2074
this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
2074 points (93.5% liked)
Fuck Cars
9697 readers
832 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Now try moving between two cities where there isn't a train line because it isn't financially viable.
My hometown to the city I work in (and have an apartment in, I don't drive this distance daily) is about 4 hours on the trains and maybe an hour wait depending on which two trains you take.
Driving this is about an hour. The train takes this long because you first have to take a train in the literal opposite direction for 100 km. The government will never build a train line because there isn't enough demand and whichever government were to waste money on this would end about as fast as one that tried raising the price of vodka.
There IS a bus line, but holy hell are those seats bad. I had back pain for 3 days last time I took one.
"Now try moving between two cities where there isn't a train line because it isn't financially viable."
Congratulations, you found the problem. A train line shouldn't have to be financially viable. Streets aren't eather. Let's vote for better rail infrastructure.
Train lines cost hella money to build. There's no point building a new one for maybe 100 people to regularly use. The road network is so interconnected that people from many places can use the same roads as part of their journey, but if each journey was to be completeable by rail, my country's entire tax revenue for several decades would have to be spent building it.
I keep finding cost comparisons for 6 lane roads vs railroads where the railroads often come out winning, but the reality is, my country doesn't really do 6 lane roads. 4 lanes is reserved for SOME sections of the big highways, but mostly it's 2 lanes, and sometimes you'll even see some gravel roads. There are very few places where the raw throughput of rail is required, because most settlements in our country are literal villages. There's a few decently sized towns and when you run out of those, it gets small and spread out very fast. We have just a tiny bit more area than the Netherlands, with less than a tenth the population.
Would I love to live in a train utopia where you can get everywhere via rail and maybe an electric scooter for the last few kilometers? Absolutely. But it's simply not affordable, so we have 4 or 5 main lines to cover the low hanging fruit. The rest would have increasingly diminishing returns to implement. Actually there are two more lines that I literally just thought of, that could be implemented to get the connectivity to cover a significant part of the population, but they'd be pretty expensive, lots of marshland areas to go through, etc. And it still won't help the people living in small towns spread across the country. I do hope those lines will be built, but right now there's nobody talking about it. Right now they only want to electrify existing mostly non-electric lines, add more trains on existing lines, and increase speeds. So there's definitely more to be done that is also not being done. But I don't think the country will ever be fully covered by a rail network, many lines would just be running empty most of the time.
Basically, I hope we get more train lines, but they'll never cover all needs, it'd just be way too inefficient. We're a very low-density country outside of the main towns.