Sounds vaguely similar to Jesperson's cycle and double negatives, the "couldn't care less" idioms. And "absolutely avoided for clarity" is a bit harsh, language is by its nature imprecise and telling people how to speak has (thankfully) almost never worked to avert language change.
Do the poles fall off the wires a lot? Our trolley buses in Seattle have a bit of a problem with that. According to the folks I know in San Francisco, theirs do too. They're great otherwise though. Seattle's newer trolley buses can operate off the wire for about 3 miles/5 kilometers (on a LiFePO4 battery) which helps a bit.
I have seen it happen a few times, but it does not seem to happen very often. I don't think I ever saw it happen when riding a trolley bus - usually I saw a stopped trolleybus with the driver stepping out & reatacching the collector poles before driving away. Took a couple minutes at most.
It was usually in some tricky spots - trolley wires crossing streetcar wire on Konečného náměstí (yeah, we have both :) ) or on the top of the rather steep slope of the Kotlářská street next to the Natural sciences faculty of the Masaryk university.
I guess the new trolley busses with batteries and poles thatr can be stowed automatically might be even better for this - no need to fix the poles immediately, but wait for a regular stop or even the line terminus & just use the battery.
Also once when touring one of the trolleybus depos (the small one in Husovice) the local maintenance chief mentioned that the one roundabout wired for trolley buses (yes, that exists) is a pain to maintain & maybe they could scrap it in the future, with the busses crossing it on batteries instead. :)
Oof yeah I can see how a roundabout would cause a headache. I really enjoy the trolleybuses; there are some plans in place to expand the system, but not enough IMO.
More expensive that driving? My public transport ticket for my whole state costs less than 400EUR, (whole country ~1000) while a car would run me around 6000/year, depending on how much I'm driving
Which ticket do you mean? If you're thinking of an adult GA it's actually now ~$4,700/yr :(
But, an adult GA is a premium ticket. That buys you unlimited travel on the entire network for a year. Not many travel patterns need that. If you just buy tickets as you need them and especially combined with a Halbtax it's not so bad. Where the crossover between car ownership and using public transport for everything occurs is going to depend a lot on your specific travel patterns and what kind of car you compare to.
That's a lot more than I remember, but doesn't surprise :)
You are right tho. If I would live near a bus station that has more than 3 rides a day (which 98% of all Swiss do, rough estimate) I would probably just use a halbtax and a Region specific subscription.
But if I use regular SBB tickets for like 10-15 short trips a year you are already getting closer to the GA. Depends on your patterns :)
Hmm what do you define as a short trip? 10 trips/yr at $4700/yr would be $470 per trip, I don't even know how to spend that much by crossing the country: Zurich to Geneva Airport without a halbtax is $114 CHF.
€6k/year is a crazy price for a car. For me insurance, tax, servicing and depreciation are about £1k/year. And also that's an extremely cheap train ticket. In the UK it would be 10x that easily.
That depreciation number is extremely suspicious, unless your car is very old/cheap in which case your service number is suspicious (or you value your time at close to 0 GBP per hour).
Also, your car has to park somewhere presumably, which uses land, and I assume your car uses fuel (or electricity, but unlikely if your car is that cheap)
I bought it for £12k when it was 3 years old (Skoda Octavia) and I'm hoping it will last 20 years at least. Service is like £200, insurance £230, MOT £50, tax £130 or something. Ok maybe more like £1.3k. Still waaaay less than €6k.
Park it on the drive. Yeah I wasn't including fuel costs because they depend on how much you drive. I'm probably about at about £500/year at most (I work from home).
When I commuted by car it would have been maybe £1k/year (£10/day but I lift shared).
Ah, okay, so the deprecation is more "this is what I imagine the deprecation to be" than anything else. You may expect maintenance costs to... increase as it gets older.
Yeah that is true, but even extremely pessimistically there's no way I'd get near €6k/year. My last car only cost £4.2k (in today's money) and that lasted for 10 years.
Fuel, mandatory insurance, yearly service (also mandatory here), highway tolls, parking fees, usually even the parking space at home, in apartments,...
£5k/yr would be fairly typical for lease of an average family car in the UK I think. Quite low, even.
