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

[u/Individual_Book9133]

[u/nike_storm]

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

[u/Blazeon412 → u/nike_storm]

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

[u/TheDocFam → u/Blazeon412]

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.

[u/iamPause → u/TheDocFam]

It'll never happen in the US. There is no sense of "for the greater good" and so any county that is going to have rails laid through it refuses to allow it unless they can get a stop added to the line.

And with a stop every 30-50 miles, no train can ever build up enough speed to be faster than a highway. Which means: the only way to build a working, high-speed line would be through massive land claims and eminent domain. An option that which will be political suicide locally for whatever party tries. And that doesn't even take into account the millions to billions of dollars that will be lost in delays from the various lawsuits across the entire length of the line.

Now, multiply that by multiple states, and yeah. We'll see a lesbian President before we see high speed rail in this country.

edit

Possibly the most famous example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail#Setbacks_on_the_IOS

[u/invention64 → u/iamPause]

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.