If you’ll allow me to nerd out a little. I love trains as much as the next guy. I also love arriving at the next station alive. Every single time. And i also want my grandchild to arrive at the station Alive. Every single time.
But by the time we start to actually lay down the tracks, a whole lot of work has already been done. Ground has to be sampled along the way. The ground has to be prepared, large boulders has to be cut/blown apart. Engineers and geologist must have had time to calculate that the ground will hold, perhaps certain areas needs to be reinforced more than others The ground has to be owned by an entity that can authorise the use of it.
Signal cables has to be drawn. There has to be space for trains to pass eachother. And then there are probably solutions to things we didn’t even know was a problem.
What’s my point? Of course trains take a lot longer than setting up a bunch of cameras on poles… I’d be more concerned if it was the opposite. And yes, I’m hillarious at parties.
There are trains that just charge on charge station
Trains benefit people, those other things benefit billionaires.
And billionaires only care about one thing.
The future of humanity!
Where humanity is defined as billionaires, everybody else are just NPC.
If you want to build a train in empty space I’m sure you could get that approved pretty quickly. Of course, it’d be useless. The biggest problem with trains is getting land for it since they are most useful where there’s a lot of people.
I hate these data centers and flock cameras as much as the next guy, but they aren’t really comparable. Flock cameras don’t even take up much space and they are put up on land the government already has. It’s like asking why it’s so easy to put stop lights.
Sorry, I’m Mr Buzzkill.
The USA has no problem bulldozing housing to build highways.
Yeah, but only because that land belonged to blacks and cut prospering communities in half to drown them in traffic hell. You wouldn’t want a repeat of that.
Rip out the extra lanes of the damn roads and highways that induced demand, and we got all the space we need without destroying much in the way of existing buildings. A double track is only about as wide as one lane of our surface stroads.
This. American roads are widened constantly for no reason other than paycheck justification. They could rip out existing highways (which cause lots of traffic) and replace them with trainlines.
Lol all this is just wrong
California high speed rail was something my parents voted on when I was a child.
I had this friend who was a year under me in school. Her kid voted for it too.
It still doesn’t exist. California can’t build something as modern and cutting edge as a train.
If California became it’s own country and stopped funding the red States it could find the funding to build anything really
I think the amount of funding is kind of irrelevant. Our government has lost (or perhaps given away) the ability to actually build anything without an infinite array of subcontractors all trying to fleece the taxpayer for as much money as possible. If the budget was higher, the expenses would simply grow proportionally to absorb it.
Real trains are cutting edge though. But yeah the usa just cannot.
All the funding was eaten up by Muskolinis hyperloop project that didn’t bear any fruit. All according to plan, now they can sell more Teslas.
