Developed high speed rail since 2008 in China vs the US:
The silver lining of autocracy.
Why would a democratically elected leader plan for the long term if their sucessors, possibly from an opposition party, can claim credit for it.
In a dictatorship, they can plan for the long term, since they know they will be in power.
Also, the hyper-individualism in western countries doesn’t make “working together” as a country easier. Just look at the anti-maskers and anti-vax people lol
And also, the big population in China would never allow for a “car culture” in the firsr place, since there just isn’t room for that many cars, public transit is a must for a densely populated country.
the hyper-individualism in western countries doesn’t make “working together” as a country easier
I’d be careful with overgeneralizing that. Even though Latin American cultures also push for individualism to some extent, we do have tight-nit communities regardless because of the unified cultures that we have.
And also, the big population in China would never allow for a “car culture” in the firsr place, since there just isn’t room for that many cars, public transit is a must for a densely populated country.
I’ve been to China plenty of times, I promise the car culture is alive and well.
Eh, parking costs is a huge problem.
Its probably the reason why my parents never got a car when they were in China.
Its the same in NYC tbh. I mean, brooklyn, maybe, but if you wanna go to Chinatown in Manhattan, yea… good luck finding parking. Its not even that “Public Transit is good” (NYC subway is filthy compared to China’s subway, and also there’s no safety barriers in NYC, feels sketchy to wait for a train/subway because you get the feeling like some racist is about to push you 😕), since missing a scheduled subway/bus is gonna make you like 30 minutes late. Its just that having a car is so inconvienient in a crowded city, so much so that even the terrible public transit system is better than having a car.
Now in philly, there is street parking, and malls with parking lots… so… yea we got 2 cars in the family… 🤷♂️
We had nice things before.
Got a not potato copy? Or context?
Extent of railway development from 1860 through 1870 to 1890
the story of streetcars in the US is similarly depressing; in the 1900s most large cities had trolly systems.
the automobile companies fixed that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
Gah, America as an empire is past its prime. Look what we had!!!
And also, the big population in China would never allow for a “car culture” in the firsr place, since there just isn’t room for that many cars, public transit is a must for a densely populated country.
I’ve been to China as part of a company visit. They took us everywhere by car. Even what I would consider walking distance.
I did not see mass transit once.
That’s because you were visiting. When I was in China (as a citizen), I always had to take public transit if I want to go anywhere. My mom had to take public transit to work. Parking costs wete high, because there’s no street parking like in the US. (This was in Guangzhou btw) Now in the US, they just drive, because free street-parking is everywhere.
As a visitor, you’d of couse visit places by car.
part of a company visit.
Well that’s why… they don’t want ya’ll getting lost and your group split up.
I did not see mass transit once.
Lol where did you go? Some rural area?
Shenzen.
Okay, so I’ve never been to Shenzhen (or at least I don’t remember ever going there), but I just looked it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenzhen_Metro
If you went there like… before 2010 or something, pehaps you wouldn’t see much of that, because they were kinda still building it.
The subways are all underground, so you probably didn’t notice them unless you went looking for them, it’s not like the US where some parts of the subway are above-ground, and others are underground. I have no idea how you didn’t see any of the busses tho… perhaps you didn’t pay attention to your surroundings… 😅
TLDR: Public transit exists, you either went there like a long time ago before they got built, or just didn’t pay enough attention.
Yeah, I don’t doubt it exists and probably is well used by the people living there. Just wanted to address the part of the comment saying “China would never allow for a “car culture” in the firsr place” because there sure was a car culture. It felt like an American city.
I’m also aware that Shenzen is different from the rest of China, and, well, that the rest of China is different from the other rest of China.
“China has good railways because China bad” is one hell of a bad take.
China isn’t an autocracy any more than the US is, getting to vote which party gets to erode your rights and enact genocide on your behalf isn’t democracy
Xi Jinping’s third term is literally autocracy. President Cheeto would kill for that much power.
