- cross-posted to:
- fuckcars@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fuckcars@lemmy.world
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I’ll take the backroads in my dumb little fartbox. It will take twice as long and I’ll hear banjos the entire time but at least I’ll have fun.
Oh, and my car won’t leave without me.
If you miss your train just catch the next one, it’ll be here in like 10 minutes.
I wish that would be true
How does the situation in farm country Japan matter to me when I miss my train and have to wait 1 or 2 hours for the next one?
Happy for those that get to use those trains, but thats just not a universal train experience
The point is that things don’t have to be so bad; places with probably less demand run more trains, you just have to force the train companies to invest in infrastructure instead of stock buybacks.
I’m not gonna try and take any of that away from you, but I’m pretty sure fartbox is slang for butthole?
Or hoopty, a junky vehicle.
Some of those Americans are washing their gas station sandwiches down with gas station wine too.
You might be joking but I saw a guy a few years back in an old SUV drinking the last remnant of wine out of the bag from some box wine on the highway.
and gas station dick pills
A gas station that does not sell beer and ammunition is not some place I will buy gas from!
If you saw how expensive and shitty our trains are you’d pick the accord too
At least you recognize that the system is forcing you to make that choice, and not your “individual freedom”.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Soft Sleeper trains in China are quite nice and like 10USD/100 miles.
Yes it does, sadly. Our trains are basically set up to fail. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN7e38Q7e1U
Wait you just posted a video about how the system was intentionally designed to fail.
If it can intentionally be designed to fail then it can be redesigned to succeed. There is no reason it has to be the way it is
Wait 'til you hear about the ice cream machines at McDonald’s
Probably an intenet myth. But I have somewhere in my memory, that the machines are hard to clean. So enployees mark them out of order to not have to clean them.
Urban Legend. Probably.
It doesn’t happen to ice cream machines at other fast food franchises nearly as frequently, and the machines at McDonald’s give unhelpful error codes and are generally designed to require pricey field technician visits (that are helpfully provided for by the manufacturer) to resolve.
There was a third party device that was created to get around the error code issue, providing actual details of what was wrong and saving franchise owners thousands of dollars. So naturally the manufacturer sued the creator and petitioned McD’s corporate to disallow its use.
There are billions of dollars aligned against fixing the problem though so its going to look bad on paper to start fixing things, at least at first. You’d need to fix the political system to allow that kind of multi election cycle thinking to exist.
Yeah, but money has lost elections before.
It’s not money controlling the issues. It’s hatred of minorities and mistrust of the government (that people voted in), as well as of course a slew of other issues. But it starts with mentalities, not dollars.
It doesn’t have to be that way but it currently is, and that’s why Americans don’t take trains. Have you seen Amtrak? It’s like an 1800’s coal train; the LA metro (light rail) is great if you want to get stabbed by a tweaker on the way to work.
I used to take Amtrak between Philly and DC. It took about 2 hours which is a bit shorter than driving if you’re lucky enough to not hit major traffic. The problem was that if it rained you had water pouring into the car from multiple spots in the ceiling. Just an amazing thing to see in 200-year-old technology. Even Amish buggies don’t leak like that.
I thought about taking the Acela on that route once. Cost 4X as much and shaved a whopping 10 minutes off the time.
I do not understand Amtrak at all. The Keystone has been the absolute best thing about moving back east for me. $25 to Manhattan, grab a bagel, see a show, $25 home. And the Keystone is the crappy commuter train, the Pennsylvanian is way nicer. I’ve done it tons of times and it’s only been late once, and no leaks on the rain.
Getting to DC costs hundreds each way and isn’t any faster than driving. I’m better off buying a ticket to Baltimore and then taking the $7 commuter to DC…
Omg, the soft sleepers. Took them all over China. Hangzhou, yinchuan, chengdu, kunming. Once completely fucked up with language and took a slow train hard seat to Xian from Beijing. More than 24hrs over May Day/labor week. People were crawling in the windows in the middle of a field. Cannot recommend that.
Was it just absolutely packed and the window was the only way to make it inside? Maybe you ended up spending hours pressed against other people? Not sure if folks would be motivated to try to board without a ticket
Yes. Climbing in the windows and sitting in the aisle. I went to the bathroom once. It was like those puzzles with one piece missing, including those standing in the bathroom.
It was like those puzzles with one piece missing, including those standing in the bathroom.
Perfect visual :D
What’s that adjusted for income?
Somewhere between 40 and 100 USD depending on location.
But as wages increase and the market is able to bear higher prices, its unlikely to increase to those prices, since the rail network isn’t run for profit.
