Comment by llbbdd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by llbbdd | Hacker News Reader

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I didn't bring up money except to call out that profitability of either trains or cars is irrelevant to actual utility and comfort. Obviously they both cost money and you can subsidize either one.

I'm also not concerned with or pretending that alternative modes of transport are full replacements of cars; basic comparison of the modes obviates that.

I also don't own a car, and if I did I wouldn't consider it precious, or be worried about anybody taking it away. Public mass transit advocates always go there though, it's a pretty common ad-hominem-adjacent implication. Cars are just generally a better experience. They go from A to B, and they don't have other people on them. Those factors make them obviously desirable.

If somebody comes up with a teleporter I can install at home I'll use that instead. Maybe then I'd consider that precious, or even be in love with it. It would save me a lot of time.

All of that aside my main point is to push back against the idea that more trains solve any problems with US transit, especially looking forward even a little into the future. They're complicated and time consuming to build out additional infrastructure for compared to an airport, and solve a transit gap between self-driving vehicles and air travel that will likely increasingly narrow.

> I wouldn't consider it precious, or be worried about anybody taking it away. Public mass transit advocates always go there though, it's a pretty common ad-hominem-adjacent implication.

Aka your pure fantasy that you present as fact. Of course there might be idiots who may claim to "seize the means of private transportation" or something like that, but let's not pretend it's a serious argument.

> Cars are just generally a better experience. They go from A to B, and they don't have other people on them. Those factors make them obviously desirable.

Can't see anyone arguing against that.

> All of that aside my main point is to push back against the idea that more trains solve any problems with US transit, especially looking forward even a little into the future.

Strange then that Northeastern Corridor whose validity you immediately called into question, keeps increasing ridership.

> solve a transit gap between self-driving vehicles and air travel that will likely increasingly narrow.

Of course they don't for many obvious reasons that start with words like "capacity" and "throughput".

It's also funny and ironic that you imagine the fantasy argument of "we'll take your cars away in favor of public transportation" and then literally arguing for taking away any and all alternative modes of transport except cars, and especially except cars owned by private companies (I do love the coming era of arbitrary surge pricing at any convenient time).

> Aka your pure fantasy that you present as fact. Of course there might be idiots who may claim to "seize the means of private transportation" or something like that, but let's not pretend it's a serious argument.

I realize I could have phrased it better, but I was not talking about anybody seizing the means of private transportation. I was talking about train fetishists cheekily implying that people love their precious cars, which you did.

I also haven't argued that trains don't carry more people at once, I've just said that they suck in every other way. I also haven't argued to take away anything. Trains already exist almost everywhere they make sense to exist, which is apparently to funnel people back and forth in Japan and a couple of northeast US states on entirely private rail. It's honestly hard to find anything in your reply that intentionally or otherwise is actually responding to anything I said.

I've responded, but you decided to dismiss everything.

It's a fascinating psychological and sociological question: why Americans think that the only possible state of things is the current one as it exists in the US, and why they are completely incapable of imagining any ither possible solutions.

E.g. "Trains already exist almost everywhere they make sense to exist, which is apparently to funnel people back and forth in Japan and a couple of northeast US states".

Yup, country the size of US eastern seaboard with comparable population only needs to "funnel back and forth". And Northeast Corridor just apparently appeared out of nowhere because it somehow was needed exactly there, and not anywhere else in the US, and also "just to funnel people back and forth".

Unlike cars. Americans don't need any other forms of transportation because they are physically incapable of imagining other forms despite success cases existing even in the US, and proven to work even in the shittiest third-world countries.

It's not unlike talking to a brick wall.

Adieu.

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