this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2026
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Real answer? Because train lines cut through a lot of land and every landowner along the route can hold up progress with legal objections. Flock cameras are just attached to poles and data centres are compact.
In addition, passenger trains are only really useful if they both start and end in built-up urban areas. A train between a ranch in Nebraska and a potato field in Idaho is not going to be serving many passengers.
That means that some of the key land needed for trains is going to be some of the most valuable land there is.
That's one reason why authoritarian regimes like China have a much easier time building train routes.
Getting datacentres built would take a lot longer if it was necessary to build them in big city downtown areas like you need for a main train station.
Yeah, but if you look at the most egregious example of this, California high speed rail, at this point they've cleared most of the legal hurdles and have the land.
They still don't have an end date in sight though because of lack of investment. They get a slow trickle from California carbon tax but not much else. They'll occasionally get a grant from the federal government only to have it rescinded when Trump gets in office.
The slow trickle from the carbon tax is enough to complete the flat part in maybe 6 years, but the part where they'll have to bore long tunnels through mountains to get to LA or San Francisco is impossible without a large investment.
Meanwhile there's no shortage of investment going to data centers.
There's a saying : "Where there's a will, there's a way"
Big tech are using every trick in their book to circumvent regulations and to continue building data centers despite local community disapproval over noise, pollution and a myriad of other problems...
Of course, since data centers are (according to the DOJ), "a matter of national, economic, and energy security", doesn't matter even if they are ran by illegal gas turbines.
And they're not so small
Also, this consideration for others property.... man it would have been nice to have had it when the US was building highways through black communities...
The US building highways through black communities is a big part of why we have committees that can hold up rail development. And do you really want a government that uses "every trick in the book" to build railroads? No! You want a government that follows its own rules both in letter and in spirit, and one that reigns in the excesses of the market economy when necessary, and one that simply writes better laws.
They're not small, but they're one plot of land, not a line spending potentially hundreds of miles and tens of thousands of individual real estate parcels that each require purchasing or litigation to acquire. Which needs to be done before most of the actual work can even begin.
On the Flock cameras, pretty much agreed.
Data centers are a bit more interesting. Sure the land itself is "find a willing landowner or handful in a sea of any land that would be equally ok", but then you have supporting infrastructure. Perhaps not as large of a route to secure, and more flexibility to make pretty sharp turns and such, but still lots of room for people to get in the way of a critical dependency. So surely the datacenters are having issues getting power to their facilities in the face of so many people around their property not wanting to give up their land right? No solution for that.
Oh yeah, if they won't sell their property to facilitate it, the government will just take it over: https://www.washingtonpost.com/ripple/2026/07/16/when-can-a-power-company-take-your-land-for-a-data-center/
So yes, in both datacenter and train, people can make it very hard to get things done. Somehow they find a way for the datacenters...
You as missing the scale problem, here. A data center, hell 1000 massive data centers still aren't going to take up the land that rail does. Its why you lay down rail first, then build around it, rather than destroying things to put rail in after. So yes, if you are going to magically put all this high speed rail in places people don't live directly on with trains that don't go places people want to be, then it's a great comparison.
That’s definitely a contributing factor. I remember the train line near my city… it took longer to buy up all the land than to actually build it. It might seem the same all building a road, but there are significantly more constraints, and a road benefits everyone around it, while trains only benefit Oriole at the train station.
Roads make life worse for everyone around them. I wish there were more barriers to building roads! You should have to get consent of everyone living within 200m to pollute the air they breathe. And I don't mean the landlord, I mean the tenants.
Let me be more precise: Roads provide transportation for anyone next to them
No they don't. I don't have a car. You think I'm gonna walk down the new freeway they build next to My home? Maybe I'll rollerblade down it.
Traditional roads provide transportation to everyone, but those don't need a big government project to build. All you need is a pair of shoes, and you'll wear a road into the dirt over time.
Roads built for cars? They isolate us. They put a deadly barrier between you and your neighbours. Keep your kids inside and give them a phone, it's dangerous out on the street! Pay attention when you're outside and don't wear headphones or look at your phone. And if you have impaired vision or movement? Then fuck you, get run over. Even if you're healthy, you have to wait at a traffic light just to cross the street in some places. Roads slow down movement for people.
You can buy, rent, or lease a car. it only takes a few dollars to use a rideshare then you can utilize the road
Exactly. Here's a visual representation of what we sacrifice to roads. And that's only the standard 1 lane either direction road. Imagine the chasm if it were depicting a multi-lane highway.
How much room do you need to walk? Go to any park and the trails through the wildlife is barely a foot wide. The argument doesn’t work, we do what we can to minimize the space we use when out in nature already, yet now we are gonna claim we need everything? That’s hypocrisy.
Roads are needed to transport goods and services at a reasonable cost.
Come to Vietnam sometime, there's plenty of places that are inaccessible to cars, but still get goods and services much cheaper than in car-centric countries.
That's assuming that, first, as a common area, the space roads take up would be only used for walking, and second, that this is a low density area.
Some streets - mostly commercial ones - have heavy foot traffic and sidewalks are always flush with people. Having the whole street available as a pedestrian is much more comfortable for everyone, and it also give spaces for art, activities, lounging areas, etc.
Not to mention what they do to wildlife that more and more these days get isolated by these roads. Why aren't they forced to build bridges for wildlife when building a road? Simply not a priority.
You don't have a car. Do you receive packages? If you called for medical help, how would it get to you? Most folks if they don't have a car at least want option for a bus, which requires roads. We can't build rail to reach every household (you said freeway next to your home, so that doesn't sound like it's a very downtown situation).
Perhaps there shouldn't be as many cars on it as you deal with, but the roads themselves..
How do you think your food and other needs gets to you, what do buses operate on? How does your mail get delivered.
