I wish, but no. The US has very few, very broken, very slow trains. I once tried to see what it would be to visit my friends in Dallas from my home in Denver. We are probably the two biggest cities until you get to coastal areas, so you'd think there would be a train. Nope! The path on the train website told me to take two trains plus three busses, I think it was. It took longer than driving too.
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Thanks for sharing it. Why doesn't the transportation authority improve this sector there?
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It's multifaceted, really. One, the auto industry and the oil industry both pretty much bought politicians and wrote laws and made propaganda to give over all our resources to cars. People always say "Americans love their cars!" but no, we just don't have much of anything else, public transport sucks pretty much everywhere except maybe New York and Chicago. Places that used to have streetcars, like my city, had them paved over and destroyed for cars. Two, what trains there are are mostly freight and they were deregulated in like the 70s or 80s, and so there's no maintenance on rails (we have around three derailments per day), not enough workers, etc. And freight and passenger trains use the same rails and freight gets priority, so even if there is a rare passenger train, a three mile long freight train might make it stop and wait. Three, it just isn't funded. A lot of our infrastructure is just falling apart because it isn't funded, even car infrastructure. Bridges collapse. Trains derail. Even in rich places like New York, there's a famous tunnel crossing underwater that is literally crumbling, it floods, the electrical stuff shorts out, but they haven't gotten the funding to fix it when they should have decades ago. And that tunnel impacts some absurd number of the economy, like if it permanently collapsed some double digits of the GDP would just stop. But still it's not getting fixed.
Basically all the government money goes to weapons manufacturers and whatever industries have bribed enough politicians like oil and our country is falling apart. What few attempts are made at modernizing are often met with obstacle after obstacle, and long term projects get their funding threatened every time there's a new president (like, California has actually been attempting to build high speed rail but it's super slow and some funding was yanked away when Trump became president). Doing big projects on a national scale is difficult because states don't agree. Etc.
To the people from low-income countries or developing countries, the USA is a dreamland! But, looks like the actual scenario may be quite the opposite!
Being a world superpower and maintaining it isn't easy!!
Thanks for your response :)
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Yeah, the US likes to build new things, but not maintain anything. 😅
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