ething about anytime but it doesn’t. Sure, it takes decades until

No politician seems to want to take on a job these days that takes longer than the 2 allowed presidentail terms

FWIW, while you're not incorrect about the build process part, this person specifically mentions the politics and paper process required just to get approval to start conducting land surveys and the like, so his point is valid too. Also fun at parties, cheers!

A huge part of the reason the planning takes effort is that you need community support. The train might be running near houses or have to demolish housing or community buildings. Similarly, flock cameras are community surveillance, and ought to require community buy-in, but that process doesn't happen.

My view is that this is because:

• A huge part of infrastructure is less about use and more about separating the rich from the poor. A car lane keeps the driver in a little bubble, away from the poors. A train doesn't, so the train doesn't get built.
• A bunch of flock cameras, however, do a great job of keeping tabs on the poors. In they go. Obviously the community is for this, they want to stop criminals right?

I've wondered how impactful it would be to pass a law allowing all interstates to also count as passenger train right-of-ways. Obviously there would have to be some engineering and modifications to turn a highway median into a train line but it would simplify the land rights probably.

That is part of the reason I guess, but large long car infrastructure projects are still much more likely to happen even if they take longer than that.

No it’s really not.

Flock is a massive evil. But there’s zero planning required. They're completely self contained, solar powered cameras. You can put them anywhere. Thats their entire selling point.

You do not need any new infrastructure whatsoever.

Got a stopsign? Strap a flock to it.

Street light? Flock camera.

Tree? Flock camera.

There are no land surveys to do. No finding a site. No dealing with property ownership issues. No construction. Nothing at all other than telling Flock “yeah sure strap a camera to this existing pole”.

A flock camera requires about as much planning as slapping a sticker onto a street sign. They’re not even remotely comparable to fucking trains lol.

The fascists weren't the ones trying to build high speed rail, the decorum folks were. In fact, elmo's entire role was to suck out budget/enthusiasm for the promised future, fail like he's best suited to do and say oh well, too late.

You're noticing a bit too well citizen....

And you’re right to point out the distinction but I’d mention another distinction that in the states a rail plan crosses multi state jurisdictions, zoning, needs, electorates… all that in a country where there are specific political mechanisms designed to make top down federal imposition difficult.

In other words, a data center, or a flock contract is easy to install. It only needs “corruption” aka approval in ONE location. It’s spread is implemented point by point, it’s not like a gas pipeline, fiber cable or any PHYSICAL infrastructure that must cross multiple borders.

A corridor railway, unlike individual cameras or server farms, needs sign off across multiple states plus multiple sectors of public and private land to get started. It is hard to get all those parties and locations to conform and adhere to a plan; all in a country expressly designed to prevent the fed from forcing it all.

That’s before construction gets ever considered. So compare that to installing a flock cam…

All the funding was eaten up by Muskolinis hyperloop project that didn't bear any fruit.
All according to plan, now they can sell more Teslas.

Do those freight trains need to stop inside city centers?

You are proving their point.

Adding more lanes increases the amount of traffic. It's not a fix for anything.

More lanes, more space, more people taking the route. It might seem counter-intuitive, but if you want to reduce traffic, you remove roads. Building viable alternatives to cars is the best way, fights pollution and congestion. People will use the trains, trams and buses, if good service exists.

It’s also been known that when laying track over large distances, a site of archeological importance has been discovered, this can delay the project for years whilst it’s examined.

Yeah, that's huge and it sucks on a local level, but making a functioning train network for the US would be something that would have to overhaul the entire logistical network for the whole country. Even if every local and state government was on board and all the citizens were five with it, that's still a massive undertaking.

It's one we should do, but it's still Herculean in scope

making a functioning train network for the US would be something that would have to overhaul the entire logistical network

We have a massive network of legacy rail to exploit. What has been talked about largely involves upgrading and retrofitting existing lines, building out new terminals and expanding old small ones. In particular, just increasing the frequency of service on neglected lines - the San Antonio to Austin route is notoriously neglected, despite being a prime candidate for cheap and easy improvement that would save millions of road hours for intercity transit and exurban commuters.

It’s one we should do, but it’s still Herculean in scope

On a national scale, it is Herculean. But at a thousand individual points, it is a very straightforward and doable job.

I mean... yeah. Trains have had a lot of arbitrary obstacles put in their place. And it goes without saying that Flock and AI datacenters can fuck right off.

But trains also are much, much more complicated projects. A flock camera needs like 4 square get of space next to the road that's already in the ROW, and data centers are built a single piece of land.

Trains, and especially high-speed trains require securing of land and grade separation/fencing that makes their installation very difficult from an engineering and property-ownership stance.

Roads can just be routed between property lines as much as possible because cars can make pretty sharp turns. High-speed trains have to cut properties in half, build off grade, and put up a fence.

