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Comment by kccqzy | Hacker News Reader

> Certainly, part of it is also cultural and legal frameworks that in the US make it very hard for this model to work

How so? In the United States Congress granted land to railroad companies, and the companies can sell the land to finance building tracks. Many cities started as railroad stops and grew because of the railroad.

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I suspect the commenter above is reflecting on 2026 USA and not 1850 USA. The past tense nature of your comment if part of the concern highlights a common recognition that there is limited evidence the country is currently capable of building.

A lot of NIMBY/racism/classism and modern reality of legal delays means that it can be costly.

Zoning laws is another. It's a lot of fun visiting Japan and Taiwan because you can wander around and there's a huge variation of utilization in a given block. US approach to zoning means that I rarely see similar utilization in the US.

Separate from this is politics.

I'm in the NYC metro area and we've been trying to expand access into NYC for decades.

You would think that this would be a no-brainer because it enables so much economic activity in both directions (NY/NJ). Yet, Chris Christie canceled the ARC project (which itself was years in the making) for optics at the time of the Tea Party.

NIMBY seems to have a hard time stopping data centers. Why do they have more success stopping renewables and rail?

If we put the same amount of economic pressure on rail that data centers have...the US would have probably have almost as nice infrastructure as China and be significantly better off.

NIMBY is stopping data centers.

Maine set to become first state with data center ban: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/09/maine-data-center-ban.html

Also, it's a different kind of more insidious and visceral NIMBY rooted in racism and classism.

Yes, see the famous essay, Nimby Good When My Neighborhood by I Hyppocrit.

Not sure it's a bad thing. So, they would employ maybe 30 people after they're built. Consume a lot of power and water. I'd have to see the details of a specific proposal but I'd probably vote against personally.

Sure, it’s stopping some, but not most/all even with strong public opposition.

See: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/small-missouri-to...

It's facetious to pretend NIMBYs are as such because they're racist and classist, rather than because they just want to protect the single most valuable and future-determining investment they'll make in their entire lives.

Those factors are tied together and aren’t easily separable. The racism and classism comes in because they believe that people of a different race or class will diminish the value of their investment.

If enough people believe this then it is true. That's just how markets work.

It is how (unregulated) markets work, but is this the right outcome? What do you think would happen if this were allowed to play out to its logical extent?

Desirable things become expensive and undesirable things become inexpensive.

The public rail industry has no bribing mechanism unlike the data center industry and the fossil fuel industry. Did I write bribe? Sorry, “campaign contribution.” But sometimes also literally bribes like Tony Soprano cash in the bag.

There's an existing disused commuter rail line in NJ near the Hudson that was shut down in the 60s. It still has many of its stations and density to support rail service today but can't be reopened because of the NIMBYs. If they can't make that work, the rest of the country is mostly hopeless.

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