Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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Re: commuting:
The average commute in the US is about 32 km, a distance decently doable by regional train.
However, if we include daily errands, the median distance of any trip is about 6 or 7 km, a distance perfectly manageably by bicycle.
Back to the national scale, it takes a lot of suspension of critical thought to insist that the USA is too big for a nationwide railway network, while never blinking an eye at the fact that a nationwide highway network does exist, despite highways being more expensive to maintain, more energy-intensive to use, slower, harder to electrify & more dependent on specific energy resources, offering much worse capacity in both number of people and tonnes of freight, and uniquely getting worse in experience if/when upgraded to address induced demand.
It doesn't require suspension of critical thought when you can look around the world and see that nowhere does anyone have high speed rail spanning distances and population densities equivalent to what the US would need to go from, say, New York to LA, it East to West Coast in general. There are plenty of examples similar locally to East or West Coast population centers, but nothing in between. High speed commercial routes? Maybe. High speed commuter rail? It's not even close to being worth the cost: utilization.