Bread and CircusesIs this too much to ask? Evidently it is. 😕
#Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis
#ClimateAction #WarOnCars #BanCars
Hughster@breadandcircuses Not everyone lives in a city. All those millions of people in towns and villages will always need private transport of some kind, unless one would rather try to forcibly depopulate the countryside like some modern-day version of the Highland Clearances.
LisPi@hughster @breadandcircuses Did you know that most of the old-time USA was built on the back of trains & rails?
Those thing were abandoned or torn up during the 20th century to make the automobile industry happy. They literally bought rail operations to shut them down.
@lispi314 It wasn't some auto industry conspiracy: cars became omnipresent and trains less used because cars were much more convenient and flexible than trains, serving every location in the country point to point. It happened in pretty much every economically developed country in the world, even though the US went further than most in reshaping development around it.
Trying to deny this is pointless and doesn't help us solve the problems of car dependency and traffic in cities and large towns.
Grandpa Don RIP World@hughster
There absolutely was a combination of auto and gas industry behind the decommissioning of interurban railways and trolley systems in cities. Yes, autos presented big advantages & would have taken over a lot of personal transportation, but killing the rail systems sealed the deal. Case in point: the Chicago, Aurora & Elgin railroad went out of business when its track into Chicago that fed directly to the Loop elevated system was eliminated by the building of the Eisenhower expressway.
There absolutely was a combination of auto and gas industry behind the decommissioning of interurban railways and trolley systems in cities. Yes, autos presented big advantages & would have taken over a lot of personal transportation, but killing the rail systems sealed the deal. Case in point: the Chicago, Aurora & Elgin railroad went out of business when its track into Chicago that fed directly to the Loop elevated system was eliminated by the building of the Eisenhower expressway.
@dbc3 Sure, but I think we're talking about US-specific circumstances here, though, rather than the overall reason cars took over across the world. Other countries with well-developed rail networks didn't experience this, particularly in Europe. The UK had incredible rail coverage until the 60s, when it closed a great amount of the network because people had simply been shifting to road transport en masse over the previous few decades—both for freight and passenger services.
@hughster
@lispi314
@breadandcircuses
You may be talking world-wide.
I was responding to the OP:
"Did you know that most of the old-time USA was built on the back of trains & rails?"
Had intelligent long-range planning been used rather that corporate greed, the interstate highway system would have incorporated high speed rail as a basic design requirement for the major coast to coast routes like I-80, I-70 & north-south like I-95, I-5