this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2025
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[–] SARGE@startrek.website 107 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Hey now, that's a misrepresentation of both the US and China.

China had way nicer locomotives in 96. It wasn't 1896.

And in the US, that guy would have either been replaced by a machine, or replaced by someone younger who won't be expecting the seniority and pay raises that being there for over 20 years usually gets you.

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[–] DmMacniel@feddit.org 83 points 5 days ago (1 children)

What hypercapitalism lobbied by big oil does to your country.

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[–] caboose2006@lemmy.world 32 points 5 days ago (2 children)

US Train travel has actually gotten worse since 1996.

[–] FosterMolasses@leminal.space 7 points 4 days ago

Came to say this. If it had literally remained unchanged they'd still be doing pretty good.

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[–] xantonin@lemmy.world 32 points 5 days ago (2 children)

This is because public transportation is socialism and we can't have tax dollars going to that pretext for communism. Capitalism is far superior which is why we are instead spending over $150 billion on deporting immigrants, which will help promote a free and open capitalist market.

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[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 47 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (3 children)

this is kind of an exaggeration, but still crazy to think about. in a way similar to when we think of space exploration in the 60s today.

we can achieve so much so fast when we actually put some effort into caring about it.

[–] mriswith@lemmy.world 29 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

It's exaggerated and massively understated depending on location.

There are several metro areas in the US with over 1 million people that has zero metro/subway or light rail, some of them don't even have a passenger train connections or stations, or at most it stops by once or twice a day. Places like Columbus Ohio that has literally zero rail passenger rail for over 2m people in the metro area. If you want to take the train from there to NYC you'll have to spend a couple of hours on a bus to a different city first. And it's not like they never had it, they razed the train station in the 70s.

Other places that lack light rail or metro and have 1m+ people in the metro area: Tampa, San Antonio, Indianapolis, Oklahoma, Memphis, Richmond, Louisville, Rochester, etc. with many of them having a very bad outside passenger train connections. There are also a bunch of others that almost slipped by or did stay off the list over technicalities like having a single tram line going up and down main street or similar. Places like Orlando, Cincinatti, etc.

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[–] outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 points 5 days ago (2 children)

when we care

Yeah but who would get to skim off the top of that?

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[–] ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 58 points 5 days ago (4 children)

China 2060: ..... a space elevator

USA 2060: .... still the same rail service

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[–] Snowclone@lemmy.world 50 points 5 days ago (2 children)

yeah, anti public transit has several motivations, the most American is racism. if we have robust public transit, they can't be "whites only" and you can't force the not-whites to sit in the back. so right there. Then you have white land owning hegemony. Why do the busses only go downtown and not to the shopping center half way to the suburbs? because they don't want the filthy poors mucking up their white fort, if you let busses go up to the suburbs then THEY can get there and do all the things they get blamed for!! Lastly, profit motive. mass transit means people can choose to have a car or not. the powers that be are making a lot of money off cars and mass transit will upset the apple cart.

[–] ZkhqrD5o@lemmy.world 25 points 5 days ago

You know, I've been thinking about this a lot. And your comment reminds me of it. The aesthetics of evil. Racist segregation is an obvious evil. So if you tell black people to stand at the back of the bus because they're not allowed to mix with the whites, that's rather obvious and a horrific picture to have. But, if you handicap them, make sure they can only live in the cheapest communities and then limit the mobility of them. Same result. But because you didn't see it, and the enforced segregation is rather subtle... Well, looks better, doesn't it? So people are more likely to accept it. And if you say things like "The city has marked this black community unfit for investment." then it sounds already like a conspiracy theory. Making you the weirdo for speaking out. Horrid, but an elegant and efficient system for censorship, isn't it?

And to be absolutely clear: I reject racial segregation and censorship, obviously.

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[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (13 children)

In Capitalist nations, the further we are from the era of peak Unions and in general civil society movements (which was just after WWII) the slower infrastructure improves from one year to the next, something visible not just in trains but at all levels (even National Health Services for those countries which have them).

