Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

I agree with other commenters: it's not "the rest of the world". It's China.

For regional transit, China's high speed rail buildout [1] is truly breathtaking. If you look at the miles of track [2], China has 45000km with 25000km under construction. Number 2 on the list is Spain (with 4000 and 1000 respectively).

For urban transit, China again completely dominates [3] by like a factor of 6-7 to #2. The US actually fares better here bu that's skewed by a handful of outliers, most notably NYC.

It makes me so mad because of the concerted effort made to dismantle and derail (pun intended) public transit efforts in the United States. The Koch brothers (well, brother) spend a fortune fighting these projects [4]. Elon Musk famously only propsosed the Hyperloop in the hopes of killing the California High Speed Rail ("HSR") [5].

Look at Las Vegas, a huge tourist destination. What Las Vegas actually needs is a subway line between the airport and the major Strip hotels. This would require probably less than 20 miles of tunnels. It could even be a mix of light rail in the suburbs and to the airport and tunnels under the Strip. You could extend it to key parts of Las Vegas to include all the people that need to work on the Strip through Park and Ride stations. It would be incredibly cheap for the benefit.

But instead we got the idiotic Tesla tunnels by The Boring Company, which I'm convinced was only proposed to kill the idea of any public transit infrastructure in Las Vegas.

It's all so short-sighted because public transit scales and it would make life easier for anyone who actually wants or needs to drive. But instead we get idiotic infrastructure like the Katy Freeway in Houston [6].

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/xszhbm/chinese_hig...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-speed_railway_lin...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems#List_by_...

[4]: https://archive.is/UFujh

[5]: https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1571628269555826688

[6]: https://b93.net/widest-freeway-in-the-united-states-is-in-te...

Gonna chime in with the "why" that goes unspoken (except for on The Site Which Shall Not Be Named, where they are quite vocal), as far as public support goes: poor people and minorities. That is, the middle class, upper middle class, and elite who are influential enough to make-or-break these projects (usually by killing them with a number of phone calls, emails, dinner conversations, and lawsuit) are either afraid of poor people and minorities and don't want to ride public transit with them, or else don't want to give them a "free lunch" (never mind that the realities of car dependency mean that these people are actually subsidizing the complainers, by having to put a large portion of their own income into maintaining the means of transportation by which they get to the businesses that enrich the wealthy).

And, yes, I know, I know, the source; however, the consistency of their (incredibly profane and offensive) sentiments, squared with the ongoing reality of our public transit systems (SIDS: Sudden Infrastructure Death Syndrome), leads me to believe that there's a non-zero chance that they're merely expressing a more crass version of a shared belief among the more well-off and less incel-adjacent.

I post this not to inflame, but to raise an issue that has to be addressed in order to make these things happen. Not poor people and minorities, but the irrational attitudes towards any public good that is perceived as benefiting them. I dunno if you have to solve racism/classism, or merely convince the top 20% that public transit is a benefit to them, too, but you're going to have to do something wrt this matter if you want to see improvement in public transit infrastructure in this country (and preferably before a multi-billion-dollar quasi-FSD boondoggle ends up in the federal budget).

> never mind that the realities of car dependency mean that these people are actually subsidizing the complainers, by having to put a large portion of their own income into maintaining the means of transportation by which they get to the businesses that enrich the wealthy

Why would you never mind one of the most important features of the American way of life?

Crushing the poor to enrich the rich. It's the American Dream.

>Look at Las Vegas, a huge tourist destination. What Las Vegas actually needs is a subway line between the airport and the major Strip hotels.

No, because this would be bad for the taxi companies, and we can't have that.

Maybe you can help me understand: Why would Elon Musk go to such lengths to kill HSR and public transit in Vegas? Is it just that he sells cars? The impact of these projects on Tesla sales doesn't seem like it would justify such an elaborate scheme to derail them.

Elon Musk has spoken on this [1]. It's such a silly argument too because nobody is forcing Elon Musk (or anyone else) to take the subway.

Elon is really unexceptional here in terms of being of the billionaire class. The US billionaire class is relatively unified in trying to collect as much wealth as absolutely possible.

So the likes of Koch fought public transit because of the idea of taxes. Billionaires in general simply want to reduce how many taxes they pay to collect more wealth. They'd rather people pay for their own cars rather than the government building a subway.

Health insurance, high housing costs, cars and high education costs are wealth extraction from the government and ordinary citizens to the ultra-wealthy.

It's exactly the same whenever you hear anyone talking about "small government" or otherwise reducing regulation. It's nothing more than wealth extraction by the ultra-wealthy.

[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-awkward-dislike-mass-t...

I'm sure there are a lot of people who agree with this, and maybe it's right. But I don't really find this to be a persuasive explanation.

First: Why would the billionaire class be especially concerned about taxes? They are famously lightly taxed in the U.S. and one would think that the marginal effect of taxes on their quality of life would be virtually zero.

Second: What's going to be more expensive: Elon Musk's share of the tax revenue required to build high speed rail, or standing up the Boring Company to offer a fake alternative? Doubly so in Las Vegas, in a state where he doesn't even live.

It does make sense to me that he'd rather have people buying Teslas than paying someone else for mass transit—which is the point I originally posited. But it's still not clear to name that the math remotely works out here, unless he thought that the Boring Company also had a real shot at succeeding and capturing some of that public transit revenue. But that, of course, would make it something other than pure sabotage.

I suspect a part of Elon's issue is pure ideology. However, I am a railfan (I even ride long-distance Amtrak for fun) and a Texan advocate of building HSR from Dallas to Houston, and I have to say he at least has a point about California specifically. A French contractor involved in that project famously pulled out saying that North Africa was far less politically dysfunctional.

https://www.businessinsider.com/french-california-high-speed...

The Katy Freeway seems idiotic, unless you actually need to drive in Houston, and then it's great. It's great that I have space between me and my neighbors. It's great that I can stay cool in my car and avoid the heat and rain from my garage to my destination (often, an HEB with a parking garage). It's great that I can get anywhere in the city outside of rush hour in 30 min or less. It's great that I can fill up my battery from the comfort of my home at off-peak hours. It's great that Tesla FSD takes me the whole way and only tries to kill me once or twice.

I've lived in a tiny apartment in a super-dense European city with Japanese levels of extent and service, and yet now for less money I live in my house like the European upper class, in a house bigger than theirs and with the same car they drive. I could never have afforded this in Western Europe (or Europe-like SF, NYC, etc). But freeway-loving America makes it possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI (One of a series)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2rI-5ZFW1E

A few videos on why this is (and I apologize for my language) incredibly selfish and idiotic.

tl;dw Owning a car in an American suburb is extremely expensive, and (especially if you disagree) your pleasant commute is likely being heavily subsidized (particularly by less-well-off Texans who you are forcing to live in worse conditions, and to pay proportionally more of their income to cover their own car dependency).

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