Prices will still go up as labor costs increase, just not as much as they could, similar to rent and food.
There are of course far cheaper options such as hard sleepers, soft seats, and hard seats, which pack 6 beds per birth, 8 seats, or ~12 seats respectively
Intrigued by the different options. I can search images of each of the four seating option types to compare… I am curious if you might find it a good use of your time to share photos of each of the options as you remember them, maybe with little annotation wherever is relevant?
Also quickly in my defense, the soft sleeper Wikipedia article features a hallway photo instead of a bed photo. :)
Sorry, I don’t have pictures I took myself that show the layout, but the app has examples. I think the top business class pic is actually Premium Business Class.
Theres a few other layouts, but you get the gist.
spoiler
High speed from Beijing to Shanghai:
And for slow trains:
Most slow trains have a dining car in my experience.
Put a smile right on my face, a hundred pics & all better than web image search results :D asked the right alcoholicorn
So - And then there’s standing!
Great look into all those options, American Amtrak has a fraction I think
No problem, I would have taken pictures myself if I expected anyone to care. Maybe when I return in 3-4 months.
Unrelated, here’s a simulator at a train museum in Tokyo.
Its really mixed tbh. Some make sense others cost a lot.
Expensive? Sure. Shitty? Not so much. I like our trains, at least the major lines.
I drive a Ford Fiesta thank you very much. 😉
If the Honda accord is good enough for Jesus it’s good enough for me
Yes but at least Trump is saving me money with the Freedom Fuel Network™
proceeds to pay >$100 to fill up the emotional support truck
/S massive giant /s since there are idiots who really think this, even after the Iran war erupted
emotional support truck
I’m going to start calling them this now. It’s perfect. Thank you. I usually call them Compensators or “Ferd F-Teen Thousands”
You just grew a 3rd ball.
I love picnicface.
Removed by mod
You just grew yourself a 4th ball.
it’s wild to me that americans don’t use propane as a car fuel
We tried it pretty well back in the 1970s. It was not uncommon to see LP powered conversions on the road. People even experimented with wood gas systems. The problem with LP, at least where I lived, was those engines didn’t start well in cold weather. And the second issue was regulations required fueling stations to have someone(s) trained and dedicated to doing those refills. It was deemed not safe to let the common man, (you know morons), do that. That added to the cost. And finally, with an LP tank in your car, you could be driving around with a possible bomb or at least a BLVE under your ass. Which is not safe for those around you.
Sometimes to day you will still see LP powered delivery vans rolling down the road. So it hasn’t totally gone away.
It’s wilder that we don’t use gasoline in our barbecue grills.
Could have sworn I remembered a video of a sedan, maybe in Russia, that had allegedly been converted to run on something like propane and the tanks were stored in the trunk. Sure this was more affordable than regular vehicle fuel, but when it got rear-ended… it exploded!
YouTube isn’t full of these videos by any means so maybe it’s safer than I thought?
it’s very common in turkey italy mexico and a couple other countries that sell lpg (propane-butane mix) at lower prices than gasoline, nothing explodes these tanks need to be certified (varies by country) and gasoline is already flammable so nbd
in a city where i live most of taxis are hybrids modified to run on lpg so it has to be both safe and durable
Propane-butane, interesting!
Oh good
its a mix that varies by season because in winter higher pressure at the same temperature is needed, and in summer the opposite. and also in winter gasoline has a little butane dissolved, because it’s cheaper and has high octane number, and makes engine startup easier. its a bit complicated but it works
Ah!
Are you familiar with the way California has winter and summer blends? I think it’s a slightly different principle, focused on being environmentally friendly in the summer when it shouldn’t be too hard for engines to start.
every country has these seasonal changes (except those near equator) both for gasoline diesel and lpg and this is before we get into renewable components
gasoline and lpg are changed for the same reason, it is to keep vapor pressure at the same temperature lower in summer and higher in winter. too low and it’s hard to start, too high and volatile components bubble out = gasoline degrades and makes smog in the city. diesel is more complicated because it gels out at lower temperatures but how exactly this happens depending on several things, and mitigations are different
I can tell you I’m not imprisoned by my powerful, responsive Acura.
Lol I love The Onion.
You can tell some people either didn’t get the joke or watch the vid.
thanks for reminding me of this gem
I drive my car to work so I can afford a car so I can drive to work so I can afford a car
This reminds me of when my parents made me get a job to pay for auto insurance at 16, though I didn’t have a car or plan to get one right away. Their rates would go way up unless I had a separate plan, so I had to get one. And then I needed to get a car to get to a job, so I had to spend everything I had saved up as a kid to get a barely functioning car and insure it. I will say that it was sadly a good intro into life as soon to be adult in America.
