this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2026
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Real answer? Because train lines cut through a lot of land and every landowner along the route can hold up progress with legal objections. Flock cameras are just attached to poles and data centres are compact.
There's a saying : "Where there's a will, there's a way"
Big tech are using every trick in their book to circumvent regulations and to continue building data centers despite local community disapproval over noise, pollution and a myriad of other problems...
Of course, since data centers are (according to the DOJ), "a matter of national, economic, and energy security", doesn't matter even if they are ran by illegal gas turbines.
And they're not so small
Also, this consideration for others property.... man it would have been nice to have had it when the US was building highways through black communities...
The US building highways through black communities is a big part of why we have committees that can hold up rail development. And do you really want a government that uses "every trick in the book" to build railroads? No! You want a government that follows its own rules both in letter and in spirit, and one that reigns in the excesses of the market economy when necessary, and one that simply writes better laws.
They're not small, but they're one plot of land, not a line spending potentially hundreds of miles and tens of thousands of individual real estate parcels that each require purchasing or litigation to acquire. Which needs to be done before most of the actual work can even begin.
Yeah, but if you look at the most egregious example of this, California high speed rail, at this point they've cleared most of the legal hurdles and have the land.
They still don't have an end date in sight though because of lack of investment. They get a slow trickle from California carbon tax but not much else. They'll occasionally get a grant from the federal government only to have it rescinded when Trump gets in office.
The slow trickle from the carbon tax is enough to complete the flat part in maybe 6 years, but the part where they'll have to bore long tunnels through mountains to get to LA or San Francisco is impossible without a large investment.
Meanwhile there's no shortage of investment going to data centers.
That shit is a lie. Love to see it, but they should have done that before you and I were born, no matter your age or mine
On the Flock cameras, pretty much agreed.
Data centers are a bit more interesting. Sure the land itself is "find a willing landowner or handful in a sea of any land that would be equally ok", but then you have supporting infrastructure. Perhaps not as large of a route to secure, and more flexibility to make pretty sharp turns and such, but still lots of room for people to get in the way of a critical dependency. So surely the datacenters are having issues getting power to their facilities in the face of so many people around their property not wanting to give up their land right? No solution for that.
Oh yeah, if they won't sell their property to facilitate it, the government will just take it over: https://www.washingtonpost.com/ripple/2026/07/16/when-can-a-power-company-take-your-land-for-a-data-center/
So yes, in both datacenter and train, people can make it very hard to get things done. Somehow they find a way for the datacenters...
You as missing the scale problem, here. A data center, hell 1000 massive data centers still aren't going to take up the land that rail does. Its why you lay down rail first, then build around it, rather than destroying things to put rail in after. So yes, if you are going to magically put all this high speed rail in places people don't live directly on with trains that don't go places people want to be, then it's a great comparison.
China was capable of doing it. Oh, but they have central planning and blah blah blah. Yeah, let's do that then. Let's lay some track. If "freedom" means no functional transit but se still get the surveillance state. And "China bad no freedom" means you get a surveillance state but also get functional transit I'll take Chinas system please. If I'm gonna have cameras watching me wherever I go; I'd at least like to be able to actually go somewhere.
That’s definitely a contributing factor. I remember the train line near my city… it took longer to buy up all the land than to actually build it. It might seem the same all building a road, but there are significantly more constraints, and a road benefits everyone around it, while trains only benefit Oriole at the train station.
Roads make life worse for everyone around them. I wish there were more barriers to building roads! You should have to get consent of everyone living within 200m to pollute the air they breathe. And I don't mean the landlord, I mean the tenants.
Let me be more precise: Roads provide transportation for anyone next to them
No they don't. I don't have a car. You think I'm gonna walk down the new freeway they build next to My home? Maybe I'll rollerblade down it.
Traditional roads provide transportation to everyone, but those don't need a big government project to build. All you need is a pair of shoes, and you'll wear a road into the dirt over time.
Roads built for cars? They isolate us. They put a deadly barrier between you and your neighbours. Keep your kids inside and give them a phone, it's dangerous out on the street! Pay attention when you're outside and don't wear headphones or look at your phone. And if you have impaired vision or movement? Then fuck you, get run over. Even if you're healthy, you have to wait at a traffic light just to cross the street in some places. Roads slow down movement for people.
Not to mention what they do to wildlife that more and more these days get isolated by these roads. Why aren't they forced to build bridges for wildlife when building a road? Simply not a priority.
Exactly. Here's a visual representation of what we sacrifice to roads. And that's only the standard 1 lane either direction road. Imagine the chasm if it were depicting a multi-lane highway.
You don't have a car. Do you receive packages? If you called for medical help, how would it get to you? Most folks if they don't have a car at least want option for a bus, which requires roads. We can't build rail to reach every household (you said freeway next to your home, so that doesn't sound like it's a very downtown situation).
Perhaps there shouldn't be as many cars on it as you deal with, but the roads themselves..
