this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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Honestly I think it's just sticker shock. I would say that as soon as we get some people would be more willing to get more, but no, because people are hesitant to expand existing rail. MARTA please expand, I beg you. Oh great spirits of public transit, I pray that you soften the NIMBYs' hearts.
It's so upsetting that every small town in my state has an old historic train stop but none of them are actually passenger train stops anymore. Once you see it you can't unsee it. I am 15 minutes from my town's historic train stop which is a steak house now. My parents are about the same distance from theirs, probably even closer, but it's a museum or something. Can I just take a walk to the train, ride down, and see them? Nope. Gotta deal with the hellscape that is metro Atlanta traffic.
Glorious coal for scenic steam locomotives. It’s a win-win
Still cleaner than even the cleanest electric car, just by physics.
In theory, you could make a carbon-neutral coal-burning steam locomotive. You would need to make synthetic coal out of atmospherically-captured CO2. But in theory it would be possible...
Nope. Thermodynamics.
You'd just be making batteries at that point
And the making wouldn't be free
And what's wrong with that? Who says the coal has to be a net source of power?
Synthetic fuels are actually a pretty viable method of decarbonizing, especially for hard-to-decarbonize applications like aviation. Sure, you don't get net energy out of them, but who cares? Thanks to dirt cheap solar, our civilization has stupidly abundant access to energy. It's only portable energy or energy when we want it that costs a lot. But people have seriously proposed making even gasoline from atmospherically derived carbon. Sure, it's just a fancy battery. But the Joules/dollar you get from the grid is so much cheaper than what you get from gasoline that it may be worth it.
Wouldn't be carbon neutral.
/dollar is a fantasy bullshit metric. Joules portable per joule in, joules per weight, joules per area, chemical byproducts per joule, fancy gear and maintenance required. those are what actually matter in the real world. We cannot afford to keep fucking around with childish LARP shit like money.
And the best tool we have for carbon capture is still just trees. No process is perfectly efficient, can't be, and all have collateral costs.
It could be carbon neutral. It's all about how you do it.
In some convoluted process where you output a bunch of other stuff; sure.
Copilot’s deep think says it would take a 2K passenger train to be more environmentally friendly than 2K electric cars, given a coal-steam train and electric cars recharged by a coal fired power plant.
But that’s irrelevant, electric cars lose the coolness factor against steam trains. Choo-choo electric drivers!
I cannot express the depth of disappointment i feel here.
Suffice to say that this is not an answer, and if you think it is; you're going to get a lot of people hurt very badly someday. I sincerely hope you are never responsible for so much as brunch.
Well I don’t know anyone who works in either designing mass transportation nor makes environmental impact analysis, so no one could give me an accurate guess, hence why I specified that I asked.
I even let it ‘think’ some extra time, come on
I’ll make it my goal to ensure I’m supervising every single brunch you’re going to for the rest of our lives
There are rough numbers to be foubd, math to be done. Not enough for real work, but enough for guessing a rough course, or knowing when it's close.
Too much work for shitposting after work, don’t you think?
Then dont. An llm answer is worse than some shit you just made up on the spot.
A baseless answer is a baseless answer regardless of origin though. I'd argue more thought went into getting the LLM to give me an estimate that it would've if I just typed "yeah 600 passengers on a coal train are probably better". But hey, do feel free to hate on LLMs
A human mind is not random. You would be relating it to something. If you have a mind.
The llm does not.
I would have looked up the capacity/fuel burn/output of ay least one engine in each category, then vehicle weight. Two minutes.
Or just not said anything unless i had a joke.
Slopping at me in the guise of fact, totally uninteresting deceptive misinformation with no entertainment value is fucking offensive. A person would be ashamed of themselves. I would like an apology.
You know I'm kinda tempted to link you to a Copilot session with an LLM written apology.
No apology, but do have a nice day.