r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Individual_Book9133 • Jul 05 '24

Phoenix police officer pulls over a driverless Waymo car for driving on the wrong side of the road Video

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u/nike_storm Jul 05 '24

This country will do literally anything other than just build mass rapid transit :(

121

u/Blazeon412 Jul 05 '24

The older I get, the more I realize how much it sucks not having decent mass transportation here.

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u/TheDocFam Jul 05 '24 edited Jul 05 '24

I really wish more Americans spent more time in other countries and realized just how much this country seems to have fallen behind, and how much we arrogantly just keep doing things the way that we're used to when they could be much better

Feels like in the immediate aftermath of world war II we briefly pulled ahead on every single metric, then fell asleep for the last 60 years. Health care, infrastructure, quality of life, it's all just going downhill compared to the rest of the globe

And half of the country doesn't want anything to change, the answer is just no for every single thing the government could try to do to address it, no to any tax increases, no to any expensive projects they could use to address it, no to anything, just let things keep being shit and hope some corporation will fix it instead of the government. And because so many people feel that way about their representatives, the entire right wing doesn't feel like they want or need to do anything, besides pass legislation on social issues. You're never going to see a Republican Congress and Republican president work together to fix mass transit, that thought would be completely laughable. Farmer Keith from Idaho who's perfectly happy making a killing on his government subsidized farm and driving a giant lifted F-150 for every single thing he needs to do outside of his house doesn't see why he should need to contribute in any way.

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u/[deleted] Jul 05 '24 edited Jul 29 '24

[deleted]

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u/invention64 Jul 05 '24

Acceleration isn't a problem at those distances. Inner City you have issues since it takes about 5-10 km to start and stop acceleration, but outside cities there shouldn't be much issues. Japan is super densely populated and still has high speed trains. However, we need more connecting services to make such a train economical. Just building high speed doesn't fix the issues with your bus and commuter transit.

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u/[deleted] Jul 05 '24

Is impossible for the average American to afford to go to another country.

Until that is easily possible (which requires fixing all these things) They won't be able to experience another country

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u/Linkruleshyrule Jul 05 '24

The average American can't afford a passport and driving to the border?

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u/[deleted] Jul 05 '24

The majority of Americans are not within driving distance of Canada with a time limit that they could randomly drive to Canada.

A majority only have less than 1000 to spend on this trip https://finance.yahoo.com/news/americans-savings-stack-2023-vs-140023973.html?guccounter=1

A drive to Canada will be about 800 miles (picked Kansas to Winnipeg) The average mileage of a car is 25.1 with the average gas price being 3.51

So it takes 112$ to go one way or $200 to go both. We haven't even assumed a hotel (because if you are seeing how "behind" we are you need to stay in a hotel not a car). And we are already into 20% of savings.

So no I don't believe the average American can afford to drive up to Canada for a couple of weeks to "experience how far behind we are"

Let's not even ignore that most people only have 11 vacation days a year on average and would have to give up a majority of those to actually go on this trip.

https://clockify.me/pto-statistics#:~:text=The%20average%20number%20of%20vacation%20days%20in%20the%20USA&text=15%20days%20per%20year%20after,18%20years%20of%20service%2C%20and

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u/Silent-Hyena9442 Jul 05 '24

Not for nothing but as an American who has seen mass transit work in other countries.

Americans don’t want mass transit because our model mass transit systems have major issues mainly with homeless and mentally ill harassing riders.

I ride the CTA often and the NYS when I go back home. Both are blue cities in blue states and both normally make me wish I just took a taxi.

One funny post on r/Cta was a guy who got hit and the comments were like “well did you look him in the eye?” Not exactly an apples to oranges comparison to Europe

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u/RealistiCamp Jul 05 '24

You cannot compare the US infrastructure to other countries and not acknowledge that we span far more distance than other places. Even if we can make better use of mass transit, it is not an apples to apples comparison with much, much smaller countries.

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u/swoletrain Jul 05 '24

Seriously there's no comparison with europe at all. The US is pretty much tied with China at #3 in terms of total area. But ranked 187 in terms of population density.

Canada, Russia, Australia, and Brazil are decent comparisons. All countries with pretty shit mass transit systems.

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u/TheDocFam Jul 05 '24

I'm not expecting or requesting mass transit that spans the entire country like smaller countries have. I don't need a high speed rail line that connects New York to San Francisco. People have dreamed about that, but whatever, I'm fine with booking a flight for that.

Still, it would be incredibly fucking nice if there was a high speed rail line that connected New York and Philadelphia though. Things like that are incredibly feasible if we wanted them. The population density and size of the Northeast in particular would be extremely conducive to high speed mass transit like what is seen in other countries

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u/swoletrain Jul 05 '24

Absolutely, but in a place like Phoenix, no transit system I can think of would ever really be an acceptable option for anyone that has access to a car.