The Green Leap Forward

[GloryofGreece]

It wouldn't suck like Amtrack because they'd own their own rails. Amtrack sucks because they borrow the rails from freight, and are always second in line to use those tracks to freight.

Actually riding in Amtrack is not that bad, but obviously not fast either.

It's possible to make train travel really fucking nice if we wanted to do that.

Commuter trains are fucking horrible because they are packed in with people. That's not really what happens on long distance trains.


My concern with high-speed rail is the safety. We are headed into a kind of dark age with diminished capabilities. Shit we could have done in the 1980s is not necessarily what we can do now, even if we have the technological know-how. A dark age is not really about the knowledge being ultimately lost, but that the social and economic structures are unable to support it.

Can you elaborate some? Specifically what you men by "unable to support it" compared to the 1980s?

[MilSpecs]

We consider everything but the most logical place to start: a real country-wide mass transit system. Besides the huge energy savings and destruction of unwanted foreign entanglements, we'd also have a better quality of life, much expanded job markets, lots of jobs during construction and afterwards for maintenance, more efficient movement of goods, a lower death and disability rate, and we'd even have a more cohesive society. Pretty much nothing else is as much of a win-win for the country as a whole.

We have that, it's called an interstate highway system.

Not a mass transit system. Also inefficient, dangerous, spews pollutants, uncomfortable, and ugly. Are we incapable of achieving what Switzerland achieved?

[DBTrek]

We consider everything but the most logical place to start: a real country-wide mass transit system. Besides the huge energy savings and destruction of unwanted foreign entanglements, we'd also have a better quality of life, much expanded job markets, lots of jobs during construction and afterwards for maintenance, more efficient movement of goods, a lower death and disability rate, and we'd even have a more cohesive society. Pretty much nothing else is as much of a win-win for the country as a whole.

We have that, it's called an interstate highway system.

Not a mass transit system. Also inefficient, dangerous, spews pollutants, uncomfortable, and ugly. Are we incapable of achieving what Switzerland achieved?

Why are people so easily taken in by the "A tiny ass country with a fraction of our population does 'X', shouldn't we do it to?!?!" argument? Do you guys simply never stop and consider what you're asking, or are you actually unaware of the differences between adopting mass transit in a nation 1/10th the size of Clifornia vs across the entire USA?


California is almost 10 times bigger than Switzerland, it covers 404'653 square kilometers (156'297 sq miles).

[C-Mag]

Doing what's right for the people and the environment will be a lot easier after we pass Green Communism, get rid of the electoral college and get rid of guns.

Then we too can have elections with leaders getting elected with 120% of the vote.

[MilSpecs]

We consider everything but the most logical place to start: a real country-wide mass transit system. Besides the huge energy savings and destruction of unwanted foreign entanglements, we'd also have a better quality of life, much expanded job markets, lots of jobs during construction and afterwards for maintenance, more efficient movement of goods, a lower death and disability rate, and we'd even have a more cohesive society. Pretty much nothing else is as much of a win-win for the country as a whole.

We had that... 100 years ago, "envy of the world", all the major northern cities had grand architecture train stations, cities had trolley systems...

...and we gave it all up, the car companies pushed the "freedom" of everyone having their own vehicle(s), driving down the highway in style in a sleek finned automobile smoking your totally safe non cancerous cigarette with a picnic basket in the back seat... most of those grand train stations got torn down or abandoned...

And now all we gave left is some local bus lines, Greyhound, and Amtrak.

Thing is, your not gonna get people to accept $trillions in debt for "super-Amtrak" without a far better sales pitch than "it'll help the environment, but suck as bad as Amtrak and cost $trillions".

All true. We need a light rail system, clean, comfortable, and convenient. Small buses or trolleys could take people from their transit stops to their neighborhoods.

[MilSpecs]

We have that, it's called an interstate highway system.

Not a mass transit system. Also inefficient, dangerous, spews pollutants, uncomfortable, and ugly. Are we incapable of achieving what Switzerland achieved?

Why are people so easily taken in by the "A tiny ass country with a fraction of our population does 'X', shouldn't we do it to?!?!" argument? Do you guys simply never stop and consider what you're asking, or are you actually unaware of the differences between adopting mass transit in a nation 1/10th the size of Clifornia vs across the entire USA?


California is almost 10 times bigger than Switzerland, it covers 404'653 square kilometers (156'297 sq miles).

Does this country not have ten times the resources? Why are you so easily taken in by "a tiny ass country with a fraction of our population does X so we clearly can't"? We can do anything we have the will to do. I place no limit on our ability to accomplish great things.

[PartyOf5]

We have that, it's called an interstate highway system.

