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Florida recently completed a high speed rail project (The same cannot he said for CA HSR). It’s no bullet train but pretty comparable to Acela. Everyone throwin
by oceanplexian 3y ago
Florida recently completed a high speed rail project (The same cannot he said for CA HSR). It’s no bullet train but pretty comparable to Acela. Everyone throwing shade on FL might be surprised that they are actually ahead of the game on a lot of infrastructure.
- chrisco255 3y agoStill doesn't change the fact that highway driving and automobile based transportation is not going anywhere. High speed rail won't ever replace cars. It's a nice supplemental form of transport, and works fine for point to point transport between major hubs, but it doesn't work at a distributed scale.
- justrealist 3y agoI think that's kind of the point. * CA talks a lot about replacing cars, and accomplishes nothing. * FL makes no pretense about being primarily a based car-culture, but successfully implements mass transit where it makes sense
- outside1234 3y agoCA has moved on and is just going to electrify all of the cars
- Gigachad 3y agoElectric cars solve almost none of the problems associated with cars.
- amanaplanacanal 3y agoAdding fossil carbon to the atmosphere seems like a pretty important one though.
- remote_phone 3y agoThe pandemic proved that pollution is primarily caused by trucks and not cars. Most of the highest polluted cities in the world that were clear during the global lockdown regained their pollution once trucks went back on the road.
- MikeTheGreat 3y agoGenuine question: How do you know this? (Maybe a source or something)? I know the supply chain got messed up, but given that trucks are so crucial to transporting goods (at least here in the US) I would think that trucks remained on the road during the pandemic while individuals driving cars all stayed home during quarantine. I'm really curious how this conclusion ('trucks are the primary cause of pollution') was reached
- bombcar 3y agoProbably something like this: > In the most recent year for which data are available, combination trucks made up only 1% of the vehicle population but were responsible for 6% of all vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and 17% of vehicle fuel use. Given that diesel is often considered "more polluting" you can probably make it work out given a bunch of assumptions that may or may not apply. Trucks are the primary cause of road wear, for example.
- George83728 3y agoTrucks also produce the lions' share of the noise pollution. Don't laugh, noise pollution is very serious; it causes cognitive damage to people who live near busy roads which in turn has innumerable deleterious social effects.
- bombcar 3y agoThere’s a number of climate fights that I think would be better argued with noise pollution reduction instead of carbon reduction, and vehicles especially trucks is one of them.
- justrealist 3y agoI don't actually have a problem with that, but if so they should have spent the $128 billion HRS buying every tenth person in CA a Model 3 instead.
- WillPostForFood 3y agoOr spent it to keep their nuclear points operating and generating clean energy.
- cool_dude85 3y ago>* FL makes no pretense about being primarily a based car-culture, but successfully implements mass transit where it makes sense Effectively no FL city has mass transit, unless you want to count South Florida which has a commuter train (Trirail) and the Metro, which are both essentially north-south only. It makes sense to do everywhere, but has been done nowhere.
- justrealist 3y agoThe Disney World monorail[1] has higher daily ridership than BART[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney_World_Monorail_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney_World_Monorail_Sys... [2] https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2020/news20200225 https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2020/news20200225
- taeric 3y agoAmusing stat, but doesn't really speak to FL builds.
- justrealist 3y agoWhy not? It's in Florida, and one way or another, Florida policymaking enabled mass transit where it made sense. You probably don't like that it's a private company on private land, but that's irrelevant to the question of decarbonation.
- majormajor 3y agoYou know there's a Disney park in California too, that has a monorail and shuttle services too? So why not compare Disney to Disney and the metros to... well...
- taeric 3y agoWas it a FL public project? That Disney, famously in "battle" with the FL government right now, did something commendable says little about what FL would do.
- LeanderK 3y agoWell, but cars don't work very well as soon as you concentrate parts of your population in urban centres. Both are needed and both are optional depending on where you live. At least individual ownership, because you will always need trucks, but you will also always need freight trains.
