/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.10434856]

>Travel at speeds of 300 mph
>Doesn't get stuck in fucking traffic for 3 hours
>Little pollution, environment friendly
>Don't have to buy a metal box that costs 25,000 plus maintanence
>Doesn't require putting concrete slabs all over the country and constantly repairing them, which costs a ton of money

Why don't we just say "screw Eisenhower" and instead replace the road system with the train system over time? Why do we allow this to happen when it is economically, environmentally, and logically better?

[Anonymous No.10434863]

>>10434856
SCREW EISENHOWER!

[Anonymous No.10434865]

the US is too spread out for trains, it's different in a country like japan or a continent like europe which is more densely populated and has less distances between large metro areas, you could maybe justify rebuilding the eastern corridor (ny, boston, whatever)

[Anonymous No.10434866]

America is big as fuck, I agree that we need effective transit systems for urban areas but much of America still lives in rural or suburban places and commutes to work.

[Anonymous No.10434867]

>>10434856
SCREW EISENHOWER!

[Anonymous No.10434893]

>>10434865
>>10434866
Europe still has roads but they still rely on public transportation. Although the rural people should have roads (maybe to get to the train stations and other places), the majority of them should be rid of. It's crazy how much space roads and parking lots take up in cities.

Also, China's a pretty big place and they have been trying to expand their public infrastructure (although it's mostly on the coast connecting places like Beijing to Shanghai).

[Anonymous No.10434927]

>>10434856
Rail is the single most expensive mode of transportation in terms of passengers carried per day per mile. Look at high speed rail in California if you want an example of how big of a joke it is. Even in Europe where rail is heavily subsidized it's still faster AND cheaper just to fly.

Pic related is (You), the typical rail memer.

[Anonymous No.10435373]

>>10434856
Public Transport
>drive 10 minutes to train station
>pay $4.50 for one way ticket, $8.00 for two way ticket
>wait 20 minutes for train
>get on train, smelly niggers and beaners and landwhales sit next to you
>train takes 15 minutes to travel 20 miles
>exit train
>take taxi, $5.00 minimum payment, another 10 minute trip
>finally at work, total commute time: 1 hour for 30 miles traveled, cost: $9.50

Driving
>get in car, start driving
>arrive at work 30 minutes later
>$0.35 per mile, total cost $10.50

Gee, why do people prefer driving to public transport?

[Anonymous No.10435382]

>>10434856
Where the fuck do you live that it takes 3 hours to drive somewhere? Why don't you live closer to your job?

[Anonymous No.10435388]

>>10434856
Because trains don't make billionaires a profit

[Anonymous No.10435390]

>>10435373
10 years from now.

Enter electric smart car, tell it to drive you to work. Check mail and latest news while getting driven to work. Arrive 20 minuets after leaving (car continuously updated on traffic and always picks fastest route). Total cost of trip in electric car, about 50 cents.

[Anonymous No.10435396]

>>10434856
But OP, then I won't get that bourgeois feeling of extravagence that comes from the private jet flight or the apartment in the sky first class seats!

[Anonymous No.10435418]

>>10435373
In any slightly bigger city public transport is almost always the faster and cheaper option (since you usually can buy annual tickets). It's true that it can suck sitting next to disgusting people, though.

[Anonymous No.10435453]

>>10434856
>Little pollution, environment friendly
I commute by train. It is a bad environment inside: people sneeze with open mouth and you get that clammy feeling in your neck. And you know that in 2 days you will have a NEW cold.

I have never been so ill so many times as when I started commuting by train.

[Anonymous No.10435851]

>>10435453
wow, what country? not Japan, hopefully not US

[Anonymous No.10435894]

>>10434856

Because at the time cars were seen as clearly superior in all ways. It took twenty years for people to see otherwise and for another Repbulican, Richard Nixon, to create Amtrak. It could have been much worse all told.

Also people accepted it because neither planners, businesses or individual citizens wanted to be beholden to RR monopolies and prices.

[Anonymous No.10435901]

>>10434927

Only because of the low volume. At high volume it becomes the cheapest due to the high throughput and traffic density, which cars can't do. Also CAHSR is so expensive, in part, because they're completely rebuilding their system instead of using the existing track. It's no different than building a brand new freeway in this regard.

>Pic related is (You), the typical rail memer.

Most hipsters either own Teslas or Uber everywhere and think mass transit is for retards. If you had ever encountered a hipster IRL you'd know this.

[Anonymous No.10435973]

>>10434865
East vs West

[Anonymous No.10436017]

>>10434865
Debunked argument. China now has the largest high speed network, and its not just the densely populated metros, but also the most sparsely populated country sides. All in last 10 years.

China went from two high speed rail networks to the world's largest high speed rail network in under 10 years. That's how long it took for california to PLAN their highspeed railway. K E K. US is horribly inefficient and slow in comparison to a country with a solid will to grow.

[Anonymous No.10436023]

>>10436017
china is a big country like the us
how the hell did the get away with it

[Anonymous No.10436025]

>>10436017
Every US news media outlet virtually advertised European and Japanese high speed rail (because they are our satellite states). But when China outpaced both, no one even knows about it. How strange.

[Anonymous No.10436026]

>>10436023
Government prioritizes infrastructure investment. This is where all the "real estate bubble" idea comes from. People don't see how large, how fast, and how ambitious the Chinese government is. Then they compare the Chinese debt to the US debt, not realizing that the debts are mainly investments for future that will pay dividends to China in not just economy but also military and socially.

This decade's project is China's trillion dollar Belt/Road network. They will complete dominate the global economy in the coming decades.

