You must log in or # to comment.
My vehicle is also air conditioned, but weighs 1000 tons and has 2000hp and hundreds of couches:
Seethe in jealousy, non-Europeans!
Seethe in jealousy, non-Brits!
deleted by creator
Still a subscription. Not quite to big oil, though.
Yeah, but at least it doesn’t carry the same environmental cost.
Nope, no subscription. Check in, check out, pay as you go. https://www.sbb.ch/en/travel-information/apps/sbb-mobile/easyride.html
Pay as you go is even closer to what the post says about the big oil subscription. 😂
No, it’s really not
[哈哈哈/하하하/ははは]
Linking the page for my favorite hair pulling topic on traffic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
By hyper subsidizing car road infrastructure we make it almost impossible to use anything else and competing infrastructure (trains, planes, seperated bus traffic) appears more expensive by contrast forcing more people to use cars.
Also the plot of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) if I recall correctly.
Fascinating! Seems I have to thank the artists of my past for my supplemental progressive education.
That’s a lot of lanes. I’ve never been anywhere more than like, 10 wide and that’s counting both ways, and that’s in the city.
Looks like Houston TX to me. Horrible experience there, they are allergic to public transportation and sidewalks.
I once had to visit a client in Dallas and noticed their office was right next to a hotel, so I booked myself in there expecting to be able to just cross the relatively small side road on foot. NOPE.
Even doing it in the car was close to a half mile round trip if I followed all the rules of the road.
I hear if they just added one more all problems would be solved.
What I learned in Texas is that almost everything is a toll road too. So you have to pay to use the roads each time.
Hey at least you also wind up doing your job mostly over the Internet with people that aren’t anywhere near your office when you get there.
There was a brief moment when one nation was so wealthy that everyone could afford that.
Just one more lane bro
Classic: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0dKrUE_O0VE
The Katy cost a mere $7 billion and it’s still often a glorified parking lot. It’s got less throughput than a single train for moving people, but I’m sure adding another lane will fix it. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/o-F-7Yc-A8U
Love this reply
I used to just think of this as yeah sure things are just bigger in America, it’s a huge place with lots of people… but then I realized that the cities with ridiculous numbers of lanes like this aren’t any bigger than cities in the rest of the world. Houston (pictured) isn’t even in the Top 200 biggest world cities.
There are 29 countries in America that aren’t like this. It’s really just the USA.
The built-up parts of Canada are about as bad.
I know. It was a passive-agressive way of telling them not to arrogantly abuse the name of the continent for their country.
I’ve looked it up and the Katy Freeway on the picture has an average of 219 000 vehiclra using it per day. Let’s be very generous and assume an average of 1.5 person in each car, so around 329 000 people are moved each day thanks to this highway.
A single metro line or two tramway line moves more people per day than that.
Its crazy. At its widest it has 26 lanes. It amazes me that they just kept widening it, instead of thinking “We’ve added 5 lanes, we should probably find an alternative solution”.
In the city where that exists, they really isn’t much else that’s viable. Decades of bad urban planning mean that comprehensive public transportation is not cost-effective in that area. And “not cost-effective” doesn’t just mean “expensive”, it means “would cost an order of magnitude more than the city budget”. So the only real solution for them in the short term is to build the world’s most ridiculous laughingstock of a road.
Key phrase being “short term” - nobody seems to build with a 20+ year plan to improve the city in America, whereas in European cities every time I visit one I haven’t been to in a decade, I usually notice I’m reaping the benefits of major infrastructure improvements which take decades to plan and build. Short term, selfish (what will get me elected again, or what will pay me the biggest bonus) thinking, and corruption, is what keeps American cities shitty
Yep, just look at Tokyo.
people argue that japan has an easier time doing public transport because it’s a slim island that’s roughly linear from north to south, so it’s easy to serve it by one public transport line.
But the same is true for the US, where most people live either on the east coast or on the west coast. You basically have two slim, linear areas that can be served by 1 line of public transport each.
It’s even worse in Canada where 50% of the population literally lives in a straight line in Ontario/Quebec
And we’ve been “studying” high speed rail in that corridor for roughly 40 years now. One of these days we’ll build it, I swear!
