Post
A hypothesis about US infrastructure/politics:
Amtrak continues to exist for the same reason the Democratic Party exists—to make the alternatives (respectively: driving/flying, the Republican Party) look reasonable.
(If American governance was sensible, the feds would have dropped about $1Tn on building out a modern, high speed, electrified, grade-separated network no later than 1980 and would now be in a whose-trains-are-faster-and-more-punctual race with China.)
@cstross I believe that this nation, before the decade is out, should dedicate itself to conveying a man via land to Pittsburgh in comfort, and returning him safely to civilization.
@cstross Amtrak never addressed the true weakness of rail in the USA, that it is a mishmash of private lines who don't really like interoperability. There is no national rail grid, and Amtrak is forced to travel on rail that they don't own.
@cstross I love this idea, but “If American governance was sensible” is a sci fi premise on par with if-the-Romans-had-internal-combustion; the technological landscape of such a world could easily be past mere trans-continental rail networks.
@cstross The Powers That Be don't want us to have easy access to affordable transportation. Besides, the oil and auto lobbies have worked HARD to keep us from enjoying train travel without laying out more than we earn in a week.
@Oma_Trisha_F Giving transport tech to the peasants always ends with them becoming restless and moving around. Which makes it *really hard* to pin them down and force them to work for peanuts.
True.
Shit, we don't even have county transportation here, much less a bus service. Uber charges an exorbitant fuel surcharge if they have to drive 23 miles from the nearest (small) city. If you don't have a car out here in the rural South, you're fucked. Groceries cost more, and options are limited. People who tell us we need to boycott companies like WalMart and Amazon have no idea how hard that can be for those with mobility issues or no transportation.
@Oma_Trisha_F Meanwhile I live 500 metres or so from the milestone marking the heart of the capital city I live in, with the second-best public transport service in the UK (per studies), in a nation with 70M people crammed into half the area of Oregon. And we *still* have public transport black spots because of fuckwitted privatization initiatives from the 1960s-80s backed by politicians who had shares in road construction companies. It is to weep.
@cstross That's nothing short of fucking absurd. Of course, it's also part of the plan.
@cstross President Eisenhower had an idea that was simple, elegant, and wrong.
His experience of WWII informed him that there needed to be better capacity to transport military stuff across the US mainland. There were two reasonable ways to go about it - massive investment in rail or massive investment in interstate highways.
He chose the latter. A system of highways was better than rails in case of a massive enemy bombing campaign, right?
Except no. The USA was not Germany, who's gonna be
@isaackuo No: Eisenhower's lesson was informed by the 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy which ran coast-to-coast and averaged 5mph, which then-Major Eisenhower was assigned to as an observer: he was already a logistics guy.
@cstross Thanks for that correction on when Eisenhower came to this realization, but still - the conclusion was still simple, elegant, and wrong.
@cstross bombing the heck out of the USA?
And also, even with the increased vulnerability of rails, rail transport still more than makes up for it by being leaps and bounds more efficient than truck transport.
Interstate highways instead of rail for military logistics. Simple, elegant, and wrong.
@cstross I muttered an expletive when I read this, because it makes so so much sense and also I hate it.
@cstross There's probably a timeline where the US did spend heavily on a modern rail network … but by 2025, the curse of "adopted too soon" has struck, and stuff that looked state-of-the-art when it was conceived now looks superannuated.
It's moot, of course, given that the oil and car industries have weaponized the myth of American rugged individualism, so that only weaklings and Europeans would even think of taking public transport.
@angusm @cstross People do take intercity buses and trains in the Northeastern United States where population density makes them practical. But you have to remember how vast and empty North America is. Assuming no stops, a train going 250 kph would take 18 hours to go from New York to Los Angeles. Almost anyone would fly instead under those circumstances.
@cstross you don’t even need to choose between trains and cars! America is truly the land of opportunity!
@cstross Amtrak has one more or less usable route -- the Northeast Corridor, from DC through New York City to Boston -- where ticket prices often exceed airfare because it's just a better experience. (Same time door-to-door, figuring in airport security and ground transport to the airports, even though it runs at the speeds of a European intercity local for most of the route.)
Perhaps not coincidentally, this route gets used by a lot of Congress members and high-rank bureaucrats.
@rst I have ridden the Acela. It's got comfortable seats and leg room, but it's sluggish even by British inter-city standards, never mind France. IIRC it peaked at 125mph for about ten minutes, but kept slowing down for shared tracks passing through small towns.
@cstross A lot of the right-of-way is shared with suburban commuter rail, and limited to its speeds -- and speed limits on the rest are set by track conditions (aside from the two short stretches where it can go full-speed; the "regional" trains on the same tracks take longer only because they make more stops). There are several stretches parallel to highways where it reliably goes slower than the cars.
@cstross I had a period where I camped on railfan forums where lamenting our inability to get high speed rail was a common post.
Their opinion is that our Federal Rail Administration's safety policies were not in line with the safety policies of countries that managed widely deployed high-speed rail. Our requirements were too heavy and prioritized passenger survivability far higher. Also, that we weren't hard enough on *cargo* trains for things like Automated Train Stop systems.
@cstross
There MUST be some kind of "pandemic" at global scale among politicians.😒 #mpd (madpoliticiandesease)
In germany the trainsystem got worse + worse the last decades. Up to something like, a local trainline had a very bad rate of running late very often. So it was decided to - not improve but to give up providing that tranconnection alltogether.
Btw. it's nowadays not uncommon train(connection)s are slowed down because of "traffic jams" (1 track for passengertrains + freighttrains). Wtf!
@cstross Alas, the Democratic party is failing to keep the distance from the Republicans that makes that possible.
IMHO, that's because of the structures of both US and Canadian elections. Someone else will have to tell me if that applies to the UK and EU. https://leaflessca.wordpress.com/2024/12/15/the-elephant-in-the-roomenforced-corruption/
@cstross Charlie, you're drunk. Go home.
@jbayes Stone-cold sober, unfortunately. You've got a problem with straw man opponents being kept on life support by the real villains, just to "prove" that there's an opposition.
I look at the likes of Kat Abugazaleh (Illinois) and Katie Porter (California), and they seem to be quite strong counterexamples contradicting that claim. Straw men, being funded by the rich, they definitely are not.
@cstross 3 words- car industry lobbyists
@cstross Yes please.
@cstross I once suggested to one of my students in Pennsylvania who was complaining about waiting 7 hours for his train to arrive that he should have just caught the next train instead. He informed me that there was only one (passenger) train a day.
That's certainly why the bus service in my city exists. "See, we have transit! And nobody uses it! So let's not bother spending any more on it!"
Meanwhile the schedules are such that, even in areas it serves, you can't realistically get to where you need to go, and back from there, in the time you have available.
We have that in parts of England, too: there is a bus into the nearest town so people can go shopping, once per day; The bus that does the return journey leaves the town twenty minutes before the outward bus arrives. But "Hey, they have a bus service, what are they complaining about?". 🤬
@cstross If they were serious about passenger rail at all, they'd enforce the rule that passenger trains have priority over freight traffic, to start with.
@cstross FYI, "Democrat Party" is a slur used primarily by the Republican Party.
@dresstokilt Kerrping up with every foreign nation's weird political shibboleths is exhausting, y'know?
(Meanwhile, here in the UK even members of the Conservative party call themselves Tories.)
...and a substantial proportion of the UK population call them "scum", "Bastards", or possibly both. 3:O)>
@dresstokilt @cstross he did say the Republican party looks reasonable when compared to Democrats. I don't agree, but his usage of the slur is consistent.
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