Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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Japan is smaller than California, with several times the population density.
Reframe your thoughts as: taxpayers per mile of track. Then begin to understand.
Japan finds solutions, America finds excuses.
You have enough taxpayers to build 26 lane highways in California, but you're telling me you don't have enough money to build a 2 lane HSR?
Sorry, I'm not American. Looking at it from the outside. There are a lot of things America can do better.
But from a purely math perspective, it's a good metric to explain why Japan has what it has.
They have it because they spent more money on rail and less on highways compared to the US. They chose the better infrastructure.
If you tax billionaires more you can pay for the high speed rail
I’d settle for rebalancing money from other forms of transportation.
There are plenty of highways thoroughly congested where adding more lanes is no longer scalable, not a good investment. Those are clear scenarios where money should be rebalanced toward the more scalable option
Or look at the huge infrastructure backlog in the US, the number of decades it took to invest in it, and the fate of the infrastructure bill from just three years ago. While there are political concerns, it’s easy to argue that we’ve overextended ourselves to more infrastructure than we can afford to maintain. Rail may be expensive to establish but it’s much more maintainable over time. It’s a better investment for the future.
Or healthcare. Or whatever else. Yes.
But you've already lost the war against the capital class and are left dreaming.
Sure thing bub
Japan still runs trains to areas where there's 1 village every 15-20 miles. Single track, that splits at the odd unmanned platform so people can board and trains can pass each other, and they have a train like every 10-15 minutes.
The USSR didn't even bother with the platforms sometimes, just had a guy driving a locomotive by a bunch of villages every few hours, stopping any time he saw a farmer who had to take some cows to market or whatever.
Roads are expensive to build and maintain, cars are expensive to build and maintain. Every trip taken on a train or bike instead of a car saves the tax payers money.
It's not like everyone in the country needs to ride it daily. The US has plenty of people. You connect population centers. And if you can build on flat land rather than Japan's mountains, you're on easy mode. Really you're the one that needs to reframe things.
It's what the people want. There's been several times where high speed rail in Florida was put on a public ballot, and overwhelmingly got voted for. And then the government came back and said, "wha...we didn't think you'd want this? We don't have the money." The last I was involved in explored high speed from Miami through Orlando and the I-4 corridor to Tampa. Huge potential. "We're a poor state, can't do it." FU FL
The non Disney parks keep lobbying against it because it would either destroy their foot traffic relative to Disney or need too many stops that it's no longer high speed rail