America as fucked up as we, are can bash our president and resist his power grabs as much as our oligarchy allows.
In China, you can’t even post a whinnie the pooh cartoon because making an autocratic dictator look bad can’t fly.
China doesn’t have rapid shifts in infrastructure because China bad, it’s because China has an autocratic dictatorship which allows for massive investment of resources without argument.
The US has massive investment of resources without argument too when it comes to the military industrial complex or to rescuing banks that have committed fraud, or to genocide Palestinians. The fact that it doesn’t do so with basic infrastructure is because the oligarchs in the US don’t want that, not because of a lack of oligarchs in power. They make it theatrical in congress, but look at the defense budged and the speed with which they approve multi-billion expenses that go into bombing kids in the middle east, suddenly the American democracy works expediently.
People talk about it and complain. there was and is debate on all those topics. You have lost in all the topics you are talking about, but it was fair and square.
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A democracy would be voting for a party promising not to erode your rights and getting your rights not eroded. That’s not what you get in the ol’ US of A, anywhere in the west for that master
Yeah that’s what happens when all your manufacturing is outsourced there. China is insanely insanely rich now
Still not as rich as the USA.
China’s GDP is 17.79 trillion dollars compared to the USA’s 27,36 trillion.
There’s plenty of money to invest in public infrastructure, but no one wants to do it.Yeah, just to add, per capita the difference is even starker. The low population density in the US makes it extremely costly to build a high-speed railway from east to west coast, but there is no good reason why there is no railway between LA-Bay Area-Sacremento, and a high-speed rail connection along the East Coast is a no brainer.
USA is very wealthy. It’s always a choice what to invest in.
For anyone who really likes driving:
More public transport = less people driving = less traffic = win-win situation for everyone
Fully agree and the US public transportation system is fucking pathetic.
What is “the US public transportation system”?
some cities have amtrak and it’s expensive. there’s also the private public transit system of greyhound, megabus, and the chinatown express network
Wouldn’t it be nice if this was people attitude and not “WHY SHOULD I BE PAYING TAXES FOR STUFF THAT I DONT USE”.
Why shouldn’t people say that? We have a long list of other examples of bad transport investments, transport projects that cost for more than they will benefit society and so on. Show that this investment isn’t a waste of money and I might be interested, but all I see is people who see transit as a way to shovel money their union and consultant donors. Clean up the our side of politics first.
“WHY SHOULD I BE PAYING TAXES FOR STUFF THAT I DONT USE”.
I’m on a citizen’s advisory committee for a county’s planning and development board… this can be answered rather easily in a way most posing the question haven’t even considered. Approach the person like this: “So, you’ll never use this thing, you like driving, but I’ll bet you don’t like traffic… every single solitary person riding on that new bus/light rail line, cycling on those new bike lanes, and walking on those new sidewalks is another car you’re not going to be stuck behind in traffic. You personally come out ahead in this as well!”
Usually, they’ve never considered that traffic calming and alternative transport modes actually IS infrastructure from which motorists benefit. It’s true that private vehicles aren’t efficient as a means of mass transit, but they are convenient… it’s the convenience factor where you can get car-brained folks to have a change of heart. The more you can emphasize that these improvements to other modes can make driving even slightly more convenient, the more they’ll get on board with spending on them. Remember, these folks are already used to telling each other “I don’t mind all the construction, that extra lane on that highway is needed.” Half the time, this line of reasoning gets them on board or, at the very least, to stop outright opposing improvements.
America, the land of “i got mine”
I watched a few episodes of that recent show “Paradise,” and as soon as I saw that they chose to make their giant bunker inside a mountain a fucking suburb with cars as the main form of transportation, I was like “fuck this…”
Then I remembered what time line we were on, and of course that’s exactly something that the US government would do.
Could fit several times more people by building vertically, but instead fill it up with one-family homes with a quarter-acre backyard and swimming pool. Sounds about right.
