this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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San Francisco has a pretty good bus/trolley system. There might be other cities with decent busses but I’m unaware of them.
Some major cities like New York, Boston, Philly, Chicago have acceptable subways, and commuter rails. You can probably get a daily train from one city to the next. Example: you can take a train from Boston to NY once a day - it’s fairly ok, and probably preferable than driving for most people.
Most cities have busses that suck, and literally zero trains and subways.
Most Europeans don’t realize how big the US is, and how much of it is quite rural. It doesn’t make sense to build a rail to service the few dozen families in east bumfuck nowhere.
Getting a license to drive is, generally speaking, pretty easy from most states. Usually just a written test and a road test where you just have to drive around the block without breaking any rules.
Some city dwellers survive without cars, but they are kind of stuck in the city. When they want to get out, they’ll rent a car for the day.
Just took a look at some population density maps, and I must say that the kind of density you have between Boston and Washington DC is approximately what most of Central Europe looks like. Other parts of USA are pretty sparsely populated.
Apart from the large cities, you could say that anywhere east of Dallas looks a lot like northern Scandinavia in terms of population density. Even Poland has a higher density than the gaps between major cities such as Phoenix and Denver. To me, it seems like nearly everyone lives in one of the big cities, and there's hardly anything in between them.
The worst part, from a transportation perspective, is that our low density rural areas in the US are often isolated homesteads. Fully scattered single family farms and ranches, miles from the next family. We don't have as much village centric rural areas as in Europe. So it makes delivering services (transportation, education, health care) to our rural population much harder.
Similar sort of scattering happens in northern Scandinavia too, but I guess it's to a lesser extent. Most people in the region prefer to live within a 1 h drive to the nearest town, even if they are scattered. Proper hospital services might not be within that radius, but at least you can do basic shopping without driving the whole day. If the town isn't conveniently between two cities, you can forget about trains, and maybe even busses too. Having a driving license is absolutely necessary, because providing public transport in remote areas just isn't cost effective. Same goes for various public services too.
That makes sense, yeah. It's probably the closest comparison.
Boston to NY is more like hourly - Amtrak has a lot of trains going on the line from Boston to/from DC (DC also has a very good transit system for the US at least from what I've heard).
The problem with those trains is that they're expensive and slower - the Amtrak northeast regional costs $75-300 (depending on the date and time, as Amtrak is a company and charges more around holidays and during peak travel hours 🙃) each way from NY to Boston and takes ~4-4.5 hours. Driving can take 3.5-4 if you plan around rush hours in both cities.
Yup - I was thinking the fast train, which isn’t fast at all compared to the rest of the world. I think that one is only once or twice a day - could be wrong though. Price aside, it’s not a terrible experience.
I’d rather dig my eyes out with a dull spoon than take the others. Snail’s pace and stops every 5 min.
The Acela (faster one) is also several times a day now, but it's more like every 2-3 hours instead of 1
Ah, good to know!