China 2060: … a space elevator
USA 2060: … still the same rail service
a space elevator
You’d have to harness carbon nanotubes first… then deal with all the debris in LEO, then come up with an elevator that doesn’t take days to reach GEO (granted the counterweight can rest there and the cab can stop sooner).
Easy, just attach a huge rocket to the bottom of the elevator, problem solved. Oh, use AI to design the rocket, make the ticketing system use block chain, and when you get to orbit, a robot remotely operated by a human on the ground (but prentends to be fully autonomous) takes a picture of you and generates an NFT of it that you can purchase for 35000 USD in the gift shop.
I’ll be over here swimming in my money pool.
This is a joke meme that doesn’t mean anything … just like the American public transport system.
i agree with your sentiment completely, just to point out a small technicality:
space elevators aren’t technically feasible. i’ve done the calculations a while ago and practically, the weight of the space elevator itself would be so much that it wouldn’t be able to carry its own weight. remember that it would essentially be a tower several hundred kilometers high. the highest buildings on earth today aren’t even a single kilometer high.
i believe in spaceflight though
yeah, anti public transit has several motivations, the most American is racism. if we have robust public transit, they can’t be “whites only” and you can’t force the not-whites to sit in the back. so right there. Then you have white land owning hegemony. Why do the busses only go downtown and not to the shopping center half way to the suburbs? because they don’t want the filthy poors mucking up their white fort, if you let busses go up to the suburbs then THEY can get there and do all the things they get blamed for!! Lastly, profit motive. mass transit means people can choose to have a car or not. the powers that be are making a lot of money off cars and mass transit will upset the apple cart.
You know, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. And your comment reminds me of it. The aesthetics of evil. Racist segregation is an obvious evil. So if you tell black people to stand at the back of the bus because they’re not allowed to mix with the whites, that’s rather obvious and a horrific picture to have. But, if you handicap them, make sure they can only live in the cheapest communities and then limit the mobility of them. Same result. But because you didn’t see it, and the enforced segregation is rather subtle… Well, looks better, doesn’t it? So people are more likely to accept it. And if you say things like “The city has marked this black community unfit for investment.” then it sounds already like a conspiracy theory. Making you the weirdo for speaking out. Horrid, but an elegant and efficient system for censorship, isn’t it?
And to be absolutely clear: I reject racial segregation and censorship, obviously.
i think it’s not only racism though. surely, there’s also a lot of kicking-downwards on the poor. the poor shouldn’t get a nice life, so they’re motivated to work harder and be successful, so since public transport helps everyone, including the poors, we don’t want that.
(not my words, just a common sentiment i’ve heard)
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It’s exaggerated and massively understated depending on location.
There are several metro areas in the US with over 1 million people that has zero metro/subway or light rail, some of them don’t even have a passenger train connections or stations, or at most it stops by once or twice a day. Places like Columbus Ohio that has literally zero rail passenger rail for over 2m people in the metro area. If you want to take the train from there to NYC you’ll have to spend a couple of hours on a bus to a different city first. And it’s not like they never had it, they razed the train station in the 70s.
Other places that lack light rail or metro and have 1m+ people in the metro area: Tampa, San Antonio, Indianapolis, Oklahoma, Memphis, Richmond, Louisville, Rochester, etc. with many of them having a very bad outside passenger train connections. There are also a bunch of others that almost slipped by or did stay off the list over technicalities like having a single tram line going up and down main street or similar. Places like Orlando, Cincinatti, etc.
I recently planned out a trip to Chicago using trains. The fastest and most cost efficient route was to drive 3 hrs to Indianapolis and then take a 3 hr train to Chicago from there. Literally, the passenger rail network in the US is so bad that the fastest and cheapest way to travel by train is to do it as little as possible.
Id argue the northeast corridor is effectively the only place we have intercity rail.
