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Only in US
Canada too. Europe was adopting it, but their Continent is already too population dense for the ponzi scheme of car centric design to really take off.
“Cars” were the “superior” invention to rail, so wide spread adoption was attempted in most places.
Pretty sure car centric design is everywhere.
not to the same degree everywhere, most European cities do have plenty of infrastructure for cars, but also plenty for public transport; I live in a city where it’s possible to get everywhere without a car, which is why I don’t own one
TIL Australia doesn’t exist.
Is that the vast wasteland off the coast of NZ?
What of it?
That’s a lot of lanes. I’ve never been anywhere more than like, 10 wide and that’s counting both ways, and that’s in the city.
Looks like Houston TX to me. Horrible experience there, they are allergic to public transportation and sidewalks.
I once had to visit a client in Dallas and noticed their office was right next to a hotel, so I booked myself in there expecting to be able to just cross the relatively small side road on foot. NOPE.
Even doing it in the car was close to a half mile round trip if I followed all the rules of the road.
I hear if they just added one more all problems would be solved.
Linking the page for my favorite hair pulling topic on traffic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
By hyper subsidizing car road infrastructure we make it almost impossible to use anything else and competing infrastructure (trains, planes, seperated bus traffic) appears more expensive by contrast forcing more people to use cars.
Also the plot of Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) if I recall correctly.
Fascinating! Seems I have to thank the artists of my past for my supplemental progressive education.
Just one more lane bro
Classic: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0dKrUE_O0VE
The Katy cost a mere $7 billion and it’s still often a glorified parking lot. It’s got less throughput than a single train for moving people, but I’m sure adding another lane will fix it. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/o-F-7Yc-A8U
Love this reply
What I learned in Texas is that almost everything is a toll road too. So you have to pay to use the roads each time.
I used to just think of this as yeah sure things are just bigger in America, it’s a huge place with lots of people… but then I realized that the cities with ridiculous numbers of lanes like this aren’t any bigger than cities in the rest of the world. Houston (pictured) isn’t even in the Top 200 biggest world cities.
I’ve looked it up and the Katy Freeway on the picture has an average of 219 000 using it per day. Let’s be very generous and assume an average of 1.5 person in each car, so around 329 000 people are moved each day thanks to this highway.
A single metro line or two tramway line moves more people per day than that.
Its crazy. At its widest it has 26 lanes. It amazes me that they just kept widening it, instead of thinking “We’ve added 5 lanes, we should probably find an alternative solution”.
In the city where that exists, they really isn’t much else that’s viable. Decades of bad urban planning mean that comprehensive public transportation is not cost-effective in that area. And “not cost-effective” doesn’t just mean “expensive”, it means “would cost an order of magnitude more than the city budget”. So the only real solution for them in the short term is to build the world’s most ridiculous laughingstock of a road.
Key phrase being “short term” - nobody seems to build with a 20+ year plan to improve the city in America, whereas in European cities every time I visit one I haven’t been to in a decade, I usually notice I’m reaping the benefits of major infrastructure improvements which take decades to plan and build. Short term, selfish (what will get me elected again, or what will pay me the biggest bonus) thinking, and corruption, is what keeps American cities shitty
Yep, just look at Tokyo.
people argue that japan has an easier time doing public transport because it’s a slim island that’s roughly linear from north to south, so it’s easy to serve it by one public transport line.
But the same is true for the US, where most people live either on the east coast or on the west coast. You basically have two slim, linear areas that can be served by 1 line of public transport each.
Another problem is that the US has stupidly strong private property rights. Everyone whose land is going to need to be confiscated to build the railroad tracks will try to bilk the high-speed rail authority out of every dollar they can, and because the US has a very strong civil court system which strict procedural law, it only costs a landowner a few thousand dollars to cause millions of dollars worth of legal headaches for the rail authority
isn’t that also true for highways?
The difference is that most highways were built in the past before such things like environmental studies were required and before many of the attack vectors used by property owners and other obstructionist parties to block construction were discovered or created. The US no longer builds major roadways, and merely widens existing ones, which in many cases do not require more land to be requisitioned.
interesting. here’s a short reminder that railway tracks existed before highways (even before combustion engines in general). it’s sad that they were neglected so much. maybe they can be built directly adjacent to existing highways? at least along the coastlines …
This idea has been adopted to some degree. The Brightline West high-speed rail project (in construction since 2024, planned to open 2028) connecting Las Vegas with Los Angeles uses existing land along the existing I-15 expressway, which is extremely congested.