I believe 20% of household spending in the US was for cars. So people could seriously work a day less every week, if they got rid of their car.
Really I wish I could live without one. Ive decided on harm reduction instead.
I learned something weird about cars and money and such just this last week. I got tired of working on a truck just to spend more money dumping fuel in it, and I took what I considered the nuclear option. I traded the truck in. On a used 2nd generation Nissan Leaf.
The car wasn’t expensive. I could easily afford it. But as I was working on the required financial gymnastics to fit a car payment in my budget, I saw that the truck has been using $200 of gas every month. And the auto insurance dropped by about $100 each month. The car payment is $200. It costs something like 70 cents to charge it after my commute.
The silly car isn’t cheap. It’s free. And its so quiet and smooth, no wonder people get evangelical about their EV’s.
The silly car isn’t cheap. It’s free
If you don’t count maintenance and insurance, parking, etc. Add those and it’s once again expensive.
I don’t understand your argument.
The truck I traded in had those same costs
And it got 15 mpg.
And the tires cost more.
And the insurance was twice as expensive.
And it needed oil changes
And it needed transmission fluid changes.
Sure its more expensive than owning no car at all. Owning no car at all just isn’t an option for a lot of people in the US. So instead of spending money on tires/brakes/insurance/fuel/oil/fluids/tires for an F150, I’m paying for tires/insurance for a dorky little EV. And I have an extra ~$400 in my budget.
The silly car isn’t cheap. It’s free
I don’t understand your argument.
The car is not free. The car is still expensive. Even if it is a necessary expense. Even if it’s cheaper than the truck.
So its hair splitting then.
No, it’s talking about how cars are expensive, not free.
Have you looked at a depreciation curve? For newish vehicles, the biggest “expense” is depreciation. Its higher for luxury cars and EVs than trucks.
Yeah, but I didn’t buy a new ev…
Correct, so you dodged the 25-35% cost of driving out of the lot, but unless its so old the resale value is like 5-10% of the og cost, depreciation is still going to be your greatest loss, likely 10-20% per year. Thats a few thousand dollars.
That’s nearly a line in Metric - Handshake
Buy this car to drive to work, drive to work to pay for this car.
There’s also some great movies about American poverty, and it feels like there’s always a scene where car trouble of some kind tips their life into an immediate downward spiral. They need it to get to work to sustain everything else, making one traffic stop the moment of despair.
The one I really appreciated, as heart wrenching as it was, is called Straw.
This is why rednecks are always shadetree mechanics of some stripe or another. Me too. I grew up poor, so I got real good at working on cars.
The worst part is that scenario you mention is a real thing that can happen and does happen to a lot of people in the US. You should see some of the cars in my deep red no-vehicle-inspection state. I once witnessed a car running on four donut spares, one headlight, and one taillight. And probably no insurance. The alternative is possibly losing a job and becoming homeless.
Too real. Barely avoided that trap once myself.
I got a shiny car. I like shiny things lol. That’s all it’s got going for it. I would rather be drunk on a train haha
Americans will be shocked by the infrastructure when they to go to China.
Not that they ever will because according to US propaganda news, it’s a total third world country hell hole, worse than North Korea.
Who wouldn’t be shocked?
If anyone’s wondering that’s Guangzhou South.
Looks very impressive, but also pretty airport-like. I think I prefer the look of Frankfurt or Zürich, which operate on a similar scale (all three at around 170 million passengers a year).
Of course there is way different railway history behind those. Making it look retro would also have been weird for Guangzhou South I would think.
I edited it to include locations.
I do find Chinese architecture and design is often a little less inviting or more sterile than I’d like.
Ah I thought it was all the same location and stopped searching after the first 😁 thanks for the edit!
There are some amazing airports in China. Chengdu Tianfu International Airport or Beijing Facing are state of art and great design.
How about Shanghai Songjiang railway station?
Impressive, but not very warm.
Yeah, no. None of us making that argument (except, you guessed it… conservatives) aren’t comparing ourselves to Europe. Obviously they win. We should be implementing the brilliant socialist policies of especially northern Europe.
Meanwhile I could be in Beijing teleporting around in my BYD hoping the transporter trace doesn’t pattern-recognize the pooh bear meme I just made. Unless, of course, I want to make my family disappear.
Sorry boss I don’t think Americans can really throw any shade on China for authoritarian overreach anymore.
Your guy just fired the people looking after postal vote rolls. I wonder how many of those families might get disappeared, memes or not.
He just launched his own personal brand of gas stations selling fuel he stole or extorted from whomever he’s picked on recently.