Sorry, best we can do is shitty robotaxis and electric cars that lock you inside when they explode.
it’s taken a few decades but seattle finally has really good light rail. every 10 minutes. you can get from the airport to the other side of the city for $4. it’s not perfect, and doesn’t go everywhere, but holy hell is it a giant upgrade for living in town.
Mmmmm. Grew up in Seattle, and finally having light rail is, of course, better than not having it.
But I’ve also lived in San Francisco, and I’m often frustrated by the unreliability and mismanagement of Seattle’s system. Meltdown days seem about as common as non-meltdown days.
fo sho if you’re going to compare it to bart, which is like, 50 years of concerted civil engineering to the last two decades here in Seattle, it’s gonna fall short. Bart’s an impressive outlier in commitment to the problem.
BART was pretty impressive too, but I was mostly thinking of San Francisco’s Municipal Railway (Muni). It’s about 110 years old, and ran eight routes, cable car and light rail, when I lived there in the '00s (they’ve added a few routes since then). I didn’t have a car, and Muni took me everywhere inside the city, pretty reliably. Sure, you could count on a meltdown of the system every month or two, but Sound Transit is only 15 years old, too young to be as rickety and unreliable as it is. And it still flabbergasts me that no heads rolled over the bridge fiasco for the 2-line.
Not trying to be argumentative. Big fan of public transit. I live in Seattle and don’t own a car. Sound Transit needs to be better, is all.
San Francisco’s Municipal Railway
muni is hella awesome too, it’s a great example of how not kneecapping things in the early 1900s changes the equation.
I wish ST was better, but I have limited expectations moving here from a red state.
Reminder that transit will never take off unless there are written and unwritten rules of public decorum, and they are enforced. I live in New York and take the subway every day. There are obvious pros to doing so, which is why I do it, but you would have a hard time selling my experience to people not used to it. I regularly have to deal with shit you should never have to.
I’ve been to a bunch of places and probably taken a dozen different subways/metros, they are all way better behaved than here. East Asia is not even in the same ball park.
Who you vote for matters. Right not everyone votes for the democrats who want it this way and so that is what you get. You need to find/make a choice that cares about transit and vote for them. Good luck.
I still want self driving cars
Safe and reliable self driving cars, affordable and accessible high speed public transit, a smart grid that can handle a nationwide shift to renewables… I want so many things. But my expectations have never been lower for what we’ll actually get.
I mean I can want two things.
Not having to drive myself to the hospital in a minor emergency where I’m alone would be nice, but even the friends and family discount at the local ambulance company is too expensive.
Maybe, you know, get universal healthcare instead of people relying on self driving cars for their emergency trips to the hospital?
Lmao never saw that, it’s great
But I think the solution to that is more accessible health care, not self driving cars
in my country during the day, you dont need to check schedules.
but then public transit is slow, uncomfortable and expensive.
they just made it frequent and to cover a big area because most of us cant afford cars but they still need us to get to work.
The US had voted against having this
During rush hour my city’s transit comes every 15 minutes, 7.5 minutes on the shared line. I only used it for commuting. On the weekend I saw the train leaving and didn’t worry but had to wait a while 30 minutes. Which sucked.
A train/bus every 30 minutes is fine for work - most people can plan their work day around that, so long as the schedule is reasonably consistent. However when going doing anything else there is too much risk that you will have to wait 29 minutes when you finish whatever it was you came to do and that is not acceptable to most people.
you see, if the City does that then it’s the city’s responsibility to maintain, both the infrastructure for transportation and the transportation itself. With cars, they only do infrastructure
car infrastructure is more expensive than public transportation
Sure, but you need some of that car infrastructure for trash collection, deliveries and such. In small towns that double duties for everything at no extra cost. Until you have a good network investments in public transit are bad as so few will ride that it isn’t worth having at all - then suddenly you have a good network and people start riding.
Please Colorado ffs connect our major cities.
If Colorado expands public transit, it would be too OP. /j
Maybe if they did then they’d actually remember there is more to Colorado than just Denver area, sincerely, someone who lives an hour and half south of Pueblo.