Imagine you're a farmer and they put a trail line android your property. Now to get between the house and the barn that was 100 yards away you have to travel 2 miles down the track to the nearest crossing, so you've made a 200 yards round to 8 miles. Yeah, you'll get paid"fair market value" for the 50-ft wide strip of land their treasure from you, but with half your land cut off from the rest the damages are much higher.

You don't want that, so you sue to stop it. And so do thousands of other property owners in the same situation. And the business owners of the roasts that will be bypassed, cut off, or simply used less. And the cities and counties who now have their existing transportation infrastructure fucked.

It's a huge impact, and even if it's a net good, there's severe collateral damage and those imitated will fight to stop it.

The time to secure rail rights was 150 years ago. And that's what they did and why that's where pretty much where all the rails are.

Do what China does.

Buy out people's houses for the market rate, and give them a plot of land to build their new house on. Find land with market rates similar to the one you're seizing.

EZ

Iam new Lemmy user

Highways are not nearly as easy to construct as you make them out to be. Especially in metropolitan areas their (not so much) smaller possible radius is counteracted by much larger area requirements, gigantic interchange areas required, pollution and noise that is destroying land values in a wide corridor ... Also regarding pedestruan crossings, highways are no better than rail. They are actualy worse as crossings have to be much longer.

What you consider showstoppers for rail are consequences of countless recent highway projects, that were miraculously not impossible to construct.

It is BS that real estate can be routinely sacrificed for highway widening and even brand new highways but not for modern rail infrastructure.

this goes into more detail about the problem in a better way than I could

The rails we need for a real rail network are the long-haul rails, and those are much harder than highways.

Yeah, i10 is like 20 lanes forna few miles in Houston, but just a few miles out of town and it's 2 lanes wide for the next 200 miles to San Antonio where it gets a few more lanes, and is then 2 lanes for the next 500 miles to El Paso, then gets a bit wider, then is 2 lanes for 300 miles to Tuscon, and so on.

And along those 2-lane stretches the roads are very flexible in their placement. It's why they're not straight. They constantly turn left and right to avoid splitting properties, cities, etc in a way a train (especially a high-speed train) simply cannot. And they're built largely at grade. When there's a hill the road can follow the hill, wheras a train needs a tunnel, bridge, or trench.

Rail's requirements for flat, straight paths and the extreme braking distance of trains combined with their inability to turn independently or operate off track makes them a much more difficult project in terms of engineering, logistics, politics, and legal issues.

Outside of town is high speed rail also less of a headache to build. Sure, you need more tunnels and bridges but for example the LGVs in France have surprisingly high gradients, so they can follow the landscape better than many people believe.

I am not saying that HSR is easy to build I am merely saying that they are not such an existential challenge as US Americans make it out to be. Even developing countries manage to build them, highly developed ones manage it and everyone in between. The problem in the US is not that that the technology is so challenging. The problem is legislation that is extremely hostile towards such projects, creating overhead costs that are multiple times the entire project costs in other high cost countries. The problem is a lack of political will and the problem is especially ideology, the idea that rail infrastructure has to be profitable to be justifiable (road infrastructure interestingly is not having that requirement more often than not).

PS: "extreme breaking distance" and "inability to turn independently or operate off track" are not an issue at all, why would they be?

The braking distance and inability to turn is why greater physical barriers are required to separate rail. If a cow walks onto a road, the car drivers can stop or swerve. And even if they hit the cow, the entire network isn't shut down during the cleanup because people can drive around the wreck.

The inability to operate off track means the system is less flexible because it requires rail everywhere, and the rail spec has to match the train.

Cars operate better on nicer roads, but they're capable of driving on any pavement, on gravel, dirt, and more. A car has no issues transitioning from one type of road to another, can be more easily re-routed, and is just generally more adaptable.

Rail is great. It can move a lot at once between designated points, and as long as that's all you want to do and it's all working that's great. It works really well in specific circumstances that happen to match the needs of much of the world. But the thing with a lot of the US is that it wasn't really settled until there were air conditioners and cars, and so it was development with both in mind, and is very difficult to adapt rail to those developments. For rail to work in the South, the whole system from first mile to last must be solved at once because none of it works in isolation.

Houston tried. They put in a light rail system and it super duper sucks because you still have to drive to Houston, pay to park in a giant lot, pay to board the rail, then walk the last 3/4 mile in 110° heat or wait 20 minutes to pay to take a bus in 110° heat. The alternative is just to drive to your destination and pay to park in the garage for less money. And even that shitty system uses up half of Houston's sales tax.

