Too bad we can't have good public transportation
Too bad we can't have good public transportation
171 comments
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Hey now, that's a misrepresentation of both the US and China.
China had way nicer locomotives in 96. It wasn't 1896.
And in the US, that guy would have either been replaced by a machine, or replaced by someone younger who won't be expecting the seniority and pay raises that being there for over 20 years usually gets you.
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Replaced by machines that can't transport humans or even freight for that matter
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now I want to watch an entire playlist of Adam Something videos about dumbass tech bros trying to invent the train over and over again
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What hypercapitalism lobbied by big oil does to your country.
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it's not even capitalism at this point. there's various definitions of capitalism out there, which makes it blurry and difficult-to-talk-about, but most of them feature some element of wealth maximization. in the current trajectory, nobody's wealth is increased.
trump's policies hurt not only the common people, but also the economy. if the common people have less money, they spend less on consumerism and that cripples the economy. that is actually what's already happening rn. and it's only going to get worse. we need handouts, so people can spend money.
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China 2060: ..... a space elevator
USA 2060: .... still the same rail service
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a space elevator
You'd have to harness carbon nanotubes first... then deal with all the debris in LEO, then come up with an elevator that doesn't take days to reach GEO (granted the counterweight can rest there and the cab can stop sooner).
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This is a joke meme that doesn't mean anything ..... just like the American public transport system.
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Easy, just attach a huge rocket to the bottom of the elevator, problem solved. Oh, use AI to design the rocket, make the ticketing system use block chain, and when you get to orbit, a robot remotely operated by a human on the ground (but prentends to be fully autonomous) takes a picture of you and generates an NFT of it that you can purchase for 35000 USD in the gift shop.
I'll be over here swimming in my money pool.
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i agree with your sentiment completely, just to point out a small technicality:
space elevators aren't technically feasible. i've done the calculations a while ago and practically, the weight of the space elevator itself would be so much that it wouldn't be able to carry its own weight. remember that it would essentially be a tower several hundred kilometers high. the highest buildings on earth today aren't even a single kilometer high.
i believe in spaceflight though
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yeah, anti public transit has several motivations, the most American is racism. if we have robust public transit, they can't be "whites only" and you can't force the not-whites to sit in the back. so right there. Then you have white land owning hegemony. Why do the busses only go downtown and not to the shopping center half way to the suburbs? because they don't want the filthy poors mucking up their white fort, if you let busses go up to the suburbs then THEY can get there and do all the things they get blamed for!! Lastly, profit motive. mass transit means people can choose to have a car or not. the powers that be are making a lot of money off cars and mass transit will upset the apple cart.
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You know, I've been thinking about this a lot. And your comment reminds me of it. The aesthetics of evil. Racist segregation is an obvious evil. So if you tell black people to stand at the back of the bus because they're not allowed to mix with the whites, that's rather obvious and a horrific picture to have. But, if you handicap them, make sure they can only live in the cheapest communities and then limit the mobility of them. Same result. But because you didn't see it, and the enforced segregation is rather subtle... Well, looks better, doesn't it? So people are more likely to accept it. And if you say things like "The city has marked this black community unfit for investment." then it sounds already like a conspiracy theory. Making you the weirdo for speaking out. Horrid, but an elegant and efficient system for censorship, isn't it?
And to be absolutely clear: I reject racial segregation and censorship, obviously.
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i think it's not only racism though. surely, there's also a lot of kicking-downwards on the poor. the poor shouldn't get a nice life, so they're motivated to work harder and be successful, so since public transport helps everyone, including the poors, we don't want that.
(not my words, just a common sentiment i've heard)
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US Train travel has actually gotten worse since 1996.
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Yeah, the only reason we still have tracks most places is for freight.
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Came to say this. If it had literally remained unchanged they'd still be doing pretty good.
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This is because public transportation is socialism and we can't have tax dollars going to that pretext for communism. Capitalism is far superior which is why we are instead spending over $150 billion on deporting immigrants, which will help promote a free and open capitalist market.
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as much as I'd like to call this a win for socialism, I don't think socialism is actually necessary for good transit. Japan is very capitalist and has private rail networks which are comparable in quality and extent to China's.
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the "Socialism" is in quotes as were aren't really talking about actual socialism. Its now a boogeyman dogwhistle used by rich people to steal public property and convert it into private capital.
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In Capitalist nations, the further we are from the era of peak Unions and in general civil society movements (which was just after WWII) the slower infrastructure improves from one year to the next, something visible not just in trains but at all levels (even National Health Services for those countries which have them).