Not a mass transit system. Also inefficient, dangerous, spews pollutants, uncomfortable, and ugly. Are we incapable of achieving what Switzerland achieved?

Explain how the interstate is inefficient.

[DBTrek]

Mass transit is one of the oldest Democrat boondoggles around. Projects always come with a astronomical cost, always run over budget, and do not always reach completion. As soon as mass transit funding passes the politicians start jostling, favor-trading, and accepting bribes to determine which neighborhoods get stops, whose properties will increase in value sue to being on the rail line, and which neighborhoods simply eat shit by having no stops but have to deal with nearby railway traffic.

You can see this boondoggle play out over,and over, and over again anywhere Democrats start clamoring for "mass transit".

Furthermore, America already has the largest rail network in the world, by far. It doesn't deliver all the same-old-tired-benefits that progressives promise every time they're getting ready to fleece the public once again.

AMERICA has by far the largest rail network in the world, with more than twice as much track as China. But it lags far behind other first-world countries in ridership. Instead of passengers, most of America's massive rail network is used to carry freight. Why don't Americans ride trains?

Rail ridership is usually measured in passenger-kilometres—one passenger-kilometre represents one passenger travelling one kilometre. One 1,000-person train travelling 1,000 kilometres would on its own account for a million passenger-kilometres. Yet American railroads accounted for just 17.2 billion passenger-kilometres in 2010, according to Amtrak, America's government-backed passenger rail corporation. In the European Union, railways accounted for nearly 400 billion, according to International Union of Railways data. When you adjust for population, the disparity is even more shocking: per capita, the Japanese, the Swiss, the French, the Danes, the Russians, the Austrians, the Ukrainians, the Belarussians and the Belgians all accounted for more than 1,000 passenger-kilometres by rail in 2011; Americans accounted for 80. Amtrak carries 31m passengers per year. Mozambique's railways carried 108m passengers in 2011.

https://www.economist.com/the-economist ... ide-trains

More rail than anywhere on earth, we don't use it for transportation. "Mass transit", like "carbon tax", is just a successful scam Democrats have discovered for duping low-info, non-citical-thinking plebs, into forking over more money.

[DBTrek]

Does this country not have ten times the resources? Why are you so easily taken in by "a tiny ass country with a fraction of our population does X so we clearly can't"? We can do anything we have the will to do. I place no limit on our ability to accomplish great things.

California isn't the country, Mil. California is one state, which is ten times as large as Switzerland. Nice to see a senior like yourself adopting the dim-witted argumentation style of socialists in their 20's.

"That's not feasible, economically viable, or an efficient solution to the problem"
"Yeah . . . well . . . I PLACE NO LIMIT ON OUR ABILITY TO ACCOMPLISH GREAT THINGS!"

What does accomplishing great things have to do with your favored party soaking the public for more infrastructure we don't use, but will be taxed on forever?

[Speaker to Animals]

It wouldn't suck like Amtrack because they'd own their own rails. Amtrack sucks because they borrow the rails from freight, and are always second in line to use those tracks to freight.

Actually riding in Amtrack is not that bad, but obviously not fast either.

It's possible to make train travel really fucking nice if we wanted to do that.

Commuter trains are fucking horrible because they are packed in with people. That's not really what happens on long distance trains.


My concern with high-speed rail is the safety. We are headed into a kind of dark age with diminished capabilities. Shit we could have done in the 1980s is not necessarily what we can do now, even if we have the technological know-how. A dark age is not really about the knowledge being ultimately lost, but that the social and economic structures are unable to support it.

Can you elaborate some? Specifically what you men by "unable to support it" compared to the 1980s?

We have lower human capital now, and we focus on shit that has nothing to do with making better and safer infrastructure. That architectural group in South Florida were more interested in having more women engineers than actually safely building a bridge, and the bridge fell on commuters. Google is more interested in having purple-haired feminist transgenders than having the best engineers, so their innovation has greatly diminished in just a decade. Then you have mass migration from nonwhite nations where as a group you are not going to find as many people qualified to actually become engineers and scientists. If you look at South Africa, the people who inherited the high-tech cities are not the people who built those cities or created that technology, and it's now all falling apart.

There are several reasons for the dark age. The two big ones are mass migration into the western world by nonwhites coupled with anti-white policies suppressing the white reproductive rates, and the adoption of cultural marxism by corporations and governments.

We simply no longer value competency more than anything else, and we no longer have as competent a population anyway.

And if you consider the effect of these anti-white and anti-male hiring policies have on the human capital of a corporation, it's really staggering. For every affirmative action hire they get, they not only increase incompetency, they reduce the institutional knowledge as competent people retire.