What I think the Americans in this thread itt are taking for granted tfg is in Japan at least people do not give a fuck about emergency vehicles. They will cut them off walk in front of them sit and stare. Which the one thing America has going for it is we will absolutely respect a loud flashing vehicle. I’ve seen people in wheelchairs cross a crosswalk while the ambulance intercom begs them not to. At the same time 30 salarymen also crossing. Bikes zooming past that shit. Fuck that emergency vehicle.
Shout out in the comments how much your country respects emergency vehicles.
Yeah, I forgot to mention how often emergency vehicles get stuck in traffic currently. If it takes you an hour to go ten miles at 6PM, that’s about how long it takes for a firetruck or ambulance as well.
Traffic is a menace.
Of course, train traffic is a reality, and trains are very much about putting years of effort and millions upon millions of dollars up front. It’s probably slower to expand train lanes than car lanes. But again: we don’t have to imagine some future unitary decree that outlaws cars. We can just build more trains over the span of 20 years, and if I’m right, this stuff will happen on its own.
I believe mostly full aircrafts are superior to cars when it comes to net emissions, and they’re so expensive to use that the routes and available flights are extremely efficient and pretty strongly regulated.
So frequent fliers are more responsible than drivers. Though–again–most people don’t really have much control over whether they have to own a car.
Trains are of course more efficient than any other option and cause the least pollution. If we had good city-to-city bullet trains in the US, certainly some people would choose the half-price 15-hour trip to the 5 hour plane trip.
The real waste in air travel comes from private jets, which make five people responsible for, like, 50x the emissions they would be as a coach passenger. Also: police shouldn’t use helicopters so damn much. If you are dying on the side of a mountain and didn’t get insurance, someone is literally gonna be on the other end of the phone telling you that you need to choose between death and $15k in debt. And yet in LA they fire up a birdie to catch drug dealers on foot.
So yeah: we–as a society–have a lot of really dumb ideas about efficiency in travel and emissions. I don’t know if it’s the result of deliberate misinformation or if we’re just dumb.
Incidentally all earthly travel contributed 25% to emissions in the US in 2017. Industry contributed 22%. Individual choices have little effect on climate change. Buy efficient lightbulbs to save yourself money, but if you ever want to expend any energy on lecturing someone about a personal emissions choice, you are much better off putting that same amount of effort into pushing for legislation. This is not directed at Doolittle–just a general note, because this particular topic grinds my gears.
My yearning for the Dallas shinkansen aside none of that is ever going to happen in Texas - eg San Antonio has 19 public school districts because everyone with two dimes to rub together is an asshole about property and property taxes.
In Austin the light rail goes way out of its way to NOT stop at UT.
YEAH FUCK BUISINESS CLASS FLYING MOTHER FUCKERS just make a damn skype call im with doolittle
unless that’s not the frequent flyer you’re talking about
Yeah, business class is an abomination, but it pales in comparison to private jets and helicopters, let alone first class, plane suites (Emirates offers basically a hotel room on a plane).
Speaking of such things, say what you will about those involved, but this clip does a great job of explaining why flying cars are stupid (spoiler: we already have both helicopters and highways).
Cars can be pretty fun but I hate how cities are built to accommodate them.
I’d love to pick up an old Saab 900 Turbo and fix it up but I dont know shit about that and would be better off with a new decent bike.
Basically, I’d love to buy a car for fun and not because I need it (which I do not).
calls for buying more rolling stock often do not consider one major problem we do have:
They all share the same tracks. Most systems have been designed to work with way less capacity than we are using them nowadays (mainly due to modern rail control solutions), and there is a limit to how much these systems can scale, i.e. even if you buy 50 more trainsets, you can pretty likely only put one or two additional trains into the schedule, and the rest is just a buffer for maintenance, unforseen issues etc…
And if you life in a rural area, you may think that Timetables are the problem - no they aren’t! The issues are that running large trains for a few people past midnight isn’t worth it - maintenance intervals, calculations for ROI, personel, etc make it unviable for operators to offer service from 0200 to 0600am. And then there’s the issue that so many people want to get somewhere at the same time - into the city in the morning, out again in the afternoon/evening. Flex time at work, home office! How well does that work out atm in, say, Paris, who surely must have heard of that idea before? And their metro system usually has less than 5 minutes between trains (a mindboggingly complicated matter to space them so closely to each other physically, and no leeway - if one train gets stuck, it’s basically game over for that direction, if they haven’t room for diverging trains and get back onto the normal route again)…
don’t get me wrong though, if that sounds a bit pessimistic - i love trains (and btw, a shinkansen is a japanese train, korea has TGV-derived KTX’es, just sayin’) and would love to take a ride in so much more than what i have covered up until now, e. g. a shinkansen, BART, Amtrak, Feracchirossa (spelling absolutly wrong, the highspeed trains), a mag-train, vintage monorails, and lotsa more metros…
otoh, i love my French Nice Boat V6 3.0L Petrolengined Monster of the Past, which i can only afford to own/maintain/fill up due to… earning my money working for a train building company, so i am kinda the best hypocrite you will find itt?
But I mean… the answers to every train problem are basically just, “throw money at it”, “build more tracks”, and/or “become socialist”, though, right? Like, yeah: the only reason to not run trains 24/7 is because it isn’t profitable. But, like, that’s why the government had to pay for space travel as well.
I do think it’s possible that no matter how many tracks we build (over the span of many years), we’ll hit a sort of equilibrium where instead of cars become a rarity, they become a common tool of the upper class. But…again, that’s a major improvement in many ways.
highspeed trains), a mag-train, vintage monorails, and lotsa more metros…