>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvXROXiIpvQ

[Anonymous No.10436032]

>>10436026
>This decade's project
I should correct myself here. This isn't the only major project for China this decade. They want to catch up and win the AI race. As well as having ambitions on space access, military, and domestic technology development. They want to lead the world in their direction.

[Anonymous No.10436034]

>>10436026
>They will completely dominate the global economy in the coming decades
Someone may as well because the West isn't doing it anymore. I welcome their domination. At least the globe as a whole will be progressing, as opposed to.. not.

[Anonymous No.10436038]

>>10434865
> it's different in a country like japan
Yeah. Trains are popular if you can rub your pee pee all over a woman's dress

[Anonymous No.10436054]

>>10436025
Japan knows about it, painfully so. They were forced to transfer their bullet train(high speed rail) technology when they wanted to build one in China. Its similar to how all the foreign companies were forced to transfer technology to Chinese for market share in China. The Chinese took that technology and ran it through economy of scale and came up with something better than even what the Japanese had come up with(afaik thats what the Chinese railway minister claims). I have doubt about their claim but it could be true given their, now, experience with building this high speed rail network.

[Anonymous No.10436056]

>>10434865
>the US is too spread out for trains
The US was the premiere country for trains BECAUSE of its spreadoutedness. The greatest rail-based fortunes were minted right in this very country. Municipalities in the US sprouted along rail lines. If it could be done back then, why can't it be done now? China is proving today that it absolutely CAN be done now. There is some unspoken reason why the people who build don't want to build in this here country. That's the underlying reason.

[Anonymous No.10436073]

>>10436054
that is startling

if true (hopefully not)

[Anonymous No.10436086]

>>10434927
But you neglect Japan because there rail is superbly successful, even over the large (relative) distances the cost rivals going by air, so it comes down to time and convenience. You can walk up and catch a train from Tokyo to Fukuoka within half an hour, you can't do the same with planes.

[Anonymous No.10436174]

>>10435373
This is basically why.
Americans are actually incredibly racist, and the idea of having to share space with people they don't like is anathema to them.
They would literally be fine with genocide if they weren't worried (and for good reason) that someone would kill them back.
See: Slavery, Japanese internment camps (and while technically not americans) the irish potato famine.

[Anonymous No.10436182]

>>10434856
You must be European or Asian. Try making subsidixed commuter rail make a profit in the American Midwest, great basin, central Canadian provinces, or rural Australia, and get back to me. When you have massive urban populations moving through a few heavily populated areas, rail sort of works if the people cant afford cars and the government is too poor to build a lot of roads.

[Anonymous No.10436187]

>>10436174
European detected. Ride the New York subway with trains full of niggers for a year and get back to me with your "Whites are racist" shit.

[Anonymous No.10436192]

>>10436086
>Large distances
>Japan

Come visit the states, my sweet summer child.

[Anonymous No.10436209]

>>10436187
You're literally proving my point.
Unless you're being assaulted or rights are being deprived, you're just being asshurt that people different from you exist in your general proximity.

[Anonymous No.10436224]

>>10434856
Take building a rail along, say, California. How do you build a high speed rail that's safe from earthquakes? If it's going at 300mph like you say, people are going to die when an earthquake hits, and its gonna be PR suicide, the equivalent of a plane crash except it'll kill twice as many people. The Japanese have just decided to live with this risk, and when the next earthquake comes, they'll be fucked. There are all sorts of hazards like this that must be accounted for all over the country.

Let's just consider the minute slipping of the tectonic plates, which would be a problem pretty much anywhere except the midwest. How much give do you need to build into your rail to make it safe? Every inch of give in a tunnel or underground system is gonna cost that much more, and soon enough you've either got a system that will need complete overhaul in a matter of years, or project that'll never see the light of day due to budget issues. Great, now you've potentially wasted millions of dollars on something that won't get finished. And, whoops, while you were waiting, you've lost some of that give you spent so much money to get.

Do you know where US electricity comes from? It would be a better move environmentally to work on getting more stable methods of green power generation than to just put everything on electric, and then use extra coal when variable sources of power like wind and solar can't keep up. You could make the argument for hydro, but that involves fighting the EPA to build dams, which would take years, (assuming you win).

Lastly, thinking that an electric rail that would span potentially over 3000 miles of track (and that's if you want one rail going longitudinally, let alone any extra stations north or south of it) that needs to be precise enough that objects travelling at 300mph don't fly off at the slightest imperfection is somehow less costly to maintain than a slab of concrete with some paint on it is goddamn retarded.

[Anonymous No.10436636]

Simply put, rails are expensive to build and maintain

[Anonymous No.10436655]

>>10436023
Gee maybe because they don't outsource their contracts to senators husbands who leech that shit for billions of fucking dollar to do literally nothing. Japan had to blast through endless fucking mountains making their network incredibly expensive and yet it is still fucking fantastic and turns a profit.

The reason it doesn't work in the west is quite literally corruption.

[Anonymous No.10436657]

>>10436224
Holy kek this strawman of a post.

[Anonymous No.10436689]

>>10435901
That's just it: trains are inherently low volume because they all have to run on the same extremely expensive tracks, and they have to be really spaced out in order to avoid crashing into each other. They can't use existing tracks either because they are designed for low speed trains, and the G forces during turns would cause the trains to derail.

[Anonymous No.10436697]

>>10436689
>Most densely populated country in the world moves the vast majority of people via trains in a cheap, efficient and incredibly timely manner

Trains are vastly superior in terms of people moved to both aeroplanes and cars.