Flight impossibility just emphasizes the fact that many of the available alternatives don't exist. Here in Lyon, it is still possible to get around on trains to your final destination (though many are very booked right now). However, any option over water just seems silly. There are virtually no transatlantic passenger ships or even routes across the mediterranean to Africa or the Middle East (I suppose Morocco is the exception).
Of course, there's good reason for this - I believe it takes multiple days to get from Spain to the UK by boat, and weeks to get across the Atlantic. If air travel is normally possible, no one is going to do that, except the few crew on shipping vessels. I suppose sea travel is faster than horse-drawn transport, but it's slower than rail, automobile, or any other modern ground transport, all of which are substantially slower than air.
But maybe this just indicates that we really should have been looking into surface-based alternatives several decades ago, rather than putting all our long-distance transportation eggs in the air travel basket.
than rail, automobile, or any other modern ground transport, all of which are substantially slower than air
If you consider travel from departure to arrival, then, yes, rail is slower than air. But the amount of preprocessing (checkin, security, even just how long it takes to board) and post-processing (disembarking, baggage claim) makes air much slower than rail in much of Europe. Before TGV, the Paris-Lyon route was nearly all served by air; now 90% of passengers take the train. Similar phenomena occured around France, as well as Paris-Brussels, Madrid-Barcelona, Frankfurt-Cologne, etc. And train is only going to get faster with the AGV, which will soon be giving airlines a run for the money on a lot of profitable lines (Paris-London, for example).
And yet Americans insist on not investing on train transportation because... I do not know. Just like they insist on not having public health care, or in not being a civilized country over all.
That's true. I've had the thought several times in the last few months (or maybe year or two) that airlines are actually public transit. Yet somehow we don't think of air travel the same way we think of trains, buses, subways, etc. I'm not sure why exactly that it, but maybe it's just because commercial air travel is something that even relatively rich people do, while (outside New York and Washington), most other public transit is only something poor people do in the US.
So now I'm reversing the direction of my definition. Where before I said that Americans don't like public transit because it means they don't own the vehicle, now I'm saying that in the couple cases where there is no personally-owned alternative that more than 1% of the population could have, it doesn't count as public transit. Hmm...
I don't think it's very popular. I think people consider Greyhound a step down from Amtrak, which is already pretty low. There definitely has been a bit of a resurgence of intercity bus travel among the middle class (well, students and young professionals) starting with the Chinatown buses connecting the northeastern cities, and continuing with more high tech buses that offer greater legroom and wi-fi and such. I did take a Chinatown bus once, but haven't taken any of the new-school buses yet. But I think this is all still relatively marginal compared to driving or flying, and intercity rail in the northeast.
Shorter-distance regional buses are reasonably well thought of, as long as they don't say "Greyhound" on them. Because everyone knows that riding Greyhound results in rape, stabbin's, or at best sitting on pee anointed cushions... ^_^
All nonsense, of course... OR IS IT? I haven't ridden Greyhound myself, but my old roommate had to when her car destroyed itself midway between Oregon and the Bay Area. She ended up having to wait at the Greyhound stop with several lumpy boxes of her hastily stuffed worldly possessions, and it just so happened that this stop was populated with very recent inmates from the nearby prison, also waiting for the bus, who still had enough anger issues that they insisted on yelling and spitting on her for several hours while they all waited for the bus.
Also, I believe in Los Angeles the Greyhound terminal is right in the middle of or next to Skid Row, which is really shocking in terms of the conditions that thousands of people live in in a city in an OECD country.
I remember when, only a couple years ago, I was shocked to discover Skid Row is an actual street & neighborhood in LA, instead of just a fictional location in the Little Shop of Horrors musical!
In their defense, Americans get misinformed by lobbies a lot. For instance, Southwest Airlines lobbied very hard in the early 90's against a high-speed rail triangle Dallas-Houston-San Antonio, and they won. The project was scrapped and $40 million invested into it was wasted. Based on that history, I think it's not much of a wonder that Texas didn't get any of the high-speed rail stimulus money: Texans need to be convinced that it can work by seeing it in place and profiting in another state. That, and their proposal wasn't that strong and pragmatically speaking, investing in Florida can bring a swing state into the Democratic fold
( ... )
Flight impossibility just emphasizes the fact that many of the available alternatives don't exist. Here in Lyon, it is still possible to get around on trains to your final destination (though many are very booked right now). However, any option over water just seems silly. There are virtually no transatlantic passenger ships or even routes across the mediterranean to Africa or the Middle East (I suppose Morocco is the exception).
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But maybe this just indicates that we really should have been looking into surface-based alternatives several decades ago, rather than putting all our long-distance transportation eggs in the air travel basket.
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If you consider travel from departure to arrival, then, yes, rail is slower than air. But the amount of preprocessing (checkin, security, even just how long it takes to board) and post-processing (disembarking, baggage claim) makes air much slower than rail in much of Europe. Before TGV, the Paris-Lyon route was nearly all served by air; now 90% of passengers take the train. Similar phenomena occured around France, as well as Paris-Brussels, Madrid-Barcelona, Frankfurt-Cologne, etc. And train is only going to get faster with the AGV, which will soon be giving airlines a run for the money on a lot of profitable lines (Paris-London, for example).
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And yet Americans insist on not investing on train transportation because... I do not know. Just like they insist on not having public health care, or in not being a civilized country over all.
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So now I'm reversing the direction of my definition. Where before I said that Americans don't like public transit because it means they don't own the vehicle, now I'm saying that in the couple cases where there is no personally-owned alternative that more than 1% of the population could have, it doesn't count as public transit. Hmm...
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All nonsense, of course... OR IS IT? I haven't ridden Greyhound myself, but my old roommate had to when her car destroyed itself midway between Oregon and the Bay Area. She ended up having to wait at the Greyhound stop with several lumpy boxes of her hastily stuffed worldly possessions, and it just so happened that this stop was populated with very recent inmates from the nearby prison, also waiting for the bus, who still had enough anger issues that they insisted on yelling and spitting on her for several hours while they all waited for the bus.
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