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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Fuck Cars
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Why is it that trains are always proposed as the alternative to cars? I, for one, really want PRT to succeed. It seems to be the best middle ground between efficiency and convinience.
trains are the most efficient way of moving between cities.
want to move around the city itself? just hop into an underground train.
and for shorter distances (like grocery stores and stuff) you can usually just walk.
Sometimes. Depending on your neighborhood, it might be a ridiculously long walk to get to the grocery store. At my parents' house it is a 30 minute walk with up to a 200ft change in elevation to get to the nearest grocery store.
City planning needs to allow for grocery stores to be better spread out within neighborhoods.
idk I've never been to a place where a grocery store is more then 600m away (even in remote villages..) but that depends on the country i guess...
Yeah, it's also very country dependent. I live in the U.S. so I am kinda fucked if I want my transportation to the grocery store to be anything other than a car.
I live in a fairly walkable, semi-urban area in a large city (over 3 million) in the US. The closest stores are .7, .9 and 1.1 miles away which is 1100 meters through 1750 meters.
Now try moving between two cities where there isn't a train line because it isn't financially viable.
My hometown to the city I work in (and have an apartment in, I don't drive this distance daily) is about 4 hours on the trains and maybe an hour wait depending on which two trains you take.
Driving this is about an hour. The train takes this long because you first have to take a train in the literal opposite direction for 100 km. The government will never build a train line because there isn't enough demand and whichever government were to waste money on this would end about as fast as one that tried raising the price of vodka.
There IS a bus line, but holy hell are those seats bad. I had back pain for 3 days last time I took one.
"Now try moving between two cities where there isn't a train line because it isn't financially viable."
Congratulations, you found the problem. A train line shouldn't have to be financially viable. Streets aren't eather. Let's vote for better rail infrastructure.
Train lines cost hella money to build. There's no point building a new one for maybe 100 people to regularly use. The road network is so interconnected that people from many places can use the same roads as part of their journey, but if each journey was to be completeable by rail, my country's entire tax revenue for several decades would have to be spent building it.
I keep finding cost comparisons for 6 lane roads vs railroads where the railroads often come out winning, but the reality is, my country doesn't really do 6 lane roads. 4 lanes is reserved for SOME sections of the big highways, but mostly it's 2 lanes, and sometimes you'll even see some gravel roads. There are very few places where the raw throughput of rail is required, because most settlements in our country are literal villages. There's a few decently sized towns and when you run out of those, it gets small and spread out very fast. We have just a tiny bit more area than the Netherlands, with less than a tenth the population.
Would I love to live in a train utopia where you can get everywhere via rail and maybe an electric scooter for the last few kilometers? Absolutely. But it's simply not affordable, so we have 4 or 5 main lines to cover the low hanging fruit. The rest would have increasingly diminishing returns to implement. Actually there are two more lines that could be implemented to get the connectivity to cover a significant part of the population, but they'd be pretty expensive, lots of marshland areas to go through, etc. And it still won't help most people living in small towns spread across the country. I do hope those lines will be built, but right now there's nobody talking about it. Right now they only want to electrify existing mostly non-electric lines, add more trains on existing lines, and increase speeds. So there's definitely more to be done that is also not being done. But I don't think the country will ever be fully covered by a rail network, many lines would just be running empty most of the time.
It's a meme, not a comprehensive list of types of guided vehicles. No one is excluding them, nor should they.
Have you ever lived in a big city?
At some point trains are the only logical way to get around. They move far more people than cars or even buses. Bikes are good but only take you so far.
Having said that DRT started near me in my small city and it's awesome. That and trains are the ideal (with loads of bike lanes).