A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
Highway spending increased by 90% in 2021. This is one of many reasons why car traffic is growing faster than population growth.
Explain to me how you solve the mass transportation issue in non metro areas. I live in Montana, where cities are an hour or three apart by vehicle, but even in said cities, outside of the main commercial areas, people are spread out. Like, really spread out. There is a single bus stop eight blocks from my house, with exactly four scheduled pickup/dropoff times. My kids go to school with other kids who live twenty miles away. Commercial rail doesn't exist, except for a single cross-country Amtrak line with a station four hours away from here.
Images like this are illustrative, but they completely ignore the physical reality of how vast swathes of the US are laid out. You can't just flip a switch and have bus stops on every corner and rail lines connecting your major cities and residential areas. That's a massive undertaking that would cost way more in up front infrastructure than maintaining and augmenting existing highway program already does.
How do you change the culture away from cars where there is literally no realistic way to do it for 99% of people in areas like this? And how do you push for infrastructure change when there is no anti-car culture? It's a chicken and egg problem where you have no chickens and you have no eggs.
Well you already expressed how to solve it. Issue is we have to think of a strong bus service and train service as a proper service rather than a for profit business. We can do it just we won't.
Montana is around 147k square miles large it costs $1-2 million per track. We could cover every square mile of Montana for $147 billion which is half of the aid we have sent to Israel since it's existence or 1/10 of our military budget. For $10 billion you can have train tracks every 15 square miles. For perspective there is 73k miles of public road in Montana supposedly.
If we brought all our troops back to the USA and used them as manpower and spent our military budget on infrastructure we could have 7 million miles of track laid in the last 10 years. For perspective we have 4 million miles of road in usa by quick glance.