Trying to move to escape America’s car-centric hell. The Netherlands is pretty high on the list but I wanted to explore other options. How do the following countries and their cities fair in terms of urbanism:
-Ireland
-Spain
-Belgium
-France
-Denmark
-Portugal
-Sweden
I could list more but I’ll be here all night.
Great summary. One small correction:
The rail system in Germany has pretty much been unmaintained for decades. It used to be good, but the decay is showing by now and even the Deutsche Bahn says it’s less “calculating” than “guessing” when trains will arrive.
How is that a correction? I predicted that a German would respond to this by shitting on DB.
Also, those rail lines are only decades old total.
Take an Amtrak from Chicago to NYC or a 15 hour ride across Sweden in SJ. You have no idea how good DB is. As much as y’all complain, a quick Google says they are within a 6 minute window 90% of the time. The publicly funded American rail company doesn’t even own the rail it uses.
https://www.bts.gov/content/amtrak-time-performance-trends-and-hours-delay-cause
It’s currently more in the realms of 62%. In june, it was 52%.
That the arrival times were more guesswork was a direct quote by a Bahn boardmember.
It might not be as bad as the US, but it’s still worse than most of Europe.
what?
https://www.deutschebahn.com/de/konzern/konzernprofil/zahlen_fakten/puenktlichkeitswerte-6878476
Current year numbers. Also: check the long distance values.
Yeah. Super impressive considering the track changes with Denmark, France, Switzerland, and Poland (what about Austria? I don’t remember changing tracks). I’ve had delays of 45 mins on 30 minute NYC subway commutes and Sweden’s trains stop running in the winter because they didn’t bother to get the kind that work in snow.
You can keep arguing, but you’re not gonna convince me DB is bad which is where this discussion started.
It’s severely underfunded. A DB board member is publicly on record, agreeing with me.