cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/40545492
India's definitely aping the US all right in terms of how utterly carbrained everyone is becoming
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
259 points (98.9% liked)
Fuck Cars
14224 readers
18 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Still not that big of an achievement, but it's total length and India is only about 1/3 the size of the US. So it's more than 3 times as dense already.
But if this is about metro trains then size doesn't matter as much as number of big and dense cities
of which the US has a quite a few
Right but many does the US have vs. how many does India have? The original comparison was for their land size, I think a better comparison would be based on the number of big and dense cities.
Yes, it’s not a very useful metric. Better would probably amount of people living in urban areas / area of urban areas.
For metro rail population density is what matters, since it is almost exclusively an urban thing. On the global list of population density by country, India is #19 while the US is #149 (out of 197).
India has about 4 times the population of the US, so even if they could all afford cars, geometrically it wouldn’t work
For the list it is an achievements. That means it grew from the third largest to the second largest network. Catching up with China will take longer since it’s 11x as large.
India is much poorer than the US, so i think it's a big achievement
The US spends practically nothing on public transit, this is like claiming you can run faster than a cheetah but neglecting to mention that you specifically mean you can outrun Lasty The One-Legged Cheetah
Like yeah it's an achievement, but maybe it would be a more impressive achievement if you weren't essentially claiming "hey look were almost not in last place".
But it does help if it's against a famous name. For example saying "I had a better baseball career than Michael Jordan" can really draw headlines.
The US hasn't seriously invested in its infrastructure in 50 years now. I'm glad that India is at least ahead of the US, so it's a start.
That’s a perfect comparison, actually. I would probably also have a snarky voice in my head while reading that, but I’ve never laid a railroad track or played baseball, so I don’t really have a leg to stand on
Metro rail network length per country isn’t a very useful metric. India already passed Japan.
As of 2020 the top ten were:
There is country size, population, population density, percentage of population living in urbanized areas … a lot of factorsimportant for metro rail