Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Trains and railways are cooler and better than cars and highways. Imagine making everyone get their own personal vehicle, engine, tires, fuel, service, license, and insurance, just to watch them all crash into each other and die constantly.
Yes although I would argue cars and highways are just evolutions of horse carts on dirt roads, a way older technology than trains.
Trains aren't old tech though. Just tech that got pushed out by auto-maker lobbying. In places (like Japan, or China, or parts of Europe) where they kept evolving they only got better.
Especially the interurban lines that built every American megacity. Small single driver electric trains (basically trolleys but designed to go faster than streetcars and ran on dedicated right of way outside of the city) they were a really efficient method of transporting people into cities, many allowed for flag stops (where a passenger would flag down the car anywhere along the tracks to stop so they could get on) and would run between cities, feeding from smaller towns into larger ones or just running between nearby cities.
Unfortunately passenger railroad service has always been unprofitable. Until the 1960s most passenger services were largely paid for by lucrative mail contracts and would haul Railroad Post Offices, which were delicated cars with tiny postal sorting facilities in them that post workers would sort the incoming and outgoing mail on and pickup and drop off big bundles of mail at every stop and often even without stopping. Most interurban and trolley lines were largely real estate schemes where they'd buy comparatively cheap farm land, build a rail stop and possibly a few homes and businesses near the stop to sell for a tidy profit, then sell the rest of the land plot by plot now that the rail connection and other nearby homes and businesses made it far more valuable. This was even the tactic when building the transcontinental railroad, where the railroad companies built entire cities along the way.
So simply put, railroad construction and operation is prohibitively expensive. On the other hand, if the US Federal Government matched their spending on highways for railroad expansion the cost of rail transport would probably blow the cost of driving or hiring a truck out of the water entirely