i mean from what i read there is only one country with more ppl die in traffic which is india https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Länder_nach_Verkehrstoten but good they have a few trains for 1 billion ppl. sure thats going to help. LOL.
Congratulations, you figured out that China is a large country! It would be ridiculous to think that a country with 1.4 billion people would have less people dieing in traffic than a country with a smaller population.
If you just go by absolute numbers, a large country will have more of absolutely everything than a small country.
Now go back to your link and sort by “Je 100.000 Einwohner” and see how that changes the list.
Weird to compare a brutal dictatorship which violates human rights on the regular vs a democracy which violates human rights a little less.
a brutal dictatorship which violates human rights on the regular
Don’t you think you’re a little harsh on the US?
So far…give Trump time and he’ll catch right up.
Now do aircraft carriers!
Aircraft carriers don’t let me travel to my destinations
Your fault that you weren’t born as an aircraft!
Setting that cash on fire would be more practical use of tax payer money
Well, the most efficient form of government is a dictatorship, which nobody want except the dictator.
An inefficient government has groups investigating other groups to see if what they are doing is correct. This process takes time, so things move much slower. But is generally a much better protection against corruption.
Well, the most efficient form of government is a dictatorship, which nobody want except the dictator.
I mean… some people do, but they’re weird.
You say that, but… Iraq was a dictatorship, and they weren’t all that efficient at anything other than killing Kurds.
Hyperloop any day now!
Right now, the Chinese government has effective eminent domain powers which allows them to acquire property for which to build public infrastructure, both expressways and high-speed railways. That the Chinese people have no questions about the positives regarding HSTs, especially crunchtime during holidays where railway stations would be jampacked. That they’re rolling their HSTs to show their technological prowess.
Why the US HST programs and passenger rail transport in general are at glacial pace is partly because of the usual car lobby, because of NIMBYs, because of cheap air transport, and some people now on online gambling instead of touching grass and tossing dice in Vegas.
Doesnt the us also have those powers and didn’t they use them liberally in the construction of both the railways and interstates?
That just changed completely, far cry when there was this Robert Moses had whole neighborhoods demolished for highways and rearranging whole cities. Now any sort of public infrastructure in the US does have to undergo scrutiny, whether it’s going to affect people or their mortgages or both. And most of the homeowners will oppose anything that shatters their idyll.
Right now, the Chinese government has effective eminent domain powers which allows them to acquire property for which to build public infrastructure, both expressways and high-speed railways
I’ve heard people claim as much, but at the same time, Stuck Nail Houses exist, I’m not sure how to reconcile the two. I think it’s that their eminent domain is limited to property that was purchased after a certain point, so if it’s property your parents owned since the 80s, it’s literally easier for developers to route the highway around your home than win that lawsuit, but if they bought in like 2010, they can just give you a similar or better property, or the cash to buy one, and that’s that.
There do exist stubborn nail houses but those are very rare occurrences in China where they do indeed fight to hold onto the land they consider their birthright property or believing to be much more valuable than their government tries to buy from them, the only few outbursts of dissent in a country that quashes dissent.
stuck nail houses 釘子戶 may apply in limited situations but there is no such thing as land ownership in China. When you purchase real estate in China you are buying the right to use the land for a period of time (I think it’s 80 years but don’t quote me on that number, I’m going off memory here) but the state owns the land. When the party wants to build something they are going to build it.
That conductor is a total hottie tho
Yes, but.
It’s China. I guarantee you that loads of people got fucked over one way or the other for this improvement. The Chinese government usually doesn’t care much for the rights and lives of the individuals
Plenty of people got fucked over for America’s interstate system. You just don’t care about them because they’re poor minorities
One of the reasons it was built was to demolish black neighborhoods.
Are you suggesting that’s why the US hasn’t improved trains? Is there something about train improvements specifically that you think is harmful?
You say that, but medical debt? Homelessness? Ice concentration camps for brown people? Highest incarceration rates, social credit (credit score), pedophile leaders…
Europeans, feel free to complain about China. Americans have no right to complain about China.
Not to be a tankie, but China taking over the US government would be an improvement
I AM European.
Having said that, the US is a shit show and the Empire pretty much needs to be rebuilt from scrap at this point but it’s still better than China.
If you disagree I would suggest you go to China and start posting lots of tiananmen square videos from the 90’s and then tell me which place is better.
yhea, that’s not nearly as bad as paying taxes to a pedophile to finance a death camp for brown people.
