Yes. If we had infinite money, infinite time, and the ability to put people into stasis while we tear up entire cities to retrofit them for a train system… that still wouldn’t solve the problem.
If you live in a city, you are done. If you live on the outskirts of a city? Your life gets a lot less convenient, but you are good. Maybe a train runs from your “town” to the center of the city once or twice an hour. Cool.
If you live in a town an hour away? Nobody is running trains to a podunk mountain town or whatever. And even in some of the most public transit friendly countries on Earth (like Japan), it is a mess of bus and train connections where one or two significant delays can leave you stranded for the night.
And as an aside: holy crap do buses suck. They are the worst of all worlds. Almost universally poorly maintained. A driver who is constantly on the verge of losing their mind. Stuck in traffic. Prone to skipped stops and unannounced route changes. And again, that is even in civilized countries.
And I am definitely not renting a car whenever I need to go into town to hit up the Target or catch a plane. If only because rental companies tend to not like low volume out of the way locations that just result in cars not receiving maintenance. We have interns that come out every year and a lot of them realize that they need to drive an hour away just to pick up and drop off a rental…
Don’t get me wrong. I think a massive effort to make public transportation more viable is needed. But, regardless of what that rich guy with a cycling youtube channel constantly screams, we aren’t getting rid of personal vehicles until the entire planet is one interconnected megacity. And even then, it is just going to screw over the people who aren’t fortunate enough to live close to a transit stop.
EDIT: Just as a few examples of even places with good public transit being a mess the moment you get away from the city center and the touristy bits.
Better part of a decade ago, I was in the London area of the UK for a couple months. I stayed in a town about 50 miles outside of London proper, but getting into the city was generally a 20 minute train ride to Paddington and trains left a couple times an hour. It was amazing and I loved it. And then I started dating a girl who lived in (if memory serves) Kensington or Hammersmith or one of them. About 3 or 5 miles away from “London” proper, but she basically had the exact same commute. Minimal lines went to where she lived and the stops required meant she also started her weekends with a 20 minute train ride to Paddington and then… And that just broke my brain
And, more recently, I spent a few weeks in Tokyo. I stayed on the outskirts of Kabukicho because it was cheap and in the city center (and later I would learn WHY it was cheap AND start the Yakuza/LAD series with a love of Kamurocho). Trains were perfect and I could basically get anywhere at any time with very minimal commuting hassle.
Until I wanted to go on a tour of a sake distillery out in Ome. Outskirts of the tokyo megacity and, if all went according to plan, about an hour and a half by train with two-ish connections (been a couple years). And I remember needing to piss like my life depended on it after drinking WAY too much sake, making my way back to the train station and having to:
Wait about 40 minutes for a train to arrive
Get to the station where I need to make my connection
Frantically move from one platform to another
Miss the train by about 30 seconds
Wait another 20 minutes for a new train to arrive
And that was all to go from a very touristy part of town to a very touristy destination. Albeit, I might have done a better job of making that connection if I hadn’t been day drinking for an hour or two by that point. But just pretend I am a responsible adult and was wrangling children or something.
And that is the thing. Walkable cities are AMAZING and everyone should strive for those. But unless you are rich enough to live in the city center, you are still going to deal with a lot of headaches.
Yes. If we had infinite money, infinite time, and the ability to put people into stasis while we tear up entire cities to retrofit them for a train system… that still wouldn’t solve the problem.
Cars haven’t existed forever and we managed to build places around them. There’s no reason we can’t start building everything new around other modes of transport.
If you live in a city, you are done. If you live on the outskirts of a city?..
I live in Switzerland, and none of the problems you mention in the next few paragraphs exist here. I mean frequency of public transport isn’t as good out of the cities, but I can get a bus or train to pretty much anywhere a car can get to, and some places they can’t. The buses are nice and work well, they have priority in the city so they don’t get stuck in traffic. I can get train, tram, bus, or bike to the airport no problem and if I need something bigger than I can carry I’ll just get it delivered. Yes Switzerland is rich but there’s a lot of money to be saved if it wasn’t being spent on cars, car infrastructure, and all of the externalities of driving. It’s also small, but our trains don’t go particularly quickly.
Even then, the vast majority of people in developed countries (and the majority worldwide) live in urban areas. If the people living in podunk towns need to drive, power to them. Focusing on urban areas will have a bigger impact.
But unless you are rich enough to live in the city center, you are still going to deal with a lot of headaches.