While there are other routes, it’s mainly just keeping the lights on. How can rail be useful at 1-2 trips/day, travelling at glacial speeds? We shouldn’t even count it. If we ever start funding rail seriously, we’ll save a crap load of money where Amtrak kept the right of way sort of in use but that’s the only benefit.
The 2022 infrastructure bill would have made a huge difference increasing several routes to “plan to be useful” or even “sort of useful”, but even then a decent rail system would be a century out until we actually start spending. It doesn’t even have to be much, compared to road spending, but it has to be a lot more than we do now, in percentages more similar to road spending, and it needs to be consistent, long term. It can’t just disappear every time a Regressive is in office.
This is because public transportation is socialism and we can’t have tax dollars going to that pretext for communism. Capitalism is far superior which is why we are instead spending over $150 billion on deporting immigrants, which will help promote a free and open capitalist market.
as much as I’d like to call this a win for socialism, I don’t think socialism is actually necessary for good transit. Japan is very capitalist and has private rail networks which are comparable in quality and extent to China’s.
the “Socialism” is in quotes as were aren’t really talking about actual socialism. Its now a boogeyman dogwhistle used by rich people to steal public property and convert it into private capital.
US Train travel has actually gotten worse since 1996.
Yeah, the only reason we still have tracks most places is for freight.
Came to say this. If it had literally remained unchanged they’d still be doing pretty good.
America: if ain’t broke don’t fix it Every other country: yah it’s time, what are our new requirements?
I mean this is sorta one of the things an autocracy does well. You might get substandard work and a lot of graft but when the order comes down no one gets to complain when they run a train line through your house.
actually, they do get to complain
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/gallery/chinas-extraordinary-nail-houses-show-5727566
And then turn a blind eye to all the broken stuff because “we have been living with it so it’s not broken”
Then there’s “if it ain’t broke… how can we break it to extract a few extra bucks from it?”
I wonder if the early proliferation of rural cars / mega expressways kinda fucked us. When your transportation network grows around trains, upgrading the trains/rails makes good economic sense. We just kind of spread out everywhere quickly and made the train locations somewhat irrelevant.
No the auto industry has lobbied against trains and similar projects. It’s not about the science but more about how our politicians have been selling their souls for centuries.
Pretty much part of the plot from Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
People choose those politicians, too sensitive for fear of even slightly bigger government. Paired with racism, nowadays.
No, because cross-country trains and heavy use of them to move goods and people predates cars by quite a bit. Trains were a key component of the North winning the Civil War, for example.
Lots of existing train infrastructure needed to be torn out to make room for car infrastructure.
I definitely think this is the case. Something akin to tragedy of the commons (or maybe Braese’s paradox?) where small investments for short term gain trumps bigger investments for, comparatively, bigger gains.
Sweden, where I live, is in this situation too where the rail network is 50 years in reparation debt but it’s easier for politicians to budget for small road repairs and say that they make meaningful infrastructure work
If anything, shouldn’t that make it easier? The US has quite open and wide streets/roads. You have more space to build stations and rail tracks than for example Europe with much narrower streets/roads.
We just kind of spread out everywhere quickly and made the train locations somewhat irrelevant.
Do you know any US history
I know enough that it wasn’t so much lobbying as it was advertising to the to the US citizens that made cars more popular. Ford figured out how to make it affordable then a bunch of companies that stood to make money on cars bought up streetcars and shut them down in favor of busses, but that doesn’t actually answer the demise of long distance rail.
The US was built on steam trains going literally everywhere
That’s kind of the problem though. They’re not everywhere now. There’s a whole lot of places that are nowhere near a train line.
