- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
America is too big for planes, too. If your transportation solution is flying, now everyone has to get around via endless highways or big, complicated regional airports, and you can only have so many of those. There’s a reason why rural areas in North America have completely different politics from urban areas, and why so much of it is driven by a sense of isolation and abandonment. Trains promise to help here because they are able to stop in small places that will never, ever have practical airports.
A good rail network provides a reliable, consistent, repeatable, and straightforward three hour connection from Nowheresberg to the nearest city. Slow, but good enough to feel like they exist in the same planet. Unfortunately, that promise is subtle, and it plays out over decades, so the reward system we’ve created for ourselves is incapable of supporting it. And thus, we have Amtrak and confederate flags
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Rural America is covered in local airports. No large commercial carriers, but the airports exist.
We need more rail. The argument starts from a bad premise.
They’re not viable as general passenger hubs.
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Why not though? Honest question, I’ve been to an airport that had a terminal of around 30 square metres with decent passenger service in the EU.
I’d say it’s the flying that’s not scalable, not the airport footprints.
Most municipal airports can’t handle jet engine planes around here. They are all just small body, single engine aircraft on poorly maintained and non-level runways. They are fine for recreational flights, crop dusters, or flight instruction, but most rural airports here are little more than a few hangers and an administrative building with a runaway.
So the airport I’m talking about is Sønderborg, it also can’t service jets, the only passenger service operates 2-3 twin turboprop planes to Copenhagen and back. The airport is six hangars, the terminal literally is a single room with enough room for the passengers of a single plane.
Flying is much more energy intensive, there are heightened security concerns and pilots are expensive
Every county has a county seat. There’s nothing preventing the county seat from being a regional travel hub.
True, my southern Illinois relatives are aware they can catch an Amtrak to the cities, but the trains suck really bad and the stations are often in a terrible place to leave anything of value (like your car) so they just drive when the occasionally need to go to the city for something like real healthcare
And the Amtrak in southern Illinois can be hours late.
I just really hate flying and really like going places. Give me rails, I don’t want to drive either.
I really love flying but hate going places, especially fucking packing it’s bloody endless and you always forget something
I love flying but hate everything to do with air travel from the airports to the seats and especially security.
Father, I yearn for the rails!
Coming from a more rural region, even if trains were available, when people go to the city they come back with their car filled up with stuff because it’s easier to find/cheaper in the city, most won’t take the train even if it’s available if they have their car they can rely on.
But cars are still more efficient (L/km/passenger) than planes so we don’t need more planes for rural regions either.
Yeah going to the grocery store was a 40 minute round trip growing up. You go there and buy as much as you can so you don’t have to go again for two more weeks. Having a train will not be suitable for this type of trip.
A 40 minute round trip would be average in most US cities, eg Dallas, Denver, Atlanta, suburban Chicago, etc
Those cities have grocery stores every exit off the highway. I’m in NW Ohio and while every town over 15,000 people has at least onc grocery store, lota of the surrounding villages do not. 30 miles each direction to a grocery store is rough. Growing up in suburbs of major cities, i cant remember a grocery store being further than 5 miles away. It’s a vastly different experience.
May I point out that this effect is killing small towns and living-wage jobs? Before the car, there had to be stores and groceries and doctors’ practices, et cetera, in small towns. Those provided local jobs for people, and community. Now, people drive into the city, or to the regional Walmart, and the small towns are decaying, mired in crippling poverty, isolation, and the diseases of despair that we see today. So the car might offer “freedom” to load up on a large selection of cheap consumer goods, but at the cost of dignity, connection, and meaning.
(Walmart, by the way, can be seen as predatory, killing small business with prices they can’t match, but also, it is successful largely because it is so well-adapted to a car-based lifestyle. It’s not the cause, it’s an effect.)
Plenty of places with developed rail networks are still conservative in rural places.
Yeah, but passenger rail collapsed hard. Amtrak is a shell of the former service and most states that kept their systems focused only on commuters into cities.
You also see a lot of rural towns encouraged to spread out far more than before because cars provided transportation. A small town in the early 20th century looked a lot more like a very small city instead of the hollow suburban form they have today.
Do Australia, Canada or India have the same problem?
Australia and Canada, yes. India has a much more developed rail infrastructure.
The main driver for passenger rail success is population density–people per square mile or per square kilometer. The US, Canada, and Australia do not have enough population density in most areas to really support a passenger rail service.
There are parts or sections of the US that are starting to get the kind of density that supports trains, and trains do tend to appear when that happens.
I hear this argument often, but it perplexes me. Yeah, the US has large areas with little population density, but surprisingly, comparatively nobody lives there. The places with high population density have lots of people living there. We could have trains in places where people live, but for the most part, we don’t. Not even a single high-speed line to connect the Northeast Corridor, just the Acela. The Great Lakes region has higher population density than, and about the same size as, Spain, but Spain has a well-developed rail system.
It’s not really about population density.
The DC metro system was built when the population was 750k. The population of Columbus, Ohio is about 950k. Columbus could support a rail system (which would also bring more growth).
All those countries are very small, poor and sparsely populated with people who’d want to travel.
USA: 9.53 Mio km² | 33.6 inhabitants per km² | $85,373 GDP (PPP) per capita | 32.5 Bn pkm (rail) | 1.98 Tn pkm (air, domestic + international (by departure)
Canada: 9.98 Mio km² | 4.2 inhabitants per km² | $60,495 GDP (PPP) per capita | 1.44 Bn pkm (rail) (2007) | 198 Bn pkm (air, domestic + international (by departure)
Australia: 7.69 Mio km² | 3.6 inhabitants per km² | $66,627 GDP (PPP) per capita | 10.5 Bn pkm (rail) | 220 Bn pkm (air, domestic + international (by departure)
India: 3.29 Mio km² | 426.7 inhabitants per km² | $10,123 GDP (PPP) per capita | 1,157 Bn pkm (rail) | 233 Bn pkm (air, domestic + international (by departure))
This quick comparison misses international inbound tourism, infrastructure size and infrastructure cost per capita as well as an actually spatially differentiated interurban density-adjusted connectivity parameter (or whatever that’d be called), so take it with a grain of salt, but I’d argue that while having different markets, those English-language adjacent countries have similarities and relevant differences.
Planes, few cripple trains, and a shitload of giant automobiles
Thank you for writing the text and a link.
I don’t know why this is so hard for people who post screenshots of websites.
