781–790 of 910 posts
It was one of the most intelligent ( and rare) decision the government took. Off course, there are parties loosing money like car manufacturers and oil producers.
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The Paris metro is amongst the most frequented in the world and operates near peak capacity. You absolutely can’t compare it to anything in Germany. Germany doesn’t really have a city which can be compared to Paris. Berlin has the most populated urban area and it has less than half the population of the Paris one. The only similar city in Europe is London. Plus there is no bed bugs and pickpockets are an oddity outsi…
pickpockets an oddity? brother I took all the suburban trains you can think of, the paris subway on a regular basis ive seen people injecting their arms on the wagon, antisemitic attacks, stabbings, punching, people shit on the floor, drunks and pickpockets are a daily thing in paris in EVERY public transportation. some bus lines in non-touristic areas are even so infamous that everyday legions of comments tell stori…
Second, why are you blathering so much non sense. I have been taking the Paris metro daily for the past decade, commuting on the B, then the 6 first, then the 8 as I moved. I regularly go around including on some of the allegedly poor lines and cross Gare du Nord quite often. Stabbings never happen. An attack would be a newspaper worthy thing. People don’t take shit in the metro. What kind of non sense is that. And pickpockets are limited to the touristy parts because well there is not much to pickpocket in the other parts.
At first, I thought you were some kind of Russian chill spreading misinformation but then it finally hit me that you are probably using your car all the time and trying to justify your prejudice.
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No. This is something Texas is having to come to terms with right now. Cars and roads only scale so much before you physically can't move more people fast enough even with more roads and more lanes. Rail scales way better. So Texas is pushing a high speed rail line that will allow people to commute 30-90min into a city from locations that currently are 1.5-3 hours away. And at that allow those people to commute to ci…
> Cars and roads only scale so much before you physically can't move more people fast enough even with more roads and more lanes. The Induced Demand observed in car traffic, also known as Downs–Thomson paradox.
Note that I didn't specify you should get ahead of induced demand, only that you should. Trains are much cheaper in the long run for most cities but it requires a large investment to make them useful.
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you could also work from a car if someone else is driving it like a taxi, but imagine the price difference to travel such a long distance every day over rail versus metro + rail. Another point I haven't seen mentioned much is safety. Rail is vastly safer than cars and results in less strain on the medical system.
I like your taxi idea. I hate driving myself. We could bring down the cost of the taxi by putting more people in the car, to share the cost of the driver. That'll bring the costs down significantly. If the car is sufficiently large, we can get, say, 50 people in a car with a single driver. That should make the extra cost of the driver split between the 50 lassengers significantly cheaper. We could go further and link…
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Keep in mind there’s only about 50 miles of high-speed rail in the U.S. so far. With major cities like Dallas and Houston or San Francisco and LA still unconnected by fast rail, there's significant room to boost GDP and improve lives. Expanding rail isn't just about GDP growth, it's about enhancing daily living and connecting communities more effectively. As RFK famously noted, GDP measures everything ‘except that wh…
no one has ever been able to explain who will be the daily rider for SF/LA or Dallas/Houston rail I don't mean people trying it out once, or tourists...I mean people who will commit to riding it daily
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There are definitely places where rail is awesome, a great example is New York to DC. Better than driving or flying by a mile. But on a purely cost basis, rail is very expensive. It just more expensive for the government to build an operate rail than it is for them to build and operate roads. You’re right that part of it is because some of the cost is shouldered by the car owner. But, even in Europe, car ownership is…
> But on a purely cost basis, rail is very expensive I'm not sure that's true, and I don't see any obvious reasons why that would be the case. Do you have a source to back that up? Of course we need roads. But the question is how many and how big they need to be.
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I used to live in Toronto in 2019 to 2020 and used the transit exclusively. I return as a visitor of Toronto every quarter for work and there are many times where I Uber instead of TTC because of these comments. Even slightly busy at 4-5 PM there's always folks who have hit the gym and skipped showering and most days there's "something" happening on the TTC.
Motorists in Toronto have killed 34 people so far this year and seriously injured an additional 146 [0]. Meanwhile the TTC, with daily ridership in the million people range [0] has seen one homicide [2]. Which one is safer? [0] https://www.toronto.ca/services-payments/streets-parking-tra... [1] https://www.ttc.ca/transparency-and-accountability/Operating... [2] https://www.blogto.com/city/2024/06/outrage-person-murde…
How many of those are Uber specifically with passengers? Why this specific? Because Uber has a ranking system and my gut feels says anything with a ranking system that has tons of feedback weeds out bad drivers.
The other portions of my comments is psychological safety, how many times do individuals get in an Uber and feel unsafe vs being in the TTC?
How many times do individuals take an Uber service, are crammed and with a driver that smells? Even if I got a ride like that I know the market system will remove that driver.
If you told me the TTC required an identification card to enter onto and TTC could suspend/revoke access I'd go back because there would be a regulating system to remove behavior that riders don't want.
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Rail was famously first in the USA, and you can still see politics focused around rail as the main long distance transportation merely a century ago. But yes, there was a lot of car-centric buildup (and maybe even some new cities??) since then.
For places like NYC, Chicago, Boston, yeah. And we see rail in those locations. We do not see rail in towns and suburbs around those areas. In Atlanta, for example, MARTA exists, but NIMBY policies in Northern suburban counties keep it from expanding. This is especially bad considering more people live in those counties than in the city proper. Further, even if one could get sign-off, the cost to acquire the property…
Considering how the wasteful cars / trucks / planes are on their way out in a short time frame (decades), while buses / rail / barges are much less so,
I expect that transition to happen naturally as economic pressures make the position favoring the minority able to still afford cars / trucks / planes as less and less politically tenable.
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There are definitely places where rail is awesome, a great example is New York to DC. Better than driving or flying by a mile. But on a purely cost basis, rail is very expensive. It just more expensive for the government to build an operate rail than it is for them to build and operate roads. You’re right that part of it is because some of the cost is shouldered by the car owner. But, even in Europe, car ownership is…
> rail station taking you from anywhere you want to go to anywhere else you wanna go unless you’re in an urban hub. The specific people pushing this form of development also want you to live in ultra-high-density housing in an urban center - that's the whole idea and eventuality of this type of development. You WILL raise your family in an apartment, they WILL ride a bicycle everywhere they aren't using mass transit.…
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Even if you don't drive a car yourself you depend a lot on things delivered by road. Most of the road wear is done by trucks bringing you food, construction materials and whatever else. You can't exactly replenish your local grocery store by rail or cargo bike.
Most of the need for roads though is cars. It is rare to see a multi-lane road where trucks are restricted to only 1 lane and cars allowed the rest - if though trucks wouldn't fill that single lane and in turn the other lanes could be built much cheaper. (in part because the road needed for a car isn't that much cheaper than the road needed for a truck - labor is about the same, and weather is often a large factor)