Its so naive to think that this was the cause lmao
Not just trains but all transportation services and systems is severely lacking in this country. Along with crumbling infrastructure and terrible build quality of cars and trucks and you got a recipe for disaster. But no one will care cuz Merica!
yeah it’s so funny when people think the US has good car infrastructure, the truth is that the US just generally fucking sucks
yeah sure there’s a lot of interstate highways which i guess you can consider good, but most people aren’t using them for very large distances, most people are driving to and from work every day and that part is so hilariously miserable that i don’t think people in the rest of the world truly believe it’s a real thing that happens…
Agreed! I live in a very rural part of the country and the conditions of the roads and highways are laughable.
not just that, but the design itself is often actively counterproductive, and the fact that driving is often the only way to get around means the roads are forced to handle an insane amount of traffic.
i like to say that the nordics are an example of actual car-centric design: the roads are simple and efficient and the other modes of transport are good enough, which means there aren’t thousands and thousands of incompetent and unwilling drivers on the roads.
What’s the problem? The rich have private planes.
Every three years China pours more concrete than the US has since WWII.
Just a reminder that concrete releases huge amounts of CO2 as it cures. Empty cities don’t help anyone.
Another reason good urbanism and walkability is super important: the emissions don’t just come from the cars, they come from the excess roads themselves, too.
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It wasn’t even necessarily a bad idea given property growth, but it will be interesting to see what happens if they can’t stop population decline
Their intention was to bolster the economy with busy work, but that’s not a long term solution.
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That’s comparing Apples to Shampoo. To completely different concepts and it’s not an either/or situation.
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Concrete doesn’t house CO2. When they created Biodome2, the engineers didn’t factor in the curing time and CO2 output and the scientists had to vent the facility or suffocate.
Houses don’t stand long on their own. It takes a significant amount of time and money to keep these things from filling up with mold or collapsing.
cement releases large amounts of CO2 when it is being produced, i.e. when the cement powder is being produced from limestone. this is due to a chemical reaction: CaCO3 (limestone) -> CaO (cement) + CO2
later, when you mix the cement with water and sand to make concrete, it re-absorbs (approx. 43% of) that CO2. you’ve got it backwards :D
curing reaction: CaO + CO2 -> CaCO3 (facilitated by water presence)
edit: ok i looked it up and concrete only absorbs about 43% of the CO2 that is emitted during cement production. Source
Bragging about encasing the natural world in a synthetic crust and displacing wildlife… Great flex
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Hyperloop any day now!
we
Is this some sort of US problem that I’m too not-US to understand?
Public transportation in USA sucks, and people from USA often use we on social media platforms, assuming they are the majority :P
It’s because US companies dominate the internet, plus English is the de facto language of discussion. I’m not sure how to deal with this since we probably are the majority.
You’re third, after China and India. Now tell me how those don’t count ;)
Your moral and intellectual superior was not talking about literal population, but that wasn’t the point. I was saying that US citizens most likely predominate US sites that are written in US English.
That was number of online users, not total population. And 50% of internet companies are Chinese, only 6% are American. I’m sure you’ll twist that fact to suit you too :)
Number of online users has nothing to do with what your superior was talking about. This is like saying most of the world speaks mandarin or something. Maybe you should learn how to think before being an obnoxious prick to your masters.
They don’t speak English, so they’re just not present in these forums. Way to needlessly start ab argument tho
India has a billion english speakers. But they do tend to their own sites/fb
Well, the most efficient form of government is a dictatorship, which nobody want except the dictator.
An inefficient government has groups investigating other groups to see if what they are doing is correct. This process takes time, so things move much slower. But is generally a much better protection against corruption.
You say that, but… Iraq was a dictatorship, and they weren’t all that efficient at anything other than killing Kurds.
That’s because they’re politically illiterate. The important difference is the economic model and its end goal. Is it to make a small elite super rich? Is it to meet the peoples’ needs? The US is extremely efficient in creating a small class of super rich people (and by that I mean corporations too) while China is extremely efficient in switching to renewable energy and expanding high speed rail.
Well, the most efficient form of government is a dictatorship, which nobody want except the dictator.
I mean… some people do, but they’re weird.
Now do aircraft carriers!
Setting that cash on fire would be more practical use of tax payer money
Aircraft carriers don’t let me travel to my destinations
Your fault that you weren’t born as an aircraft!