I think the big problem with Canada, the US, the UK, and other former British colonies is that the legal system gives private property owners a lot of rights.
In places like France or China the government can just say “we’re building this” without a lot of public input. But the second CA put out their high speed rail proposal it was met with hundreds of lawsuits over eminent domain.
Another problem is that the US has stupidly strong private property rights. Everyone whose land is going to need to be confiscated to build the railroad tracks will try to bilk the high-speed rail authority out of every dollar they can, and because the US has a very strong civil court system which strict procedural law, it only costs a landowner a few thousand dollars to cause millions of dollars worth of legal headaches for the rail authority
isn’t that also true for highways?
The difference is that most highways were built in the past before such things like environmental studies were required and before many of the attack vectors used by property owners and other obstructionist parties to block construction were discovered or created. The US no longer builds major roadways, and merely widens existing ones, which in many cases do not require more land to be requisitioned.
interesting. here’s a short reminder that railway tracks existed before highways (even before combustion engines in general). it’s sad that they were neglected so much. maybe they can be built directly adjacent to existing highways? at least along the coastlines …
This idea has been adopted to some degree. The Brightline West high-speed rail project (in construction since 2024, planned to open 2028) connecting Las Vegas with Los Angeles uses existing land along the existing I-15 expressway, which is extremely congested.
I believe it was during the presidency of Ronald Reagan that private rail operators were relieved of service requirements for passenger trains, as long as the companies maintained the tracks and gave priority to passenger trains operated by Amtrak, the American state rail operator.
The companies have completely neglected the tracks and many are in poor condition from heavy use by freight trains, and as a result, maximum speeds have been drastically lowered to maintain a level of safety. Many ordinary trains in the US run at around 80-90 km/h, which is miserably slow.
In addition, Amtrak trains are supposed to be able to overtake slower freight trains by using splits in the track (where a section of track splits into two temporarily, the slower train taking one side and the faster train taking the other to pass it). However, as freight rail operators have realised, the number of engineers and conductors needed to run the trains is directly proportional to the number of locomotives, and thus they prefer running fewer, longer, trains than many shorter ones. As a result, freight trains are unbelievably long, some are a good few kilometres in length, which is longer than the entire sections of split track, making such sections worthless as it is impossible to use them to bypass the slower trains.
Where Amtrak has complete control of the tracks, such as in the northeast, service is comparable to European rail providers. For example the Acela service, which runs between Washington (DC) and Boston with stops at Baltimore, New York City, and Philadelphia. There are 20 trains per day and it reaches a top speed of around 250 km/h. The total journey takes 6.75 hours and travels 735 km (12 stops) meaning the average speed is a comfortable 109 km/h.
It’s sprawl. Building up costs too much via some combination of building taxes, NIMBYs, and construction overhead, so people build out instead. Building out means more and more miles of infrastructure (Roads, water, electric, natural gas, signs, gas stations, etc., etc.) per capita.
Then when the people in the sprawled-out suburbs want to visit the city centers anyway, because that’s where jobs and shopping inevitably are (People live where people live), they have to build massive roads to get in and out.
I have never been on a road like the one in the picture.
I’d have a nervous breakdown.
“Can I sit in the recliner at work?”
“No. You have to leave it outside so that poor people can’t have apartments there.”
Unless you’re poor, then it’s also your apartment
But don’t let us catch you using it as one, that’s illegal.
How did this happen?
Convenience and Capitalism, what a wild duet!
It’s ALWAYS capitalism, people STILL don’t get this (I can’t blame them they got propagandized into believing capitalism is the holy economy or some stupid shit)
“Just a little more neoliberalism, bro, I swear we’ll usher in an era of prosperity if we just do it harder”
And it’s not even convenient…unless you purposefully destroy existing infrastructure and aggressively promote individualism in your society such that nobody has any other real choice! Walking distance? Never heard of her.
Yeah whats actually convenient is being able to step out your home, jump into the tram, read the newspaper for 15 minutes, jump out and have teleported to work.
And also I can walk 5min to grocery store or 10min to a haircut, I can have a drink and don’t need to spend Uber money to get home, all travel time is the same because there’s no such thing as rush hour on a metro or with a bicycle(actually with the metro it’s faster because it comes more frequently at those times), etc… It’s all winning, basically.
