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It is a strange experience to be jealous of countries with high population density. However, every time bicycles, electric vehicles, or renewable energy comes u

by duaneb 11y ago

It is a strange experience to be jealous of countries with high population density. However, every time bicycles, electric vehicles, or renewable energy comes up, I feel profoundly embarrassed the US can't form a similar effort given our resources, even if I rationally understand it's probably not worth it to have a high speed train hit all the small towns in Montana, or how solar panels might not work as well in Forks, Washington as they do in California.

mjevans 11y ago
While I too agree that high speed rail (and even Internet) in absolutely rural areas doesn't really make sense... The US still has areas of fairly to -really- high population density, and arguably, areas that should be far higher (city cores with skyscrapers, and city outskirts with 6-8 story high multi-use buildings), even the current suburban density is more than dense enough to support better transit experiences than we presently see. Transit of both the mass people and the mass-data kind.
- amazon_not 11y ago
  > While I too agree that high speed rail (and even Internet) in absolutely rural areas doesn't really make sense... Yeah, it's not like rural areas have power or phone service. /s Seriously, what makes high speed internet so special that rural areas should not have it? It's not like we don't know how to build networks and we've already built the power and telephone networks. Internet access is getting to be as important as phone service and power and it's undeniable that from a societal perspective everyone would benefit from having equal access to internet services.
  - duaneb 11y ago
    I was not arguing against rural internet; the cost is constant over time. But the rural internet requires lobbying and money to invest that requires political lobbying. To reduce my position to something extremely concise, I'd simply lament that electric cars require a LOT of political lobbying compared to a country with higher average population density.
  - personjerry 11y ago
    > Seriously, what makes high speed internet so special that rural areas should not have it? Internet is not considered a utility in the same way that power and phone lines are. If this is the change you are suggesting, the ongoing debates about net neutrality, as well as rather confusing bandwidth monetization by telecom companies, are big issues in the way of commoditizing the Internet.
    - amazon_not 11y ago
      > Internet is not considered a utility in the same way that power and phone lines are. I would not mind that the Internet be classified as a utility. Regardless of if it is or not, a co-ordinated effort should be made to bring high speed broadband access to all, including rural areas. What I do take exception to is claims that bringing high speed Internet access to rural areas does not make sense or should not be done. > If this is the change you are suggesting, the ongoing debates about net neutrality, as well as rather confusing bandwidth monetization by telecom companies, are big issues in the way of commoditizing the Internet. Excuse my ignorance, but how does network neutrality stand in the way of commoditizing the Internet? I'm much more inclined to say that mandating network neutrality, open access, transparent pricing and verifiable metering and billing would go a long way to solve any problems.
      - personjerry 11y ago
        > I would not mind that the Internet be classified as a utility. Regardless of if it is or not, a co-ordinated effort should be made to bring high speed broadband access to all, including rural areas. I mean, legally, they are public utilities. From my limited understanding, the utility companies MUST provide for either everyone in an area or no one, for example, amongst other regulations. This is not true for internet access, not in most places. > Excuse my ignorance, but how does network neutrality stand in the way of commoditizing the Internet? If people are able to "pay" for better, faster internet access, how can we regulate it as a public utility for everyone? One might argue that it seems "unfair" (for certain definitions). This is related to internet billing: Do we bill the downloader? The uploader? How do we measure it? How do we verify the measurement? What if someone MITM injects packets? We need to make decisions and figure things out in order to get internet to the level of, say, electricity.
  - Unklejoe 11y ago
    [Seriously, what makes high speed internet so special that rural areas should not have it?] I can see both sides of the "argument". On one side, the internet is becoming a basic requirement for everyday life in this day and age (not yet though; there are still many people who do perfectly fine without it). I predict that it will eventually be considered as necessary as electricity itself. Depriving people in rural areas of that can be seen as somewhat inhumane and unfair. On the other side, it seems kind of selfish to expect a company/government/whatever to spend billions of dollars to deploy infrastructure into areas where they will have one customer every 10 miles. This would eventually lead to increased costs for everyone, including those who have made the "sacrifice" of living in more densely populated areas. One of the benefits of living in rural areas is that you're away from people. One of the downsides of living in rural areas is that you're away from people. NOTE: I'm mainly thinking in the context of the USA's midwest, where you can