this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2025
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That's great. If you are in the US it isn't going to happen at a meaningful scale. Best we can do is larger scale self driving mini busses for public transport and single user self driving vehicles for expediancies. Use existing infrastructure but work to eliminate human driving (save that for track driving for pleasure) and enforce heavy pedestrian priorities so foot traffic and bicycling becomes easier and safer.
I've heard this said a lot, and I'm not necessarily doubting its true, but what's the reason behind the richest country in the world not being able to build good public transport? Large countries like China yave good public transport, and the continent of Europe has great trains- is it just the USA's size combined with its lack of public infrastructure in general?
All the wealth is concentrated in the hands of selfish pricks who don't give a shit. Why advocate for high speed rail when you have a private jet?
Also making people waste time in traffic is probably good for the ownership class. You're not organizing if you're stuck in your car.
Low taxes so nothing goes to infrastructure
unless the trains could use the existing land building the rail would be extremely costly due in part to the slowness of emminent domain and the us actually having functional property rights that make it hard to take land from people (those that can afford lawyers). coupled with the large number of citys with populations under 100,000 buses are generally going to work better here.
It's the fact that our cities were built around cars. Kinda bad timing really.
Many european cities were too, after they got leveled in ww2. Changing that is possible, but it requires actually starting.
Your defeatism mindset is a large part of why it's not happening right now. Stop posting this shit so that progress can actually be made.
I'd rather direct progress in a meaningful direction. My attitude isn't breaking trains coming to the US. Autonomous vehicles are way behind where they should be for meaningful progress and fear and misunderstanding is the only real obstacle there.
It might happen. Manhattan just introduced congestion charges and it apparently made a big difference.
And places that we now think of as bike and public transit focused cities in Europe were very car-centric in the 70s. I don't know why or how they changed, but they did.