How do you think your food and other needs gets to you, what do buses operate on? How does your mail get delivered.
You use roads.
I don't think the user implied we should have no roads ever though, no?
I'd say the majority of even the fully car free urbanist crowd, which is a pretty narrow and more radical version, still want roads for access to things like delivery vehicles or emergency vehicles, even if they want a total ban on private cars. They're just pointing out we spend a huge cost on roads in terms of space that we don't often consider and sometimes should when deciding if a full road is really necessary.
I mean so to trains or any other transportation system. And without those transportation systems, you wouldn't be able to live the life you currently have. Are vehicles the best way to do it? Probably not. Are trains the best way to do it? nope. The best would be to have a blend of all things, and one that works for the majority rather than the minority, but thats difficult especially when one form gains traction over others.
They provide more than transportation. Take a coffee shop, for example. How are they going to get their coffee without road access?
The road provides transportation for the coffee delivery truck, yes, but it also provides coffee for everyone who visits the coffee shop. Without a road, there is no coffee to drink, and therefore no coffee shop.
Plenty of European and Middle Eastern cities already have pedestrianised streets that still allow vehicles in for deliveries with a 10 - 20mph speed limit. They're often not "through roads" (e.g. bollards at one end) and can be cobbled to prevent people using them as normal roads.
It returns the streets to the people whilst still allowing deliveries in.
Same way that humans used to do it for millennia before the invention of automobiles.
So they simply didn't exist. That's how that worked.
As I pointed out to another person, coffee was a worldwide commodity by the 18th century, and a flourishing coffee culture. Coffee shops most certainly did exist!
Except the affordability was the issue, as previously pointed out.
Highly-incorrectly, though. Actual historians cite the cheap coffee as bringing the rich and poor together in coffeehouses daily, and helping drive social reforms of the era.
Roads pre-date automobiles by thousands of years. The original claim wasn’t about automobiles, it was about roads.
The original comment was clearly about roads full of motor vehicles.
By growing their own food since there wasn’t any supply routes….? Or you’re waiting months for something the next county over? What if it spoils on the way? Robbed? Weather takes it out?
You’re making stuff out to be way to simple of a thing, it’s not black and white. What if you want coffee? Options other than wheat.
Europe had coffeehouses in the 17th century, and it became a world-wide commodity by the end of the 18th century, about 200 years before the invention of cars.
(Reminds me of hearing Johann Sebastian Bach's Coffee Cantata not long ago.)
For sure. Know how much a cup of coffee was inflation adjusted? Roughly $10-15. On top of that those 'coffee houses' weren't remotely close to what you have today. They were bulk brewed diluted black coffee with no sugar or other condiments because those too were expensive. A cup of coffee for the common man in 1700 was roughly 10% of his daily wage. Not exactly sure what point you are even trying to make here though, especially considering the highest cost for getting coffee in the 1700s up to the invention of the car was you guessed it, transportation costs. Invention of the car and transportation networks, why look at that, the price of coffee and other non-local agriculture products plummeted.
That's bizarrely incorrect. According to the Bank of England inflation calculator, the cost for a cup in, 18th century Britain would be equivalent to £1.57 now.
But I'm glad you asked about the point, which is: A functioning, healthy society (with coffee shops, even) does not require everybody driving their private vehicle everywhere, for every function of daily life. In fact, the opposite appears to be true, given that we can draw some pretty direct lines from a car-dominated landscape to the affordability crisis. We could have good lives without streets and roads filled with high-speed traffic.
LOL bud, you may want to actually read a little more into history instead of assuming from a single calculator. Can you name a single country that lives good lives without streets with traffic?
I did read the history out of curiosity after being surprised at hearing Bach's cantata.
I can name several such places. The United States, for one. The Census Bureau declared the frontier closed in 1890. That is, the continent was fully-settled from coast to coast before automobiles were a thing. Immigration was in full swing because the country was becoming an economic powerhouse. People lived quite well.
Considering coffee is only cheap because of slaved workers, you’re incredibly missing the point.
Coffee is only affordable because of mass transport, and that’s only after the slave work is done.
Somebody made a ridiculous claim that coffee shops can only occur in the presence of cars, when they predate cars by hundreds of years, but I'm missing the point?
There are lots of problems with the global coffee trade, and always have been. That doesn't change the fact that logistics and personal transport are two very different processes, and the OC was right, roads full of speeding traffic are bad.
Uhh… you mean the slaves back than…? And the slaves they continue to use in the coffee trade…?
It’s only affordable because of the slaves, still is, pay everyone an liveable wage along the way, and that’s not happening.
Roads go back to the Roman Empire and earlier. By the 17th century, road networks were highly developed.
Nobody was supplying coffee houses by hauling sacks of coffee beans on foot through forests, fields, and river fords. They had ships on the ocean, barges on canals, and wagons on roads.
Or they already own the lines and their cars are sitting there surrounded by weeds waiting for vandalism. The train lines consume vast acres of city landscapes, for Cockburn what