The same thing will happen in China now that they're getting more Capitalist than Socialist.
It was never the Capitalist part doing the kind of improvements that benefit most people, it was the stuff outside Capitalism (that used it as a Trade Philosophy only) constraining it and guiding it for policy ends which were independent of Capitalism.
This slowing of improvements of course itself accelerated with Neoliberalism, since that stuff is mainly about making Capitalism the sole definer of policy, or in other words make Capitalism the entirety of politics, hence unconstrained and unguided by interests other than those of Money, so ever less policy was done for the greater good.
Capitalism is reasonably decent at optimizing Trade in the short and mid-term, but is completelly shit for non-Trade interests such as Quality Of Life, as well as for anything which doesn't have direct and reasonably immediate action-consequence links such as situations where negative effects are very delayed in time (for example, companies enshittifying their products but keeping on going for years on the inertia of brand name) or emergent in nature (i.e. things that appear due to the accumulation of the actions of many actors, such as Global Warming).
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The same thing will happen in China now that they’re getting more Capitalist than Socialist.
China: "We're working on our next five year plan, as part of a grand fifty year plan for full national modernization. We haven't had a recession in 40 years and we've functionally eliminated poverty within our borders. We're currently working on a network of trans-continental railroads and global shipping lanes to bring our modern industrial capacity to the planetary scale. As we slough off the productive surge of capitalism and turn state owned enterprises into the foundation of our economic model, we are enjoying an era of wealth and social stability not enjoyed by any country on earth in human history. This is just as Karl Marx predicted, two-hundred years ago."
American: "No, that's just capitalism. You're doing capitalism right now."
Also American: "We invested another trillion dollars in VR that hosts an AI that makes bitcoins. Our GDP is up to 15 digits. No, we don't care about our measles epidemic, it builds character."
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American: "We invested another trillion dollars in VR that hosts an AI that makes bitcoins."
China: "Sounds great, we'll gladly make and supply 90% of all bitcoin hardware to make a quick buck off of your global ecological crisis machine (100% not capitalism I promise)"
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You might ask if capitalism is the sole definer of policy, what’s the purpose of our elected parasites? If they can’t define a reason for their existence, they too need to be replaced with ai.
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Well, the point of Neoliberalism is to de facto destroy Democracy by making the powers controlled by voters (the State) be secondary to the power of Money.
I guess the end stage will be something similar to Feudalism, or maybe just Fascism (a number of very Neoliberal nations have of late become a lot more Fascist).
In the transition stage, the politicians are needed keep up the Theatre Of Democracy and distract the masses with ever louder shows of conflict around things which Money doesn't really care about (hence the Identity Politics Wars).
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I don't know if this analysis is true generally, Japan is pretty fucking capitalist.
I would argue it's more a matter of what wing of the capitalist oligarchy has the upper hand. In the US and Canada, it's the extractive fossil capital and that ultimately holds power. In Japan, or the Netherlands it's more the manufacturing.
Don't extrapolate from the US to capitalism in general. It's more nuanced than that.
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Whilst I can't speak in an informed way about Japan, I can about The Netherlands and they have been degrading in terms of quality of public services during the Neoliberal era.
Certainly by the time I left (about 15 years ago) the trend was well establish in that country of having Scandinavian levels of tax (but only for people, not for companies) and ever more American-level of public services. For example, they don't have a National Health Service (instead they have Health Insurance) even though taxes there for individuals are significantly higher than in countries which do have one such as Britain or Portugal.
They also use to have a high level of public housing but haven't been building much of it in the last few decades and now have a giant realestate bubble.
The Netherlands is a great example of how even countries which started with a higher level of policies geared towards the good of the many, have a decay of those over time as we get further and further away from the post-War era, especially during the Neoliberal years.
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That's nature in general.
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I wonder if the early proliferation of rural cars / mega expressways kinda fucked us. When your transportation network grows around trains, upgrading the trains/rails makes good economic sense. We just kind of spread out everywhere quickly and made the train locations somewhat irrelevant.
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No the auto industry has lobbied against trains and similar projects. It’s not about the science but more about how our politicians have been selling their souls for centuries.
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Pretty much part of the plot from Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
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People choose those politicians, too sensitive for fear of even slightly bigger government. Paired with racism, nowadays.
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No, because cross-country trains and heavy use of them to move goods and people predates cars by quite a bit. Trains were a key component of the North winning the Civil War, for example.
Lots of existing train infrastructure needed to be torn out to make room for car infrastructure.
