• Floon@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Quid: you’re British. Great.

    You’re smaller in area than Texas. It’s a little easier for you to stay close to everything, you’re never more than 70 miles away from the sea.

    • ProgrammingSocks@pawb.social
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      1 year ago

      Hello, I’m Albertan. Stop saying this. Our governments maintain roads in between these cities every year, there is no reason they couldn’t have been train lines instead. Roads are far more expensive than many realize.

      Once upon a time, all cities were connected by train, and we ripped it all up to build roads instead. Sure, it’s going to cost money to build these up again – that’s what happens when we make a mistake, we have to pay for it in one way or another. But connecting smaller towns and cities is not the herculean impossible task that people seem to want to pretend it is.

      There ARE major urban areas in North America. People are not evenly spread out across the landmass equally. Connecting these first is obviously the goal, because that will take care of 70% of the problem already. And always remember not to make perfect the enemy of good - even if we stopped there we’d be in infinitely better shape than we were before.

      • Floon@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        We’ve done a ton of that. The Acela is great, I’ve ridden it a bunch. But that kind of thing doesn’t scale as efficiently as you would hope. It can serve corridors of people, but not huge continents of hundreds of millions all that well. There are to many places to be.

    • hglman@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      How odd, russia has plenty of walkable cities in the largest country on earth.

    • Iron Lynx@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Look mate, if you’re going to shove the “tHe stATeS arE ToO bIG, thus wE cANNot SOlvE The transIt ProbleM” rhetoric on us, please find another place to wallow in your lack of trains while assuming car industry rhetoric as undeniable fact.

      Also, your claim has been debunked and reclarified so often that I’m not going to begin to explain just how wrong you are.

      • Floon@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        You guys are all idiots. A bunch of Europeans lucked into an infrastructure that works with twice the people in half the space, and you act like it was an intentional and smarter design decision in anticipation of a climate crisis. You shipped your most insane people off your continent to become Americans, and their shitty Calvinism has made everything that has always been terrible about Northern Europe even worse.

        Now you want to act like anyone who thinks what you propose isn’t exactly easy (or democratic) is some kind of corporate fascist. Fuck off, the lot of you.