this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2026
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Real answer? Because train lines cut through a lot of land and every landowner along the route can hold up progress with legal objections. Flock cameras are just attached to poles and data centres are compact.
There's a saying : "Where there's a will, there's a way"
Big tech are using every trick in their book to circumvent regulations and to continue building data centers despite local community disapproval over noise, pollution and a myriad of other problems...
Of course, since data centers are (according to the DOJ), "a matter of national, economic, and energy security", doesn't matter even if they are ran by illegal gas turbines.
And they're not so small
Also, this consideration for others property.... man it would have been nice to have had it when the US was building highways through black communities...
The US building highways through black communities is a big part of why we have committees that can hold up rail development. And do you really want a government that uses "every trick in the book" to build railroads? No! You want a government that follows its own rules both in letter and in spirit, and one that reigns in the excesses of the market economy when necessary, and one that simply writes better laws.
I can go walk around and take pictures of the shit train lines. Shit cars and scars across communities
They're not small, but they're one plot of land, not a line spending potentially hundreds of miles and tens of thousands of individual real estate parcels that each require purchasing or litigation to acquire. Which needs to be done before most of the actual work can even begin.
Yeah, but if you look at the most egregious example of this, California high speed rail, at this point they've cleared most of the legal hurdles and have the land.
They still don't have an end date in sight though because of lack of investment. They get a slow trickle from California carbon tax but not much else. They'll occasionally get a grant from the federal government only to have it rescinded when Trump gets in office.
The slow trickle from the carbon tax is enough to complete the flat part in maybe 6 years, but the part where they'll have to bore long tunnels through mountains to get to LA or San Francisco is impossible without a large investment.
Meanwhile there's no shortage of investment going to data centers.
That shit is a lie. Love to see it, but they should have done that before you and I were born, no matter your age or mine
On the Flock cameras, pretty much agreed.
Data centers are a bit more interesting. Sure the land itself is "find a willing landowner or handful in a sea of any land that would be equally ok", but then you have supporting infrastructure. Perhaps not as large of a route to secure, and more flexibility to make pretty sharp turns and such, but still lots of room for people to get in the way of a critical dependency. So surely the datacenters are having issues getting power to their facilities in the face of so many people around their property not wanting to give up their land right? No solution for that.
Oh yeah, if they won't sell their property to facilitate it, the government will just take it over: https://www.washingtonpost.com/ripple/2026/07/16/when-can-a-power-company-take-your-land-for-a-data-center/
So yes, in both datacenter and train, people can make it very hard to get things done. Somehow they find a way for the datacenters...
You as missing the scale problem, here. A data center, hell 1000 massive data centers still aren't going to take up the land that rail does. Its why you lay down rail first, then build around it, rather than destroying things to put rail in after. So yes, if you are going to magically put all this high speed rail in places people don't live directly on with trains that don't go places people want to be, then it's a great comparison.
There should be some stuff where high speed rail is, but it only should connect hubs and cities, most who give up land will not feel a direct benefit, since for most there should be buses and trains getting them to a high speed rail stop. There is a 36k town with a HSR stop ~60-90min with public transport. To the HSR stop actually 15 more minutes because it was built outside and has shuttle buses, but they also built more and supermarket, fasfood etc around it over the years so it becomes a more and more interesting destination. There was no meaningful way to add it to the existing train stations. Meaning you can definitely connect such stuff in a useful way. But there are also political issues and this line probably got more stops already then it should. HSR is just really best with few spaced out stops, but districts and states don't really like it when infrastructure is built through their territory, but they don’t get any stops
China was capable of doing it. Oh, but they have central planning and blah blah blah. Yeah, let's do that then. Let's lay some track. If "freedom" means no functional transit but se still get the surveillance state. And "China bad no freedom" means you get a surveillance state but also get functional transit I'll take Chinas system please. If I'm gonna have cameras watching me wherever I go; I'd at least like to be able to actually go somewhere.
That’s definitely a contributing factor. I remember the train line near my city… it took longer to buy up all the land than to actually build it. It might seem the same all building a road, but there are significantly more constraints, and a road benefits everyone around it, while trains only benefit Oriole at the train station.
Roads make life worse for everyone around them. I wish there were more barriers to building roads! You should have to get consent of everyone living within 200m to pollute the air they breathe. And I don't mean the landlord, I mean the tenants.
Let me be more precise: Roads provide transportation for anyone next to them
No they don't. I don't have a car. You think I'm gonna walk down the new freeway they build next to My home? Maybe I'll rollerblade down it.
Traditional roads provide transportation to everyone, but those don't need a big government project to build. All you need is a pair of shoes, and you'll wear a road into the dirt over time.
