Rail is best for practically any type of land.
this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
113 points (96.7% liked)
Fuck Cars
9626 readers
748 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Yet North America has thrown away all of its rail expertise. 🤬
What? The US has the best freight rail system in the world
Subways and light rail make a ton of sense in all metro areas. They can efficiently transport tons of people from one pleasant, walkable area to another, so you don't have to spend half your life in soul-crushing bumper-to-bumper traffic.
The article seems to be behind a pay wall, but it looks like it's specifically talking about connecting regions with high speed rail.
Long distance passenger rail is better with higher population densities, with cities that are roughly in a line, and large population centers that are relatively close together.
Rail is underutilized in the UK and US, sure. But I don't think rail is ever going to be the best option for getting people from Chinook, Montana (population 1,185) to Maple Creek, Saskatchewan (population 2,176).
Rail is also never going to be a fast way to get from Lisbon to Moscow, or from New York City to San Diego. Which is not to say that high speed rail isn't an incredible way to connect Toronto to New York City.
I just had to drive almost three hours to the closest airport and am in a hotel for a 0630 flight. I would say rail is best in ultra rural areas, too, because all the people live in the same towns along the rail. But no! No rail for me grumpy noises
It would help with this sentiment if the current Rail network was cheaper to use.
The issue is that a lot of the network runs at capacity, so we need to be building new tracks...