Oops I used the B-word and the PB-words and summoned the repress-o-bots and local stochastic parrots. We’re not there yet and we haven’t been for the past 10 years. So why has anyone who actually cares been cheering on our downfall like it’s a forgone conclusion? Accelerationist scum.
I’m not cheering on your downfall, I’m challenging you to engage in some introspection rather than whataboutism.
What a bullshit lie. There is no debate or discussion happening online. You’re here to fight, inflame, and enrage.
Please don’t breed
Sorry mate did you reply to the wrong comment? Not making much sense there.
Do people in the US really get disappeared?
Where have you been for the last year? Trump is absolutely going to use ICE to discourage people on the postal voter list from voting.
I’m been in my country I guess? I’m just surprised if ICE is used against those officials
You might have misunderstood my comment.
Trump has fired the officials who were looking after the list of postal voters. They will appoint replacements who will hand over the list.
They will use ICE to intimidate people on the list into not voting.
Yes. All the time. That’s what ICE does.
Are ICE used against officials like that too?
Disappearing officials who use their positions to get rich would actually be pretty cool. Maybe we could disappear billionaires who get political too.
Yes.
You Europeans aren’t very far behind with the amount of population surveillance you are adding to. What surveillance bill just got passed this week?
I don’t think any of us can be throwing rocks around about freedom anymore.
Actually im in Australia but I acknowledge we are also heavily surveilled.
However, we do have free elections, we embrace, we respect bodily autonomy, and we don’t have a tinpot dictator.
Until you don’t. And surveillance is often a first step.
My original comment was, American’s don’t have much credibility when calling others authoritarian shit holes.
That applies just as well to your comment as the original commenter I responded to.
Consider it a warning that is probably too late.
And when they’re stopped at the lights, the desperate people knocking on their window hoping for some loose change
I’ve always wondered if that and the people coming to clean your windshield etc. are a real, common thing or just movie/tv show trope
It’s very real. Where I live I think I’ve only seen someone try to clean my windshield maybe twice. But seeing people beg on intersection corners is a very common sight. There’s whole tent cities out here. The solution? Obviously it’s to criminalize begging and post signs everywhere that say “Be part of the solution, say no to panhandlers” as if that solves anything. The ‘ol ignore it and maybe it’ll go away approach.
I also see a lot of people selling flowers, or occasionally candy apples at intersections as well.
It’s real in some parts of Los Angeles for sure.
I’ve often used about homeless people in Los Angeles. What’s it about LA that they’re associated with/have a large homeless population?
Or maybe it was San Francisco. I think one of those.
I’ve had to sleep in my car in a midwestern winter. If I hadn’t been in school and expecting to find a place to stay I probably would’ve headed out to the west coast too. Milder seasons are extremely valuable in such situations.
There’s also a thing I’ve heard of with more conservative states shipping some of their homeless to the coasts so as to not have to deal with them themselves
What’s it about LA that they’re associated with/have a large homeless population?
It’s great weather to be homeless in.
It’s real
I’ve seen poor bastards putting themselves in harm’s way in moving traffic, desperate for some help
Damn that’s rough
like an american would drive a vehicle as small as an accord
This made me laugh because I do indeed drive an Accord. I hate that sedan’s seem like they’re dying.
think about how I feel, with wagons pretty much already dead for the past decade
They’re still popular here in Europe. My last car was a wagon.
I’m still grieving horsedrawn carriages. 😔
Plenty of Accords in the US. It’s a pretty popular car over here.
for the poors, maybe /s
Having taken the bus to work for two years now, I have to say… The complete and utter lack of responsibility has been liberating. Like, sure… There’s still some stigma there where I feel kind of poor or something standing in my uniform at the bus stop while cars whiz past me, but I only spend $70 CAD /mo on my commute, and it I want, I can travel anywhere in the city using that same pass. That’s pretty reasonable.
Plus, as someone actively engaged in nature-based spirituality, it feels kind of nice knowing that I’m traveling a bit more responsibly than I would have with our vehicle.
I feel you friend, I’m the same way. I’ve told so many people that and they are so carbrained that they refuse to understand anything beyond time to get there. Yes my bus takes about 10-20% longer, and they immediately augh at me for being a fool, such a fooly fool.