Well now it’s fascism
Fascism is capitalism in decline.
Trains are much more convenient.
This one is fully on capitalism.
Trains are convenient until you want to go somewhere without rails :( which I guess could be solved with more rails…
Cars are convenient until you want to go some place without free parking directly in front of the entrance. (Or so I gather from the whining and complaining that drivers so often do.)
I mean, the answer is in the line right above the question.
It’s the bike lanes! 😡 /s
STAY IN THE BIKE LANE !!
Capitalism. That’s how that happened. They shaped the world in such a way as to sell more stuff. In this case cars.
Car-dependent development was the workaround that government officials devised to keep housing segregation in effect after the Supreme Court ruled it illegal. If one needed a car to get around those new subdivisons, poor people couldn’t live there. If Black people were largely poor, and if government programs like the GI Bill were denied to Black people, well, that wasn’t a segregation law, so it wasn’t illegal, right?
Subsidizing the white middle class with government money so that they could afford to buy cars happened to work well for the capitalists, too.
(By the way, this isn’t a conspiracy theory. The people doing it weren’t shy, and left explicit, written records of their racist intent.)
This isn’t entirely the case, but the reality is actually no different. Long story short, a major reason that most of the US interstate freeways exist and have been built the way they have been is because they will stand up to moving heavy machines, like tanks. There’s long strips of straight Highway that can be used as runways.
The highway system was built so that in the event of a civil war, domestic uprising, or invasion, the military could more or less operate very adequately anywhere with a decent stretch of highway available, and some way to get there.
Until then, automobiles rarely had to travel very far each day, and couldn’t really run any faster than a few dozen miles an hour, partly because of the challenges of the terrain.
Automotive companies then took advantage of the newly built infrastructure and sold faster vehicles that could drive farther…
So blame who you want, but it was a joint effort between the civilian government, military industrial complex, and capitalistic automotive manufacturers, that drove (pun intended) us to where we are now.
I have my doubts that military considerations were anything but a ruse to help sell the nation on the cost. That claim feels a lot like an utban legend, with embellishments like the design accommodating aircraft landings. The contemporary source material from the people supporting it cited the economic benefits mostly. As well, the military voiced support for the system, but the Secretary of Defense was Charles Erwin Wilson. He had been CEO of General Motors before taking office. At his confirmation hearing, he could see no conflict of interest. It was there that he uttered that famous quote, “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.”
The capitalist automotive companies had captured the military industrial complex, so I think maybe there’s a slight possibilty that the latter’s support for something that benefitted the former so immensely may not have been wholly genuine.
Doubt all you want, it’s a free country afterall.
Some (just some) of the information I’ve seen on this indicates that the freeways built in North America are massively over built for the use case. The amount of underlying structure and support for the roads is not necessary and just serves to add costs with no tangible benefit to automotive travel to those that drive on it.
The only good reason to be so over built is so that the roadway can be used for something that isn’t civilian traffic… Like the road being used as a landing strip, or to support tanks and other heavy equipment rolling overtop without entirely annihilating the road.
But hey, you do your own research. Come to your own conclusions. I’m not telling you anything as fact here, just relaying what I’ve heard, and what, in my opinion, is true. But that’s just like… My opinion man.
That’s the thing. I’ve looked into it, not super extensively honestly, but never found any project specification that included clauses or numbers about military use. Further, the infrastructure isn’t overbuilt for the purpose, which is road transport of cargo. Trucks threaten to overburden the Interstate highways, which is why we have weight limits, and weigh stations to enforce them. Also, all.of the military vehicles I’ve seen on the highway are still just vehicles, modified from civilian models; even the tanks are not so.massive that they can’t transport them on a typical flatbed trailer. The last thing that makes me doubt the military-use justification is that it’s a double-edged sword: Our military can use them.to rapidly deploy forces, but invaders could also use them just as effectively, and to rapidly advance into the heart of our cities.
Eisenhower is called the father of the Interstate Highway, and he saw the need for economic reasons. The cost of construction was the primary fight, and “Defense” got added to the title of the bill authorizing it so they could justify spending some defense funds, but that looks awfully perfunctory, being added later.