The same thing will happen in China now that they're getting more Capitalist than Socialist.

It was never the Capitalist part doing the kind of improvements that benefit most people, it was the stuff outside Capitalism (that used it as a Trade Philosophy only) constraining it and guiding it for policy ends which were independent of Capitalism.

This slowing of improvements of course itself accelerated with Neoliberalism, since that stuff is mainly about making Capitalism the sole definer of policy, or in other words make Capitalism the entirety of politics, hence unconstrained and unguided by interests other than those of Money, so ever less policy was done for the greater good.

Capitalism is reasonably decent at optimizing Trade in the short and mid-term, but is completelly shit for non-Trade interests such as Quality Of Life, as well as for anything which doesn't have direct and reasonably immediate action-consequence links such as situations where negative effects are very delayed in time (for example, companies enshittifying their products but keeping on going for years on the inertia of brand name) or emergent in nature (i.e. things that appear due to the accumulation of the actions of many actors, such as Global Warming).

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[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 16 points 5 days ago (6 children)

I wonder if the early proliferation of rural cars / mega expressways kinda fucked us. When your transportation network grows around trains, upgrading the trains/rails makes good economic sense. We just kind of spread out everywhere quickly and made the train locations somewhat irrelevant.

[–] newaccountwhodis@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 days ago (3 children)

We just kind of spread out everywhere quickly and made the train locations somewhat irrelevant.

Do you know any US history

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[–] Pacattack57@lemmy.world 20 points 4 days ago (2 children)

No the auto industry has lobbied against trains and similar projects. It’s not about the science but more about how our politicians have been selling their souls for centuries.

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[–] Mniot@programming.dev 13 points 4 days ago

No, because cross-country trains and heavy use of them to move goods and people predates cars by quite a bit. Trains were a key component of the North winning the Civil War, for example.

Lots of existing train infrastructure needed to be torn out to make room for car infrastructure.

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[–] Prior_Industry@lemmy.world 8 points 4 days ago

Hyperloop any day now!

[–] WanderWisley@lemmy.world 15 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Not just trains but all transportation services and systems is severely lacking in this country. Along with crumbling infrastructure and terrible build quality of cars and trucks and you got a recipe for disaster. But no one will care cuz Merica!

[–] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

yeah it's so funny when people think the US has good car infrastructure, the truth is that the US just generally fucking sucks

yeah sure there's a lot of interstate highways which i guess you can consider good, but most people aren't using them for very large distances, most people are driving to and from work every day and that part is so hilariously miserable that i don't think people in the rest of the world truly believe it's a real thing that happens..

[–] WanderWisley@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Agreed! I live in a very rural part of the country and the conditions of the roads and highways are laughable.

[–] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 days ago

not just that, but the design itself is often actively counterproductive, and the fact that driving is often the only way to get around means the roads are forced to handle an insane amount of traffic.

i like to say that the nordics are an example of actual car-centric design: the roads are simple and efficient and the other modes of transport are good enough, which means there aren't thousands and thousands of incompetent and unwilling drivers on the roads.

[–] dan69@lemmy.world 14 points 5 days ago (4 children)

America: if ain’t broke don’t fix it Every other country: yah it’s time, what are our new requirements?

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[–] Honytawk@feddit.nl 6 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Well, the most efficient form of government is a dictatorship, which nobody want except the dictator.

An inefficient government has groups investigating other groups to see if what they are doing is correct. This process takes time, so things move much slower. But is generally a much better protection against corruption.

[–] RedFrank24@lemmy.world 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)

You say that, but... Iraq was a dictatorship, and they weren't all that efficient at anything other than killing Kurds.

[–] newaccountwhodis@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 days ago

That's because they're politically illiterate. The important difference is the economic model and its end goal. Is it to make a small elite super rich? Is it to meet the peoples' needs? The US is extremely efficient in creating a small class of super rich people (and by that I mean corporations too) while China is extremely efficient in switching to renewable energy and expanding high speed rail.

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[–] xorollo@leminal.space 9 points 4 days ago

That conductor is a total hottie tho

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