But my ride is mine. I read a book, I think about other things, my time is mine. It’s not worried if the asshole will cut me off, the heightened blood pressure, the anger, the worried if I’m in an okay parking spot. None of that exists. I’ll gladly take 45 minutes on the bus over 30 minutes of stressful driving.
god, I wish. bus routes here are generally 3x longer at minimum
last route I checked against a 22min drive was 90min by bus
Where I live, and for the places I want to go, typical travel times are:
- car: 15 minutes
- bike: 25 minutes
- walk: 1.5 hours
- transit: 45 minutes
Or:
- car: 20 minutes
- bike: 35 minutes
- walk: 2 hours
- transit: 1 hour
And, that’s if it’s a good time of day for transit. If I’m coming back home near 11pm the transit option can be essentially the same as walking. If I have the option to leave at 11:15 so I can arrive 5 minutes before the bus instead of leaving at 11:00 and waiting 20 minutes for the bus, and the bus is on time, and the bus I’m supposed to connect to is on time, then the bus option can be noticeably faster than walking. But, if the first bus is running late (which happens all the time) it can mean missing the next connection, and walking is actually faster than taking the bus, even if it’s a walk of more than an hour.
So, needless to say, I bike whenever the weather permits. But, unfortunately, winter is awful here, the bike lanes and trails aren’t plowed in the winter, so biking for roughly half the year isn’t a real option.
Yeah, I can tolerate up to 2x the length of the drive, above that is where I start to get annoyed. I know transfers happen, and they are unavoidable, but a well oiled system keeps them to a minimum and keeps bus routes direct.
I would love to have this opportunity because I fucking hate maintenance on my car. As soon as my car senses my bank account reaching a certain threshold it decides that the starter should die the next weekend.
Man, I tried to do public transport to work. I was in the best situation. I lived walking distance to the light rail, my office was on the other side of town, within walking disance to the light rail.
leave at 7:30, walk to the rail by 7:50, not bad buy a ticket on the automated machine and wait, assuming 1 of the 3 machines was working. 50:50 honestly. trains come every 15, except they don’t.
On a good day, the train would be there by 8, on a bad day, maybe 8:30 Ride it for 20 minutes, 4 stops, until I need to switch trains. Get off train 1, buy a ticket if the machines there work, god forbid there’s no ticket on the first run and a train already there, i’ll be waiting for another train. train 2 shows, on a good day, 30 more minutes to my work stop, on a bad day, 45. i hop off at my stop, walk 15m to the office. I’m at the office between 9:30 and 9:45. If it’s hot i’m covered in sweat. If it’s cold i’m freezing. Luckily my job DGAF what time we show up.2h there, 2h back.
except after 7:30pm, trains go to every 30 minutes, which means maybe every 45.
If there’s an accident, a bus bridge will easily make that one way trip 4 hours.
If I drive, I’m there in 27 minutes.
3.5 hours a day to take public transport here for a 30m drive.
We’re not clusters of towns with jobs where everything is near transport and even when things are close our trains are slow an full of homeless trying to stay warm in the winter. I would have loved to hell to get rid of one of the cars. but giving up 1/4 of my family time on a job that already wants 10 hours a day wasn’t negotiable.
According to everyone in this thread, you’re a super ignorant American who can’t see the benefit of spending half your day on public transport in order to achieve something that would be a 20 minute car ride.
I really wish it was a reasonable option. The only wine on the train near me is in a paper bag and the guy drinking it smells like old cheese :)
In my hometown people are attacked on the public bus constantly. It’s a new story all the time. Just someone today was trying to set the inside of the bus on fire and it’s in the news. Apparently, I’m a greedy American for not wanting to put my five-year-old child next to a homeless schizophrenic with a knife.
Do you not have digital tickets of some form?
Also light rail is not that fast. So if you have to wait a long time, you are probably better off riding a bicycle. Obviously infrastructure permitting. Your description sounds like that should be possible in a bit more then an hour, but I have obviously no idea where you live and your work is, so can not honestly judge. Just wanted to throw that out there.
No digital tickets when I was doing it (5 years ago). It’s a major metro, but the government here doesn’t take it seriously; they treat it as poor transport.
Can’t bike through the center of the city safely, no bike lanes. Many streets north and south of the city don’t even have shoulders.
40km each way, average summer temps in the 30’s
To bike, I’d need to move closer to work, I’d still sweat my ass off and show up stinky. Also, I can’t be sure I’d get employment near there if anything happened. Needing to sell my house everytime I change jobs seems like a rough time.
We’re just not architected for it. Busses take even longer and are more unpredictable.
This is sort of overblown. In very few situations will you wait in traffic for 3 hours. There are plenty of roads that flow with only minor traffic delays outside of the big cities.
Still need trains. Fast trains. Choo choo!
I can guarantee you depending on where you live this is absolutely normal
Live in Massachusetts anywhere outside the 90 belt and it will take you hours to get in to boston if your woek is there.