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I definitely think this is the case. Something akin to tragedy of the commons (or maybe Braese’s paradox?) where small investments for short term gain trumps bigger investments for, comparatively, bigger gains.
Sweden, where I live, is in this situation too where the rail network is 50 years in reparation debt but it’s easier for politicians to budget for small road repairs and say that they make meaningful infrastructure work
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If anything, shouldn't that make it easier? The US has quite open and wide streets/roads. You have more space to build stations and rail tracks than for example Europe with much narrower streets/roads.
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We just kind of spread out everywhere quickly and made the train locations somewhat irrelevant.
Do you know any US history
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I know enough that it wasn't so much lobbying as it was advertising to the to the US citizens that made cars more popular. Ford figured out how to make it affordable then a bunch of companies that stood to make money on cars bought up streetcars and shut them down in favor of busses, but that doesn't actually answer the demise of long distance rail.
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Its so naive to think that this was the cause lmao
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Not just trains but all transportation services and systems is severely lacking in this country. Along with crumbling infrastructure and terrible build quality of cars and trucks and you got a recipe for disaster. But no one will care cuz Merica!
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yeah it's so funny when people think the US has good car infrastructure, the truth is that the US just generally fucking sucks
yeah sure there's a lot of interstate highways which i guess you can consider good, but most people aren't using them for very large distances, most people are driving to and from work every day and that part is so hilariously miserable that i don't think people in the rest of the world truly believe it's a real thing that happens..
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What's the problem? The rich have private planes.
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America: if ain’t broke don’t fix it Every other country: yah it’s time, what are our new requirements?
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I mean this is sorta one of the things an autocracy does well. You might get substandard work and a lot of graft but when the order comes down no one gets to complain when they run a train line through your house.
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actually, they do get to complain
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/gallery/chinas-extraordinary-nail-houses-show-5727566
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And then turn a blind eye to all the broken stuff because "we have been living with it so it's not broken"
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Then there’s “if it ain’t broke… how can we break it to extract a few extra bucks from it?”
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Yabbut somebody think of the car companies!!!
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While continuing to produce the worst cars imaginable
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Every three years China pours more concrete than the US has since WWII.
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Just a reminder that concrete releases huge amounts of CO2 as it cures. Empty cities don't help anyone.
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Another reason good urbanism and walkability is super important: the emissions don't just come from the cars, they come from the excess roads themselves, too.
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cement releases large amounts of CO2 when it is being produced, i.e. when the cement powder is being produced from limestone. this is due to a chemical reaction: CaCO3 (limestone) -> CaO (cement) + CO2
later, when you mix the cement with water and sand to make concrete, it re-absorbs (approx. 43% of) that CO2. you've got it backwards :D
curing reaction: CaO + CO2 -> CaCO3 (facilitated by water presence)
edit: ok i looked it up and concrete only absorbs about 43% of the CO2 that is emitted during cement production. Source
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Bragging about encasing the natural world in a synthetic crust and displacing wildlife... Great flex
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That conductor is a total hottie tho
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Hyperloop any day now!
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Well, the most efficient form of government is a dictatorship, which nobody want except the dictator.
An inefficient government has groups investigating other groups to see if what they are doing is correct. This process takes time, so things move much slower. But is generally a much better protection against corruption.
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You say that, but... Iraq was a dictatorship, and they weren't all that efficient at anything other than killing Kurds.
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That's because they're politically illiterate. The important difference is the economic model and its end goal. Is it to make a small elite super rich? Is it to meet the peoples' needs? The US is extremely efficient in creating a small class of super rich people (and by that I mean corporations too) while China is extremely efficient in switching to renewable energy and expanding high speed rail.
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Well, the most efficient form of government is a dictatorship, which nobody want except the dictator.
I mean... some people do, but they're weird.
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we
Is this some sort of US problem that I'm too not-US to understand?
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Public transportation in USA sucks, and people from USA often use we on social media platforms, assuming they are the majority :P
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Weird to compare a brutal dictatorship which violates human rights on the regular vs a democracy which violates human rights a little less.
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So far...give Trump time and he'll catch right up.
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a brutal dictatorship which violates human rights on the regular
Don't you think you're a little harsh on the US?
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Now do aircraft carriers!
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Aircraft carriers don't let me travel to my destinations
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Your fault that you weren't born as an aircraft!
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Setting that cash on fire would be more practical use of tax payer money
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This isn't even about government styles. This is just investing in infrastructure vs not doing that.
