h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

like surry ?

you lost me....

Surry, -county next to London where people move too & commute from

Ah, I see... sorta...

Do you have "developments" (bunches of houses built on former farm land) that are not even remotely connected with any town like we have here?

sort of

There has been some attempt here to create "village concept" developments... supposedly it would be possible to work and live and do all your shopping in these villages (thereby driving less).....however, when they're planned, they never seem to include anything but multiple types of housing. Of course who's gonna live in these "villages" under the guise of driving less if there's no where to work or shop there?

sounds just like here - same thing happening in the counties around London - Thats wher a good public transport syastem comes into play - so people don't have to drive

Good public transportation we dont have...

There are buses, but you have to make so many transfers to get anywhere - it can take hours to make what would take 15 minutes or less by car.... no wonder no one rides the buses except those who have no other way.

And our trains only go to large enough cities to have a train station. There is one in Lancaster, though, but you're limited to travel to big cites...

Britain really has to save its public transport system. The state of it at the moment is pretty scary- in my more pessimistic moments I just get the feeling that what with the Rail situatiuon being the way it is, and the car situation being the way it is, a few more years deterioration of the Rail service and people will look at it and just think - why bother? Written off by neglect fuelled by greed.

vp

Amtrak was supposed to revive the railway system here - but now it's in serious financial trouble (and in bad need of serious maintenance), because not enough people use it.... and what incentive is there? Unless you're going to a large city, you would still need to rent a car and drive (possibly for hours) to theplace you really wanted to go to from the closest city you could get to by train, so it ends up costing more and taking longer..... and I really can't say we have any fewer rail accidents than you do over there.

build more stations & more line

Me?!?!!? Personally?!?!?



That would tend to cut into my time on here a little too much, I'm afraid.

But you see, Happy, building more lines makes too much *sense*...

Email your politicians and let them know what your thinking (I do it to the ones over here all the time )

you might find http://www.governmail.com/ useful

Problem is, what I'm thinking is that since Amtrak was started in an attempt to revive our rail system, and it has serious financial and maintenance problems already, I can't imagine them sinking trillions of $$$$ into building yet more line and stations for a system that's under-utilized as it is... Just linking all the areas of Lancaster county would be an immense undertaking.... I counted a list of nearly 75 towns with post offices in this county, and there are quite literally hundreds of tiny towns in addition to those....

And that still doesn't solve the problem of how to get from the scattered developments to a (as yet to be built) station in a small town when we have no sidewalks to speak of, and you would also need to build massive parking lots at the stations so that lots of people could ride the trains to work/shopping... Someone would need to pay for all this, which means that not only would taxes be out of bounds, ticket prices would skyrocket, making it even less attractive to the average person who already owns a car that can take them wherever they need to go quickly and cheaply. Unless driving is somehow severely restricted (not a popular idea at all), it's going to be a very hard sell to the public.

And then there's the problem of exactly how do you decide which places should have a station? All the small towns? Even the ones so small no one actually lives in them? or just the ones that are large enough to support a station? ...even though that gets into the whole area of how big is big enough? or what if it's 50 miles to the next town that's big enough? What about clusters of housing developments? Should they have their own station? ANd where exactly are we going to lay all this extra track between towns? straight through existing homes? Through our already dwindling farmland? Across thousands and thousands of existing roads? under them? over them? $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

This is still primarily a rural area even if we do have lots of developments - our closest grocery store is only about 2 miles from the house (it's actually located on a farm - they started out selling their farm produced veggies and milk, and expanded to a full size supermarket over the years), but part of the road between here and there is divided highway, not a sidewalk in sight, and I would not reccomend walking along that road - very dangerous. Our closest drug store is in a little shopping center in the other direction - maybe a mile from here - however, the intersection with the light is so dangerous that there are signs up prohibiting pedestrian crossing - again, no sidewalks either. Shorty's school is only 3 miles from here.... no sidewalks in that direction either,and the road is narrow, twisty, and would be extremely dangerous to walk.

