Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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I can see this working in places where there's a single abandoned line and no budget to recover it. I've seen plenty of these in SE Asia. A small government investment (skip all the app bullshit etc) could make these work to inter connect small villages that otherwise would waste hours on shitty poorly maintained roads. If it can be made low-tech, I can see this being useful.
and unsurprisingly it's a german project, a country which is absolutely fucking covered in rural lines that are just rusting away
like, holy shit, can we stop branding everything that isn't a bog-standard train as "tech bro gadgetbahn"? this thing very explicitly has a specific problem it's trying to solve.
Trains are expensive, high-capacity vehicles.
If these small cheap vehicles can repurpose tracks in low demand areas, what's so bad about it?
Because 9/10 times they are awful, expensive, unused, and quickly shut down.
You don't see any of these niche techslop pods operating anywhere you actually go, because they don't work.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. I'd say you're wrong, because it's 10/10 times these things don't work. I've seen many similar projects get proposed, funded and abandoned (even some that really did sound more efficient than this to me). The truth is, standard trains are still the cheapest thing you can put on those rails. They're simple, repairable, predictable, they don't break easily, can be easily driven by anyone or automated with standard systems that have been around for decades. Even if a small govt can't buy a new train, they can get second hand trains from other cities, which will still work perfectly for decades.
have you actually looked at what we're talking about, like at all? or are you just following the programming of "small vehicle=bad"?
okay so where do these things actually work?
on the testing tracks, because it's new technology and needs to be exhaustively tested before the government allows it to be put into service.
like, trains were also new technology at one point, being new doesn't somehow inherently make it bad lmao
Except this is not the first time this sort of thing has been proposed.