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Comment by drunner | Hacker News Reader

Wait till you hear about how we fund roads and how much it costs to drive on most of them, lol.

That's a fallacious argument because roads are the universal, basic transportation infrastructure. You cannot have no roads. Your point has some relevance regarding motorways, which are not free in every countries and may be considered part of the universal road network, too. So mentioning the cost of roads is trying to deflect via "whataboutism" without addressing the point.

One can have a roadnetwork as primary means of transport .. or a railnetwork. With roads mainly for the last mile.

Where society here and now should invest, what direction to go from from here, is totally up to us. What makes the most sense - preferably in the long run.

Cars are pretty shitty for long distances. Rubber tyres wear down the road and create unhealthy dust, way more friction and noise than metalwheel on rail. And they can be directly powered with electricity.

Not carry a heavy battery around and waste energy with charging and discharging.

Or well, have the noise and dirt of combustion engines.

Those are all pretty strong arguments to invest at least equally into a well functioning train network.

Every car that can be replaced with a train (in the simple often case of a person riding the train not moving his vehicel for himself) is a net profit for society. Cleaner air. Less or allmost no pollution.

(The electric trains here next to my home are really silent and still fast)

Note that I did not claim that we shouldn't invest in train networks. I questioned the use of taxpayers' money to make train tickets extremely cheap or free when there is no affordability issue to begin with, both in itself and when compared to everything else that public money could be spent on, and the overall situation in many European countries.

Personally I think this is having our priorities very wrong.

(I also think that rail as a primary mean of transport over roads is totally unrealistic and impractical, but that another issue)

The whole idea of making train tickets extremly cheap is to make it "competitive" to cars. Trains are already cheaper to use than cars for a lot of people. But many people already own a car and have to pay the fixed costs per month anyway. Insurance, taxes, depreciation

If they plan a trip, the don't calculate the whole cost of ownershipt, they calculate the distance and how much fuel they need (a.k.a. flexible costs).

An extremely cheap ticket makes the car owners stop using their cars so much. This is not just a benefit for the abstact idea of "environment", but also a direct benefit for the population. Less cars means less noise pollution, less air pollution and more space on the roads. That way people, who actually need a car, van or truck to get around and do their work, benefit.

You can definitely have no publicly owned or maintained roads though. There are none in my area of town and $0 tax/public funding. It's private property all the way down. The only reason why public roads look like barely competed against monopolies is that you can't compete with "free" (at the point of use), which creates the illusion that the public element of roads are more crucial than they are. But if you just shit-can all the public transport private transport will emerge organically.

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