201–210 of 609 posts
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NIMBY seems to have a hard time stopping data centers. Why do they have more success stopping renewables and rail?
NIMBY is stopping data centers. Maine set to become first state with data center ban: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/09/maine-data-center-ban.html Also, it's a different kind of more insidious and visceral NIMBY rooted in racism and classism.
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I’m probably a top 5% train nerd for the U.S. I took trains to work primarily from 2012-2020, in NYC, Philly, Baltimore, and DC. I used to ride Amtrak from Baltimore to DC every morning. I love Tokyo’s train system. I go there every year and I always take the train. But when I went there with my wife and three kids, I took a lot of Ubers! You can’t fit our double stroller with big America bags of toys and snacks on a…
> We’d have to give our kids independence to take the train themselves, instead of spending every saturday driving them around to 3 different far flung activities. The shock! The horror! > The idea of just accepting whatever brand of hamburger buns they have at the store... How could a family possibly survive! Imagine having to eat a different brand of hamburger buns ! Truly, America is a shining beacon of modernity…
> "I think that though we are a railway company, we consider ourselves a city-shaping company. In Europe for instance, railway companies simply connect cities through their terminals. That is a pretty normal way of operating in this industry, whereas what we do is completely different: we create cities and then, as a utility facility, we add the stations and the railways to connect them one with another." I think thi…
I sometimes see the US referred to as a "post-rail" society, meaning that it has outgrown the need for rail for the more intimate, personal transportation methods we see today. I submit that, like other HN commenters say, the US doesn't need rail due to this society. How will US citizens help their friends move or do their large (in terms of volume) Costco grocery shopping without large trucks and only using rail?
If anything, right now America is tilted heavily to car-only.
In the early 20th century, US rail companies were beholding a very favorable situation: high demand to run loads of heavy freight all over the country, high demand to ferry passengers all over the country, and basically no serious competitors to either revenue source.
Now freight revenue was never going to be transformative to the industry, but it had the benefits of being reliable, un-fussy, and fairly easy to build a financial business around. Passengers, on the other hand, offered huge revenue potential, but had the downsides of being very fussy about things like safety and comfort and timeliness, along with wanting stations in convenient places and an ever-expanding rail network.
Students of US business management history should be unsurprised, then, that while evaluating the market that offered reliable revenue, versus the market that wanted large capital investments, the railroads overwhelmingly chose the freight market. In other words, US the railroad companies spoke and said we do not want passengers loudly and clearly.
The thinking was: passengers can do take the wagons and busses and cars and these newfangled airplane thingies, but freight is a guaranteed market for us! So the passengers slowly migrated to other form of transportation. But the kicker was, freight also wanted things like timeliness and access to an expanding transport network and, shockingly for the railroad execs, were willing to pay for it.
Add about 80 years, declining rail traffic, and tons of corporate mergers, and we have the sad state of US railways today: many residents have never seen a railway expansion or shiny new rail equipment, much less a real functioning passenger train. It's easy and comfortable to say that zoning or regulations or market forces allowed US rail to languish, but that would be ignoring the part where the industry did not want the customers in the first place.
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I bet you'd see natural market driven concentration around rail stations in Texas too, if they had a useful rail network.
You might be surprised, look at Dallas. They have a pretty extensive rail network.
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I sometimes see the US referred to as a "post-rail" society, meaning that it has outgrown the need for rail for the more intimate, personal transportation methods we see today. I submit that, like other HN commenters say, the US doesn't need rail due to this society. How will US citizens help their friends move or do their large (in terms of volume) Costco grocery shopping without large trucks and only using rail?
Rail for the US has always been more about moving goods than people. For overland long-haul freight it is significantly cheaper than trucking. Rail allows us to ship goods to places where we don’t have ports or river access. A place like Japan can make such good use of rail simply because it is so densely populated.
The Midwest, as an example, has roughly the same size and population as France with a larger economy. In fact, if you overlay the French TGV network onto the Midwest with Chicago where Paris is, you get a pretty good approximation of where major Midwestern cities are located: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/s/NMr3J3gt8C
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> So it's just a matter of some space and noise barriers. And guess what's often hotly contested. Noise barriers tend to draw complaints because they ruin the sightline, are either ugly from the start or end up being "decorated" not by good art but quick throw tags. And landlords are often too much penny-pinchers to install decent windows unless you legally require them to, which is often impossible for already const…
This is my major problem as a renter in the US. The minimum code really is too minimum. The city ordinances also enforce high limits on walls in ways that preserve a baby boomer childhood era view of suburbs. It'd suck less if it felt like E.G. noise and environmental pollution ordinances were ever enforced. (Break up those parties and stop people from doing trash burns / crappy fires during burn bans which are prett…
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They still have influence in Japan. The maglev train has been delayed for years because a small portion passes through Shizuoka, and the local government wouldn't approve construction due to it making no stops in the prefecture and potentially affecting water supplies there. This delayed the opening of it from 2027 to 2035 at the earliest. Shizuoka as a whole is unusually screwed by the Shinkansen system. Large citie…
It's a bit ridiculous to imply Tokuyama gets better shinkansen service than Hamamatsu, because it has Nozomi service. Looking at the schedule towards Tokyo for Monday, April 27th: Tokuyama has: 4 16 car Nozomi trains to Tokyo 19 8 car Kodoma/Sakura trains to Shin-Osaka 9 8 car Kodoma/Sakura to Okayama Hamamatsu has: 31 16 car Kodoma to Tokyo 19 16 car Hikari to Tokyo Keep in mind the fastest Kodoma seems to only take…
The total number of trains with a direct connection from Hamamatsu to Fukuoka is, at least based on all the info I can find, zero.
Or even a much closer city that people in Hamamatsu would frequently go to: Hiroshima. Also zero direct connections without a transfer.
People in Tokuyama can go direct to Fukuoka and Tokyo. They can do a transfer at Osaka in the case of non-direct trains. They're very much better set up than Hamamatsu.
> Japan is one of the only countries to have privatized parking. In Europe and North America, vast quantities of parking space is socialized: municipalities own the streets and allow people to park on them at low or zero cost. Initially with the intention of encouraging the provision of more parking spaces, Japan made it illegal to park on public roads or pavements without special permission. Before someone buys a ca…
> Before someone buys a car, they must prove that they have a reserved night-time space on private land, either owned or leased. > This is got to be a huge factor. If the USA implemented that exact rule, it would change almost nothing. People already need nighttime parking for non-legal reasons.
Such a change would have a significant impact.