We have the technology and means to do better than we ever have before in every area; and at least here in the US, we're ripe to have this infrastructure put in place. We need a true Green New Deal, not a watered-down bill that allocates funding to the few to accomplish nothing or something small-scale and localized.
If we added thorough, accessible high speed rail infrastructure for transportation AND freight here in the US, we could reduce our fossil fuel emissions and dependence by a pretty large factor. And make travel more dignified and safe. It's absolutely ridiculous how we ship and receive goods - and it's absolutely ridiculous that the best means of travel from any place more than a few hours away is essentially just air. The roads are laughably bad, and they are clogged to the brim with tractor-trailers. It's time to stop.
The real, measurable cost of continuing fossil fuel dependence is higher than we know or predict most likely, and justifying continuing this solely because doing better is "expensive" or "problematic" just shows the lack of leadership we have and the massive tumors that we need to excise. The amount of jobs that a national infrastructure deal would create are staggering, and the new, more sustainable economies of scale that would develop around it are priceless.
There is so much low hanging fruit in the US its not even funny. If you want to invest money and get people in rail, start with proper S-Bahns and combine that with the historic rail network outside of the cities.
Add trams to your cities and proper bus service with priority lines and priority signaling.
And of course the absolutely brain dead land use and zoning policies in the US are the real issue even if you build public transit.
Worry about those things before dreaming up schemes of high speed trains.
That said the Great Lakes region high speed rail, combined with Canada would make a huge amount of sense.
People preference is why I wait 2 minutes at a crosswalk to get to my local park.
Cost can be solved. I'm not sure car dependence can be.
Rail is preferable to planes on most places you want to go in Europe. And the places where its not, its because the rail infrastructure hasn't been built out. This is because of 60 years of overinvestment in roads and 60 years of under investment in roads.
Even Switzerland extreme successful increase in rail was born out of a necessity and a restricted budget. So much more could have been done.
Once rail infrastructure is built, its operation is efficient and much of the infrastructure lasts for 100+ years.
Its funny how people who like roads are all like 'train so expensive' and yet I see road dependent countries (like the US) with roads that look more like the Ukraine then anything else. If its so cheap why can't you maintain it?
> drive because of costs
Because drivers don't actually pay for the massive investment in roads over the last 60 years. Cars have been given incredibly valuable space for free in most cities. The list of things like that goes on and on.
And driving also leads to an absutly insane amount of death and other health defects that society is paying for.
Is it like 40000 deaths alone from cars in the US? Yeah fantastic that people safe some money over rail in some condition.
If you actually analyses effect on society as a whole, walking, biking and rail are all utterly fantastic investments.
* cars destroy cities, they take huge chunks of the public space,
* air pollution,
* noise pollution,
* safety,
* fast floods favored by impermeable soil covers,
* social inequalities (not having a car make you less capable in a car centric environment),
* climate change
Wtf is this nonsense? Do people not need water, electricity, internet, school and other things that all depend on 'the authorities'.
I will tell you something about true freedom. When I was 15, me and friends went from Switzerland to Czech Republic by our-self in the train. Parents didn't have to drop us off anywhere. We just went.
And today, I can literally get up, without thinking or planning, walk a couple minutes, and be anywhere in the country 2h later. I can can drink and go home no problem.
But I guess its a much better solution to just keep telling people 'don't drink and drive', because that has helped so much.
It continually amazes me how 40000 a year die, plus an unimaginable amount of property damage, policy cost, medical cost, infrastructure cost and so on and so on. And the defense for that is 'freedom bro'.
Obviously, cities with good transit are substantially rarer and probably far worse maintained in the US than Europe, so I’m sure Europe is in an overall far better spot with it - but I struggle to understand the appeal of developing against walkability and transit-ability in 2023.
The issue with public transport is the first word, public.
In a developing place, good public transport is a way better option, as it allows people without higher salaries to be able to spend money on other things than transportation, which in turn grows the economy.
However, once a place is developed economically, and people can afford cars, the general desire is to have a form of transport that does not depend on other people. Public transport can be late, you have to deal with inconsiderate people, there are additional weather issues you have to deal with, e.t.c.
Same goes for living in apartments/condos versus having your own piece of land. Apartments of course are the way to go for densely populated areas, but with everything else equal, people generally would prefer to live away from others for very good reasons.
