this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023
614 points (98.4% liked)
Technology
59123 readers
2290 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
"Efficient" covers a lot of things. There are often reasons to avoid what is technically the most efficient solution by some measure. For trains, their high up front cost has to be made up by low marginal cost, which typically means having a high number of passengers for each stop.
And before you say it, no, I'm not demanding they be profitable, just that they be cost effective.
Trains and good public transport are one of the most productive things economically and the best tools for rising economically for individuals, it might have a higher up front cost (which I don't think it has, I highly doubt a mile of tracks costs more than a mile of road, especially long term), but it's absolutely worth it long term.
pretty sure a lot of US towns spawned from being railroad stops or railroad adjacent, if they can make that happen, they can also revitalize the local economy, meanwhile cars are woefully inefficient and serve more as a gatekeeping device, if you need a car to function you have basically put an entry fee on society.
It does. Highway costs around $10M/mile, and rail (without tunnels) close to $120M/mile. We also don't need to build many new highways, while our aging rail infrastructure needs a lot of work just to get what we have up to snuff before we even talk about new rail.
Mostly, this comes down to things that go away with experience. Get rail projects going en mass and the problem will go away. That said, hooking up every town along the route is only going to make the initial build out worse.
mile? see that's your problem.
rail doesn't cost that much in Europe.
Yes, I'm aware. That doesn't actually address the problem.
well the good news is that while you accounted for costs going down once projects are built, you also failed to consider the difference in capacity between railroad tracks and roads and also the maintenance costs that are gonna be much higher for roads.
so even if it's more expensive upfront which it really isn't, it's so much better long term
Of course it's more expensive up front. That's trivially true when we have highways and not high speed rail.