It’s not remotely easier. Trains carriages are easy to build, but the infrastructure is not. You have to move and extend roads, demolish buildings, lay the rails, build bridges, if you go underground there will be lots of digging and engineering work to protect nearby buildings, and don’t forget about maintenance. It is only profitable when the population is high enough and people have the need to travel to set places en mass. Otherwise it is just fantasy. If you live your whole live around any city Center, I can understand that you are not going to drive . But plenty of people lived in a tiny town of population under 10000people .
Oh well if all our transport needs to be profitable maybe we should stop paying for public highways out of income tax funds, and stop subsidizing car and oil companies, and stop funding refinery and pipeline projects, and stop zoning with parking minimums, and all the other features of our nationalized car infrastructure.
Well for one roads are relatively cheap tarmac is almost fully reusable and is already mostly oil industry waste.
Rail lines are much more restrictive than roads in where and how you can build them. they can’t turn as sharply or have that high of an incline.
Also a good portion of most llarge city populations don’t live in the city but commute. Not all of them commute to the same few areas so of course on city exits there will be a bottle neck but it thins out relatively quickly as people fuck off in multiple directions. I guess you could reduce congestion by not allowing most car in the city and having large car parks in key point outside the city. But I’m not a civil engineer or whatever deals with traffic.
Let’s consider how many people living in Berlin vs population density in rural area. It is not building it itself that is challenging but the efficiency of building such a massive network to serve a few people. It is no different than building a helipad to them. Rail maintenance is a costly work. Rails have to be replaced, tuned every now and then or trains will derail. Underlays needs to be replaced. Why bother building a multi hundred million dollar project to serve the few people in rural areas? Do you think trains does not cost energy?
Are the train going to take 1-2 passenger in rural areas every station? How do people even get to the stations? Are they going to drive? Will they question the point of driving to train station and wait half an hour for the train instead of driving to where they want? Once they get off the station, how are they going to get to their final destination? Not everything is near a train station.
There are different kinds of people living in different parts of the country so just to say no cars for everyone is exactly the same as saying people should all drive and ban all public transport. We need a mixture of both for everyone to get to work efficiently. In all the bigger cities, public transport is a crucial component. Not so much in less densely populated areas.
I think people who say this truly don’t understand how vast and how challenging it truly would be to service all rural areas. I live and work in a mountainous area. My “town” has a population of 300 people at 7 thousand feet elevation in a very dense forest. I’m 30 minutes drive to the nearest store with several thousand feet of elevation change. Putting a rail line here would be absolutely ridiculous and we’d have to cut ancient trees down and get creative in the civil engineering to even make it possible. There are often earthquakes and landslides, just to make it more challenging. This would all be just to service a small number of people. This is just one tiny example of how it isn’t practical in all cases. I’m all for increased public transportation and highly support it. I’d ride the train when practical if there were one. But I’d still need my vehicle to get to job sites and haul what I need to regularly haul. I’m convinced many people here have genuinely never been out of the city and simply can’t comprehend it. It isn’t so black and white.
You’re right, but it depends on the infrastructure already set up. In areas with high rail density ( like here in Europe ), if you can use the existing rail infrastructure, electric trains would be amazing.
![[meme] Trains are 100000x easier to electrify and automate than cars, so why does everyone keep talking about electric and driverless cars?](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/11c37658-7c32-4cc2-b12c-6ced348bd09d.png){kind=link}
It’s not remotely easier. Trains carriages are easy to build, but the infrastructure is not. You have to move and extend roads, demolish buildings, lay the rails, build bridges, if you go underground there will be lots of digging and engineering work to protect nearby buildings, and don’t forget about maintenance. It is only profitable when the population is high enough and people have the need to travel to set places en mass. Otherwise it is just fantasy. If you live your whole live around any city Center, I can understand that you are not going to drive . But plenty of people lived in a tiny town of population under 10000people .
Oh well if all our transport needs to be profitable maybe we should stop paying for public highways out of income tax funds, and stop subsidizing car and oil companies, and stop funding refinery and pipeline projects, and stop zoning with parking minimums, and all the other features of our nationalized car infrastructure.
Please explain to me: how is it possible to build a new highway through Berlin but so damn hard to build a railway through rural area?
Well for one roads are relatively cheap tarmac is almost fully reusable and is already mostly oil industry waste.
Rail lines are much more restrictive than roads in where and how you can build them. they can’t turn as sharply or have that high of an incline.
Also a good portion of most llarge city populations don’t live in the city but commute. Not all of them commute to the same few areas so of course on city exits there will be a bottle neck but it thins out relatively quickly as people fuck off in multiple directions. I guess you could reduce congestion by not allowing most car in the city and having large car parks in key point outside the city. But I’m not a civil engineer or whatever deals with traffic.
Let’s consider how many people living in Berlin vs population density in rural area. It is not building it itself that is challenging but the efficiency of building such a massive network to serve a few people. It is no different than building a helipad to them. Rail maintenance is a costly work. Rails have to be replaced, tuned every now and then or trains will derail. Underlays needs to be replaced. Why bother building a multi hundred million dollar project to serve the few people in rural areas? Do you think trains does not cost energy?
Are the train going to take 1-2 passenger in rural areas every station? How do people even get to the stations? Are they going to drive? Will they question the point of driving to train station and wait half an hour for the train instead of driving to where they want? Once they get off the station, how are they going to get to their final destination? Not everything is near a train station.
There are different kinds of people living in different parts of the country so just to say no cars for everyone is exactly the same as saying people should all drive and ban all public transport. We need a mixture of both for everyone to get to work efficiently. In all the bigger cities, public transport is a crucial component. Not so much in less densely populated areas.
I think people who say this truly don’t understand how vast and how challenging it truly would be to service all rural areas. I live and work in a mountainous area. My “town” has a population of 300 people at 7 thousand feet elevation in a very dense forest. I’m 30 minutes drive to the nearest store with several thousand feet of elevation change. Putting a rail line here would be absolutely ridiculous and we’d have to cut ancient trees down and get creative in the civil engineering to even make it possible. There are often earthquakes and landslides, just to make it more challenging. This would all be just to service a small number of people. This is just one tiny example of how it isn’t practical in all cases. I’m all for increased public transportation and highly support it. I’d ride the train when practical if there were one. But I’d still need my vehicle to get to job sites and haul what I need to regularly haul. I’m convinced many people here have genuinely never been out of the city and simply can’t comprehend it. It isn’t so black and white.
I think OP just did
As I don’t have much time, let’s meet at your level: no, he didn’t.
You’re right, but it depends on the infrastructure already set up. In areas with high rail density ( like here in Europe ), if you can use the existing rail infrastructure, electric trains would be amazing.