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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

I live in Atlanta.

The Atlanta Metro has 6.5 million people across TWENTY THOUSAND square kilometers.

Trains just don't make sense for this. Everything is too spread out. And that's okay. Cites are allowed to have different models of transportation and living.

I like how much road infra we have. That I can visit forests, rivers, mountains, and dense city all within a relatively short amount of time with complete flexibility.

Autonomous driving is going to make this paradise. Cars will be superior to trains when they drive themselves.

Trains lack privacy and personal space.

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The German metro area "Rheinland" has a population of 8.7 million people across 12 thousand square kilometers. ~700/sqkm vs the 240/sqkm population density of Atlanta metro. Train and metro travel in this metrk area is extremely convenient and fast. It's not that Atlanta (or anywhere else in the United States for that matter) couldn't do it because of vastness, there's just no political and societal will behind this idea. In a society that glamorizes everyone driving the biggest trucks and carrying the largest rifles, of course convenient train systems are "not feasible".

And it loses money. And doesn't it have time reliability issues?

The exact same comment could be made of Atlanta's roads.

How did we get here from the post about uv?

This did veer very far from uv!

I'm so stoked for what uv is doing for the Python ecosystem. requirements.txt and the madness around it has been a hell for over a decade. It's been so pointlessly hard to replicate what the authors of Python projects want the state of your software to be in.

uv has been much needed. It's solving the single biggest pain point for Python.

Is your car a profitable investment?

Public transport is to move people around, not to make money.

roads also lose a lot of money, and that's fine. Public infrasturcture doesn't need to make money

I'm not following your logic. Having nearly triple the population density in Rheinland makes trains way _more_ feasible, not _less_. That means on average you have a train 1/3 the distance away from you. That's a big difference.

I live in NYC which has 29,000/sqkm in Manhattan and 11,300/sqkm overall. Public transportation is great here and you don't need a car.

but at 240/sqkm, that's really not much public trans per person!

Rule 35 of the internet? Every discussion will eventually devolve into the United State's horrible usage (or lack thereof) of public transportation.

Having replied in good faith already, I also want to call out that your jab about trucks and rifles adds nothing to the conversation and is merely culture-war fuel.

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

It seems like a fair point to me. You can't bring your rifle on the train but you can bring it in your truck. Whether or not that shapes Atlanteans choice of transport I can't say though.

Fair point perhaps, but was clearly intended as sarcasm:

> a society that glamorizes everyone driving the biggest trucks and carrying the largest rifles

> The German metro area "Rheinland" has a population of 8.7 million people across 12 thousand square kilometers. ~700/sqkm vs the 240/sqkm population density of Atlanta metro. Train and metro travel in this metrk area is extremely convenient and fast. It's not that Atlanta (or anywhere else in the United States for that matter) couldn't do it because of vastness

Did you forget to support yourself? You're saying Rheinland has three times the population density of Atlanta, with convenient passenger rail, and that demonstrates that low population density isn't an obstacle to passenger rail in Atlanta?

Yep, driving in Atlanta is so great, historians write whole books about how bad the traffic is and what caused it:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/traf...

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