I believe it was during the presidency of Ronald Reagan that private rail operators were relieved of service requirements for passenger trains, as long as the companies maintained the tracks and gave priority to passenger trains operated by Amtrak, the American state rail operator.
The companies have completely neglected the tracks and many are in poor condition from heavy use by freight trains, and as a result, maximum speeds have been drastically lowered to maintain a level of safety. Many ordinary trains in the US run at around 80-90 km/h, which is miserably slow.
In addition, Amtrak trains are supposed to be able to overtake slower freight trains by using splits in the track (where a section of track splits into two temporarily, the slower train taking one side and the faster train taking the other to pass it). However, as freight rail operators have realised, the number of engineers and conductors needed to run the trains is directly proportional to the number of locomotives, and thus they prefer running fewer, longer, trains than many shorter ones. As a result, freight trains are unbelievably long, some are a good few kilometres in length, which is longer than the entire sections of split track, making such sections worthless as it is impossible to use them to bypass the slower trains.
Where Amtrak has complete control of the tracks, such as in the northeast, service is comparable to European rail providers. For example the Acela service, which runs between Washington (DC) and Boston with stops at Baltimore, New York City, and Philadelphia. There are 20 trains per day and it reaches a top speed of around 250 km/h. The total journey takes 6.75 hours and travels 735 km (12 stops) meaning the average speed is a comfortable 109 km/h.
It’s even worse in Canada where 50% of the population literally lives in a straight line in Ontario/Quebec
And we’ve been “studying” high speed rail in that corridor for roughly 40 years now. One of these days we’ll build it, I swear!
It’s sprawl. Building up costs too much via some combination of building taxes, NIMBYs, and construction overhead, so people build out instead. Building out means more and more miles of infrastructure (Roads, water, electric, natural gas, signs, gas stations, etc., etc.) per capita.
Then when the people in the sprawled-out suburbs want to visit the city centers anyway, because that’s where jobs and shopping inevitably are (People live where people live), they have to build massive roads to get in and out.
I have never been on a road like the one in the picture.
I’d have a nervous breakdown.
There are 29 countries in America that aren’t like this. It’s really just the USA.
The built-up parts of Canada are about as bad.
I know. It was a passive-agressive way of telling them not to arrogantly abuse the name of the continent for their country.
We all now how
I’m happy to never see wherever the fuck that is.
Houston
With all those luxuries, why not just live in this thing and avoid rent?
Many people do sadly
Very luxurious going from point A to B, not so much stationary.
Source: My back hurts
Our entire continent has been given almost wholey over to the automobile, and despite it being a wasteful, ultra expensive, and inefficient way of transporting people and goods, because of entrenched interests we cannot well improve on it with even interstate freight and passenger rail being opposed by oil companies and car companies and probably Road repair companies and everyone else.
A real popular government would rally the population to overcome those entrenched interests and make a viable Interstate freight and passenger rail, it will not get any easier in time and it has to be done.
It would be a proper use of borrowed money as it would pay for itself many times over and lower the cost of living and doing business and make the us more competitive.
Without needing automobiles we could have higher standards of living with vastly lower expenditures.
This biggest argument i see is people somehow think things like transit will remove their freedom of mobility, when in reality it vastly improves mobility, especially for those who can’t or don’t want to drive.
My grandmother was trapped inside her house for years at the end of her life. All she could do was wait for people to visit her because she couldn’t drive.
When I lived in a small city in Japan, if I went out during the day, there were ancient people all over the place who had taken the bus into town.
Anybody who would say that the American way of throwing elderly people to the wolves is better… Well, anyone who says that is just an inhuman monster, aren’t they?
It blows Americans minds when they hear about how people go skiing in Switzerland, taking public transit from their front door to the foot of the ski hills.
Buts it not possible to play any sports without the dodge ram 3500 extra cab mega box extra large big horn edition.
The dodge ram commercial shows some guy driving offroad, smashing through snow, then climbing out and going skiing.
Some sucker buys the truck and spends 3 hours stuck in traffic slowly driving to the ski hill with his skis in the back.
Relying on the automobile has made us exceptionally vulnerable. At any time our only means of achieving an income can be removed. We spend magnitudes more money than we could otherwise and everything from building infrastructure to support so many cars everywhere, to the cost of cars and repairs, too the ability of others to take that away from us at a moment’s notice.
