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Tashkent too.

Russia is evil. Putin apologist!

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Kash, and Don

Yeah. A city in the least-thought-about part of the world built secular mosques for their subway stations. We get piss tubes and expressway medians.

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I was just in Prague, their platforms are set up like this. You get a nice blast of cold air right before a train arrives. Also, the escalator ride that takes a minute, because they act as bomb shelters as well.

But do the Russians get guys who have been arrested 42 times screaming at metro riders that he's going to kill them? Or vagrants pushing old asian women onto the track?

Go move there then, Commie scum.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Kash, and Don

Glad to see you guys arrive to same place I was at ten years ago.

the threat of a death sentence really dissuades graffiti artists

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

Russia has some great looking architecture. I wish it was safe to visit.

But America has similar train stations that you could use to paint a picture of some sort of grand architectural art that also happens to have trains coming through it. Grand Central Station in NYC and Union Station in Chicago have similar amazing looking pictures.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Maybe we should implement that here. Are you a fan of the crap on every viaduct and bridge along 90/94? Does it make you proud to be a Chicagoan?

_________________
Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Kash, and Don

The thing that makes it unsafe to visit is that Zelenskyyyyyyyyyy might drop an American bomb on your head.

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Anybody here seen my old friend Bobby?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
I thought I saw him walkin' up to The Hill
With Elon, Kash, and Don

Is he the one imprisoning Americans to trade?

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

These are subway stations not intercity rail terminals.

That seems to be a fairly meaningless distinction. Union Station in Chicago doesn't count because you can also get there from Amtrak? The Moscow Metro and Metra seem to be pretty much the same thing.

Chicago is also at a disadvantage in terms of how nice things can look when it's an outside stop rather than an inside stop. None of these pictures look much different than the "nice" parts of the NYC subway system for instance.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

I’m just telling you that big opulent intercity rail depots serving as living museums for a bygone time in American history are not representative of what public transportation looks like in most of America. You bring up Metra, but Metra, the LIRR and that one nice one that goes from Sausalito to Santa Rosa are all exceptions not the rule.

Generally speaking with very few exceptions your non-driving options in America are basically a rolling homeless shelter.

Yes, and my point is that it is likely the exception in Russia too.

Plus, underground rail in the US is not all that common even in cold weather cities.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

[quote="Brick"]
Yes, and my point is that it is likely the exception in Russia too./quote]
No, it’s not. Same goes for Eastern Europe and the former USSR in Central Asia. They might be significantly poorer than the USA but they certainly value public transportation in a different way.

The starkest comparison for me was Brazil. A country with an even more dramatic rich/poor gap in America, vastly less public money to maintain their trains and crime levels that would make even the worst US cities blush…but you take the train in Rio or SP and it’s very nice and immaculately maintained. Certainly no crime or homeless people.

It’s just a truth. You can admit that America sucks in this regard. I know that you must fully insist that Everything Everywhere Has Never Been Better at all times and that’s part of your act.

No. I think public transportation sucks in America outside of NYC. I'm just pointing out I've been to multiple cities that look as nice as the photos posted at the top.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

It’s the consistency. Yes the old Cincinnati Union Station that gets like one train a day is gorgeous, but you go down to the Jackson Blue Line stop and its about a coin flip that you’ll see somebody cooked out of their gourd scaring the shit out of everyone.

I'm sure no one in Russia is ever scary in public.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

America is a freak show in a way other places simply are not.

I would say there's a meaningful distinction between rapid transit and intercity rail (as well as commuter rail in the middle). They serve different purposes, have different usage patterns. What's particularly impressive about the Moscow Metro is that these are all train platforms, not separate waiting rooms. Even the nice, photogenic part of Union Station is across the street from the functional half of the building, which is a rabbit warren of halls and half-floors that I always seemed to take a wrong turn in no matter how many times I went there.

As for Chicago, the North Side L stations are generally nice to look at and stand at. The Kimball subway is fine, the State and Dearborn subways could be better, and the expressway branches are the most miserable experiences of all. Most of the Metra Electric is an atrocity.

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There are no nice looking L stations, just stop. The architecture and infrastructure in the US follows the economic maxim of getting the most (something barely functional) for the least amount of money(which is still a rip off).

I was just in Munich for the millionth time. They're currently rebuilding most of the Hauptbahnhof (everything but the platforms), while also adding a new UBahn line and SBahn line concurrently, which will be accessible from the Hauptbahnhof. There are already oodles of ubahn and sbahn lines stopping there. Germans are complaining that it might open a year or two late.

Quincy is cool. Get out more.

I like 18th, even if it could use a deep cleaning. The Mexican folk art feels organic, but not like graffiti.

Sox-35th, there was an effort to make it feel unique upstairs, but there's just no saving the Kennedy/Ryan/Eisenhower stations from not sucking once you're standing literally in the middle of traffic. The expressway branches were good in theory, terrible in practice.

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Driving down the Kennedy with my mom we saw a guy just drop trou and take a shit on the platform at Montrose. Classic moment.

I’d also say there are some very quaint and pleasant stations on the Purple Line. I used to live off Logan Square, loved that it was underground in the winter. Anyways, the issue with the L is the insane behavior that you are basically guaranteed to witness if you ride it. No rules, just a shitshow. It’s a bad experience.

Yeah, and to bring it back to Russia, you always hear about what a low-trust, thuggish society it is over there, and maybe it is, but everyone seems to be on their best behavior when it comes to transit. Maybe part of that is because the Metro feels like a great public space, maybe it's because they'll be shot on sight if they act up.

But too many progressives revel in the squalid conditions of American public transit because it makes people confront poverty. Hey, if you don't like it when someone who smells like weed and urine asks you for money, then solve homelessness or move back to Iowa. I don't know what we even do when the people who should want transit to be good actually want it to be strategically bad.

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It is why I brought up Brazil. I must have taken a hundred or so rides in three weeks on the Rio & Sao Paulo metro’s and never saw a single incident. In Chicago or New York I’m more likely to witness one hundred incidents in one ride than a hundred rides without an incident.

And this is Brazil we are talking about here. A country analogous to the United States in many more ways than anywhere in Europe or Asia.

I’ve actually been fortunate enough to see someone disciplined on a U-Bahn train in Berlin at Mockernbrucke stop. White guy, clearly some issues and he smelled bad but was not causing any issues. Well I’m sure you know in Germany there are no turnstiles, fares are on an enforced honor system and this guy didn’t pay. He was resistant to the fare-checker, so she radio’d ahead and sure enough two cops basically brutalized this guy and carried him off the train. Overreaction? Well if that guys gets his ass kicked for not paying two euros then shit imagine what happens to the guy who gets in people’s faces and spills booze all over everyone?

At some level there are places where you gotta suspend the feel goodies of liberal democracy just to make sure everyone gets along. The train is one of those places where your Bill of Rights get checked at the door. People don’t really seem to mind this standard when it is applied to air travel (though you always have line crossers anywhere). Somehow it became just a fundamental human right to be a psychopath in public in America, and we would rather live like shit than suspend that right.