this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
1 points (100.0% liked)
Fuck Cars
12448 readers
45 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
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:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No, sorry, only cities can have trains, because traditional wisdom™©®¹ says the physics of trains literally stop working outside cities.
If you tried to do something like that, youvwoukd risk damaging the fundamental laws of reality! Imagine if, like, the weak force or gravity or the ability for oxygen to form ionic bonds just got suddenly 30% weaker. You train people are such blind mad zealots, that you would risk this.
¹a Chrysler brand!
This is even funnier to me because where I'm from, trains in cities aren't really a big thing, but trains BETWEEN cities very much are.
This map is outdated as the Lelle-Pärnu route isn't currently serviced, and missing some stops, but this is our railway map:
Tartu has 2 stations as far as I know, Tallinn has multiple, the other places the train stops are all small enough that only one station exists. Entire point of it is to get people into and out of the cities. In the cities we have buses and (only in Tallinn) trams, used to also have trolleys. But only the capital, Tallinn, is a place where you would take a train from one station to another within the city itself.
Most of these places are villages and small towns. The population of Puka is like 500. Orava is around 200.
Now we just need the Tartu-Viljandi-Pärnu route and maybe a Narva-Tartu route, as both would be used by a lot of students (Tartu is a university city), but unfortunately geography doesn't favour my idea, there's protected wetlands between Pärnu and Viljandi as well as between Tartu and Viljandi
This is one place where a difference is scale. In the US we always complain about the lack of trains and that is certainly a problem.
However several major cities have commuter rail lines that may be analogous. Google tells me the area served by my city’s commuter rail isn’t much smaller - the longest line runs about 60 miles and has dozens of stops in many smaller towns (nothing like you’re describing though). We even have lines running to nearby small cities. However the system is designed for commuting to the major city and is limited outside that use.
The comparison here in the us is that most cities still don’t have commuter rail system (but that is changing!) and we only have 2 practical intercity lines covering a tiny portion of our country
I might amend that from 'scale' to 'distribution'. Through the nineteenth century population centers built up around the rail lines. In the twentieth century that didn't matter so you have minor population centers just splattered all over the place.
This is the reality that our area has dealt with as they have tried to fund better transit, that they have to spend an exorbitant sum to serve a relatively small slice of the population because everyone is just spread everywhere.. Chicken and egg, designing a transit system around current population distribution is infeasible, encouraging a shift to a more amenable distribution requires that a transit system be deployed to motivate people.
We’ve all come to expect instant results and that’s really not going to happen here. Most of that scatter was built up with huge expansion of cars after wwii, it was built up over 80 years. Building last decades, that’s generally a good thing. But taking these two factors together, rebuilding our population centers should be expected to take a very long time. That doesn’t mean we give up: it means we make the investments and changes now. We plant the trees now, with the expectation that our grandchildren will sit in the shade.
One of the ways my city has been reinventing itself is with transit oriented development. Build the train first but develop a master plan around stops to develop people oriented population centers. That takes years to build out plus is one stop at a time. A big change last year was to require every community served by transit to establish special zoning near transit to encourage denser population growth. If this works, we’ll be completely different in a century or so
Sure, it's just an interesting challenge for funding development with public money.
You draw funds from people who can't benefit unless they further will spend even more money to relocate. Hard to get initiatives passed when your tax base is largely not going to benefit. The chicken and egg effect is harsher than just the time it will take.