And the alternative is being rich enough to afford a house in the suburbs AND a car for every member of the family? Walkable doesn’t have to mean the city centre, and it’s much easier to achieve if you don’t have to kowtow to a bunch of suburbanites who want to drive their SUVs through your neighbourhood.
First: Your baseline is Switzerland? The 6th highest GDP per Capita (how the hell is Ireland 5th?!?!?!) which ranks 132nd for area.
Again, if you live in Tokyo or even freaking New York City (arguably all of New York+New Jersey but upstate NY is REAL republican), you are more or less good. You might be a bit inconvenienced if you don’t live near a rail station, but you’ll probably be looking at a 20-30 minute pre-commute.
The point is that once you have a larger land mass with people who live out in the sticks? Because
Second: Please, kindly, fuck off with the mindset that it is all rich suburbanites who are the problem. Don’t get me wrong, the suburbs are very much a massive problem. But that falls into that “twenty minutes to get into town” category I mentioned above… assuming we have the infrastructure.
The issue is actual poor people. No, not the rich guy making youtube videos about how all cities should be 100% bike friendly. No, not the kids in college who are starving artists who live off mommy and daddy sending checks every week. The issue is people in actual small towns. People who, generally, are actually pretty poor. There aren’t going to be regular trains that end up at their front door and even buses might do one route a day. It becomes a complete shitshow to get in or out. And that is where EVs really shine because you can having to “drive their SUVs through your neighborhood” and instead have a relatively clean personal vehicle to do supply runs.
Anime, but I strongly encourage watching… basically anything by Makoto Shinkai but especially Your Name or 5 Centimeters per Second. He very much loves to depict what it takes to get from The City (almost always Tokyo) to the sticks. Lots of trains, lots of buses, tight connections, and sometimes nights spent in an inn in the middle of nowhere. Which contrasts well with the regular push by certain youtubers to, ironically, encourage even more of a “small town” mindset by insisting that everyone should have everything they will ever need within a few square miles of their home. Because walkable cities are AMAZING. But we aren’t there yet and, arguably never should be, for the purpose of rural communities that are surrounded by nature.
First: Your baseline is Switzerland? The 6th highest GDP per Capita (how the hell is Ireland 5th?!?!?!) which ranks 132nd for area.
Please read my entire comment, I addressed this already.
Again, if you live in Tokyo or even freaking New York City (arguably all of New York+New Jersey but upstate NY is REAL republican), you are more or less good. You might be a bit inconvenienced if you don’t live near a rail station, but you’ll probably be looking at a 20-30 minute pre-commute.
The vast majority of people in developed countries live in urban areas, so for the vast majority of people that drive, this isn’t an issue. It is the rich suburbanites who are driving into cities.
Yes. If we had infinite money, infinite time, and the ability to put people into stasis while we tear up entire cities to retrofit them for a train system… that still wouldn’t solve the problem.
Fun how we had zero fucking problem doing it to every city in the country for cars. 🤷
EDIT: lol so the !fuckcars on lemmy.world is just pro car drama addicts, got it.
Fun how we did that over multiple centuries. And it mostly corresponds to horse/buggy infrastructure
I will basically never defend modern city infrastructure. The US is probably one of the worst for it, but you can also see it in a lot of european and asian cities as well. And a lot of it is because those rail lines were being built while the country was.
It is a lot easier to build an efficient rail network when you are building up the city/country itself. Paris has been a center for culture in all of Europe (arguably all of the World) for centuries, so it makes sense to have lots of solid rails becoming a hub there. But also? Sometimes the city that was a major player last century becomes a glorified truck stop this century (I am going to intentionally not cite references since people get pissy). So you have a bunch of rail lines that exist entirely to change trains. And so forth.
And we can actually see this with the north eastern US. NYC is obviously one of the few properly functioning cities in the country. But if you actually check out the amtrak lines, they look very “european”. https://www.amtrak.com/plan-your-trip.html You can get almost anywhere within two days or so. Most of the major cities have a few major stops and those are generally serviced-ish by buses to get you the rest of the way. I grew up on the East Coast and rode the hell out of amtrak. It works about as well as the UK rail system (now THAT is a backhanded compliment…).
And you can also see which cities were “big” in the 1800s but mostly faded to irrelevance in the 1900s and 2000s.
The issue becomes as you go farther West (because, remember, comparing the US to a European country is stupid. Our states are about the size of a country and it is a much more realistic comparison to do US and EU… and here is hoping for a Texit or a Frexit pretty soon…). There is just so much empty landmass (and not even just the flyover states) that it doesn’t make sense to have a proper grid over everything. But you then run into the issue of cities like Detroit that more or less collapsed for socioeconomic reasons or the hellscape that is Phoenix Arizona where even the residents don’t understand why so many people want to live on the surface of the sun.
