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‘The Trains Are Slower Because They Slowed the Trains Down’

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Re: ‘The Trains Are Slower Because They Slowed the Trains Down’

#231

Post by solotronics »

drb91 wrote: post #98
solotronics wrote: post #96

I think the topic of a declining/slowly collapsing society needs serious research. How do you definitively measure if a society is progressing or regressing? If you measure by infrastructure the US probably hit its peak in the 60s and has been declining since then. https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/

"Progress" seems subjective and political. I posit no definitive measure of progress exists.

its pretty objective if you measure it in terms of infrastructure.

- rate of new miles of roads - rate of increase/decrease in potholes per 10 miles - number of bridges that need fixing - number of people on government assistance - percentage of population in jail - peoples test scores on standardized international tests

its not like things are unmeasureable... just that politics awards those who ignore these things

Re: ‘The Trains Are Slower Because They Slowed the Trains Down’

#232

Post by bobthepanda »

emodendroket wrote: post #210
bobthepanda wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running the ski train in Europe makes sense because it's leveraging high speed rail that was built and is mostly used for other things; very little new stuff was needed. Chicago-Denver, as a city pair, is so sparsely populated and so far apart that new HSR doesn't pencil out, nor does building it out incrementally (it's hard to justify KC to Denver or Omaha to Denver)

We built a rail system that spanned the country once and the highway system doesn't just maintain itself.

That rail system still exists. Asking for a national high-speed rail system is like giving everyone a Rolls Royce.

Re: ‘The Trains Are Slower Because They Slowed the Trains Down’

#233

Post by bsder »

smcl wrote: post #203
bsder wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And this isn't even getting into the longer term prospects of the very real danger of the efficiency and scale of China starting to eat into the core economies of other nations as they move away from simple manufacturing and beginning moving up the value chain, as we are now seeing. I wasn't really that worried about China as they are automating extremely quickly and have shown no better ability to utilize the disp…

I think I'm missing something - TSMC should move their fabs off the island because of some goings-on in the mainland? The countries are obviously connected in various ways, but they're definitely not yet united so I'm struggling to see what the reasoning here is

> The countries are obviously connected in various ways, but they're definitely not yet united so I'm struggling to see what the reasoning here is

China doesn't see it this way. And the only thing keeping China from steamrolling both Taiwan and Hong Kong are the fact that it would decimate the economies and businesses there.

However, once you have a leader more worried about his power rather than being beholden to the working class, that is no longer an obstacle.

Re: ‘The Trains Are Slower Because They Slowed the Trains Down’

#234

Post by emodendroket »

bobthepanda wrote: post #232
emodendroket wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We built a rail system that spanned the country once and the highway system doesn't just maintain itself.

That rail system still exists. Asking for a national high-speed rail system is like giving everyone a Rolls Royce.

Imagine if the response to the invention of rail were "well we just built all those canals."

Re: ‘The Trains Are Slower Because They Slowed the Trains Down’

#235

Post by drb91 »

solotronics wrote: post #231
drb91 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Progress" seems subjective and political. I posit no definitive measure of progress exists.

its pretty objective if you measure it in terms of infrastructure. - rate of new miles of roads - rate of increase/decrease in potholes per 10 miles - number of bridges that need fixing - number of people on government assistance - percentage of population in jail - peoples test scores on standardized international tests its not like things are unmeasureable... just that politics awards those who ignore these things

Not objective at all. There are a lot of values and politics embedded in the things you chose and the implicit direction that is healthy for infrastructure. And it should be, because “objective” metrics are inevitable gamed and their value is gone.

Re: ‘The Trains Are Slower Because They Slowed the Trains Down’

#236

Post by efuquen »

romwell wrote: post #125
jseliger wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Denmark is also considerably different than the U.S. along many dimensions: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-02-23/you-can-t... and not just this one.

So it's not the unions then. It's how they function in NYC.

Yes, exactly my point. Blaming 'unions' for this is simplistic to the extreme. As oyhers have already mentioned many places around the world with strong unions still maintain far better, more advanced metros at far lower costs.

Re: ‘The Trains Are Slower Because They Slowed the Trains Down’

#237

Post by bobthepanda »

emodendroket wrote: post #234
bobthepanda wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That rail system still exists. Asking for a national high-speed rail system is like giving everyone a Rolls Royce.

Imagine if the response to the invention of rail were "well we just built all those canals."

The original rail network was on par with airplanes in terms of relative improvement of speed of travel. The highway network did the same for travel to areas unlikely to ever get a rail connection. (There aren't that many sparsely populated countries with a rail connection to every town; even fairly dense countries don't manage this.)

In today's world, HSR fills a very specific market niche; planes are much faster for long distances due to higher speed and small requirements for land acquisition, and cars are just as competitive for short distances due to the last-mile problem. So I don't think it's reasonable to connect every possible city pair in the US with HSR, but rather it's much better to just build strong regional networks of HSR that work on their own. There's no reason to build a continent-spanning HSR network.

Re: ‘The Trains Are Slower Because They Slowed the Trains Down’

#238

Post by kelnos »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #194
kelnos wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be surprised if the unions representing the train drivers in France were just all "ok, cool, automate away and fire the drivers when you're done". Did they require that drivers be employed in other positions, or receive some sort of training for different jobs? Unions in the US are annoyingly different: most (at least those that I'm even passingly familiar with) seem to have one major goal: keeping the status quo…

> I'd be surprised if the unions representing the train drivers in France were just all "ok, cool, automate away and fire the drivers when you're done". Did they require that drivers be employed in other positions, or receive some sort of training for different jobs? Often that topic does not even come up because companies are not firing people to begin with like they do in the US. They just transition into a new rol…

Interesting. Is there that much slack in employment to cover that? I mean, if you automate a transit line, presumably you're displacing dozens of now-former train operators. It would surprise me if they always have productive, useful jobs to move people to in these situations.

Re: ‘The Trains Are Slower Because They Slowed the Trains Down’

#239

Post by voidlogic »

bobthepanda wrote: post #232
emodendroket wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We built a rail system that spanned the country once and the highway system doesn't just maintain itself.

That rail system still exists. Asking for a national high-speed rail system is like giving everyone a Rolls Royce.

We un-deregaulte rail and force them to offer the passenger service they used to do an excellent job at delivering.

Re: ‘The Trains Are Slower Because They Slowed the Trains Down’

#240

Post by mistermann »

bsder wrote: post #187
mistermann wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends. You may not enjoy certain micro-optimizations, but to me it seems perfectly possible that even though living in a communist dictatorship has many negatives, the net benefits under a benevolent dictator could easily surpass the drawbacks, especially when compared to a free but largely corrupt Western society where the benefits may not make it outside the top 10%. And this isn't even getting into the longer…

> And this isn't even getting into the longer term prospects of the very real danger of the efficiency and scale of China starting to eat into the core economies of other nations as they move away from simple manufacturing and beginning moving up the value chain, as we are now seeing. I wasn't really that worried about China as they are automating extremely quickly and have shown no better ability to utilize the disp…

How do you know what individuals will do?
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