Hate to say it, but unironically, they would be better off under communist China.
The bar is so fucking low.
And the West does? Hmm, you learn something new every day.
Yeah. Absolutely nothing bad happened to anyone in the rollout of the interstate Highway system. /s
Yeah, never mind. You know what I mean, of course, but you got your head so far up Pooh’s ass that you can taste his lunch
I don’t care for the US, let it fucking burn, it deserves to die fast at this point. However, at least you can still have some open expression there (for as long as that is lasting under the Cheeto)
But the likes of you pretending that China has it all covered and is doing great and totally doesn’t fuck entire populations over are just the worst.
I’m guessing correctky that you’re of the types that think that tiananmen square was just a big happy dance party?
At least I recognize both empires for the evil shit they are
Or the US rail system that used exploited labor to build it out.
I wonder if the early proliferation of rural cars / mega expressways kinda fucked us. When your transportation network grows around trains, upgrading the trains/rails makes good economic sense. We just kind of spread out everywhere quickly and made the train locations somewhat irrelevant.
We just kind of spread out everywhere quickly and made the train locations somewhat irrelevant.
Do you know any US history
I know enough that it wasn’t so much lobbying as it was advertising to the to the US citizens that made cars more popular. Ford figured out how to make it affordable then a bunch of companies that stood to make money on cars bought up streetcars and shut them down in favor of busses, but that doesn’t actually answer the demise of long distance rail.
The US was built on steam trains going literally everywhere
That’s kind of the problem though. They’re not everywhere now. There’s a whole lot of places that are nowhere near a train line.
Its so naive to think that this was the cause lmao
If anything, shouldn’t that make it easier? The US has quite open and wide streets/roads. You have more space to build stations and rail tracks than for example Europe with much narrower streets/roads.
No the auto industry has lobbied against trains and similar projects. It’s not about the science but more about how our politicians have been selling their souls for centuries.
People choose those politicians, too sensitive for fear of even slightly bigger government. Paired with racism, nowadays.
Pretty much part of the plot from Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
No, because cross-country trains and heavy use of them to move goods and people predates cars by quite a bit. Trains were a key component of the North winning the Civil War, for example.
Lots of existing train infrastructure needed to be torn out to make room for car infrastructure.
I definitely think this is the case. Something akin to tragedy of the commons (or maybe Braese’s paradox?) where small investments for short term gain trumps bigger investments for, comparatively, bigger gains.
Sweden, where I live, is in this situation too where the rail network is 50 years in reparation debt but it’s easier for politicians to budget for small road repairs and say that they make meaningful infrastructure work
Not just trains but all transportation services and systems is severely lacking in this country. Along with crumbling infrastructure and terrible build quality of cars and trucks and you got a recipe for disaster. But no one will care cuz Merica!
yeah it’s so funny when people think the US has good car infrastructure, the truth is that the US just generally fucking sucks
yeah sure there’s a lot of interstate highways which i guess you can consider good, but most people aren’t using them for very large distances, most people are driving to and from work every day and that part is so hilariously miserable that i don’t think people in the rest of the world truly believe it’s a real thing that happens…
Agreed! I live in a very rural part of the country and the conditions of the roads and highways are laughable.
not just that, but the design itself is often actively counterproductive, and the fact that driving is often the only way to get around means the roads are forced to handle an insane amount of traffic.
i like to say that the nordics are an example of actual car-centric design: the roads are simple and efficient and the other modes of transport are good enough, which means there aren’t thousands and thousands of incompetent and unwilling drivers on the roads.
we
Is this some sort of US problem that I’m too not-US to understand?
Public transportation in USA sucks, and people from USA often use we on social media platforms, assuming they are the majority :P
It’s because US companies dominate the internet, plus English is the de facto language of discussion. I’m not sure how to deal with this since we probably are the majority.
You’re third, after China and India. Now tell me how those don’t count ;)
They don’t speak English, so they’re just not present in these forums. Way to needlessly start ab argument tho
India has a billion english speakers. But they do tend to their own sites/fb
Your moral and intellectual superior was not talking about literal population, but that wasn’t the point. I was saying that US citizens most likely predominate US sites that are written in US English.
That was number of online users, not total population. And 50% of internet companies are Chinese, only 6% are American. I’m sure you’ll twist that fact to suit you too :)
Number of online users has nothing to do with what your superior was talking about. This is like saying most of the world speaks mandarin or something. Maybe you should learn how to think before being an obnoxious prick to your masters.
