2074
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
2074 points (93.5% liked)
Fuck Cars
9663 readers
229 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 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I'm all in favour of trains. I only take the train to work, and it's so convenient I even take my kids to the city via train, to entertainment or shopping. However, even though I live inside the capital city in a Western European country, the train we take is powered by diesel. The government has been talking about electrifying the track for years, and the current estimate is that it will take another decade or more to get it done. There's a single electrified rail line in the entire country, and based on the electrification progress it will take several decades to electrify the rest (if ever). Based on this experience, I'd venture to say that electric cars are far easier to deploy than electrify train lines.
It's very hard to do something if you only talk about it and not actual doing it. But that has nothing to do with technology itself
And politicians are elected on what they say, not really on what they do.
Even on diesel trains they are far far far more energy efficient than cars. Current estimate is that it takes 3.7 liters of fuel to transport 1 tonne of cargo for 100km. That's incredibly more efficient than any car can get. Not to mention cars carry around on average 1.3 persons inside.
Train infrastructure is also significantly more scalable. You can add another train car for passengers at the price of one passenger car and you have increased capacity of that train immediately. Same goes to downsizing. Rails can be easily adapted to have overhead wires. Train wheels are metal as are tracks which means significantly cheaper maintenance and slower wear than asphalt and rubber.
It's nothing to do with ease of deployment. It's all about selfishness of people and their inability to or lack of willpower to change. Even if people switched to motorcycles, which are still ICEs it would still be a lot cleaner for the environment since it would effectively eliminate traffic jams and reduce road maintenance significantly. Not to mention not needing to move 1 tonne of metal for no more than 1 passenger.