Come to the UK and marvel at our range of privatised services. It’s poetry in motion! Not that I’d dare think what would have happened in the past 13 years of glorious Conservative ‘governance’ had anything been in public ownership…
Unfortunately for us Americans, the railway industry was privatized long ago, and they consistently lobby for things to only move in their favor.
B-but that’s socialism
I mean honestly, if any government can fuck up a large-scale infrastructure project it’s absolutely the US federal government.
Having multiple companies using the same state owned tracks would be even better. Competition is always good, and you really don’t want a monopoly, which is what you’d most likely get with everything being state owned.
We’ve got one big railway in Austria (ÖBB), which is owned by the government. And then we’ve got one smaller, private one (WESTbahn) which only goes to certain cities and in a certain direction. The private one’s prices are usually way better, even though they pay the government to be able to use the rails.
My programmer’s dream is to use a geodata map of the US with population and visitor statistics to make a slime mold map to use as the transit model.
Geodata because I want it to account for terrain in addition to population and visitor data.
I also want to include the national parks system in it just because it can revitalize the whole thing with stationside hotels for people to leave their junk at while they’re in the parks.
Haha yes it also bothered me that the slime mold didn’t have to consider the ferocity of the Rocky Mountains.
I don’t fully understand what all that means but I like the sound of it and hope your dream comes true
Thank you!
Basically a slime mold map is simulating a blob that forms a network of centers and bridges based on the location of “food”, and supposedly in the process demonstrates the most efficient network of transportation between those locations.
Its applications for public transit were realized when trying it out with an actual slime mold revealed a map very similar to the actual layout of the Tokyo metro system, hence the name.
So the theory is that you can simulate transit stations by putting “food” at those locations and the slime mold simulation will organically draw a map of an efficient transit network for you because it’s a stretchy little slime that just wants food.
Get me dat yellow line! Pop into NO in 2 hours, get hammered en Vieux Carre, nap on the ride back? SOLD.
6 hours to El Paso? And I could finally afford to visit the west coast?!
So many ways to pay for this. Haul for Amazon, UPS, FedEx, USPS, all of them. Use passenger fees for ongoing maintenance.
This could be the next iteration of the interstate highway system. Ya know, that thing that made America’s economy explode by connecting us?
And if we took many passengers, and at least some freight, off the interstates, less maintenance costs.
Keep freight and passenger trains on seperate tracks for the most part otherwise you end up like Canada where passenger trains have to yield (delay) to let the frieght pass.
Yeah, because of this it takes me 8 hours to make a trip to Seattle by train when it takes 5.5 hours by car. That entire trip is in the US, too.
why does florida get three lines?
The blue green are just a merged line I think. Florida is. Kst heavily populated on its coasts and then part way down you have the ver glades. Of you look at a map of Florida now this is more or less what I75 and I95 do.
Don’t worry they’ll dedicate one to Disney somewhere where the three meet lmao
When are Feminists gonna learn that the Marxists are on their side?
Skip Texas and southern red States
Anyone in Quebec getting on the Chicago train is in for a nasty surprise.
This should be posted to that fuckcars community
Quincy? Really?
Wild that it would still take over a DAY to get from NYC to LA. The USA is huge
A day? That’s still incredibly fast. It takes a week to drive a car across the country.
The cannonball run records are under 24 hours. A week travel includes few hours per day travel and generous breaks.
The canonball run records also involve teams of people driving ahead with radios so they can do stretches of 120+
Teal line really should be going to at least Duluth (city at the western point of lake Superior). It’s so weird that it stops at the twin cities. I’m guessing the person who made this map doesn’t know much about Minnesota.
I mean, affordable high speed rail is kinda sexy, iykwim
What did that mass of land in the North-West-ish ever do to you?
Right? Seattle to New York goes through… Los Angeles???
Personally I want to ride that Chicago to Quebec City line that goes through checks notes … New Orleans
Very few people live there, though they should probably extend the turquoise line so the PNW can go somewhere other than California.
