this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2026
1298 points (98.7% liked)
Fuck Cars
16763 readers
762 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 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is doable, we just have to convince our leaders is bad for the environment, will hurt brown people, will get them filthy rich and also paint them fake gold and put Drumpfs name on each train
So yea, no,
Fucking AI an image of a gold train with Trump's name on the side and get it trending.
We can always repaint it in a couple of years.
That's actually worth a try.
The biggest issue is that it's expensive and what we have now is functional. People aren't keen on dropping tons of cash to make something better because they're short-sighted and don't care about the future.
Also NIMBY's would shut it down hard, not wanting to live near the rail. There'd also be a lot of eminent domain claims when the rail would get close to any station point.
Back when the US had excellent rail networks, we could have upgraded and maintained them for passenger rail. But so much has been ripped out and paved over that it'd be very expensive to bring it back... and no one wants to pay more in taxes despite receiving more money back in benefit.
I get your point about how our existing transportation system is functional. I mean, it's not, but it's functional enough that people and policymakers can point to it and claim that it's good enough. We can't point to all of the trips that aren't happening because our system is so godawful exactly because they're not happening.
I just think of Amtrak's Borealis route from Minneapolis to Chicago. It's not terribly convenient (2 trains a day), nor that fast (7½ hours), nor all that cheap (close to $50), and it has blown ridership projections completely out of the water. A lot of people really want to take the train, and I understand, because the alternatives (driving or flying) are so much worse.
I have plenty of friends who'd love a train to Chicago. The Illinois Central route is still in use for freight. But Wisconsin just can't get it together to offer passenger service. Beyond NIMBYs, as we saw in the campaign for governor in 2010, rail has become a political identity issue, coded as Democratic, so Republicans are reflexively against it. As well, it's a racist dog-whistle, as seen in the bizarro claims that a train would bring Chicago crime to the city.
It's functional in that people can get from point A to point B when they need to. Flights aren't prohibitively expensive enough to push people to take the tax increase. A flight from Minneapolis to Chicago is like $100-$200, and for the rare occurrence someone needs that specific route, it's not that expensive to pay for.
Don't get me wrong, we'd be much better off with a national rail network connecting major cities. But Americans are some of the most cost-averse voters, both on the left and right. And you're looking at a multi-billion dollar project for something like a Chicago to NYC line. The citizens of Illinois and NYC aren't keen to take the tax hike. Fed won't pay for it since it only benefits 2 specific voter bases and doesn't do anything to swing an election (Dems win those cities anyway, Republicans will never take them over even if they funded rail).
Agreed that it's functional in that people can get from point A to point B, but just throwing in that are a lot of people who nevertheless don't make trips because those trips are harder and more stressful than they need to be. (Elderly and disabled people, and children, as some examples.) As well, our system requires lots of trips that people don't want, or shouldn't need, to make.
$50 from Minneapolis to Chicago isn't cheap?
In my mind, I compare it to the Amtrak 30-day pass that I paid $600 for, and went all the way around the western half of the U.S.
What we have now is not functional. And you will never convince me that we somehow don't have enough money to make the average American's life better, but somehow we have the money to spend 43.6 billion, so far, on a pointless war with Iran. We have the money
The problem isn't that it can't happen, the problem is people won't vote to pay more in taxes. Left or right, we've shown that any candidate that runs on increasing taxes gets slaughtered because the voter base is too short sighted. New rail is incredibly expensive, taxes would need to be increased to pay for it (the money HAS to come from somewhere).
It's "functional" in that people can get from Chicago to NYC relatively quickly - through a flight. Sure, it's gonna cost a few hundred $$ a person, but it's not enough of a barrier to get people to pay significantly more in taxes for a few years to pay for an alternative.
The federal government isn't going to step in and do something like this ever either. They're the only ones who could even conceivably do this, but spending billions for 2 specific states doesn't sway voters from the other 48.
You missed the point. We do not have to increase taxes to achieve this. We just have to stop bombing the shit out of half the world and reallocate that funding.
Our taxes could stay exactly the same. Of course the lobbyists prefer we spend billions and billions on pointless wars and the military, but we don't get shit from it.
Only if the federal government paid for it, and they won't for the reasons I mentioned. No use catering to a vote they already have.
I don't like it any more than you do, but it's a massive side effect of the way our government works. Swing states are the only things that matter and none of them are in need of high speed rail
We may not have a functional rail system, but we have an excellent highway system, and there is absolutely no reason that high speed rail lines can't be run down the medians of many highways, eliminating much of the eminent domain issues.
There will still be pain points, but that's the challenge of progress. A national High Speed Rail system would be worth the trouble.
I personally agree, but the voter base doesn't. People are unwilling to take the tax increase over taking a flight for the rare occurrence they go between the two cities. And the issue is getting INTO the city, not near the city. Once you hit the suburbs of either city you're fucked. Not that it can't be done, but the price tag skyrockets and that makes it a harder pill for voters to swallow.