• Owl [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    How is it that train tracks are an ominous tax expense but roads are just a naturally occurring feature???¿??

    • Infamousblt [any]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      I think libs are under the (false) impression that roads are both completely mandatory in society AND somehow cheaper to build and maintain than public transit. Per person moved public transit is significantly more efficient per dollar but libs just don’t want to know stats when they don’t agree with their worldview

      • I think libs are under the (false) impression that roads are both completely mandatory in society

        They kinda are in local transport to be fair. You can’t transport truck loads of stuff by bike to grocery stores. This necessitates some level of automobile road to get there. What’s unnecessary is regional/national roads for commerce. Most cities would still require road maintenance just for EMS and local commerce even if they had a robust public infrastructure. The good news is that buses can use these roads as well so a post-personal-car future is still viable. Roadless cities are not.

          • Yep, and that’s why most people should ride bikes and then use public infrastructure as needed. But automobiles are still necessary, unless you mean to bike in all the equipment you’d find in an ambulance.

            so a post-personal-car future is still viable

            It takes 160,000 bicycles to incur the road maintenance cost of a single personal car.

            Are we disagreeing here or are you just mentioning a statistic?

            • buckykat [none/use name]@hexbear.netOP
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              1 year ago

              I think ambulances and firetrucks should be basically the only automobiles. Even most delivery vehicles should be replaced by either cargo bikes or by spur lines off the railroad.

              Also, it’s important to this discussion to draw a clear distinction between streets, roads, and stroads. Streets are destinations and can be made primarily for bikes and pedestrians, roads are routes for cars to go fast from place to place. Stroads are the cursed middle ground common to USAmerican suburbia which combine the width and car friendliness of a road with the density of destinations of a street. I don’t think it’s possible, or even desirable, to get rid of streets, but I think we can and should get rid of most roads and absolutely all stroads. The remaining impermeable surfaces will be drastically cheaper to maintain.

    • zephyreks@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      don’t you know? roads build themselves with the labour of poor illegal immigrants

      FWIW road has similar cost to standard rolling stock, which ends up being substantially cheaper than urban subway tracks… so… it’s not entirely wrong? building a road in the city is cheaper than building a subway because of… tbh I’m not too sure, but it is in practice

      • AcidSmiley [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Well, it’s a subway, you have to excavate an entire tunnel system for that. But in return you get an entire traffic infrastrucutre that takes up next to no space on the surface, which means a lot in densely built areas. I guess if you’d compare subways to underground roads like that stuff Musk had built in Las Vegas, or if you’d compare roads to cable car tracks, costs would be fairly similar again.

        • Barabas [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          If we are talking about building new roads in cities that is also usually a tunnel these days. The days of Moses tearing down entire city blocks for a highway is largely a thing of the past.