this post was submitted on 18 May 2026
237 points (98.8% liked)

Fuck Cars

15794 readers
460 users here now

A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!

Rules

1. Be CivilYou may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.

2. No hate speechDon't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.

3. Don't harass peopleDon't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.

4. Stay on topicThis community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.

5. No repostsDo not repost content that has already been posted in this community.

Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.

Posting Guidelines

In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:

Recommended communities:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Anything but trains.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 24 points 2 days ago (4 children)

The reason for busses is simple and seems to be ignored by literally everyone.

The private property between SF and LA keeps increasing in price so the costs for the project are in the billions before anything is even built. The signing of the land is in the billions. Now build a rail in Trump's economy and it becomes nearly impossible to succeed at anything rail.

Busses builds an audience that can be used to later justify rail to get buses off the road. Americans hate big trucks on the road but there they are anyway. It's a slow burn turn to morph the car brain into train brain.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The private property between SF and LA keeps increasing in price so the costs for the project are in the billions before anything is even built.

Damn, if only eminent domain existed

[–] lama@lemmy.world 1 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

Even with eminent domain though you still have to pay market value. Edit: Not that they shouldn't do it. It would still be worth it in the long run

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 points 6 hours ago

Governments can have a funny way of determining market value based on whether they like you or not.

Just point to a row of buildings and declare "slum clearance". Suddenly, you can get them for a steal.

[–] jenesaisquoi@feddit.org 2 points 1 day ago

Ahaha nonono. The problem is that the land is owned by white people. If it were owned by black people, then it would already have been bulldozed.

[–] teft@piefed.social 16 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Weird how cities used eminent domain to bulldoze entire black and Hispanic neighborhoods to build highways yet can’t use eminent domain to get some rich assholes overpriced real estate for this.

[–] Mac@mander.xyz 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

The city would lose the legal battle due to The Rich's lawyers.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago

They'd never attempt the battle due to The Rich's Legislators and Governor

[–] bryndos@fedia.io 3 points 1 day ago

Same reason we can't have it in the UK. We won't just pass a bill to CPO the land off (or take something else off) all the tory cunts at a nominal /cost price instead of market price.

Or even if we do we'll elect tories back in before it can be built, and give them the land back, probably for less than they were already compensated.

I think almost all of our railway routes were set out in 1800s when parliament and financiers went nuts for trains. We're just lucky enough that some low speed rail survived the 50s-90s when they tried to wipe them out totally. Even the carpilled couldn't fly that hard in the face of facts.