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How are you pro-bike and anti-bike lane??? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by to c/fuckcars@lemmy.world
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That's like saying "I'm pro-life and anti-gun control".

Oh. Wait.

Edit: Guy confirmed that he is, indeed, pro-life and anti-gun control.

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[–] 5 points 1 year ago* (7 children)

It’s also funny to hear Basel being called a small city

That’s kind of amusing to me as I was recently in an online debate about whether the state of New Hampshire could support passenger rail. It’s a rural state but the population centers you’d connect aren’t all the much smaller.

For posterity: yes it’s worthwhile. Normally (especially in the US) you’d think the population is too small, but

  • the track exists and is still in use
  • three biggest population centers in a straight line and fairly close
  • it’s the same track served by a Boston commuter line
  • the southern part of New Hampshire has a large population of people who work in Boston.

So MBTA could extend one of their lines, on existing track to capture thousands of additional car commuters literally ten miles to the border. And New Hampshire could get useful rail service by paying them to go an extra 70 miles. Zero infrastructure cost and NH doesn’t even have to figure out how to run a railroad

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The town I grew up in has approx. 4000 inhabitants. It is served by a railway station with 4 trains per hour (one per direction every 30min), all day, from 05:00 to 24:00. On top of that it has four bus lines with frequencies between 30 and 10 minutes. It lies next to a medium sized (for Switzerland) city of 55k inhabitants, which has much much more public transport, like 20+ trains an hour in 6 directions and dozens of bus lines.

    Just for comparison.

    A 55k community in the USA would probably be considered a very small town, I guess. Not worthy of even a single railway line.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    We do have our share of actual small towns, but in the sense of rail investments yes that’s way too small. All too many major cities still don’t have rail here.

    My town is 60k but we have two (soon to be three) stations and regular service by virtue of being a suburb of Boston. That’s a lot tougher of an argument for a rural state like New Hampshire, but they’ve been facilitating freight rail and preserving track so they’re in a good place. Most importantly this is an opportunity to take advantage of the “network effect” of just extending an exiting line rather than starting from scratch. All too much of the US can’t do that

    Bostons commuter rail network has really been expanding for the last couple decades and this would be a natural extension

    A related initiative has been to organize the region’s airports to take some of the air traffic off Boston. We already have commuter rail and Amtrak service south to Providence to help with that: not just to go there but to make it easier for more people to use that airport when they have to fly. Including Manchester New Hampshire Airport in Boston’s transit network would be a nice win.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    All your arguments might be invalid, because:

    Rails, even with overhead wire, may be cheaper to maintain than roads in that climate.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (3 children)

    I’m not sure what your point is. Are you arguing that Switzerland is cold, snowy and mountainous, or that New Hampshire is cold, snowy and mountainous?

    The maintenance cost is a particular blind spot in the US. Maintaining rail seems excessive, because we really haven’t done any in over a century and somehow think it must pay for itself. Maintaining roads is cheap because there’s always money to build a new one and cost is no object. It’s not a sustainable way of thinking.

    I had been hoping Detroit’s plight would open some eyes. Among the many problems that city had was maintenance. No one can afford to maintain infrastructure for 1,850,000 on a tax base of 630,000 and still shrinking. It’s a similar deal with our road system everywhere. We build for max population, assuming cars are the only possibility, without considering that people move and that other forms of transportation may be more scalable and maintainable

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    Yeah. We should increase surveillance on cars to block freedom 0f movement, and militarize roads for freedom.

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