You use roads.
I don't think the user implied we should have no roads ever though, no? I may be losing track of who you've replied to.
I'd say the majority of even the fully car free urbanist crowd, which is a pretty narrow and more radical version, still want roads for access to things like delivery vehicles or emergency vehicles, even if they want a total ban on private cars. They're just pointing out we spend a huge cost on roads in terms of space that we don't often consider and sometimes should when deciding if a full road is really necessary.
Buses are shit. They're a way to shoehorn transit into a network built for cars, and they can never be faster than the cars because they're in the same traffic. (BRT is a special thing to solve this problem.) It would be a net gain if buses went away along with the cars.
My mail gets delivered by a guy walking.
Roads and streets built for food delivery vehicles would need to be far smaller, and less extensive. And all of the land for parking lots and interchanges and turn lanes and drive-thrus and gas stations...
This "you use roads" argument falls flat when the car industry and drivers arrogated all of the space and forced it upon us.
How many packages do you think the guy can carry at once? Every block as a box that the guy walks to and collects to deliver before moving onto the next. Do you think that they’ve walked all the way from the postal office to your house with your mail…? You can’t seriously think that do you?
How do you think those get supplied? Your coffee shop? How did they get the utilities in to provide everything to the block?
You just don’t understand distribution and concept of scale. The argument only falls flat if you ignore major points along the way, like how the mail gets to your guy that walks. Or how those shops get supplies for the food delivery trucks.
And instead of that, why not multi use high rises? The bottom floor has a coffee shop, grocery store, and other amenities, how would you supply those without a road…?
You gotta look past your own nose and see the entire picture dude.
Ahh yes, the classic 'I live in a city, so obviously everything can be dense and done by human power alone'. Except for the massive amount of people who don't. I have incredibly few areas in the US or even Europe where no cars or no roads are needed. Can you reduce your reliance on them with a lot of changes? Sure. Can you eliminate them? No.
We didn't need cars 200 years ago and we don't need them today. Has our technology turned our entire society into a finely tuned swiss watch with no tolerance for change? No! We have better technology than ever for living without cars. Look at this stuff:
It's easier than ever for town planners to design a small rural town that doesn't need cars.
The only cars I support are fire trucks and ambulances.
You slayed that strawman but good.
I mean so to trains or any other transportation system. And without those transportation systems, you wouldn't be able to live the life you currently have. Are vehicles the best way to do it? Probably not. Are trains the best way to do it? nope. The best would be to have a blend of all things, and one that works for the majority rather than the minority, but thats difficult especially when one form gains traction over others.
They provide more than transportation. Take a coffee shop, for example. How are they going to get their coffee without road access?
The road provides transportation for the coffee delivery truck, yes, but it also provides coffee for everyone who visits the coffee shop. Without a road, there is no coffee to drink, and therefore no coffee shop.
Plenty of European and Middle Eastern cities already have pedestrianised streets that still allow vehicles in for deliveries with a 10 - 20mph speed limit. They're often not "through roads" (e.g. bollards at one end) and can be cobbled to prevent people using them as normal roads.
It returns the streets to the people whilst still allowing deliveries in.
Same way that humans used to do it for millennia before the invention of automobiles.
Roads pre-date automobiles by thousands of years. The original claim wasn’t about automobiles, it was about roads.
So they simply didn't exist. That's how that worked.
As I pointed out to another person, coffee was a worldwide commodity by the 18th century, and a flourishing coffee culture. Coffee shops most certainly did exist!
By growing their own food since there wasn’t any supply routes….? Or you’re waiting months for something the next county over? What if it spoils on the way? Robbed? Weather takes it out?
You’re making stuff out to be way to simple of a thing, it’s not black and white. What if you want coffee? Options other than wheat.
Europe had coffeehouses in the 17th century, and it became a world-wide commodity by the end of the 18th century, about 200 years before the invention of cars.
(Reminds me of hearing Johann Sebastian Bach's Coffee Cantata not long ago.)
Roads go back to the Roman Empire and earlier. By the 17th century, road networks were highly developed.
Nobody was supplying coffee houses by hauling sacks of coffee beans on foot through forests, fields, and river fords. They had ships on the ocean, barges on canals, and wagons on roads.
Uhh… you mean the slaves back than…? And the slaves they continue to use in the coffee trade…?
It’s only affordable because of the slaves, still is, pay everyone an liveable wage along the way, and that’s not happening.
Sure, shipping is easy when you don’t need to pay and the lives of people don’t matter. But hey, you get your coffee, cheap too!
For sure. Know how much a cup of coffee was inflation adjusted? Roughly $10-15. On top of that those 'coffee houses' weren't remotely close to what you have today. They were bulk brewed diluted black coffee with no sugar or other condiments because those too were expensive. A cup of coffee for the common man in 1700 was roughly 10% of his daily wage. Not exactly sure what point you are even trying to make here though, especially considering the highest cost for getting coffee in the 1700s up to the invention of the car was you guessed it, transportation costs. Invention of the car and transportation networks, why look at that, the price of coffee and other non-local agriculture products plummeted.
That's bizarrely incorrect. According to the Bank of England inflation calculator, the cost for a cup in, 18th century Britain would be equivalent to £1.57 now.
But I'm glad you asked about the point, which is: A functioning, healthy society (with coffee shops, even) does not require everybody driving their private vehicle everywhere, for every function of daily life. In fact, the opposite appears to be true, given that we can draw some pretty direct lines from a car-dominated landscape to the affordability crisis. We could have good lives without streets and roads filled with high-speed traffic.
Considering coffee is only cheap because of slaved workers, you’re incredibly missing the point.
Coffee is only affordable because of mass transport, and that’s only after the slave work is done.