America: if ain’t broke don’t fix it Every other country: yah it’s time, what are our new requirements?
And then turn a blind eye to all the broken stuff because “we have been living with it so it’s not broken”
I mean this is sorta one of the things an autocracy does well. You might get substandard work and a lot of graft but when the order comes down no one gets to complain when they run a train line through your house.
actually, they do get to complain
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/gallery/chinas-extraordinary-nail-houses-show-5727566
And now wait for five years and see if the Chinese one is still there.
It’s been 16 years and counting.
This one is from 2024 Let that sink in Home not alone, just unfinished
One swallow does not make it summer. Shall we continue this path to see which one runs out first of resources?
Sorry, what do developers abandoning large housing projects have to do with longevity of train infrastructure?
It seems pretty improbable to me that this infrastructure will be replaced in China in just five years.
Didn’t mean replaced. I meant collapse. Rotted away. Tofu dreg.
Well I don’t really have any reason to doubt the quality of the rail system. It’s one thing to go over-budget on transit (which they apparently did); it’s quite another to go over-budget and build the whole system to a poor standard where it won’t even last.
I hope that you are right but I doubt it.
Americans: “Nice infrastructure. Would be a shame if we had to come over there and liberate it.”
I am as American as Pancetta. It is just the glorification of China that is rubbing me the wrong way.
Their buildings are collapsing. Yes, it is built fast, cheap and looks nice. And then it fails.
And the Chinese peope themselves. They suffer.
when you’re used to propaganda that says china is awful, seeing people say “china is pretty okay actually” looks like glorification.
No one is saying china is amazing, they’re saying china is not actively stabbing themselves in the stomach. China is doing the blitheringly obvious things a country like that should be doing, things that most other countries can’t be arsed to do because the people in power benefit from the status quo of things being shit.
They’re not perfect, things go over budget and things get built shittily by bad companies, just like what happens in every other country on earth.
the glorification of China
The Chinese government has definitely run ahead of the pack on domestic investment. But you could play the same game with Spain or Japan or Turkiye. The numbers simply would not have been as impressive.
Their buildings are collapsing.
This is a meme from 2008. You won’t find any more crumbling buildings in China than you’d find in the UK or Korea.
And the Chinese peope themselves. They suffer.
They’ll never know the joys of bumper to bumper traffic
Explain the sinking just finished metro. The ghost towns. The buildings collapsing. The bridges decaying because of concrete rot. There are so many current projects going bad because of the use of bad materials and dodgy practices. Skipping a geo research before building etc.
The Chinese are surpressed by the CCP. More than 90% of the drinking water is not fit for consumption. Aside from the AI cleaned up videos and pictures, there isn’t much of a clear sky with the smog.
And where are the birds?
… Also have you seen China. They too have traffic jams.
No country is a wonderland. And if someone is really really really trying to convince me they are that magnificent, and better than everyone else. I. Do. Not. Trust. Them.
Actions say more than words. And the actions have spoken.
Source: it came to me in a dream.
Source. Straight out of mainland China. Not all does get stopped by the Firewall.
So still no source
In Capitalist nations, the further we are from the era of peak Unions and in general civil society movements (which was just after WWII) the slower infrastructure improves from one year to the next, something visible not just in trains but at all levels (even National Health Services for those countries which have them).
The same thing will happen in China now that they’re getting more Capitalist than Socialist.
It was never the Capitalist part doing the kind of improvements that benefit most people, it was the stuff outside Capitalism (that used it as a Trade Philosophy only) constraining it and guiding it for policy ends which were independent of Capitalism.
This of course accelerated with Neoliberalism, since that stuff is mainly about making Capitalism the sole definer of policy, or in other words make Capitalism the entirety of politics, hence unconstrained and unguided by interests other than those of Money.
Capitalism is reasonably decent at optimizing Trade in the short and mid-term, but is completelly shit for non-Trade interests such as Quality Of Life, as well as for anything which doesn’t have direct and reasonably immediate action-consequence links such as situations where negative effects are very delayed in time (for example, companies enshittifying their products but keeping on going for years on the inertia of brand name) or emergent in nature (i.e. things that appear due to the accumulation of the actions of many actors, such as Global Warming).
That’s nature in general.