Given time and money? I think we could get a REALLY solid network. Just looking at that amtrak map, a train line from Albuquerque to Dallas and turning Denver into a hub would go a long way toward making rail travel viable in the Southwest (and probably help with supply chain issues massively). The flyover fun that is the Dakotas and Wyoming… moving on.
But, again, that doesn’t solve the problem outside of those cities/“cities”. Because maybe you now have a nice train going through Buffalo, Wyoming. People in Worland are still looking at a 90 mile trip just to be able to start their travel. And MAYBE that is a popular enough route that we have regular bus service. But what about the folk in Hyattville? Also, I have no idea if any of these towns have more than five people in them, I am literally just looking at google maps and picking arbitrary names. So grain of salt, but the principle holds.
My brother in Christ we haven’t BEEN HERE for multiple centuries. Fun watching people give zero fucks that their defense of the status quo doesn’t make a damn lick of sense or even adhere to basic knowledge of reality.
My brother in Christ we haven’t BEEN HERE for multiple centuries.
Is this a “god made Earth last week” kind of thing?
In Europe and Asia, we have literally been building up infrastructure for over 1000 years. If we consider the early Roman/British/Whoever roads to be the “origin” of modern infrastructure, that goes to “around 753 BC”. If we actually go by history and the origin of “the road”, then we are looking at 10,000 BC. And if we are just saying paved roads, Egypt in 2600 BC.
Cities emerge out of population centers (unless you are building stuff for the Saudis) and railroads/highways/whatever all emerge from the heavily used roads. Whether replacing them or following similar paths.
As for the babies in the room: The United States was “gifted by the Native Americans” in the 1600s and declared in 1776. And the Louisiana Purchase, which was France selling the Americans large parts of the land that was “gifted” to them by the Native Americans, was in 1804. And, for poops and giggles, California became a state in 1850, but white folk were doing their thang back to the 1700s.
So… yes, we have been here for multiple centuries, regardless of whatever Father Tom says to you.
Also, that very mockingly euro-centric view ignores all the trails and outright roads that the indigenous people of the Americas and Australia and the like had. That colonizers mostly just claimed for their own, the same way they claimed the choice places for population centers (access to fresh water, game, etc).
![[meme] Trains are 100000x easier to electrify and automate than cars, so why does everyone keep talking about electric and driverless cars?](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/11c37658-7c32-4cc2-b12c-6ced348bd09d.png){kind=link}
Yes. If we had infinite money, infinite time, and the ability to put people into stasis while we tear up entire cities to retrofit them for a train system… that still wouldn’t solve the problem.
If you live in a city, you are done. If you live on the outskirts of a city? Your life gets a lot less convenient, but you are good. Maybe a train runs from your “town” to the center of the city once or twice an hour. Cool.
If you live in a town an hour away? Nobody is running trains to a podunk mountain town or whatever. And even in some of the most public transit friendly countries on Earth (like Japan), it is a mess of bus and train connections where one or two significant delays can leave you stranded for the night.
And as an aside: holy crap do buses suck. They are the worst of all worlds. Almost universally poorly maintained. A driver who is constantly on the verge of losing their mind. Stuck in traffic. Prone to skipped stops and unannounced route changes. And again, that is even in civilized countries.
And I am definitely not renting a car whenever I need to go into town to hit up the Target or catch a plane. If only because rental companies tend to not like low volume out of the way locations that just result in cars not receiving maintenance. We have interns that come out every year and a lot of them realize that they need to drive an hour away just to pick up and drop off a rental…
Don’t get me wrong. I think a massive effort to make public transportation more viable is needed. But, regardless of what that rich guy with a cycling youtube channel constantly screams, we aren’t getting rid of personal vehicles until the entire planet is one interconnected megacity. And even then, it is just going to screw over the people who aren’t fortunate enough to live close to a transit stop.
EDIT: Just as a few examples of even places with good public transit being a mess the moment you get away from the city center and the touristy bits.