have areas where there is one house every XX miles. When it comes down to it, I am more of a supporter of the former side of the argument. Maybe not to the extent of forcing a company/government to cover the entire country in high speed internet, but something more along the lines of "all areas with a reasonable population density". This is how things work with waste water sewage where I live. If you live in the middle of no where, you don't have access to running water and sewage; you need a well and a septic tank. But if the area has X amount of people per Sq mile, then the utility is forced to install it. My reasoning is mainly because the exclusion of non-profitable areas in terms of internet coverage extends well beyond rural areas. There are even areas within densely populated cities that don't have access to real high speed internet (mainly low income areas). That's not right to me.
- rayiner 11y ago
  I'm not sure suburban density is enough. I live in Fairfax County, VA, which has a population density of 3,000 per square mile (about the same as Seattle). They recently extended the Metro out here. Getting to any of the stations, however, is impossible. There are more new Silver Line stations than apartment buildings within a safe and comfortable walk of them (they're surrounded by a scary wide major thoroughfare). I think you'd have to double or triple the surrounding density for them to be worthwhile. I think 8-10k per square mile is the magic number, and there aren't a lot of places in the U.S. that hit that.
nihonde 11y ago
As a point of comparison, I live in a city in Japan (Nagoya) that's about the size (roughly) of Chicago. Bikes are very common here. Many street lamps have solar and wind generators. Fuel efficient 'kei' cars are everywhere. (Mine gets 35km/l.) The regional trains and local subways are always on time, never very crowded, and cover a huge area. The bullet train to Kyoto/Osaka is 1.5 hours, and 2 hours 45 mins to Tokyo.
WorldMaker 11y ago
I've long considered how weird it is that I'm jealous of the American past at times. We collectively have forgotten how deeply connected our rail system originally was and how fast it was when it originally was built. Even what small fraction of those rail lines that still exist, if America managed to wrestle them from the cargo companies running them near bankruptcy for a bandwidth of just cargo tons, found a way to pay for updates and upgrades (the most unlikely part of this scenario sadly) and got the lines back up to the original speeds, not even doing an upgrade to modern high speeds, people would be amazed at where you can travel and how fast you can get there...
- ghaff 11y ago
  By and large rail freight in the US is a rather profitable business and significantly more efficient than trucks for the routes and cargo where it makes sense. [1] As for getting passenger rail back up to its original speed, I'd have to be convinced that (modulo the delays that can occur due to sharing rails with freight) that it's a lot slower than it once was. For example, the Twentieth Century from NY to Chicago took about 16 hours (per the song) and takes about the same length of time today. How many people are going to take a 16 hour train from NY to Chicago when they can fly in a few hours? Maybe you and/or a few others who will do it now and then for the experience, but pretty much none of the business travelers who are the bread and butter of most routes would. Heck, cut it to 8 hours and, still, very few would take it. The rail service was never all that fast over long distances. There just weren't any reasonable alternatives. ADD: This isn't unique to the US BTW. I've looked at European routes like Dusseldorf to Paris and it turned out it made far more sense to fly. [1] http://fortune.com/2015/06/04/union-pacific-railroad/ http://fortune.com/2015/06/04/union-pacific-railroad/
  - WorldMaker 11y ago
    I'm mostly trying to refer to the unprofitable parts of the remaining rail network: the "rollover country" and lost connections, the towns built for rail that rail long since abandoned. I'm also explicitly not talking about long distances, but all the many medium distances where train travel makes the most sense on a continent and has almost entirely disappeared in America with rare exceptions on the coasts. For an example, used to be you could take a train from Louisville, KY to Chicago in about five hours. It takes six to eight to drive there in today's traffic. The last time Amtrak tried to run that route it took eight to ten hours between the slow down in the tracks being in such disarray and the outright antipathy from the cargo companies to passenger travel and disincentive by the cargo companies to speed up their own rails because that route between Chicago and Louisville at this point is much more "roll through" than "drop off" these days from the cargo perspective. (Sure, you can fly Louisville to Chicago in an hour and half, two hours, but a five hour train ride would still be competitive even/especially for business travel. An eight/ten hour train ride clearly was not.) That's just the example off the top of my head. Louisville is a major US city with zero (!) current passenger routes. When Louisville deals with the city's rail infrastructure from a community safety standpoint (much less any other potential need), the involved companies such as CSX whine and complain that they are broke and can't possibly invest in the rail infrastructure they supposedly "own". We refer to the founders of the American Rail system as Robber Barons for many reasons, but they certainly did a good job of robbing from the system's own future as well.

