what the fuck is wrong with boats on principle? I'm not anti-civ. I would suggest that we should switch to sails or solar though, for slow container ships.

but for land transportation: switch to fucking trains and (e)bikes/scooters

yeah, you can whine about "MUH FREEDUMS" but a modern commercial car can't go off road for a substantial length of time. if you've ever DONE off-roading, it is not the same as traveling over asphalt. you cannot go long distance like that; not as a consumer. it's a fucking expedition, and even vehicles capable of it (most modern 4wd vehicles are not) you need to be willing to put that extreme wear+tear on your vehicle, and go through that ordeal. you fucking aren't. no, shut the fuck up, you aren't. not as a regular thing to get somewhere. maybe once or twice a year as a cool adventure.

so your car needs well maintained infrastructure to get there just like a train does. except the train's infrastructure is safer, easier to build, easier to maintain, massively higher capacity, and substantially cheaper to use.

plus, you can use overhead wire/third rail, which means you don't have to carry any power (petrol, batteries, whatever. weight is weight) on board. think of it like the speed boost things you drive over in a racing game. it's really that good.

plus, you can just, like, sit on a train and chill. last train I was on? I took a NAP. can't do that shit in your car. don't talk about self driving-that's not real without infrastructure investment, which locks you more into expensive infrastructure, and why even bother when you could have cheaper more efficient infrastructure with literal centuries of testing and iteration? other things I've done on a train: run a D&D game, watched a movie, written a paper, had sex without it being a safety hazard (we splurged on a sleeper car), paced, ordered lunch, gotten completely shit faced (amtrak's coctail selection is pretty sub-par and their wines aren't great, but nobody in california cares if you're on edibles, and it's not really 'allowed' but you can absolutely trip on acid on a train relatively safely), physical therapy, pooped (yeah not my finest hour, but the paper is better than average) read a god damn book, attended a remote conference while traveling to an in-person conference. in india, where the trains mostly work; they have trains that offer massages and five star meals.

okay, so, some nitty gritty. sorry about where I started that, I probably didn't intend a pun. gravel rails and ties to keep them the right distance apart. pot hole? add more gravel and bang it back into shape. there are (barely) functional rail lines from before automobiles existed. meanwhile, in cold climates where they need road salt, asphalt roads don't last a year before becoming unusable. even the basic physics of it favor trains-steel wheels on steel rails are just more efficient-you're not bouncing around and steering side to side constantly, plus you're carrying less weight of machine for the same amount of humans/cargo. there are places that currently have asphalt roads where you couldn't take a heavy freight train, that is true, but those places also have weight limits for trailers going over them, for exactly the same reason. if you can take a car there, in any practical terms, you could build equivalent quality rail (or bike path) and run cars of similar weight/function over it.

we are running out of sand. we are not running out of gravel. road salt is an ecological disaster ruining our precious fresh water. tire dust is visible in the air where I live; that's what the famous smog of los angeles is mostly made of, and if you have testicles, it is in there (that's most of the microplastics that are in everything). trains have none of these problems. little bit of steel dust, too heavy to end up in the air, easy to clean up, even hypothetically possible to recycle it.

trains may depart on a regular schedule, but where the system actually functions and isn't subservient to cars, which mostly make themselves look good by ruining the fuck out of everything else-don't even get me started on induced demand, look it the fuck up- you usually get there faster with less frustration and more shit done in the meantime.

I really don't want to hear your counter-argument. if you can't imagine how this is better, you're not engaging in good faith. if your excuse is that the people you let have your power are pieces of shit who would never do anything that wasn't shitty, that sounds like it's not really a problem with trains (or bikes or whatever), and you need a guillotine ASAP, but you probably knew that because of all the genocides or whatever they did/endorsed and the fact you don't have healthcare.

oh, and high speed rail can go MUCH faster than 75 MPH with relative safety. look up the original shinkansen, then look up the modern ones.