Fair enough. I’m happy to have contending viewpoints on the matter and civil discussion about it. You’ve given me a lot to think about and more research to do, and I appreciate that.
I don’t know that I’ll remember to come back and comment here when I’ve done all that, so in the event I forget, I hope you have an excellent day/week/month/year/life.
Thanks for the note. I just wanted to stop back and say that I appreciate it. It’s not my intent to win an argument, and I was thinking about leaving Reddit before the API fiasco because it seemed like it has a culture of combat-by-verbiage. My username is an old, nautical version of shooting the breeze, or chewing the fat, talking just for the pleasure of talking. That’s what I was going for here, and mission accomplished.
You’re missing the “privatized railways” and “trains need more grading” components.
Businesses need to ship cargo. However the private railroads road block attempts at public freight rail (which is massively more efficient) so the demand from businesses is to run truck traffic over highways which is where like 99.9% of road wear comes from.
Private railways also have no incentive to expand service (it costs a lot to properly grade for freight and they have regional monopolies. )
There’s more to it. While the military bought in on it, the industries were the major pushers. Many towns had tram cars or cable cars (if you’ve ever been to San Fran, you’ve probably ridden these) but were bought and dismantled up by a then illegal collusion between like GM, Firestone, and oil companies a bit over 75 years ago and the legal cases lasted another 25 years.
There is a famous antitrust case on this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
Unfortunately this has resulted in such a profound malinvestment in public resources that it has turned a majority of the US into giant open paved areas: dangerous to kids, prohibitive of other small traffic, causes drainage problems, sun/wind exposure, urban sprawl, housing issues, huge parking lots, etc.
They?
Everybody wants pleasure and security.
The kaijus are just the really successful ones.
America has LUNGS and ARTERIES whereas
Europe has mere wimpy BRONCHIOLES and CAPILLARIESThose arteries are pretty congested, cars are ld cholesterol, trains are hd cholesterol, and we are eating a diet of trans fat up in here.
America, fuck yeah
Nothing a triple bypass and a meat king supreme can’t fix
Modern American society, mind you
Even though the USA is clearly the worst, still almost all countries have about twice as many people driving as taking other forms of transit, and in many more, the majority. So the image applies to the majority of people in most countries.
Very anecdotal so feel free to disregard, but I’ve traveled across the whole Europe and haven’t seen anything like that in the picture.
Maybe the closest thing was a toll gateway somewhere in France where road widened up to about 20 booths. But then it immediately narrowed back to three.
Even the Netherlands. poster child of biking 😔
I mean, 40% of the population biking to work is nothing to sneeze at, compared to the US’s 6-or-so %
It’s huge, but it’s still fewer bicyclists than car users. But, at 40% it means that bicyclists have a stake in every decision being made, and people will listen to them. Car drivers will probably still win more than their fair share of contests, but at least they’re not unopposed.
I wish the statistic include motorcycle/moped, then show the statistic from Asian country like Taiwan or Philippines or Malaysia, car and motorcycle have equal share on the road yet it still a fucking mess here(at least in Malaysia).
Most Asian countries are now on motorcycles of all sizes and even larger e-bikes.
And for most of the countries that don’t have a lot of cars, it’s not because they’ve decided to invest in public transit and bike lanes, it’s that people are poor and can’t yet afford cars. Like, India and Brazil aren’t places where people love public transit, they’re poor.
What happened to China is likely going to happen to them as they get richer. Even if the world switches over to electric vehicles that’s still vast resources plowed into massively inefficient sofas on wheels.
If you add up the India bars, you’re quite far away from 100 % still… Mass NEET is the answer I guess.
Or mass feet.
almost all countries have about twice as many people driving
No country except the US, according to your own graphic. 67% or more of “Own car” is the criterion.
Unless, of course, by “driving” you also mean motorbikes, boats etc. and there’s a sizable portion of these in some countries. The graphic doesn’t show that.
American society is 99% in on it, but many other places are trying to go there too.
We’re mostly going the other way in Western Europe
Not particularly quickly in most places, mind, but we’re heading in the right direction on that at least
Modern US American society, mind you.