by duaneb 11y ago

mjevans 11y ago

While I too agree that high speed rail (and even Internet) in absolutely rural areas doesn't really make sense... The US still has areas of fairly to -really- high population density, and arguably, areas that should be far higher (city cores with skyscrapers, and city outskirts with 6-8 story high multi-use buildings), even the current suburban density is more than dense enough to support better transit experiences than we presently see. Transit of both the mass people and the mass-data kind.

amazon_not 11y ago
> While I too agree that high speed rail (and even Internet) in absolutely rural areas doesn't really make sense... Yeah, it's not like rural areas have power or phone service. /s Seriously, what makes high speed internet so special that rural areas should not have it? It's not like we don't know how to build networks and we've already built the power and telephone networks. Internet access is getting to be as important as phone service and power and it's undeniable that from a societal perspective everyone would benefit from having equal access to internet services.
- duaneb 11y ago
  I was not arguing against rural internet; the cost is constant over time. But the rural internet requires lobbying and money to invest that requires political lobbying. To reduce my position to something extremely concise, I'd simply lament that electric cars require a LOT of political lobbying compared to a country with higher average population density.
- personjerry 11y ago
  > Seriously, what makes high speed internet so special that rural areas should not have it? Internet is not considered a utility in the same way that power and phone lines are. If this is the change you are suggesting, the ongoing debates about net neutrality, as well as rather confusing bandwidth monetization by telecom companies, are big issues in the way of commoditizing the Internet.
  - amazon_not 11y ago
    > Internet is not considered a utility in the same way that power and phone lines are. I would not mind that the Internet be classified as a utility. Regardless of if it is or not, a co-ordinated effort should be made to bring high speed broadband access to all, including rural areas. What I do take exception to is claims that bringing high speed Internet access to rural areas does not make sense or should not be done. > If this is the change you are suggesting, the ongoing debates about net neutrality, as well as rather confusing bandwidth monetization by telecom companies, are big issues in the way of commoditizing the Internet. Excuse my ignorance, but how does network neutrality stand in the way of commoditizing the Internet? I'm much more inclined to say that mandating network neutrality, open access, transparent pricing and verifiable metering and billing would go a long way to solve any problems.
    - personjerry 11y ago
      > I would not mind that the Internet be classified as a utility. Regardless of if it is or not, a co-ordinated effort should be made to bring high speed broadband access to all, including rural areas. I mean, legally, they are public utilities. From my limited understanding, the utility companies MUST provide for either everyone in an area or no one, for example, amongst other regulations. This is not true for internet access, not in most places. > Excuse my ignorance, but how does network neutrality stand in the way of commoditizing the Internet? If people are able to "pay" for better, faster internet access, how can we regulate it as a public utility for everyone? One might argue that it seems "unfair" (for certain definitions). This is related to internet billing: Do we bill the downloader? The uploader? How do we measure it? How do we verify the measurement? What if someone MITM injects packets? We need to make decisions and figure things out in order to get internet to the level of, say, electricity.
- Unklejoe 11y ago
  [Seriously, what makes high speed internet so special that rural areas should not have it?] I can see both sides of the "argument". On one side, the internet is becoming a basic requirement for everyday life in this day and age (not yet though; there are still many people who do perfectly fine without it). I predict that it will eventually be considered as necessary as electricity itself. Depriving people in rural areas of that can be seen as somewhat inhumane and unfair. On the other side, it seems kind of selfish to expect a company/government/whatever to spend billions of dollars to deploy infrastructure into areas where they will have one customer every 10 miles. This would eventually lead to increased costs for everyone, including those who have made the "sacrifice" of living in more densely populated areas. One of the benefits of living in rural areas is that you're away from people. One of the downsides of living in rural areas is that you're away from people. NOTE: I'm mainly thinking in the context of the USA's midwest, where you can have areas where there is one house every XX miles. When it comes down to it, I am more of a supporter of the former side of the argument. Maybe not to the extent of forcing a company/government to cover the entire country in high speed internet, but something more along the lines of "all areas with a reasonable population density". This is how things work with waste water sewage where I live. If you live in the middle of no where, you don't have access to running water and sewage; you need a well and a septic tank. But if the area has X amount of people per Sq mile, then the utility is forced to install it. My reasoning is mainly because the exclusion of non-profitable areas in terms of internet coverage extends well beyond rural areas. There are even areas within densely populated cities that don't have access to real high speed internet (mainly low income areas). That's not right to me.
rayiner 11y ago
I'm not sure suburban density is enough. I live in Fairfax County, VA, which has a population density of 3,000 per square mile (about the same as Seattle). They recently extended the Metro out here. Getting to any of the stations, however, is impossible. There are more new Silver Line stations than apartment buildings within a safe and comfortable walk of them (they're surrounded by a scary wide major thoroughfare). I think you'd have to double or triple the surrounding density for them to be worthwhile. I think 8-10k per square mile is the magic number, and there aren't a lot of places in the U.S. that hit that.

