Warranty period might be a nice catch, thanks :-)
> [...] anywhere that's dense and stable enough to invest in capital infrastructure would be better served by rail [...]
Honestly I'm against public transport, ad I'm against actual/modern cities: yes, in actual cities we absolutely need public transport, especially in dense EU cities where moving by car is a nightmare, BUT if we see in the world the various "economic environments":
- low density/low demographic areas are in mean underdeveloped and not very nice to live in, they tend to be poor areas for humans;
- high density areas tend to be nightmares where some start fleeing not knowing much where to flee and with density issues that have surpassed the advantage of density economic booster and being dense haven't much room to evolve;
- mid-density areas are middle ground, some are bad places some good ones, so looking at them I see a variety pattern:
- areas dedicated to something in general do see a quick flourishing period than agony;
- areas with a variety of activities and residential tend to prosper better than actual cities until density start to be high (in Riviera's terms).
As a result I see the Riviera model the best we have at today technological level: TLCs and logistics make possible to be "near enough" to have the density economic advantage without being a city, so without the downsides of cities. Surely we can't develop anything with this model, mining, heavy mechanics, metallurgic industries etc can't exists in such models, they need to be districts, but also cities nor other solution work form them and pure districts, like suburbs does not work because they have no variety. We can sustain a failure of a dedicated-to-something district if the rest of the country is resilient and agile enough to evolve, like a riviera, we can't evolve cities, so we are not resilient nor agile with them...
Long-story short in this present time I can't identify something stable enough for land-based networks, nor rails nor roads. Surely what's already build and still in a good shape can be used, but no investments in such infra seems to be a good enough one to my eyes... That's why I'm a partisan of aviation and naval, they still need infra, but such investments are cheaper if we remain at a certain scale so changes can happen with contained losses.