Riiiight… I’m confused and delusional because you want to live in a world where Big Auto’s profit margins are prioritized over the needs of the public.
Phony Stark might have a little blue check mark to sell you - he likes the way you think.
If I had my way then manufacturing would be publicly owned and based on open source principles, that wouldn’t change the fact that transport networks are still going to require cars.
Do we over use cars? Yes. Can we totally do without cars, vans and specialist vehicles? No.
They’re incredibly versatile and hugely efficient in certain usecase situations, the infrastructure is orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to maintain than any other alternative.
Ecologically they can make a lot of sense too, especially fleet managed electric self-drive which is without a doubt where we’re heading.
Investing in long distance passenger train networks isn’t a great strategy at the moment, by the time it’s half built it’s very likely efuels already on the market now will have significant adoption in aviation thus making flying a far less polluting means of travel than trains – but it’ll be too late to change because you’ve already released all that carbon from the huge steel works needed to make the tracks.
What we should be doing is creating car friendly transport hubs allowing people to do first and return mile by car and linking all those transport hubs with efficient, affordable, safe, and reliable short and medium train lines. Cities should have tube and tram networks that are accomodating to all and which include the protections required for safety of the passengers, especially from other passengers.
‘women getting harassed doesn’t matter’ isn’t an acceptable answer, ‘disabled people can just stay home’ isn’t an acceptable answer, ‘People who need to transport stuff can’t’ isn’t an acceptable answer… Until rail based public transport can actually fill all the needs of the people it’s not a viable solution in it’s own.
Mixed mode integrated transport network is what every single person who has any interest in transportation agrees is the best solution, everyone except the kneejerk flatearth anticar nuts of course.
If I had my way then manufacturing would be publicly owned and based on open source principles
You start off very well… but after that sentence you just take a running nosedive into bog-standard green capitalist apologia.
They’re incredibly versatile and
hugelysomewhat efficient incertain usecaseextremely limited situations,
FTFY.
Ecologically they can make a lot of sense too
No. They absolutely fucking do not in any way, shape or form.
aviation thus making flying a far less polluting means of travel than trains
Never going to happen, genius. Just the massive infrastructure air travel requires makes this attempt of yours a joke. When it comes to efficiency, nothing beats trains - except ships. That’s not going to change any time soon - or possibly ever.
You’re saying a lot of things in strong terms but not proving any evidence for why you’re right and groups like TfL who are regarded as one of the most advanced public transport networks in the world are wrong when they say mixed mode integrated transport networks are the only viable option.
Just adding swearwords and huffing like youre some expert talking down to a fool is a fun tactic in a discussion but when you don’t have anything to back it up then it just makes you look like a bloviating jackass.
Do you really think that running train lines to every rural house is ecologically more sound than cars? And we run them all empty on the of chance that someone wants to use them? Do we run a cargo line to ever farm and factory?
There are use cases where ecologically speaking personal vehicles are the only even vaguely sensible solution.
If you had a heart attack would you like the paramedics to spend an hour waiting for trains then another hour on trains taking you to the hospital? Maybe special ambulance trains that wizz past the others and delay everyone hours because the schedules got messed up while they were in sidings? No? Then we’re building roads anyway and it would be silly not to use them.
And yes air travel using efuels is ecologically far less impactful then train travel even on legacy lines (i.e. lines which have repaid their initial construction cost (ecological), these don’t really exist much because maintenance continues to add significant ecological cost.)
Cost over the life of infrastructure per person mile is actually very low for aviation, airports are cheaper than trainlines by a wide margin and planes are about the same cost as trains per served mile, a bit cheaper but thats largely due to economies of scale so I’ll be charitable and handwave it.
We need more trains, we get more trains by being realistic about where they’re useful and proposing and supporting sensible developments. Personally I am angry at the endless green flag waving idiots that opposed HS2 because it was going though forests, that is an amazingly good use of trains and have been already reducing both car and lorry use on some of the UK’s busiest roads while also serving as a great starting point to a integrated cargo network requiring only last mile trucking - but it got shit all over by so many people including idiots that shout on Facebook about how terrible cars are and then say the HS2 cargo transport plan was bad because it was built around mixed mode rather than some magic transporter or what most the lunatics actually seen to want a return to barbarism and the destruction of our modern society.