I don’t know if this analysis is true generally, Japan is pretty fucking capitalist.
I would argue it’s more a matter of what wing of the capitalist oligarchy has the upper hand. In the US and Canada, it’s the extractive fossil capital and that ultimately holds power. In Japan, or the Netherlands it’s more the manufacturing.
Don’t extrapolate from the US to capitalism in general. It’s more nuanced than that.
Whilst I can’t speak in an informed way about Japan, I can about The Netherlands and they have been degrading in terms of quality of public services during the Neoliberal era.
Certainly by the time I left (about 15 years ago) the trend was well establish in that country of having Scandinavian levels of tax (but only for people, not for companies) and ever more American-level of public services. For example, they don’t have a National Health Service (instead they have Health Insurance) even though taxes there for individuals are significantly higher than in countries which do have one such as Britain or Portugal.
They also use to have a high level of public housing but haven’t been building much of it in the last few decades and now have a giant realestate bubble.
The Netherlands is a great example of how even countries which started with a higher level of policies geared towards the good of the many, have a decay of those over time as we get further and further away from the post-War era, especially during the Neoliberal years.
You might ask if capitalism is the sole definer of policy, what’s the purpose of our elected parasites? If they can’t define a reason for their existence, they too need to be replaced with ai.
Well, the point of Neoliberalism is to de facto destroy Democracy by making the powers controlled by voters (the State) be secondary to the power of Money.
I guess the end stage will be something similar to Feudalism, or maybe just Fascism (a number of very Neoliberal nations have of late become a lot more Fascist).
In the transition stage, the politicians are needed keep up the Theatre Of Democracy and distract the masses with ever louder shows of conflict around things which Money doesn’t really care about (hence the Identity Politics Wars).
The same thing will happen in China now that they’re getting more Capitalist than Socialist.
China: “We’re working on our next five year plan, as part of a grand fifty year plan for full national modernization. We haven’t had a recession in 40 years and we’ve functionally eliminated poverty within our borders. We’re currently working on a network of trans-continental railroads and global shipping lanes to bring our modern industrial capacity to the planetary scale. As we slough off the productive surge of capitalism and turn state owned enterprises into the foundation of our economic model, we are enjoying an era of wealth and social stability not enjoyed by any country on earth in human history. This is just as Karl Marx predicted, two-hundred years ago.”
American: “No, that’s just capitalism. You’re doing capitalism right now.”
Also American: “We invested another trillion dollars in VR that hosts an AI that makes bitcoins. Our GDP is up to 15 digits. No, we don’t care about our measles epidemic, it builds character.”
American: “We invested another trillion dollars in VR that hosts an AI that makes bitcoins.”
China: “Sounds great, we’ll gladly make and supply 90% of all bitcoin hardware to make a quick buck off of your global ecological crisis machine (100% not capitalism I promise)”
100% not capitalism
Capitalism is when you… produce low cost surplus for general consumption?
What happens when you ban crypto trading and mining because its exploiting the SOE low cost electricity?
So long as the workers’ pockets are being filled, being the number one producer of literal trash, propping up global consumerism and burning the planet is irrelevant.
After all, it’s those dirty capitalists that forced us to pillage our own country and disregard our worker’s health and safety. But at the same time don’t forget that we’re the #1 shining world leader and those capitalist pigs can’t boss us around! 🇨🇳💪🇨🇳
those dirty capitalists that forced us to pillage our own country
My man, what are you even on? You seem to have China confused with West Virginia.
Capitalism is when there’s an owner-class controlling production via capital. It doesn’t really matter what they’re producing or at what cost or who’s consuming.
Capitalism is when there’s an owner-class controlling production via capital.
It’s funny, because I’ve seen more than a few libertarians assert that Communism is the Worst Form Of Capitalism because any kind of regulation is just Government Ownership of Production. The only true path to socialism is a fully devolved privatization of all territory and commodities.
So you have people go out into the woods to create this ultra-orthodox free market absent any kind of iron grip of Big Government. They spend millions on marketing their liberal utopia to attract a large base of like-minded people. They take over the local government, abolish the regulations, end the tyranny of the Woke Government Leftists, and finally unleash the power of individualist John Galt style ingenuity. And then their city fills up with bears.
US Train travel has actually gotten worse since 1996.
Came to say this. If it had literally remained unchanged they’d still be doing pretty good.
Yeah, the only reason we still have tracks most places is for freight.
