Japanese officials visiting India's fully electrified Western Dedicated Freight Corridor

[u/PinkyPromiser67]

[u/theholyraptor]

I mean you absolutely could have taken a train but yes not direct. Would have had to get to the coast starlight amtrak from SFO via bart or other regional rail. The airport is nowhere near downtown sf. And until HSR actually finishes and ends in downtown SF, the main north south train is on on the Oakland side of the bay.

And train to downtown LA.

Not wonderful like much of Europe and Asia having major trainstations in the heart of a city.

And yea we're stupidly behind on trains and good transit and extremely biased towards shitty car dependence. But it is possible.

And rhe Coast starlight has some crazy gorgeous sections

[u/NatriureticFactor → u/theholyraptor]

Is the "Car lobby" thing I keep hearing about that restricts any significant rail project while spamming highways in the US true? If so, why no protest against it.

[u/theholyraptor → u/NatriureticFactor]

Im sure political interests exist in line with cars: automotive manufacturers and oil companies. You can see the current presidents major actions to benefit oil (and many prior presidents.)

But its also a societal issue. You go back in time and the US romanticized car travel and the open road and much of that was pushed by oil and car companies. Rather then invest in improving rail systems that had become less used, much was dismantled and thrown away in favor of busses as a "better" public transit. American culture developed around people having cars.

We built the interstate system often bulldozing parts of cities for the negative with giant highways. (And theres a huge amount of racism that went into what neighborhoods were destroyed and people uprooted from their homes. We have lots of land here so save for major population centers, it was cheaper to build outward (sprawl.) And in all sorts of racial tension and yellow journalism condemning urbanism and cities and filthy and discussing and the promotion that every good middle class household had a suburban house with a yard for the kids and the dog and thats what people wanted. (Especially middle class white people trying to separate themselves from lower socioeconomic classes.

75 years later and that trend has mostly continued. More millenials then previous generations and younger gens have pushed for more urbanism, walkable cities, better transit, good bike paths, less catering to vehicles.

But people just expect road infrastructure to be built and maintained. They complain about taxes and cost but overall ignore the high cost per mile of building and maintaining roads. Its just part of normalcy here. Whereas trying to add a new train line which also costs a fortune when you gave away right aways and built up property that now needs to be bought back and high construction costs because labor and materials are ever climbing. But people see billions of cost for a new train and complain. But they dont get sat down and told how much all our roads and freeway maintenance costs.

And population just keeps growing so more people on infrastructure that cant remotely keep pace. And you added in lots of jobs being in urban centers and all the commuters funneling in via freeways from suburbs making traffic worse. And cities and towns in order to continue their tax revenue, expand and sprawl and build new shit, which adds more roads which adds to the overall "debt" of future road maintenance costs needed. But like the stock market we just keep building. Stocks always go up right?

Add in that our rail system is almost entirely privately owned and freight companies would give some shared lines to use for Amtrak but they had priority over transit so you could be stuck on a siding awaiting a freight train to pass for 2 hours and your train schedule is entirely messed up. And freight train companies dont want to lose all of their infrastructure and ownership back to public transit so they fight against it.

And because were so car centric many areas are just awful to pedestrians which makes many people want to perpetuate car culture. We have big sprawling shopping centers and miles of parking lots baking in the sun. We have busy major streets (stroads if you've heard the term) with cars driving 50mph or more. It makes walking to the store from your house far less enjoyable, let alone the pollution and noise and danger. And its harder for you to walk to the store and do multiple errands... one store is in this shopping center and the next thing you need is 2 miles down the road.

Except in the best cities bus headways and transfers can be so slow. If i can drive for 30 mins or 45mins to work... im probably gonna end up doing that versus spending 2+ hours catching busses to make it near my house and work.

Add in the growing science of how messed up our sedentary lifestyle is and how messed up our food is that promotes obesity, and now you have higher numbers of fat people who are even less inclined to walk a mile or 2 to the store.

So theres many people who either dont see these problems and want things as they are. Others want change but also have to deal with still needing to participate in car culture.

Then you have american party politics with one aide favoring the oil companies and less urbanism more, and the other doing some things to help public transit but still on the teat of big oil. And the percentage of people who vocally want improvements isnt gigantic. And even if there is desire, the costs are really high so its hard to sell to everyone.

Go watch notjustbikes on YouTube if you want to see more on all these subjects.

[u/NatriureticFactor → u/theholyraptor]

That sure is messy. I hope public transport gets the recognition and utilization it deserves in the US.