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0 pointsfaeriechangling2y ago0 comments

Transport becoming more expensive and housing becoming more expensive is linked at the hip.

Where is the most expensive property in the world? For the most part, next to ports, next to railways, next to subways, next to anything that makes makes it cheap to move people and things.

Demand for housing and transport is rising beyond the means of the infrastructure to actually sustain this. Most of the whinging I see against governments surrounds their unwillingness to restrict investment and immigration, which they won’t do because their books are balanced around the notion that they will “grow out of debt”. Likely we will arrive at a point where we have a bunch of infrastructure we built that’s infeasible to maintain that will turn into ruins when the population gets around to contracting.

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panick21_2y ago· 1 in thread

IF you have lots of railways and subways then almost everywhere is gone be next to those things. And it also leads to a situation where your combined transport and housing cost are actually small. That is the right way to improve society. In Switzerland there are tons of really cheap places with fantastic rail connections.

The idea that rail infrastructure isn't sustainable is kind of nonsense, even with smaller population. Road infrastructure maintenance is far more expensive and in a bad economic situation you can run 30 year old trains. Its simply a matter of what your society puts priority on.

Main part of Britain specifically is so densely populated that even with massive collapse in population most of the rail network would still be vital.

faeriechanglingOP2y ago

I agree, so it will be the infrastructure connected by no better means than roads which will turn to ruins first.

Yet we are still building up such infrastructure, even if emphasis is gradually shifting to more sustainable infrastructure. I still am sceptical that much of what is being built now can survive a century. It seems most plausible that transport costs are going to climb up every year over the next few decades and I don't see how that doesn't break the back of many many communities.

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