![[meme] Trains -- not driverless cars -- are the future of transportation](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f6468af5-8151-4b4c-b339-2fa0b0373c3a.webp){kind=link}
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Image transcript:
Calvin (from Calvin & Hobbes) sitting at a lemonade stand, smiling, with a sign that reads, “Trains and micromobility are inevitably the future of urban transportation, whether society wants it or not. CHANGE MY MIND.”
Nope.
Those super long electric busses will become more popular than trains. They are muuch cheaper to get. You can just send in a new one in case the first one breaks down, etc.
Though we also cant all live nrar these “train stops”?
I dont live near any right now.
Trains can transport higher loads of people though. So ultimately both trains and busses need to be the priority.
100% depends on where you’re going and how far journeys are.
For a small inner city area, a subway is great. For a larger urban area, a tram system. For intercity travel, trains. Out in a rural area, buses would be the way, although more remote locations would need government subsidies to be even remotely functional, and even then it may resemble on demand taxis rather than a scheduled bus service.
No single solution will get you all the way there.
Absolutely. Public transportation needs to be comprehensive.
Except for the car, which is why it’s such a popular choice. Also no need to worry about catching the next thing, or buying the right tickets, you just get in and go.
I haven’t heard of any solution or combination of solutions that would be convenient and work in most cities.
Yep there’s nothing else as good as having your own vehicle to freely travel wherever you want to on your own schedule and in relative privacy. The rest of y’all can enjoy your trains as much as you want, but there’s no train or bus that comes out to my house in the woods so I’m going to keep driving my car for the foreseeable future. After that it will probably be an electric SUV that I keep driving. I’ll charge my car from my solar power at home and be energy independent.
Doesn’t it bother you that even in cars you don’t have privacy?
Can car move you from bedrom to kitchen? Escooter can.
Subway is just giving space above ground for cars. Since there is no cars, you can just do trams.
Not that current roads to remote loctions are subsidised
What needs to happen first is fuel price needs to be so high that people are incentivized to
a) switch to public transit no matter how shitty it is because they just can’t afford a car anymore
b) start public transit companies because there is money to be made and the oil lobbies don’t have enough money anymore to lobby effectively
My guess is before 2050 nobody will really get anything done because the oil lobby is just too powerful. Would be great though.
Absolutely. The fossil fuel industry recieves billions upon billions of dollars in subsidies every year. Why in the actual fuck are we still paying for something that is actively killing us? It makes no sense. All of the subsidies to fossil fuels needs to be re-routed towards public transportation and green energy.
making consumables more expensive just makes them cheaper for the rich. poor people in areas with inadequate public transit will largely just keep driving and become poorer (maybe some of them will switch to the inadequate public transit, then they’ll be even poorer, and it likely won’t improve the transit systems either).
tax the rich in proportion to their wealth., spend it on better public interest transport infrastructure
Those markets can’t run on the rich alone. And yeah it will make rural poor people poorer. That’s actually also the goal. Urban sprawl should be stopped. Why do people need to build houses and villages out in bumfuck nowhere and then complain when amenities and authorties are shitty out there? These people should imo be forced to make a hard decision because if they can’t afford gas anymore they will move closer to a city since the move is more affordable than paying for gas. Hence prevention of sprawl and reducing of gas use. The only people that can stay are the ones that a) are rich and b) require it for their work (e.g. farmers) or c) ones that can work locally without driving around.
I totally agree that urban sprawl sucks, and should be stopped. a much more direct and fair way to do this would be to remove zoning restrictions that only allow building single family homes (instead of any higher-density housing) in most urban parts of north america, and remove minimum parking requirements for businesses – and hope that the cultural shift propagates to other places where these car-dependent designs have taken hold.
secondly, calling people needing transport a “market” seems like part of the same faulty thinking where public services need to turn a profit. taxing the rich could absolutely pay for a lot more public transport: before the Beeching cuts in the 1960s, the UK had around twice as many passenger railway lines – this was also at a time when the top rate of income tax there was 83%, as opposed to 45% now.
lastly, maybe think about who rich people exploited in order to get their (your?) money before proposing policies that explicitly aim to make poor people poorer, while letting the rich continue to live where they (you?) please
We can all live near a train stop. Roads were built everywhere. Train rails are actually not as expensive to build
But they don’t handle the 90° corners that are built into so much of the existing landscape.
You wanr to say cars can turn 90° on the spot? Unless you are an Ukrainian farmer, no - your car is not a tank.
No, I’m saying there’s a huge difference between a 15 foot turning radius and a 400 foot turning radius. Trying to put trains in the existing 50 foot x 50 foot road intersections is not going to work without moving a lot of buildings.
Sounds like a forklift. Double for cars, or triple for speeders and idiots.
20 meters at most. 71-931 has 20, and it’s HUGE. Or 65 units of imperialism.
You’d been trams,not trains. Trains are great at covering long distance quickly, but if they have to navigate tight turns and stop every few minutes then they’ll be pointless.
Not sure why people aren’t talking more about busses here, it would make way more sense to utilize busses for local travel.
The distinction between tram, train and subway is not relevant. There are full trains navigating Paris for example, but also tram and subways. They are all very good, and you can navigate the city without ever taking a bus.
Though heavy batteries are bad for energy efficiency and big capacity batteries are long to charge. Well, it can be solved by constantly charging them. This also allows to reduce required capacity, thus reducing weight. Constant charging most efficiently can be done by using wires. Oh, wait. I just reinvented trolley.
*European disagreeing noises*