Roads built for cars? They isolate us. They put a deadly barrier between you and your neighbours. Keep your kids inside and give them a phone, it's dangerous out on the street! Pay attention when you're outside and don't wear headphones or look at your phone. And if you have impaired vision or movement? Then fuck you, get run over. Even if you're healthy, you have to wait at a traffic light just to cross the street in some places. Roads slow down movement for people.
Exactly. Here's a visual representation of what we sacrifice to roads. And that's only the standard 1 lane either direction road. Imagine the chasm if it were depicting a multi-lane highway.
Not to mention what they do to wildlife that more and more these days get isolated by these roads. Why aren't they forced to build bridges for wildlife when building a road? Simply not a priority.
How do you think your food and other needs gets to you, what do buses operate on? How does your mail get delivered.
You use roads.
Buses are shit. They're a way to shoehorn transit into a network built for cars, and they can never be faster than the cars because they're in the same traffic. (BRT is a special thing to solve this problem.) It would be a net gain if buses went away along with the cars.
My mail gets delivered by a guy walking.
Roads and streets built for food delivery vehicles would need to be far smaller, and less extensive. And all of the land for parking lots and interchanges and turn lanes and drive-thrus and gas stations...
This "you use roads" argument falls flat when the car industry and drivers arrogated all of the space and forced it upon us.
Ahh yes, the classic 'I live in a city, so obviously everything can be dense and done by human power alone'. Except for the massive amount of people who don't. I have incredibly few areas in the US or even Europe where no cars or no roads are needed. Can you reduce your reliance on them with a lot of changes? Sure. Can you eliminate them? No.
You slayed that strawman but good.
How many packages do you think the guy can carry at once? Every block as a box that the guy walks to and collects to deliver before moving onto the next. Do you think that they’ve walked all the way from the postal office to your house with your mail…? You can’t seriously think that do you?
How do you think those get supplied? Your coffee shop? How did they get the utilities in to provide everything to the block?
You just don’t understand distribution and concept of scale. The argument only falls flat if you ignore major points along the way, like how the mail gets to your guy that walks. Or how those shops get supplies for the food delivery trucks.
And instead of that, why not multi use high rises? The bottom floor has a coffee shop, grocery store, and other amenities, how would you supply those without a road…?
You gotta look past your own nose and see the entire picture dude.
You don't have a car. Do you receive packages? If you called for medical help, how would it get to you? Most folks if they don't have a car at least want option for a bus, which requires roads. We can't build rail to reach every household (you said freeway next to your home, so that doesn't sound like it's a very downtown situation).
Perhaps there shouldn't be as many cars on it as you deal with, but the roads themselves..
You can buy, rent, or lease a car. it only takes a few dollars to use a rideshare then you can utilize the road
They provide more than transportation. Take a coffee shop, for example. How are they going to get their coffee without road access?
The road provides transportation for the coffee delivery truck, yes, but it also provides coffee for everyone who visits the coffee shop. Without a road, there is no coffee to drink, and therefore no coffee shop.
Plenty of European and Middle Eastern cities already have pedestrianised streets that still allow vehicles in for deliveries with a 10 - 20mph speed limit. They're often not "through roads" (e.g. bollards at one end) and can be cobbled to prevent people using them as normal roads.
It returns the streets to the people whilst still allowing deliveries in.
Same way that humans used to do it for millennia before the invention of automobiles.
Roads pre-date automobiles by thousands of years. The original claim wasn’t about automobiles, it was about roads.
The original comment was clearly about roads full of motor vehicles.
No, it was a picture of a bottomless chasm where a road would normally be, no motor vehicles at all.
So they simply didn't exist. That's how that worked.
As I pointed out to another person, coffee was a worldwide commodity by the 18th century, and a flourishing coffee culture. Coffee shops most certainly did exist!
Except the affordability was the issue, as previously pointed out.
Highly-incorrectly, though. Actual historians cite the cheap coffee as bringing the rich and poor together in coffeehouses daily, and helping drive social reforms of the era.
Or they already own the lines and their cars are sitting there surrounded by weeds waiting for vandalism. The train lines consume vast acres of city landscapes, for Cockburn what
In addition, passenger trains are only really useful if they both start and end in built-up urban areas. A train between a ranch in Nebraska and a potato field in Idaho is not going to be serving many passengers.
That means that some of the key land needed for trains is going to be some of the most valuable land there is.
That's one reason why authoritarian regimes like China have a much easier time building train routes.
Getting datacentres built would take a lot longer if it was necessary to build them in big city downtown areas like you need for a main train station.