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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • You’re missing the “privatized railways” and “trains need more grading” components.

    Businesses need to ship cargo. However the private railroads road block attempts at public freight rail (which is massively more efficient) so the demand from businesses is to run truck traffic over highways which is where like 99.9% of road wear comes from.

    Private railways also have no incentive to expand service (it costs a lot to properly grade for freight and they have regional monopolies. )


  • Fedizen@lemmy.worldtoFuck Cars@lemmy.worldanon discusses car dependence
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    7 days ago

    This is also coincidentally how the math works on big box stores.

    • Big box parking lot/strip mall opens
    • Save $100 on groceries annually
    • Pay $150 extra in taxes and gas to maintain and drive on an additional 10 miles of road
    • Local options shut down, prices go up, and it takes 5 extra minutes to get to box store with increased traffic.
    • Box store eventually closes due to not being in suburb anyway.



  • There’s more to it. While the military bought in on it, the industries were the major pushers. Many towns had tram cars or cable cars (if you’ve ever been to San Fran, you’ve probably ridden these) but were bought and dismantled up by a then illegal collusion between like GM, Firestone, and oil companies a bit over 75 years ago and the legal cases lasted another 25 years.

    There is a famous antitrust case on this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy

    Unfortunately this has resulted in such a profound malinvestment in public resources that it has turned a majority of the US into giant open paved areas: dangerous to kids, prohibitive of other small traffic, causes drainage problems, sun/wind exposure, urban sprawl, housing issues, huge parking lots, etc.