Link here https://x.com/sfliberty/status/1955774275433976212
Through the mountains, you'd use less steel but massive engineering resources. Around the mountains, you'd use more steel but save engineering for other projects. Both steel and engineering are desperately needed elsewhere for irrigation, trucks, harbors, thousands of other uses.
To choose wisely, you'd need to know what millions of people know. What farmers know about crop yields. What grocers know about customer demand. What truckers know about delivery capacity. What families know about the meals they want to cook tonight.
You'd need surveys of millions. By the time you processed the data, it would be obsolete. Even if people could articulate their preferences accurately, which they often can't until facing real choices. Ludwig von Mises called this "groping in the dark."
Now imagine you're not a commissar, but a railroad CEO in a market economy. Your goal isn't "the good of the nation" but profit. You calculate costs: engineering hours × price of engineering + steel tons × price of steel. You choose whatever costs less.
Here's the miracle: By choosing what's cheapest for your company, you automatically choose what's best for society. Those market prices you calculated with? They contain the knowledge and preferences of millions of people you'll never meet.
When customers want better produce, they offer grocers more. Grocers offer farmers more. Farmers offer more for irrigation. Irrigation companies offer engineers more. The price of engineering rises, signaling everyone that this resource just became more valuable.
Prices aren't just numbers. They're a distributed intelligence system that coordinates billions of decisions without anyone being in charge. No commissar needed. No surveys required. Just voluntary exchange revealing truth.
This is why socialism always fails and why markets always win. But most college students never learn this. They graduate thinking prices are arbitrary, that central planning could work "if done right."
Load of shit.
Facts don't care about your feelings, the Soviet Union objectively was better than the U.S when it came to State-ran railways.
That's not even touching China.
"The customer is always right in matters of taste."
That preference of an individual is personalized comfort over the common good. This is the tragedy of the commons in overdrive. Of course when given individual input, most individually will prefer an individualized option like cars over trains. This aligns with Capitalism nicely because it's is also the easier option to sell more profitable units with. Cars appeal to both consumers and Capital. What that equation does not include is the cost to the public good in the forms of water space, public health, lifelong dependency, infrastructure damage to people not using cars, and the ecological catastrophe cars create.
Building the most inefficient transit system possible because it maximizes short term profits with no regard to the wide effects, especially when Capital then uses their wealth to remove competitive public options, is not going to make the best system for the public. We know this from 100+ years of failure generated by the car oriented systems we've built into every aspect of our lives.
I think you are right if you're surveying Americans, but if you detailed the argument, I think most people elsewhere would favor public transit and lighter personal transit (e.g. bike rentals). I don't think rail systems need to be imposed on people; there were times even in America where railroads were regarded as a grandiose symbol of progress and a great boon to the people.
afaik Tragedy of the Commons is mainly a thought-terminating cliche to defend private property.
Tragedy of the commons (1600s) was just privatization by another name to my recollection
I definitely agree that the balance of attitudes towards more efficient transit is much stronger in countries with stronger community social structure. The US is kind of a special case because of just how individualistic the mentality is. People are incredible selfish in regards to government/centralized solutions to community needs.
The use of bikes, smaller electric vehicles, and personal transportation smaller than cars are all great. I'm a huge (and active) proponent of bike infrastructure and updating city policies to enable personal micro mobility options.
That said, busses can't solve transit in a major city. They have the same limitations of cars, just with more density (as do trains). Once there's enough people moving around a region they're either all walking or you need trains. There's no better way to use a road-sized piece of land to haul lots of people around. Several cities built separated bus routes for rapid transit in/out of the city core, only to find it locked up in a traffic jam made of only their own busses. They must build trains now because it's the next step up in the transit hierarchy.
Is that forcing trains on people? I'd say it's the people forcing trains on themselves because there's just no other way to move so many people in a dense metropolitan area.
For another $2000 a year I could book all the transit I could possibly want.
I'm right there with you, but we've reached a point where generations of people have never seen anything other than cars and airplanes as viable transit. They don't even know you can live without a car. In their minds it feels physically impossible to travel in any other way for daily life.
I've spent years advocating for non-car infrastructure and I've had lots of conversations where people just couldn't believe that anyone other than a destitute person might ride a bus for work or use a bike to get groceries. They driver for everything. Their parents drove for everything and their grandpa drove for everything. Living car free is having to fight generationally ingrained perspectives of the world.
This is a case in point where ideology/indoctrination trumps material interest.