It wasn't much better when we lived in the city - Amy could walk to school because it was only a couple of blocks, but as far as shopping was concerned, forget it - there were some long since closed up corner stores on our street, but the closest grocery was about 4 blocks away, had very few items, and was grossly overpriced - no one would shop there unless they had no other choice, therefore they knew they could get away with the high prices. Another place we lived in town was perhaps 6 blocks from a small shopping center - but for some reason the sidewalks ended long before you ever got to the shopping center.... again, not conducive to walking there. I do get rather sick of driving absolutely everywhere, but there simply is not much choice, and not likely to be a way to provide a choice for the forseeable future.

I know this has been long, but I hope it gives you an idea of the scope of the problem...

America is tricky, as its pretty big. You need serparate regional rail services more than you need trans state services.

Britain has got the foundations of an excellent service. Villages as small as like, 2000 people have a train station, most of which dont need carparks because you just walk to the station, and millions of people use the trains every week, but at the moment the trains are having a maintainance nightmare brought on by confusion as to who is in charge, and if it continues for much longer people are going to stop using the trains. And britain is far too small for everyone to use cars. We NEED a public transport system. OUr country literally will not be able to run without one. The whole thing is far more urgent than anyone seems to realise.

It just feels like none of the politicians really believe in trains any more. Britain is leaning evermore towards a car based culture like our cross atlantic cousins, and no one seems to have noticed that the americans have something like 40 or 50 times more space than we do.

First - I come from the Pennines, where my farther still lives which is Britain’s oldest National Park, now while the UK is a lot smaller than the US I am familiar wiv the problems of rural public transport.

So here is a low-down of how it appears to work here -

the smallest places have a bus service that link them to bigger places that have rail lines (back in the 60's most of these places smaller places had stations but there was a big round of closers).

Now - rail may not be right for the where you are BUT what about everywhere else?


I don't want to appear anti US so let me state now that the following comments apply equally to western Europe (and as far as I can tell parts of Oceania and many other parts of the world). One thing is for certain that in the long term environmental factors are going to force us all to make dramatic changes in the way we live and travel. And it is probably better to embrace the forthcoming changes and be in a nation that is at the forefront of the new technologies needed than be dragged into the new world kicking and screaming.

I should also add that I am aware that Pennsylvania is not in the dark ages of this brave new world, it being home to some to some very large wind-farms.

My point was only that implementing truly public minded public transportation here in the US would be somewhere between extremely difficult and nearly impossible.... Some of the largest cities do have subway systems (I think Chicago still has an elevated train system too) or street cars (San Francisco still does, anyway) and certainly better bus systems than we have here in Lancaster county....

If I wanted to ride the bus to the mall, it would require taking a bus from this area (this bus goes way north of here to another town... then doubles back - this part of the trip alone would likely take at least 1 hour) to a place where it would then drop me off near a route that takes a very roundabout trip into downtown lancaster city, where I would then need to catch a different bus that takes a very roundabout route to the mall... I figure it would take about 3 hours to get there - and the mall is less than a 15 minute drive from here (still in this township - but the bus routes would have me going through several other townships and into the city) ... then I'd get to do the whole thing all over again to get home... and would have to walk along the road to and from the bus stop with traffic zipping past me and no sidewalk to offer even a visual cue to stay away from the pedestrian...

Oh, and to beat it all, the buses don't even go to the train station in Lancaster!

It seems like what little public transportation we have is designed to discourage people from using it at all.

It would help lessen pollution and traffic problems if people would at least try to live a little closer to their jobs - but so many have moved to this county for cheaper housing, and glady commute to Philadelphia or even Baltimore, Md daily - they can count on at least 3 hours total daily commute. Our roads can't even handle the volume of traffic (but that's a different story, because the roads haven't been significantly improved in far too long)... If they can find someone who needs to go in the same direction at approximately the same time of day, that's not quite so bad, but all too often, there's one person all alone in huge SUV - why, pray tell, does anyone need an SUV for highway driving?