nihonde 11y ago

As a point of comparison, I live in a city in Japan (Nagoya) that's about the size (roughly) of Chicago. Bikes are very common here. Many street lamps have solar and wind generators. Fuel efficient 'kei' cars are everywhere. (Mine gets 35km/l.) The regional trains and local subways are always on time, never very crowded, and cover a huge area. The bullet train to Kyoto/Osaka is 1.5 hours, and 2 hours 45 mins to Tokyo.

WorldMaker 11y ago

I've long considered how weird it is that I'm jealous of the American past at times. We collectively have forgotten how deeply connected our rail system originally was and how fast it was when it originally was built. Even what small fraction of those rail lines that still exist, if America managed to wrestle them from the cargo companies running them near bankruptcy for a bandwidth of just cargo tons, found a way to pay for updates and upgrades (the most unlikely part of this scenario sadly) and got the lines back up to the original speeds, not even doing an upgrade to modern high speeds, people would be amazed at where you can travel and how fast you can get there...

ghaff 11y ago
By and large rail freight in the US is a rather profitable business and significantly more efficient than trucks for the routes and cargo where it makes sense. [1] As for getting passenger rail back up to its original speed, I'd have to be convinced that (modulo the delays that can occur due to sharing rails with freight) that it's a lot slower than it once was. For example, the Twentieth Century from NY to Chicago took about 16 hours (per the song) and takes about the same length of time today. How many people are going to take a 16 hour train from NY to Chicago when they can fly in a few hours? Maybe you and/or a few others who will do it now and then for the experience, but pretty much none of the business travelers who are the bread and butter of most routes would. Heck, cut it to 8 hours and, still, very few would take it. The rail service was never all that fast over long distances. There just weren't any reasonable alternatives. ADD: This isn't unique to the US BTW. I've looked at European routes like Dusseldorf to Paris and it turned out it made far more sense to fly. [1] http://fortune.com/2015/06/04/union-pacific-railroad/ http://fortune.com/2015/06/04/union-pacific-railroad/
- WorldMaker 11y ago
  I'm mostly trying to refer to the unprofitable parts of the remaining rail network: the "rollover country" and lost connections, the towns built for rail that rail long since abandoned. I'm also explicitly not talking about long distances, but all the many medium distances where train travel makes the most sense on a continent and has almost entirely disappeared in America with rare exceptions on the coasts. For an example, used to be you could take a train from Louisville, KY to Chicago in about five hours. It takes six to eight to drive there in today's traffic. The last time Amtrak tried to run that route it took eight to ten hours between the slow down in the tracks being in such disarray and the outright antipathy from the cargo companies to passenger travel and disincentive by the cargo companies to speed up their own rails because that route between Chicago and Louisville at this point is much more "roll through" than "drop off" these days from the cargo perspective. (Sure, you can fly Louisville to Chicago in an hour and half, two hours, but a five hour train ride would still be competitive even/especially for business travel. An eight/ten hour train ride clearly was not.) That's just the example off the top of my head. Louisville is a major US city with zero (!) current passenger routes. When Louisville deals with the city's rail infrastructure from a community safety standpoint (much less any other potential need), the involved companies such as CSX whine and complain that they are broke and can't possibly invest in the rail infrastructure they supposedly "own". We refer to the founders of the American Rail system as Robber Barons for many reasons, but they certainly did a good job of robbing from the system's own future as well.