That sounds like the worst rail service imaginable. Very American.
The Swiss town of Chur, which has the same population as Menlo Park, California, and which is a good distance from Zurich, as Menlo Park is from San Francisco, has five S-Bahn trains every hour, all day long, plus 9 other regional, interregional, and intercity trains per hour.
There's nothing fundamental about trains that says you have to have insulting levels of service. It's a choice.
We went to switzerland for vacation last summer, and we were quite impressed by the rail system there. Everything runs on time, there is no shortage of space, you can buy your tickets online and the trains are quiet and clean. I'm from France, so I'm not easily impressed by a working train station.
I don't think you can hold any American state to that level of expectation when they are 70 years late in their railroad infrastructure. Not even California would be able to match a 1/10 of your rail service before 2050.
I don’t need the whole USA or even California. I’d settle for fixing the Bay Area, which has close to the same population as Switzerland, about the same economic activity, and only half the territory to cover. It should be a piece of cake.
Eh, you can't compare a local area GDP to a national GDP like this. Yes, tons of software licensing and ad revenue are funneled to the SF region giving us a local area GDP of 591 Billion dollars[1] which is comparable to Switzerland's $750 Billion, but if you try to convert that regional income into infrastructure spending, you'll find that
1) the ability of the bay area to tax that 591 Billion is much less than the ability of Switzerland to tax it's economic activity, as Switzerland captures ~32% of it's national income, while the bay area captures something like 10% of its regional income, so a ballpark 1/3 deflator.
2) once revenue is obtained from taxing, the efficiency with which the distributed bay area governments can make use of the tax revenue is much, much lower than the efficiency with which the Swiss government can spend the money. I'd estimate a 1/10 deflator. This is because we will waste tons of money doing various studies, funnelling side payments to local machine politics, battling environment impact reports in courts, funding various diversity and equity initiatives, and set up a dozen committees to oversee the spending plans.
3) once a dollar is actually spent on the production of infrastructure in the bay area, you'll find that the we will get much, much less for that dollar in infrastructure spending then the same dollar spent in Switzerland on infrastructure. I'd say another factor of 1/3 as per https://www.vox.com/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs...
So when you multiply all those deflators, you'll find that our 591 Billion can be usefully channelled to 1/90 * 591/750 ~= 1% of the useful infrastructure that Switzerland has.
Which seems about right.
Remember it cost San Francisco $3 Billion for the DTX[2] which is 2 kilometers of transit. We are not Switzerland, we are a dysfunctional, corrupt, patchwork of local governments that doesn't really understand much of anything when it comes to infrastructure or efficient government.
> We are not Switzerland, we are a dysfunctional, corrupt, patchwork of local governments that doesn't really understand much of anything when it comes to infrastructure or efficient government.
Not so fast! It's easy to blame your government for all the things broken in your region, but they really are a mirror of your society.
Switzerland has a nice rail system despite being located on the highest mountain chain in Europe, because their people don't turn on each other's at the first occasion. They don't even speak the same language in half of the country ! Yet, the rails don't stop between cantons.
If you want a functioning government and infrastructure, start by changing your individualistic culture, start trusting one another (by not wearing guns, for example), stop thinking you're the best at everything and keep being a place that inspires the rest of the world. You used to be a great country, spearheaded technologies, cured diseases and acted as a role model. Today, it's not the case anymore. Recognize that and you will be able to fix something.
Thanks for this. I always get irritated by comments from Europeans like “why haven’t the Americans fixed the dysfunctional things about their country?”. You might as well ask “why don’t Syrians just decide not to have a war?”. Reality is not so simple.
Americans know trains can be nice. We just can't get our local, state or national governments to build and operate nice ones at a reasonable price (actually, nice might not be attainable regardless of price in many areas for a variety of reasons.)
But we also can't divert the overspending on rail to just building more buses, so don't worry. :) Choice would be nice.
The Swiss town of Chur, which has the same population as Menlo Park, California, and which is a good distance from Zurich, as Menlo Park is from San Francisco, has five S-Bahn trains every hour, all day long, plus 9 other regional, interregional, and intercity trains per hour.
There's nothing fundamental about trains that says you have to have insulting levels of service. It's a choice.