- panic 3y agoCA HSR is now actively being built. You can track its progress at https://buildhsr.com/ https://buildhsr.com/.
- WillPostForFood 3y agoIt has been actively being built for 8 years, in the wrong part of the state, with nothing functional yet. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jan/07/california-breaks-ground-high-speed-rail-project https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jan/07/california-b...
- helloooooooo 3y agoRome wasn’t built in a day. Cali has very difficult construction challenges wrt earthquakes and land acquisition
- sclarisse 3y agoCalifornia’s bullet train delays have basically nothing to do with fundamental challenges like seismic engineering, and everything to do with planning permission issues / NIMBYs and California specific regulations on one hand, and with bad management on the other. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-speed-rail-politics.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-speed-... https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-09/california-bullet-train-officials-say-they-were-told-to-suppress-bad-news-and-shut-up https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-09/californ... https://ktla.com/news/local-news/poor-decision-making-management-blamed-for-ballooning-costs-and-delays-in-california-bullet-train-project-in-new-state-audit/amp/ https://ktla.com/news/local-news/poor-decision-making-manage...
- maxcan 3y agoEarthquakes have little to do with it. They are simply an excuse for horrible policy. Go explain to Japan why earthquakes should prevent them from building effective infrastructure.
- sclarisse 3y ago
- itisit 3y agoThe Brightline vision is finally arriving, partially, after three decades of failures in funding and planning. To call that “ahead of the game” is disingenuous.
- rippercushions 3y agoBrightline is operational and wildly successful between Miami and Palm Beach, expanding soon to Orlando, and it's literally the only higher-speed passenger railway actually built in the US since the Acela. So, yes, it is very much ahead of the game.
- Kon-Peki 3y agoThe Amtrak Wolverine service (Chicago to Detroit) begs to differ. And just last week the Lincoln service (Chicago to St. Louis) and the Texas Eagle service (Chicago to Dallas/San Antonio) got approval for higher-speed operation. Brightline is very successful, part of which is due to having so few stops, something that a public railroad could never get away with politically. The Amtrak trains stop so often that they spend very little time at their top speed.
- cool_dude85 3y agoI don't have access to stats, but is it really particularly successful? I just checked and the Boca - Downtown Miami route takes 51 minutes, compared to (not quite comparable) Boca - MIA on the Trirail in 61 minutes. This, with way fewer stops in between. I can't believe too many commuters are paying a premium price unless they're specifically wanting to go downtown for work.
- bombcar 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightline#Ridership_by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightline#Ridership_by_year They had 1.2 million rides in 2022, that's good by any measurement. Pacific Surfliner in Southern California is a wildly successful intercity rail and only had 1.6m rides in 2022. Some people may use them to commute but it's not primarily commuter rail, would be my guess.
- AshleyGrant 3y agoThe Brightline train travels at 75 mph for a significant portion of its distance. It has to slow down due to dozens and dozens of road crossings. It's half-assed compared to what California is building.
- bombcar 3y agoBut to be fair to the Brightline, the half of the ass that they do have is actually moving passengers today. Track upgrades and locomotive upgrades are also being done to the Pacific Surfliner which in theory could get it above 120 MPH at some points, putting it semi-officially in "high speed rail" territory.
- runarberg 3y agoBut to be completely fair Brightline is only running passengers on a portion of this route (yet) between Miami and West Palm Beach, but so is the state of California, which is actually moving passengers today on both the Caltrain corridor between SF and Gilroy and the LOSSAN corridor between LA union station and Anaheim.
- stickyricky 3y agoOkay class... Everyone's trains are great. We don't need to compare. Trains are cool. Lets just encourage and build more of them.
- coev 3y agoBrightline runs on tracks that give priority to freight traffic (Florida East Coast Railway) and not passenger traffic, it's a 2nd class citizen.
- p_j_w 3y agoThe Pacific Surfliner can go faster than Brightline currently. It's also longer and has been in service for ages now. Florida isn't ahead of the game, they're playing catch up.