Sure, feel free to compare the trains in New York State vs Germany then.

The primary issue in NY is the subway service and the Amtrack trains coming in via the soon to be replaced portal bridge in NJ plus general Amtrack crappiness from other routes (not an NY problem). The commuter lines are decent. Though, with ridership destroyed it remains to be seen what impact the revenue shortfalls will have going forward.

That's only NY City though. If we consider the trains in Buffalo/Utica/Syracuse/Rochester/Albany I think you'll find it way more grim compared to equivalent German cities than what you're describing.

That's an Amtrack problem not NY specific.

I'm not sure how that's relevant though when just trying to compare travelling by rail in NY State to Germany; is the claimed problem with Amtrak that they have to cover more states than the German train system, and train system management doesn't scale directly causing rail to be worse in NY State than in Germany?

Okay, but with a GDP and population to (out)match, sooo not really relevant. Per capita and per square km, "German train system quality" is a bajillion times better than in the US.

The US has lower population density than Germany, so you need more km of rail to serve the same amount of people. But that only accounts for part of the difference in quality, to be sure

China has trains.

And China has an agenda and a government that is supporting the building of railways. It's successful.

In US the government was supporting the development of roads a century ago. It was very successful.

So is it about the size of the country or corrupt government?

I like trains.

trains

Why is it downvoted? He has a point.

I'm pretty sure Europe is bigger than US surface wise.

If you take a traditional definition of Continental Europe, including islands like Britain and Ireland, and going all the way into Russia as far as the Ural and Caucasus mountains, then Europe is slightly larger than the USA.

But if you're talking about just the European Union, then the EU is much smaller than the USA. Less than half the land area.

> Continental Europe, including islands like Britain and Ireland,

Continental Europe doesn't include Britain and Ireland.. That's kind of the point of the phrase.

Yeah he meant the European continent (the western half of Eurasia) rather than Continental Europe.

You’re right (had to look it up), though it’s only bigger by 3.5 %.

And we’ll over 2x the population.

Eh?? I thought they were quite similar... Mmm, yeah, EU population is only 447 million. You must be counting Russia and other countries too but those are outside of the socioeconomic system we're talking about.

The EU alone is under half the surface area of US, though, so it's like 3x the population density.