With designed cities we could have housing on a direct line to our business sectors on a public transit, which would free up a substantial portion of our income, while if the housing was constructed intelligently and fairly we would free up the better part of half of our costs to live.
Also remote work could Free People from the commuting nightmare in White Collar work.
“Cars are freedom!” … so long as you register it with the government, insure it with a private insurance company, carry a photo ID from the government. Where a train you just pay and get on, or a bike you just ride.
Everybody wants a back yard, nobody wants buses or trains
I have both (not so much on the train front unfortunately).
I don’t want a back yard. What I want is the noise isolation and the feeling of safety and personal space. I also like having the ability to use that space for personal projects if I want to.
I have seen condos and other urban spaces that are well-built enough to provide the same benefits that I see from a back yard. But they’re very expensive.
My basic point is that people sometimes forget what they really want, and instead focus on something that has given them those benefits.
I don’t want a backyard, I want a park within walking distance.
I don’t want an expensive hunk of steel and plastic, I want a train that picks up every ten minutes.
I know a large number of people who feel the same way. But none of them have billions of dollars to lobby my mayor or governor or President. Hell, even when we do get a bit of outright bribery to bend things our way, a single petty asshole can foul the whole project.
I wouldn’t mind living in an apartment building, so long as it’s equally co-owned by the people who live in it, and by nobody who doesn’t. And that it has a green space on the property for recreation and a community garden.
Busses work perfectly well for suburban neighbourhoods with back yards. With 1000m² each, you can place more than 250 lots around a bus stop, so that no one will have to walk more than 500m. With average families of four, that’s a thousand potential passengers. Not enough for a metro station, but more than enough for a bus service every 10-20 minutes to get to the next train station.
What also works well: Build a few 3 story apartment buildings, a supermarket, a few small stores, a school, a kindergarten and a pub around a train station. Build the single family homes around that infrastructure and you have the perfect place for almost everyone. Families can live in the outer area, when the kids get older they can move out into the apartments and still be around. When they start their own family they move back into the garden homes and the grandparents who get too old to work their gardens can move to the apartments. And all that within 15 minutes walking distance of a train station.
…no one will have to walk more than 500m.
Well I would walk 500m.
And I would walk 500 more.
My neighborhood used to have three bus lines. I think it’s down to one, and we recently put in the laziest bike lanes. (Painting a bicycle in the hard shoulder is not sufficient!)
And all that within 15 minutes walking distance of a train station.
🤦♂️
America has LUNGS and ARTERIES whereas
Europe has mere wimpy BRONCHIOLES and CAPILLARIESThose arteries are pretty congested, cars are ld cholesterol, trains are hd cholesterol, and we are eating a diet of trans fat up in here.
America, fuck yeah
Nothing a triple bypass and a meat king supreme can’t fix
My vehicle is also air conditioned, but weighs 1000 tons and has 2000hp and hundreds of couches:
Seethe in jealousy, non-Europeans!
[哈哈哈/하하하/ははは]
Seethe in jealousy, non-Brits!
Still a subscription. Not quite to big oil, though.
Yeah, but at least it doesn’t carry the same environmental cost.
Nope, no subscription. Check in, check out, pay as you go. https://www.sbb.ch/en/travel-information/apps/sbb-mobile/easyride.html
Pay as you go is even closer to what the post says about the big oil subscription. 😂
No, it’s really not
Hey at least you also wind up doing your job mostly over the Internet with people that aren’t anywhere near your office when you get there.
What if we made two separate sections that you could add or remove? Even better, let’s add a special vehicle to the front, with a trained driver. To aid the driver; rails. Oh, more people want to join? Let’s add a hitch system to the front and back of each “car” so we can add as many as we want.
Why did my brain go to motorcycle sidecar when you said a separate section you can remove? But yeah trains are the correct solution, this is coming from someone who loves his 01 Tacoma.
Yo, not bad.
Check it; double rail… side by side connectable trains. Somehow.
Modern designs are too limited. Make a 20 foot separation between the rails, giant 4x4 train.
That was actually a thing the Germans did on a few occasions, if memory serves they had to link the tow trains for the Gustav Railway Gun. I think it’s also been done on occasion for smaller locomotives to move overloaded cars.