Better part of a decade ago, I was in the London area of the UK for a couple months. I stayed in a town about 50 miles outside of London proper, but getting into the city was generally a 20 minute train ride to Paddington and trains left a couple times an hour. It was amazing and I loved it. And then I started dating a girl who lived in (if memory serves) Kensington or Hammersmith or one of them. About 3 or 5 miles away from “London” proper, but she basically had the exact same commute. Minimal lines went to where she lived and the stops required meant she also started her weekends with a 20 minute train ride to Paddington and then… And that just broke my brain
And, more recently, I spent a few weeks in Tokyo. I stayed on the outskirts of Kabukicho because it was cheap and in the city center (and later I would learn WHY it was cheap AND start the Yakuza/LAD series with a love of Kamurocho). Trains were perfect and I could basically get anywhere at any time with very minimal commuting hassle.
Until I wanted to go on a tour of a sake distillery out in Ome. Outskirts of the tokyo megacity and, if all went according to plan, about an hour and a half by train with two-ish connections (been a couple years). And I remember needing to piss like my life depended on it after drinking WAY too much sake, making my way back to the train station and having to:
And that was all to go from a very touristy part of town to a very touristy destination. Albeit, I might have done a better job of making that connection if I hadn’t been day drinking for an hour or two by that point. But just pretend I am a responsible adult and was wrangling children or something.
And that is the thing. Walkable cities are AMAZING and everyone should strive for those. But unless you are rich enough to live in the city center, you are still going to deal with a lot of headaches.
Cars haven’t existed forever and we managed to build places around them. There’s no reason we can’t start building everything new around other modes of transport.
I live in Switzerland, and none of the problems you mention in the next few paragraphs exist here. I mean frequency of public transport isn’t as good out of the cities, but I can get a bus or train to pretty much anywhere a car can get to, and some places they can’t. The buses are nice and work well, they have priority in the city so they don’t get stuck in traffic. I can get train, tram, bus, or bike to the airport no problem and if I need something bigger than I can carry I’ll just get it delivered. Yes Switzerland is rich but there’s a lot of money to be saved if it wasn’t being spent on cars, car infrastructure, and all of the externalities of driving. It’s also small, but our trains don’t go particularly quickly.
Even then, the vast majority of people in developed countries (and the majority worldwide) live in urban areas. If the people living in podunk towns need to drive, power to them. Focusing on urban areas will have a bigger impact.
And the alternative is being rich enough to afford a house in the suburbs AND a car for every member of the family? Walkable doesn’t have to mean the city centre, and it’s much easier to achieve if you don’t have to kowtow to a bunch of suburbanites who want to drive their SUVs through your neighbourhood.
First: Your baseline is Switzerland? The 6th highest GDP per Capita (how the hell is Ireland 5th?!?!?!) which ranks 132nd for area.
Again, if you live in Tokyo or even freaking New York City (arguably all of New York+New Jersey but upstate NY is REAL republican), you are more or less good. You might be a bit inconvenienced if you don’t live near a rail station, but you’ll probably be looking at a 20-30 minute pre-commute.
The point is that once you have a larger land mass with people who live out in the sticks? Because
Second: Please, kindly, fuck off with the mindset that it is all rich suburbanites who are the problem. Don’t get me wrong, the suburbs are very much a massive problem. But that falls into that “twenty minutes to get into town” category I mentioned above… assuming we have the infrastructure.
The issue is actual poor people. No, not the rich guy making youtube videos about how all cities should be 100% bike friendly. No, not the kids in college who are starving artists who live off mommy and daddy sending checks every week. The issue is people in actual small towns. People who, generally, are actually pretty poor. There aren’t going to be regular trains that end up at their front door and even buses might do one route a day. It becomes a complete shitshow to get in or out. And that is where EVs really shine because you can having to “drive their SUVs through your neighborhood” and instead have a relatively clean personal vehicle to do supply runs.
Anime, but I strongly encourage watching… basically anything by Makoto Shinkai but especially Your Name or 5 Centimeters per Second. He very much loves to depict what it takes to get from The City (almost always Tokyo) to the sticks. Lots of trains, lots of buses, tight connections, and sometimes nights spent in an inn in the middle of nowhere. Which contrasts well with the regular push by certain youtubers to, ironically, encourage even more of a “small town” mindset by insisting that everyone should have everything they will ever need within a few square miles of their home. Because walkable cities are AMAZING. But we aren’t there yet and, arguably never should be, for the purpose of rural communities that are surrounded by nature.
Please read my entire comment, I addressed this already.
The vast majority of people in developed countries live in urban areas, so for the vast majority of people that drive, this isn’t an issue. It is the rich suburbanites who are driving into cities.
Actual poor people are the ones who benefit the most from better infrastructure. Public transport is a lifeline for the homeless, and access to it is the biggest factor in whether they will be able to escape homelessness. Owning a car is really expensive, and The burdens of vehicle dependency fall disproportionately on marginalized people, especially those who are low-income and those who are Black.
