued about.
One of my issues with the whole project is how we’re not building any form of infrastructure based around trains. It’s cars. The geography is really harsh here, but adding train tracks by the road would be more future proof than just highways.
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