I love to travel all over and a few years ago I decided to try going car-free in new-to-me US cities and I have to admit it turns any mundane task into a difficult puzzle. It’s instant hard mode, but really satisfying when you can hit 50% of a city through a really cheap fast train no one else is using.

San Diego’s green line train is cheap and goes to lots of touristy spots! Kansas City’s downtown with a Bird scooter: not that bad! I’ve never needed a car in Washington DC, everything rules there. Austin: doable with rental bikes.

The single worst thing about travel in the USA is that I can count the number of cities with a train that goes directly to the airport on one hand.

It’s so pathetic that an obvious thing like a train between an airport and a city’s downtown is such a rarity in America.

The expanding light rail systems of every US city that ask you to take 2 buses and a tram to get to the airport with your luggage in tow because the rail lines are five miles from the actual airport is the stupidest failure of obvious planning but the US is a place where people turn their noses down at mass transit

@mathowie getting the trolley to the airport has been a decades long Thing in san diego, it’s always so close to getting a proper solution and yet impossible to get it to really manifest

@mathowie I highly recommend using Citymapper if you’re not. I’ve found it makes using transit even in foreign cities where I don’t speak the language much more approachable. Berlin and Istanbul were a breeze. It was a bit more lacking in Vilnius and Riga however. I’ve found it to be stellar in most larger US cities. https://apps.apple.com/app/id469463298

@belljeff whoa, I haven't touched this app in like ten years but I'll definitely check it out, thanks!

@mathowie Not 100% relevant to your post, but David Roberts has a post up about rail in the US: https://www.volts.wtf/p/how-railroads-could-boost-the-us

@mathowie Open loop payment systems for mass transit are a huge help here. Don’t make me get a special card somewhere, just let tap my phone when I get on a bus. That plus Google/Apple Maps transit routing has made it easy for me to navigate big cities’ public transit systems.

@mathowie Orlando has a (private) rail terminal right in the airport, only it doesn’t go to Orlando at all

@wenge honestly, there should just be a bullet train to Disney World there.