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Right now, the Chinese government has effective eminent domain powers which allows them to acquire property for which to build public infrastructure, both expressways and high-speed railways. That the Chinese people have no questions about the positives regarding HSTs, especially crunchtime during holidays where railway stations would be jampacked. That they're rolling their HSTs to show their technological prowess.
Why the US HST programs and passenger rail transport in general are at glacial pace is partly because of the usual car lobby, because of NIMBYs, because of cheap air transport, and some people now on online gambling instead of touching grass and tossing dice in Vegas.
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Doesnt the us also have those powers and didn't they use them liberally in the construction of both the railways and interstates?
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That just changed completely, far cry when there was this Robert Moses had whole neighborhoods demolished for highways and rearranging whole cities. Now any sort of public infrastructure in the US does have to undergo scrutiny, whether it's going to affect people or their mortgages or both. And most of the homeowners will oppose anything that shatters their idyll.
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Right now, the Chinese government has effective eminent domain powers which allows them to acquire property for which to build public infrastructure, both expressways and high-speed railways
I've heard people claim as much, but at the same time, Stuck Nail Houses exist, I'm not sure how to reconcile the two. I think it's that their eminent domain is limited to property that was purchased after a certain point, so if it's property your parents owned since the 80s, it's literally easier for developers to route the highway around your home than win that lawsuit, but if they bought in like 2010, they can just give you a similar or better property, or the cash to buy one, and that's that.
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stuck nail houses 釘子戶 may apply in limited situations but there is no such thing as land ownership in China. When you purchase real estate in China you are buying the right to use the land for a period of time (I think it’s 80 years but don’t quote me on that number, I’m going off memory here) but the state owns the land. When the party wants to build something they are going to build it.
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There do exist stubborn nail houses but those are very rare occurrences in China where they do indeed fight to hold onto the land they consider their birthright property or believing to be much more valuable than their government tries to buy from them, the only few outbursts of dissent in a country that quashes dissent.
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i mean from what i read there is only one country with more ppl die in traffic which is india https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_L%C3%A4nder_nach_Verkehrstoten but good they have a few trains for 1 billion ppl. sure thats going to help. LOL.
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Congratulations, you figured out that China is a large country! It would be ridiculous to think that a country with 1.4 billion people would have less people dieing in traffic than a country with a smaller population.
If you just go by absolute numbers, a large country will have more of absolutely everything than a small country.
Now go back to your link and sort by "Je 100.000 Einwohner" and see how that changes the list.
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But you understand that "je Einwohner" means shit with that density of cars? cant have a car crash when you ride a donkey. per car would make much more sense but that's the least the regime would care about which is why say 50k ppl died. i guess from how much their culture sucks it is 500k per year. :-)
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https://www.pekingnology.com/p/china-massively-overbuilt-high-speed
Good luck dealing with that bomb.
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so? even if that's true, that doesn't mean high speed rail is bad. it means you should be more careful with the planning, not "don't try new shit for the next forever years"
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Realistically what the United States really needs isn't high speed rail but just passenger rail service. Standard speed mainline passenger service to more places and with more frequency than three times a week at 3am (which I wish was an exaggeration)
If I were totalitarian dictator of the US I'd first have the federal government sieze control of the entire rail network, including all dispatching and all of the private rail maintaince companies and lease trackage rights back to the railroads, keeping rail construction, dispatching and maintenance in house. Next I would create a true national passenger rail network, restoring service to every city possible that still has active right of way. Then, I would use my ownership of the rail network to force the class 1 railroads to construct and operate their trains in a manner condusive to actually moving freight and not blocking other trains (it's incredible how railroad company executives seem to hate railroads and do everything they can to avoid operating a functioning railroad) plus open up the rail network to new private freight and passenger companies, and finally I'd build new rail coordidors first following the existing interstate network and as those new rail coordidors bed in I'd start reducing lanes on the interstate and introducing tolls to further discourage the use of private vehicles. Maybe some would be converted into bikeways, maybe some would be re-greened. It would be a decision made on a case by case basis what to do with all of the space reclaimed by the highway network
We used to dream big and our governments used to undertake projects like this to improve our countries. And despite our governments being richer than ever they choose to stagnate and not take risks on big public projects like this
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I read half the article and i strongly disagree with a lot of its points.
First, it lists corruption as a reason to halt the HSR (high speed rail) program. Corruption is however not specific to rail and exists in every branch of the economy, including car and road construction. So that's not a reason to target HSR.