More headaches than wet bulb temperature?
Yes, bc no headache when you’re dead.
I was thinking as your brain fries it might hurt, but you’re right! It won’t hurt for long.
Fun how we had zero fucking problem doing it to every city in the country for cars. 🤷
EDIT: lol so the !fuckcars on lemmy.world is just pro car drama addicts, got it.
Fun how we did that over multiple centuries. And it mostly corresponds to horse/buggy infrastructure
I will basically never defend modern city infrastructure. The US is probably one of the worst for it, but you can also see it in a lot of european and asian cities as well. And a lot of it is because those rail lines were being built while the country was.
It is a lot easier to build an efficient rail network when you are building up the city/country itself. Paris has been a center for culture in all of Europe (arguably all of the World) for centuries, so it makes sense to have lots of solid rails becoming a hub there. But also? Sometimes the city that was a major player last century becomes a glorified truck stop this century (I am going to intentionally not cite references since people get pissy). So you have a bunch of rail lines that exist entirely to change trains. And so forth.
And we can actually see this with the north eastern US. NYC is obviously one of the few properly functioning cities in the country. But if you actually check out the amtrak lines, they look very “european”. https://www.amtrak.com/plan-your-trip.html You can get almost anywhere within two days or so. Most of the major cities have a few major stops and those are generally serviced-ish by buses to get you the rest of the way. I grew up on the East Coast and rode the hell out of amtrak. It works about as well as the UK rail system (now THAT is a backhanded compliment…).
And you can also see which cities were “big” in the 1800s but mostly faded to irrelevance in the 1900s and 2000s.
The issue becomes as you go farther West (because, remember, comparing the US to a European country is stupid. Our states are about the size of a country and it is a much more realistic comparison to do US and EU… and here is hoping for a Texit or a Frexit pretty soon…). There is just so much empty landmass (and not even just the flyover states) that it doesn’t make sense to have a proper grid over everything. But you then run into the issue of cities like Detroit that more or less collapsed for socioeconomic reasons or the hellscape that is Phoenix Arizona where even the residents don’t understand why so many people want to live on the surface of the sun.
Given time and money? I think we could get a REALLY solid network. Just looking at that amtrak map, a train line from Albuquerque to Dallas and turning Denver into a hub would go a long way toward making rail travel viable in the Southwest (and probably help with supply chain issues massively). The flyover fun that is the Dakotas and Wyoming… moving on.
But, again, that doesn’t solve the problem outside of those cities/“cities”. Because maybe you now have a nice train going through Buffalo, Wyoming. People in Worland are still looking at a 90 mile trip just to be able to start their travel. And MAYBE that is a popular enough route that we have regular bus service. But what about the folk in Hyattville? Also, I have no idea if any of these towns have more than five people in them, I am literally just looking at google maps and picking arbitrary names. So grain of salt, but the principle holds.
My brother in Christ we haven’t BEEN HERE for multiple centuries. Fun watching people give zero fucks that their defense of the status quo doesn’t make a damn lick of sense or even adhere to basic knowledge of reality.
Is this a “god made Earth last week” kind of thing?
In Europe and Asia, we have literally been building up infrastructure for over 1000 years. If we consider the early Roman/British/Whoever roads to be the “origin” of modern infrastructure, that goes to “around 753 BC”. If we actually go by history and the origin of “the road”, then we are looking at 10,000 BC. And if we are just saying paved roads, Egypt in 2600 BC.
Cities emerge out of population centers (unless you are building stuff for the Saudis) and railroads/highways/whatever all emerge from the heavily used roads. Whether replacing them or following similar paths.
As for the babies in the room: The United States was “gifted by the Native Americans” in the 1600s and declared in 1776. And the Louisiana Purchase, which was France selling the Americans large parts of the land that was “gifted” to them by the Native Americans, was in 1804. And, for poops and giggles, California became a state in 1850, but white folk were doing their thang back to the 1700s.
So… yes, we have been here for multiple centuries, regardless of whatever Father Tom says to you.
Also, that very mockingly euro-centric view ignores all the trails and outright roads that the indigenous people of the Americas and Australia and the like had. That colonizers mostly just claimed for their own, the same way they claimed the choice places for population centers (access to fresh water, game, etc).
OOOOHHHHHHHHH You’re comparing apples to turnpikes and claiming it a win. Gotcha. Have fun mate.
Well said.