lmao remember when liberals were certain this would happen because Biden takes the train to work?
I'll just take a slow train between Seattle and Portland over and over again to see who has better coffee I guess :loudly crying face:
Ubiquitous commuter light rail would be far far better. Not that this wouldn't be great, but it would be very expensive and underutilized. Acela from DC to NY is like $1000
How useful would a rail network like that be in the US? I live in the UK where even our admittedly shit one is a godsend, but the US is fucking massive. Would it make sense to have a coast-to-coast railway?
if anything it would be better, I'm not a trainologist but I imagine having a reliable and simple 8 hour trip to seattle from dc would be nice. I also feel like it would be cheaper per trip than a airplane. But again I'm not an expert on trainonomics.
"I'm not a trainologist..." - can't think of a sexier career.
dons train engineer cap
Jesus. Leave some pussy for the rest of us, Jebediah...
That's true - trains are cheaper. The benefit of them I guess is that flying has like 2-3hrs of faffing before and after the flight, but trains just sort of run.
On another note, if wanting to half travel time in the UK makes me a trainologist then I am ready for that mad puss
A good rail network would be a huge asset to almost everyone in the US, but it wouldn't look much like the networks you see on visionary maps like this. Mostly it'd be even more clustered around the east and west coasts, New York, California, and Chicago, with fewer coast to coast passenger lines, because the US's population is highly concentrated in those places. The center of the country would benefit more from a better freight rail network, so they can more efficiently/greenly export crops and import stuff from the ports.
Go sit on a high speed train in Japan for 4 hours an then tell me you'd want to do that for 24 hours to travel coast to coast. It would suck. I'd rather fly and have it over with same day. It'd also be expensive as shit. Rail in Japan is not cheap.
Air travel is unsustainable if we want to prevent climate change
14% of greenhouse gases come from transportation: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data
Something like half of that 14% is cargo ships. The majority of the remaining 7% is cars and trucks. Airline travel is such a tiny tiny piece of greenhouse gas emissions and even if it was dropped to 0 permanently tomorrow, it would make virtually no difference.
The trillions of dollars it would cost to set up high speed rail in the image in the OP would be much better spent stopping deforestation and building clean energy for household use.
The "there are bigger fish to fry" argument is always good to keep in mind when discussing climate change (especially when we're talking about consumer-level changes vs. more structural changes), but ultimately there's no one silver bullet here. We're going to have to change a lot of things, big and small, to address the issue.
The trillions of dollars it would cost to set up high speed rail in the image in the OP would be much better spent stopping deforestation and building clean energy for household use.
This assumes there is no "all of the above" option.
oh noooo we took all the funding from the military and put it all into infrastructure revitalization and green development oh nooooooo
And that's before we start talking about Modern Monetary Theory, AKA "where the fun begins."
Any good books on this stuff? I would love to read about how it's all a racket
Here's a Citations Needed episode that discusses MMT in depth. Here's a book by the professor from that episode, although I haven't read it yet so I can't speak more directly to it.
Also check out this request thread for /c/mmt -- it already has another suggested reading in it, and will hopefully fill up with more.
I mean even if there is an "all of the above" option in terms of funding there will always be a limited pool of workers to build things.
Absolutely. I'm just highlighting that "if we do X, we have to give up Y" is often false. The U.S. is an astronomically wealthy nation; we can do a lot of things if we have the political will.
no one silver bullet here
100 companies are responsible for 70% of all carbon emissions so uh
How is that a silver bullet? If you want to vastly reduce their activities that's an enormous undertaking that would fundamentally remake society, and you have to figure out how to do so without (further) fucking over developing countries. If you want to tax the hell out of them and use that money to fight climate change, again, that's an enormous undertaking, and now we're not talking about reducing emissions so much as we're talking about semi-speculative projects to offset or recapture those emissions.
The "100 companies are responsible for 70% of emissions" figure is a great way to direct the conversation at the major culprits, but that's just describing the problem more clearly -- it's not a solution, much less a silver bullet.