The system needs commuter lines going into and out of the city, but those need the light rail. There also needs to be a way to get from your house to the commuter train. It's a 4-part system (first mile, commuter train, light rail, last mile) that ALL needs to be in place for any of it to make sense, and that's extremely difficult to implement.

you're ignoring the spirit of the post.

when the wealthy want something done, it gets done.

nothing you're talking about is outside the power of government.... do you want someone's land? then you just take it. nobody is going to put up a fuss for longer than a few months.

and when they do put up a fight, you crush them or pay them off.

we don't have anything good because nobody in power is interested.

"The braking distance and inability to turn is why greater physical barriers are required to separate rail."
That's nonsense. HSR does not require any extraordinary barriers. Nothing more than you commonly find at modern highways in Europe.

Your "inability to operate off track" argument still doesn't make any sense. I think you fundamentally do not understand how rail works. They don't need to be able to operate on roads and for pure transportation purposes, they can be moved across any freight rail track of the same gauge. The US is full of those and even where there is no network at all, units can be transported also by ship and even via road if need be. If there are reasons why a HSR can't be operated, well, it doesn't operate. Easy as that. Same as if an airport is blocked due to bad weather. My experience with HSR is that it operates much more reliable than aviation.

Houston lilght rail sucks because it is an inferior system in a city completely designed for the car, with a barebone light rail tapered on at the side. Singapore is a hot city too, yet it has a well working rail system. And much of China is also hot and humid with great working rail systems, HSR as well. I know there are a lot of excuses that the US can't have any of that because it is so big, so hot, so cold and what not. Those are excuses with countless real world examples proving that they are.

I find it rather bewildering how people don't seem to think that airports can't work because of the lack of transit, but with HSR stations it is absolutely impossible to have them working without. Yes, local transit is highly beneficial for both, but it is not a requirement for either to work.

The US was built on rail. 100 years ago, there were trains going to every little town that a passenger could ride.

Thanks to subsidies of the auto industry, many rights-of-way are not currently in use, and most that are exclusively carry cargo, not passengers.

I'll admit I like a rail trail as much as the next cyclist, but it does make me a little sad when I'm on a cool trail that's essentially the skeleton of our former public transit infrastructure.

The rights of way largely still exist, though. Some are still owned by the rail companies and just loaned to municipalities for trails, but the land of a former railway almost never gets completely dissolved into the parcels around it. There's cost to dividing/recombining parcels, and no one does it without reason. Those lines shouldn't be splitting anyone's property, either, because the land was platted with them in place.

Those old rights-of-way often wouldn't work for high speed due to the radii, but most of the rail we need doesnt need to be high speed. In situations where we do need high speed, there are usually highways that we could and should cannibalize some land from.

Lol all this is just wrong

There are trains that just charge on charge station

My entire point is that Hpusolton is already developed around cars and tacking transit on top of that doesn't work without an entire system being deployed at once, which is essentially impossible.

And the inability to work off track matters because trains don't have flexibility. If something happens to the track in the middle of a 500 mile stretch between cities, that entire area of the network is down until a repair crew can be transported to the site and complete the repair because the trains can't just drive around the issue like a car.

That is where you are going wrong. US cities were not transformed overnight to car oriented places either. That took decades. Maybe where the error arises is from the idea that only transit needs transit oriented places to work well, but cars do need car oriented places to support a car only design as well. Yes, cars can drive on all sorts of roads but that is true for one car, if you put everyone into a car in a transit oriented city, the whole traffic is going to collapse, commute takes forever ...

Transition to transit oriented places can work, but you need long term dedication and political support. The Netherlands demonstrate that quite well. In the 1970s they were on their way to become transformed into a US style car hell hole, even had US city planners to make it a reality. The first oil crises and rising popular opposition against it, saved them.

You don't transform an entire car oriented city into a transit oriented overnight. It is more like a crystallization process. A transit oriented city condensates along axis. This is happening in some places already today. One example is the Washington DC metro area. But of course, due to lack of political support if not open ideological opposition, it happens even much slower than it has to.

Exactly! The car transition wasn't overnight because it can be done piecemeal and still work fine. Connecting to a road network is really easy. My parents live at a lakehouse in a neighborhood with 100 houses that popped up in the middle of bumbfuck nowhere by laying down gravel next to a little county road running to a power plant that uses the lake for cooling.

My old office complex when I worked in Houston poured roads on both sides of the parking lot and dedicated them to the Citybas part of the platting process, and the city had a new alternate route they didn't even have to pay for.

Rail doesn't have that flexibility. If a developer dedicates an easement for rail as part of a development, it still isn't useful until every landowner along the route has done that, which will probably take centuries.

This shit is what I do for a living. All through college we all loved the TOD dreams, but when you actually work in municipal and regional transportation and development, you quickly learn how incredibly difficult it is to achieve even before the political process gets in the way.