You listed “Transit Enthusiasts” and “Bottoms” as if that isn’t the same thing
How dare you be 100% correct
Deja vu!
I love seeing these memes and checking how many apply to me
Oh no they’re all me
- birdwatchers
- Girls in Sundresses
I’m not afraid of flying. I’m too big for the planes. Trains are much nicer for people more than two standard deviations taller than average.
I would assume a cocaine addict actually wants a high-cocaine rail.
A high-coke rail off a hand rail on high-speed rail.
Hold on, I can only breathe so deeply…
Haha I’m scared of sounding like I don’t like high speed rail, which I do! I love trains in general, I’m interrailing right now! Buuut I felt this was a relevant place to link this fascinating article (slightly click-baity headline) about how high speed rail in Europe is actually not constructed in a very good way, because it ends up eliminating many of the positive sides with the European railway network: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2013/12/high-speed-trains-are-killing-the-european-railway-network/
Edit: fixed typo
The problem isn’t how they’re constructed, it’s how they’re run, and this article is basically just complaining about SNCF without realising it. They run bad timetables and aim for high occupancy rather than transporting more people. Jon Worth has better writing on the topic IMO.
That’s really a great article, thanks for the link!
Still, there’s plenty of criticism in the article I linked that is not touched on, I hardly think it becomes irrelevant by reading Jon Worth’s writing! Even with his proposals I’m really not sure if we would get back the cheap and still relatively fast connections that have been removed. To me there’s not a clear benefit to getting rid of the old “low-speed” rail even if we fix SNCF.
It’s cheaper to run a high speed service than a low speed one. You can transport more people with the same number of staff and trains because it runs faster. The solution isn’t to run an artificially cheaper low speed service along side, it’s to run the high speed service in a sane way.
Is it really? Because that claim goes against my intuition so if it’s true I would be happy to get more details! But what you say doesn’t quite make sense to me, sorry if I seem pedantic: transporting people faster is not the same as transporting more people. You transport more people per unit time, but not necessarily in total. I also don’t see how faster trains need less staff. When you say it’s cheaper, do you also take into account investment cost, or do you neglect those and just mean operating costs?
A single train with a single crew can transport more people in a day when travelling at higher speed.
This is running costs. The capital costs are irrelevant.
I’ll express my last bit of disagreement with your reasoning and then I’ll probably leave this argumentation, but I will read if you choose to respond. This is not what cost means, you are basically saying that your gut tells you it should be cheaper without any supportive arguments. If e.g. the train requires more energy to run faster, that alone could make it more costly, even if it has a higher capacity. Since neither one of us seems to have idea of the actual costs of running trains, I don’t think we’ll get anywhere with this!
Speak for yourself. I’m not pulling this out of my arse, I’m telling you things I just happen to know.
I just want to see what happens when a bullet train hits a moose.
Fuck i hate train
mission
From my experience, environmentalists don’t like large construction projects of any kind.
Edit: This comment is based on growing up with environmentalist parents who strongly dislike HS2.
Funny, as I’m a staunch environmentalist, and I’m fine with large projects if they have a few things:
- a purpose that serves society (and not just shareholders)
- a plan for mitigating environmental impacts (e.g., and environmental impact assessment --> environmental management plans)
- A compensation and offsetting plan for impacts that can’t be mitigated
- A plan for closure and reclamation
It depends on the kind. There are groups that would prefer to see human presence reduced to a speck so nature can thrive. There are groups that somehow care for one single bog or meadow but fail to see the bigger picture. There are also those that simply want to protect everything and do support large projects provided they fulfill a lot of regulations. There are also people such as myself who have given themselves to Realpolitik: Local environmentalism is pointless if global protection fails (some drama added for effect)
There are groups that somehow care for one single bog or meadow but fail to see the bigger picture
This is mainly what I was thinking about. People care a lot more about things local to them, rather than a railway which probably won’t have any nearby stations.