Maybe you can get it down to £1k/year by driving an old car that you’ve fully paid off (in which case you’re ignoring the amorted cost), never needs maintenance, has a low value to minimise depreciation and insurance etc., but even then 2-3x that wouldn’t be uncommon.
And the average EU country is quite a bit smaller than the average US state, along with the EU being more densely populated - public transit certainly has some artificial/political roadblocks in the US, but it’s also fundamentally more challenging and expensive here.
It must depend on the cities and how far in advance you can book.
I just checked on Amtrak and you can get a train from Seattle to Spokane for $37 in July. This website suggests a comparable cost for driving: https://www.travelmath.com/cost-of-driving/from/Seattle,+WA/... . That seems to be based purely on fuel costs, not counting the marginal costs of insurance and maintenance.
Using the same method, I can get Amtrak from Seattle to Chicago at $169, vs $300 drivings costs.
Yeah, I can also take a plane from Germany to England and pay less than what it costs me for the taxi that I will need to get to the airport. Does that mean that flying EasyJet should be considered the most efficient means of transportation?
What exactly are you trying to argue, here?
- That the cost of one train ticket is higher than the cost of a car trip?
I'm arguing that in America the only reason to take a train for me is for the novelty factor. Novelty isn't enough to garner a ton of investment to get rail built.
> The only reason to take a train for me is for the novelty factor.
Sure, if you are willing to disregard all of the environmental and health costs associated with car-centric development, then there is no reason to invest in rail.
If you are willing to ignore the more than 40 thousand people that die on car crashes per year in the US, then there is no reason to invest in rail.
If you are willing to ignore the fact that all cities are going bankrupt because they don't get enough in property taxes to maintain the roads and basic infrastructure in the suburbs, then there is no reason to invest in rail.
If you don't care about the fact that your kids are growing completely isolated because they can't go anywhere unless they have someone driving them around, then there is no reason to invest in rail.
There are so many examples in the US where this isn’t true. Examples of where lines make economic sense but have not been built: Ohio (Cleveland/Columbus/Cincinnati possible extension to Detroit ), Texas (Dallas/Houston), Cross-state lines like Detroit/Chicago and Madison/Milwaukee/Chicago. There are others. The problem is a lack of will to do it, a century of demonization by the auto industry, and seventy years of deep pocketed sponsorship of the interstate freeways by the federal government to the exclusion of railways.
- most travel is within the local polity, e.g. suburbs to work & back, social activities, etc. The radius for these is not hugely different between the US and the EU.
- it's the European train network at this point, not one country's, and it needs to be one US system too, not one state's.
Yes, trains are hard in the US Midwest. But not on the west coast, and not in the larger east coast area either.
Even so, at least in France, only major cities have an OK-ish public transit network (when it actually runs). But if you live on the outskirts 'cause you can't afford an apartment in the center? You're SoL. You maybe get a couple buses around rush hour.
Hell, even in the Paris region, outside the closest suburbs, there are only a few train lines going into Paris. At best you'll need to ride a bus or two to grab one, but most often you'll take your car.
Nonsense. First, the money is pretaken from your salary under several categories (taxes, social changes, public transportation tax, and occasional taxes for specific lines).
Then, a metro monthly pass is around $100 in Paris and $130 in NYC. In other words, after paying through taxes, you have to pay for tickets at market rates. That’s $1200 for city transport, not covering outer zones or intercity travel (unless you live in densely populated cities that have sufficient transportation, in which case you pay in rent).
Then, you pay through wasting time, and other factors I mentioned in my other comment.
Correct, there is no public IP address exposed to my home.
Right now my "servers" are Dell micro i5s. I've have used RPI 3 and 4 in the past. My initial foray into self-hosting were actual servers. Too hot, too noisy and too expensive to run continuously for my needs, but I did learn a lot. I still do even with the micros and pis.
What do you use for your remote server? Because even a VPS seems kinda overkill, if all it's doing is some redirecting. I guess you could do TLS termination there aswell...
Companies are outsourcing testing. I'm not surprised that they get rid of UI testing. Back in the day companies used to invite people to sit down and use their software. Nowadays they just push out whatever they have and then start collecting bug tickets. Then they let the community to vote on the tickets. It's basically a huge "pay for being a beta tester" scheme.
People don't bleach their teeth much outside the US as far as I know. You can see it especially well with US actors, their teeth looking like the someone photoshopped them to #FFFFFF
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