I grew up stateside, but it blows anything we have in Ohio out of the water. Cleveland is the only city on the state that has am actual light rail, which functions ok (i did get stuck in the downtown station for 45 minutes due to a breakdown while we received zero information from anyone at the station. A lady had to call RTA to figure out what was going on while we sweat it out on a hot and crowded underground stop). Toledo and Elyria have an Amtrak station, Cincinnati has about 4 miles of streetcar rail downtown and a few bus lines, while Columbus only has buses for a metro population of over 2.2 million. Where i grew up, St. Louis, the city wanted to expand rail routes out to the suburbs, but the residents of the suburbs shut it down because the white residents were “worried about crime” coming into the suburbs from downtown. Our systems are absolutely fucked out here.

We aren’t just talking small towns though. Any city that isn’t New York, Chicago, or Boston might as well not have any rail service at all. Houston has 22.7 miles of passenger railway that is only located downtown. Columbus Ohio has a metro of 2.2 million people and doesn’t have a single inch of passenger rail. Cleveland has an OK system by American standards, which i use whenever i go to Cleveland, but the only option for me to take a train into Cleveland from where i live in NW Ohio would take an hour longer than just driving there outright.

Don’t be dogging on Newcastle Transport like that. My grandpa used to be able to get anywhere in the UK by walking to the North Shields station and hopping on the light rail for free to Newcastle station. Just because the southerns ruined their rail systems doesn’t mean the Geordies trashed theirs.