trains trains and automo-trains
I want to get way more trains in America. Trains are the way of the future and we need to start moving towards a car-less society soon. Cars are huge polluters and moving more towards public and mass transit systems is the way of the future. Not only are the issues with the environment but also with future cities. La is notorious for having awful traffic despite having tons of 6 lane highways, not to mention street parking as an aesthetic looks terrible. In fact, there are 200 square miles of parking spaces in LA. 200. That's massive. Cities designed around cars, which are like all American cities, run into this problem. If you think of a big city you automatically think of the sound of cars honking and the congested and hard to navigate streets. American cities aren't designed for pedestrians, they are designed for cars.
There is no easy solution to this problem without bulldozing a lot of cites which is not going to work very well and is going to hurt poor people disproportionately. My big complaint is that American cities are designed really poorly. It's absolutely crazy that someone's car can break down, and then they can't make it to work, they lose their jobs, and then their apartment. The huge focus on cars in cities borders on classism. The suburbs have always been this kind of ugly sprawl and its completely facilitated by cars. Housing that is more integrated into the city looks nicer and doesn’t promote the same classism that the suburbs do.
What’s also crazy is how bad American trains are. Nowadays bullet train speeds are topping out at 267 MPH. Chicago is 136.4 miles away, making it a basically 30-minute train ride. America is so big but also mostly flat that it is the perfect place for high-speed trains. On this train, the trip from Chicago to LA would be like 8 hours or less. Not to mention they are way better for the environment than planes. Planes take so much gas and are ridiculously expensive. We could get rid of all the interstates and put in train tracks and use busses to connect smaller cities to ones with train stops. This could hugely cut down on pollution and on travel times. If we get more bikes, trains, and busses cars could be almost irrelevant. If everyone only road busses the traffic would be way better. I don't think busses alone would work in cities like LA but a well-designed bus and subway system could literally open up 200 more square miles of space, and also make that space more people-focused than car-focused. I don't really see this happening because our economy is so focused on consuming and cars are a big part of that consumption and are so deeply rooted in our cities and society taking them out would be hard and painful, but with the projected course of the future, it will be necessary. There is no reason to not start this transition now because amtrak sucks so much and America could have this amazing train system and we could really change the focus of our lives and cites from cars to people.
I enjoy the message of this blog and its message about the benefit of mass transit designed around trains. However, I find the format of this blog post quite distracting. I also agree that an alternate version of Las Angeles where cars are not present would be a beautiful utopia. Nice work!
ReplyDeleteI thought the points you brought up over the efficiency of trains and the classism cars can promote were interesting and persuasive. I agree that it would be incredibly difficult to eliminate all the cars and switch to an only train system, but we should at least make traveling by train better. I just goolged how long a train from Urbana to Chicago would take and it's longer than driving although modern trains can go much faster than cars. One issue I could see with a train only system would be deciding which cities get train stops. If too many cities have train stops, the train will be slower but if too few cities have trains stops the system will be less accessible.
ReplyDeleteCame for the format, stayed for the message. Honestly, given the amount of fear that we've generated in our society about climate change and the importance of reducing carbon emissions, I'm surprised more places haven't looked into optimizing their train system. I could see it being a large problem for rural parts of America, but at least for cities, as you talk about, it sounds like a great idea. If only Americans weren't so focused on materialism and the necessity of owning a car as a symbol of pride.
ReplyDeleteYour formatting needs some serious work...
ReplyDeleteThat said, the message was interesting and I enjoyed reading about trains. I whole-heartedly agree that we should put a higher emphasis on modes of public mass transit, such as trains. We can help save the environment AND increase efficiency!
I found your lighthearted style of writing a little out of the ordinary, but it made me laugh, so props to you!
Wow go off. I couldn't have said it better myself. America's obsession with cars as a symbol of wealth is dangerous, not only for the environment but for the world it creates. Our cities and towns are built for cars like you said, which only encourages more people to buy cars and not use public transportation, which furthers the decay of U.S. public transportation. It's a horrible, never-ending cycle. Even here in Champaign, the public transportation is subpar. I live pretty far out on the edge of town, and there's only one bus that goes to my neighborhood. Even then, it only comes out three times in the morning and three times in the evening and doesn't even go through the entire (rather large) neighborhood, let alone the surrounding neighborhoods. So everyone out here has a car and drives. It could all be avoided if America just got its shit together. Ah well.
ReplyDeleteI remember having this discussion with you at the end of the class period and honestly I agree. For one, people dislike public transportation because its so poorly maintained in the United States. If we could have a mass overhaul of the public transportation system as well as optimize cities and other places of large population around this we could have much more organized cities.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed your blog post and I can agree with it's message. Trains have some sort of different energy to them, something I can't in words. Riding from Moscow to Saint Petersberg on train have been some of the most enjoyable times of my life, there is a sense of ease that the rickety rackety rails instill.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I also think that cars are great in their own sense, and that our saving grace might actually be self driving cars. I think it's an interesting problem how traffic jams form, interesting enough to the point where many Physics Ph. D's in the 1980's in Russia where written about it because it has certain physics counterparts. It usually starts with a sudden brake, maybe because of a cat, but that causes the next person to brake, and the next, and so on and so forth. When the first person starts to accelerate, it takes some time for the person behind him to register he's starting to move and starts to move. And so you see something like a traffic snake moving down the road as people almost tow each other. Self driving cars eliminate that problem, along with traffic lights and pedestrian safety all because of a simple fact: They're a hive mind.