Rail is the predominate form of travel between cities in Taiwan. Every Friday evening workers push south towards their home cities and every Sunday evening they migrate back to Taipei where they work during the week.
US public rail infrastructure is designed to be bad to benefit Automotive and Aerospace corporations. The only reason they even make this list is because of high population and area.
Well would you rather take a train from St Louis to San Francisco and get there in 3 or 4 days and travel in relative safety and comfort or take a covered wagon and get there in 3 or 4 months and deal with awful weather, multiple river crossings and potential bandits and hostiles? Even if you took the best stage coach that was a 10 day trip and you were a lot more likely to run into bad things.
Passenger interest is what's truly abysmal. Travel by train except for the northeast corridor is huge hassle and per passenger extremely expensive when compared to other forms of travel. I live in the Houston area. Amtrak tickets to New Orleans roughly 350 miles is 57 dollars and takes 9 hours. I can drive that in 5 hours and spend 30 dollars in gas. Even better I can take an entire carload of people for the same price and have transportation for the trip. If I don't want to drive or don't have a car I can take a flight for roughly the same price as the train ticket and I get there in 50 minutes not 9 hours. Most car rentals give you 500 miles a day for free. You can get cars especially on the weekend for 40 dollars a day. So for a three day trip it's not much of a difference 120 rental 70 dollars gas vs 120 for train tickets and 50 to 60 dollars in taxis etc.to do that for a weekend trip.
What astounds me is how many people still use trains in Europe. I have in-laws in Germany and every couple of years we go see my wife's family. Multiple times we've tried to figure out a side trip to some place where taking the train makes economic sense for our family of 4. Even with 8 dollar a gallon gas it's usually half the price to rent a car than to take the train for a 3 or 4 day excursion.
I live in a village between Rotterdam and Gouda in the Netherlands, using the train, in ten minutes, I am right in the centre of Gouda, in 15 minutes, I am right in the centre of Rotterdam, and in an hour, I am right in the centre of Amsterdam. All without switching trains. The distances in Europe usually permit the use of trains for going to work or school. You can be very mobile here, even without a car.
You can usually get family tickets which cut the cost of groups of tickets. For the car, it's not just a 'tank of gas', even if you are renting, you still have to pay for parking and any tolls (which are comment in some places) and usually in Europe you are encouraged to park outside the city centre (ie few parking spaces in the city centre and if there are it's very expensive) and get public transport into the centre which is another expense.
That surprised me too. I know that long distance travel by train is much more popular in Europe than America, but I still expected America to be higher given the millions of commuters who travel by train every workday (especially in New York, but also some other major cities like Chicago, Boston, etc.). I would've thought that all those miles would add up more, but perhaps I've just overestimating it.
I think it has to do with the history of the infrastructure. Since so much of the US was built up and urbanized after cars became popular (as opposed to Europe, where much of the urbanization came before), they were built with cars in mind instead of trains. Train travel does exist in the US, but it doesn't have as many users because they aren't in actually helpful areas because the infrastructure wasn't integrated in the same way. We Americans now have a negative perception of train travel because the trains we have are usually not great, and so we don't want to invest in new infrastructure even if it would make things better overall.
(Basically down the Nile. From Alexandria on the coast, to Cairo, to the Southern cities of Luxor/Aswan).
I'm not sure what the breakdown is between commuter, military transport, and travel.
The government apparently offers some type of socialism/free/discounted tickets as well.
There appears to be a high rate of accidents/breakdowns/fatalities
I was surprised to see the absence of maybe Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Arg, Colombia, Nigeria, SA. Yet Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Poland make the list. I would've thought rail was one of the easier transport systems to build & maintain; esp when imported in 2023.
Is this quiz based on both metro transit (e.g.-New York city subway) and long-distance trains (e.g.-Trans-Siberian railway), or is it just based on one or the other?
But it's interesting to see the overlap of population density with Egypt's rail network.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_National_Railways
https://64.media.tumblr.com/9fae0a1b93c4a34f858d2725f5ee1c00/4713d19a30de812e-0a/s1280x1920/eb2b2c92ba9870c9d2cfce67237f5f0d92f204a2.jpg
(Basically down the Nile. From Alexandria on the coast, to Cairo, to the Southern cities of Luxor/Aswan).
I'm not sure what the breakdown is between commuter, military transport, and travel.
The government apparently offers some type of socialism/free/discounted tickets as well.
There appears to be a high rate of accidents/breakdowns/fatalities
I was surprised to see the absence of maybe Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Arg, Colombia, Nigeria, SA. Yet Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Poland make the list. I would've thought rail was one of the easier transport systems to build & maintain; esp when imported in 2023.