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Well I think Nerthos was right, Americans don't care about the rest of the world because they largely don't have to.
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@p_ I don't know a lot about China.
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@orekix if you never leave the country, it doesn't matter.
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@waifu I think I know what you're talking about. Even domestically we have politicians here say things like "high speed rail just doesn't work" and I want to claw through the screen and scream at them "it already works in several countries!"
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@moonman @waifu high speed rail won't work in america because americans are the problem. having a high top speed doesn't mean shit when your management is so bad that you can't even get normal trains to arrive on time. have you ever seen a train traffic jam? go to the san francisco train terminal to see one any day of the week.
i'd like to see american workers clean out and reset train car in 120 seconds.
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@moonman @waifu HSR is a system that requires a level of coodination that american passenger rail cannot achieve, and well behaved passengers who are willing to pay the premium for speed. the last time i was on caltrain we had a 15 minute delay because of a door obstruction. if this was japan, the stationmaster would commit seppuku for us by the 5 minute delay mark.
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@moonman @waifu and if this was china they'd just execute the person responsible for blocking the door in a mobile kill van
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@orekix @moonman they were just as bad a century ago, people just tolerated it because there was no alternative.
HSR is a magnitude more expensive per track mile/time than passenger, so places that are already not financially viable with passenger rail wont be financially viable with HSR. people who advocate HSR in america are ignoring why they work in japan, china and france. these countries are replacing already profitable and well maintained lines with HSR, not trying to make completely unviable and subsudy dependent lines into viable ones.
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@orekix @moonman there's only three places in the US where HSR is plausible. SF-LA, texas tri-city area, and boston-ny-dc. SF-LA caltrain is the most mismanaged rail in the US and can't get it's shit together enough to offer a normal passenger rail and manages to bleed money despite decades of investment. texas could work but their road network is a lot better too so there's less incentives, and boston-ny-dc amtrak doesn't have the funds to expand because amtrak is legally obligated to run a shitton of useless routes because it's a public/private partnership.
what the US really needs is to get as much freight as they can off the road by automating the trucking industry and building a parallel network of self-driving only lanes on the highway system... and cheaper planes.
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@orekix @moonman
profitability is sustainability. pissing away state resources on unsustainable projects that cost more to maintain than what people benefit is corruption. it doesn't matter if you're a market or command economy. bloat is still bloat.
it's like someone shut off the part of your brain that wonders where the resources and money are going to come from to sustain lines that can't pay for themselves and fail cost/benefit analysis or where the incentive is to make an efficient system rather than one that uses as much funding as possible.
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@orekix @moonman why are you gommies so allergic to cost/benefit analysis? it's always about intangible and unquantifiable goals first rather than demonstrable self sustainability. idea guys who suffer no consequences for their stupid decisions is why the US state mandates literally riderless once a day rail lines into the deep country. the regulations regarding forming a passenger rail company are insane in the US because these retard idea guys cooperate with public/privates to fuck competition that hasn't negotiated for federal funding to grift.
i dont think you understand the situation of passenger rail in the US. it's not in the same category as healthcare or education. it's a dead industry being propped up by the state because of corruption and stupid laws written before the first jetliners.
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@orekix @moonman
>laws written when rail was the only option for long distance travel that mandate that rail companies need to operate unviable lines to nowhere
>rail companies give up on passenger rail when they can't afford to operate them because there are NO PASSENGERS
>the only company that can survive is amtrak, which is part state owned and is completely dependent on subsidies to exist
>nobody even cares about rail anymore because inter-city travel is becoming more centralized around airports
>billions of federal dollars are wasted on keeping these routes open because the spending must expand to fit the budget
"Just make passenger rail state owned!!!" is a non-answer
Why do you have so much faith in the US state to operate anything competently? I don't get it. It's like you think state ownership is a magic cureall that works for every situation. The US public/private rail ownership scheme is actually the closest to the Japanese one yet the results are completely different because one state is more competent than the other.
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@orekix @moonman there is no FDR. there is no semi-fascist (in the original sense of the term) central planning obsessed policy wonk. there are no incentives to improve the efficiency of the state because there is no war or enemy to be fought. i don't know what things are like in your country but it baffles me when leftists argue for increased government control but simultaneously hate the government for being stinky, corrupt and incompetent at the highest levels. your prescriptions only make sense if i assume every useless public official in the country is executed and replaced with a giant brain commissar with unlimited authority like yourself... which is just a revolution which is beyond the scope of the topic of why the US can't build passenger rails.
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@moonman @orekix it's beyond the scope because you can answer literally any question with "we'll sort it out after the revolution." which is pointless to argue.
with regards to long distance PT, a lot of problems will get sorted out as plane and car tech improves. what kind of idiot would take a rail to another state when they can call a self driving bus to pick them up and drive them 110 miles per hour down a highway of other perfectly spaced self driving vehicles. it's not like this option is even exclusive to laissez faire crapitalism.
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@orekix @moonman
the fuck does any of that have to do with the US being bad at passenger rail.
can you offer a single solution that doesn't involve revolution into socialist utopia for any problem? i'm getting bored of this conversation because you never seem to bring up a proposal that doesn't involve a socialist revolution. we could be talking about the cheese square on my burger king whopper being misaligned every time and you'll bring up nationalization.
also that barcelona pic you linked earlier is retarded. barcelona is small because they literally can't build anywhere else. atlanta is just endless flat ground in all directions. population density is caused by geography and demand, not planning.
www.floodmap.net.png
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@orekix @moonman sorry for the aggressive tone of the last one.
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@orekix @moonman
>technology that actually in development
>america changing government types
one of these things is more likely than the other. this is not a gotcha.
i'm done with this thread.
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