Secondly, it says that HSR is not "economical", which completely ignoring that HSR does not have to be economical, at least not in the classical sense. To a political party, the cost of a project is the popularity or unpopularity of the project; i.e. to the party, the actual cost is the cost of voters who dislike projects. However, the Chinese people are overwhelmingly looking at HSR as a positive thing and an excellent idea. So it has a very positive benefit for the state. Also, note that good transportation facility is valuable for all the other branches of economy, and therefore has positive economic by-products.
These considerations make me wonder whether actually the article is paid for by the oil lobby, trying to perpetuate outdated and expensive airlines and car transport methods.
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Given that we here in the US are still trying g to work out from under 150 year old rail infrastructure, I don’t think they need to worry about it for a while.
Rail generally lasts longer than roads even if you don’t maintain it. We’ve proven that
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A feature of rail is very high building costs. If they wasted money on building HSR on a lot of places where it's not needed, this means there's gonna be a debt that never gets paid by the utilization of the rail. Bad investment.
So it's not about maintenance, but the up-front cost.
Not doing an investment where an investment would make a lot of money is of course a kind of reverse of this, but which leads to a similar outcome.
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Oh trains! Now do pollution, or infrastructure, or empty cities...
A year ago I would have said Concentration Camps, but we both have those now.
You should try to find better criticism.
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It's true that China's co2 per capita has gone up sharply, however it's still about 30% lower than the yanks. China is also dwarfing other countries with the amounts of renewable energy currently under construction https://globalenergymonitor.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/solar_wind_in_construction_treemap_for_online-1.png
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actually China's CO2 hasn't gone up in the past 12 months: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-clean-energy-just-put-chinas-co2-emissions-into-reverse-for-first-time/
it's likely that china has reached its CO2 emission peak, and now they're beginning to fall.
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China has an ambitious urbanization plan, so they're building the cities before there are people actually living there to get ahead of demand. It's not like China has a shortage of people to live in these cities and they have central planning, they can just move production into these developments and people will move there for work. In fact, it's happening right now. They don't just build empty cities that just sit empty forever.
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America has had a concentration camp since 2001
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underoccupied_developments_in_China
empty cities
Not so empty anymore, and calling them empty was bullshit.
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Turns out when you decide to build a new city, of course it would be empty at first, then people will eventually move in. But we can't do that because we need to preserve the artificial scarcity of housing so they can be used as an investment.
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A year ago I would have said Concentration Camps, but we both have those now.
Jesus Christ. American liberals are champions at historical revisionism.
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Yes, but.
It's China. I guarantee you that loads of people got fucked over one way or the other for this improvement. The Chinese government usually doesn't care much for the rights and lives of the individuals
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You say that, but medical debt? Homelessness? Ice concentration camps for brown people? Highest incarceration rates, social credit (credit score), pedophile leaders...
Europeans, feel free to complain about China. Americans have no right to complain about China.
Not to be a tankie, but China taking over the US government would be an improvement
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I AM European.
Having said that, the US is a shit show and the Empire pretty much needs to be rebuilt from scrap at this point but it's still better than China.
If you disagree I would suggest you go to China and start posting lots of tiananmen square videos from the 90's and then tell me which place is better.
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Plenty of people got fucked over for America's interstate system. You just don't care about them because they're poor minorities
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One of the reasons it was built was to demolish black neighborhoods.
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Are you suggesting that's why the US hasn't improved trains? Is there something about train improvements specifically that you think is harmful?
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.....
Wut
You read that and were like "who cares about human lives and rights, why doesn't he want trains?"
Yeah, love trains, and as far as I'm concerned the US can replace all its highways with trains
But not at the expense of a couple of humans per kilometers because the government doesn't give a shit, or worse, you're an Uyghur
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And now wait for five years and see if the Chinese one is still there.
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It's been 16 years and counting.
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This one is from 2024 Let that sink in Home not alone, just unfinished
One swallow does not make it summer. Shall we continue this path to see which one runs out first of resources?
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Americans: "Nice infrastructure. Would be a shame if we had to come over there and liberate it."
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Plot twist, the bullet train only goes to an enormous city in which nobody lives or work.
Edit for reference, clearly y'all never heard of these:
https://interestingengineering.com/culture/chinas-ghost-cities-and-its-65-million-empty-homes
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Reality: Trains in China go pretty much everywhere and are often sold out days in advance.
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Trains everywhere connecting the entire country is a very worthwhile goal for a country, regardless of profit motive. If we can see the benefit of doing that with roads, why can’t we see the benefit of doing that with rail?
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171 comments