“Just to meet business-as-usual trends, 115% more copper must be mined in the next 30 years than has been mined historically until now,” the study said.
“Just to meet business-as-usual trends, 115% more copper must be mined in the next 30 years than has been mined historically until now,” the study said.
Agreed. I love trains and it frustrates me to see them bungling the implementation. When they try, they always seem to make the same mistakes trying to bring it to my area.
To see meaningful ridership out here, the train needs to go fast enough to negate the penalty you get at the other end when you have to go from the station to your destination. They wanted to run them at ~55-70mph here, with a few stops between major cities, to parallel a freeway that is 65-75mph. Drive 1 hour (1:10 with parking) or spend 2 hours going to the station, riding a slow train, then going from the station to where you are going? I hate cars, but as someone who only gets a handful of hours to myself after sleep, work, and chores, I’m going to save my time and pick the car. If they ever build the train, as it is planned right now, it’ll just be another commuter train that’s only really used at rush hour when the roads are jammed rather than an all day all week car replacement solution that I can ride to Sunday night dinner at a friends house as easily as a 6am meeting.
/un-requested rant
@njordomir @Sanctus The safe money is it will also run too infrequently to be a good replacement. Adding ‘time waiting for train’ to the picture for trips outside of 6~9am or 3~7pm and officials wonder why services aren’t well used.
Interestingly, a similar problem as with bike infrastructure. The infrastructure isn’t useful until a lot of it is built and it connects everywhere (and timetables get shorter for trains). The infrastructure won’t pass public opinion until it’s proven to be useful to people. I will always vote yes on funding these projects even if I think they will bomb because it puts us a little closer to the peak of that hill. Its still frustrating though. We could easily do like we did with the freeways if we just decided it was worth building.
@njordomir But all of it is network effect in action: the incremental value of each piece is related to how many pieces already exist.
The worse part is, what infrastructure does get built isn’t used because it’s mostly useless, and people use this lack of use as justification for not building more.
My city has been pushing through improving the biking infrastructure for a decade now.
People have been bitching about it from day one. They bitched even more as the first lanes were going in, as they were “useless” and went “nowhere”
They’ve continued to bitch about it every year, every construction project.
But now, we have a highly interconnected network of bike lanes (most protected) all around town and they’re getting heavily used.
People still find reasons to bitch about it like it’s slowing down traffic by narrowing roads or lost parking spots or whatever, but the “it’s not useful” stuff has stopped.
My current push is bike infra for kids to get to school, parks, community centers and libraries. Roads aren’t a safe for them and they can’t drive themselves.