The TVG wasn't there - just old hard rail. Nothing in town. Streets
were small.

The TVG expanded southward and finally trying to kill off the intra-
Airplane routes.

Naturally I was there in the Early 90's coming home with a book case
of '86 wine.

Martin

On 5/20/2015 8:14 AM, David Billington wrote:
On 20/05/15 03:50, Martin Eastburn wrote:
We had college friends that rode the UP-N all the way down to Chicago.
We had light rail in San Jose/Santa Clara, Hard rail up the east bay
to SFO.

Washington DC has a nice large Metro.

LA tore theirs up when cars came and then tried to start over -
Much money for few riders.

Atlanta has a rail system as well.

Bordeaux France does not the last time I was there. Oh the High
speed train ran near there I think. But airplane / car was the
functional way.

You must have missed the station as it's had one for a long time, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gare_de...aux-Saint-Jean .
There are a number of routes in Europe where the high speed trains are
taking over from planes as the quickest options for the journey.


Martin

On 5/19/2015 3:56 PM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
jon_banquer wrote:
On Monday, May 18, 2015 at 1:18:41 PM UTC-7, Cydrome Leader wrote:

losing ground to what?

To places like Europe, Japan and China who take rail mass transit
seriously.

Was there a competition? Mass transit has never been "taken seriously"
here. People like cars in the US, not sittingon trains that quite
honestly
don't even go anywhere meaningful in the first place anyways. A total of
once I made the decision to take Amtrak somewhere as it was faster and
cheaper than flying. I've definetly not shaking my fists in anger
over it.
I just don't bother with cross country train trips.

As for intercity type transit, we have a pretty decent system in the
Chicago metropolitan called Metra, which is just passenger trains on
freight tracks. Works great, covers a lot of area too. No real
complaints
there.

here's a simple Metra system map:

http://metrarail.com/content/metra/e...ystem_map.html


Within the city we have the the CTA. Old, slow, pretty poorly run
overall,
but still an extensive system. It does work and serves its purpose.
Here's
a simple system map:

http://www.transitchicago.com/assets...tatrainmap.png

So in a major city like here, yes you can get by with no car at all.
That's not the case in smaller cities though.