The key to solving transportation is 2 fold.
First, there should be massive investments into autonomous driving from a policy level. I.e standardized systems, hardware, additional infrastructure. We did this for airplanes, no reason it can't be done for cars. Self driving shouldn't be a matter of having to train a neural net to drive from vision alone, having a car follow a path that it can reliably detect from external markers.
The second is way looser regulation on electric bicycles/mopeds and investment into that sector in general. There is HUGE value mismatch on those things. A gas powered scooter is often as expensive as an electric bike ($2-4k for a decent build), and can reach speeds that make it ok on roads, whereas the bike is speed limited for assist, and has way fewer moving parts. $2k more buys you a 300cc motorcycle that is highway worthy. If there are more affordable options for ebikes as well as options with higher power and no speed restrictions, you will have a much wider adoption of them, beyond even the current high market for them. You can pair this with regulation on disallowing car traffic on sectors within cities during certain times.
People use public transport when it is convenient. If you are a rich country that has so many of these rich people then you can make your public transport good.
If cars and roads actually had to compete in terms of cost benefits, driving would be far more expensive.
> Same goes for living in apartments/condos versus having your own piece of land. Apartments of course are the way to go for densely populated areas, but with everything else equal, people generally would prefer to live away from others for very good reasons.
Having single family homes isn't an issue. Having only single family homes and no commercial is the issue. Row houses can be very popular and cost efficient for people who don't want to be in an apartment.
If you look at subburbs in the Netherlands for example, you will see a wild mix of different types of buildings, all still conected to public tranist and of course great bike infrastructure.
As long as people pay tax for using more land (land value tax ftw) and the car is put into an appropriate place in the transport hierarchy.
> First, there should be massive investments into autonomous driving
Absolutely terrible choice. Even the best case outcome isn't great.
If there is a place where self driving makes sense its in last mile transporting people in the subburbs.
> The second is way looser regulation on electric bicycles/mopeds and investment into that sector in general.
This isn't unreasonable.
> The key to solving transportation is 2 fold.
No the key is actually to have great bike and public infrastructure, and if you do most people will use it. If you also properly restrict cars specifically in cities and make drivers actually pay for all the issues with cars. Then biking and pubic transport will be incredibly popular.
And the cars that are left over are far less of a problem.
Be it high speed rail, car, bus, e-bike, e-scooter, etc. As long as what you are doing is safe, and you're not harming yourself or other people, you should be able to use whatever the hell kind of gadget you want to in order to get to the places you need to go. You shouldn't have police coming up to you telling you what you can and cannot put on the road because the laws are ancient and stagnant - and only get changed if there is a profit incentive.
You shouldn't have to worry about getting run off the road/sidewalk/crosswalk because the people who planned/make the roads think it's a good thing to build thin, one-lane on each side, roads, with no bike lane, with no shoulder or a very small shoulder, with poorly-maintained sidewalks, etc.
We really need to rethink how roads should work, how traffic lights should work, suggest speeds instead of set limits, and update our infrastructure. And standardize, standardize, standardize.
And specifically, here in the US, we need to change to the metric system, like the rest of the world. But that probably will never happen.
One such tunnel requires building a 3rd because closing one of the two for x years is economicaly worse for the country than building the 3rd. The 3rd tunnel however will be closed at the end of construction and can not be used to expand capacity. It will be a service tunnel only.
Also Switzerland just presented their 2035 [1] and 2050 [2] rail plans. The 2035 plan alone includes several new tunnels and new/upgrades to rail stations. The expansion at Zürich Stadelhofen alone is estimated at 1.1 billion Swiss francs and that is not the main train station in Zürich. Zürich Hartbrücke also need to be upgraded and is estimated over triple digit millions as well.
[1] https://company.sbb.ch/de/ueber-die-sbb/projekte/nationale-p...
[2] https://www.bav.admin.ch/bav/de/home/verkehrsmittel/eisenbah...
So there IS a country where decision makers actually consider the costs caused by traffic jams due to road maintenance!
Yea but how much of that was the "people all moved to the cities leaving villages to rot away" problem that other countries face including Japan and the US? Europe was very much and still has many scattered villages and small towns in each country that are disappearing as time goes on. They had trains, people used them to move and leave grandma/grandpa on their farms.
