Tell ICE that you can deport way more people via trains and you will have a working train network in 4 weeks.
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2026
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Heck, the EU even named a train after them! /s
The US built its highway system in a very ruthless and efficient manner using Eminent Domain. Hundreds of communities were ripped out to place the infrastructure used for cars that most travelers unfortunately have to use today. Imagine doing that one more time over less densely populated land to lower demand for highways and possibly restoring some community space instead.
China did it and it vastly improved connectivity between remote cities in little time. Mexico also did away with a lot of the red tape associated with building railways and finished its Tren Maya project connecting the entire perimeter of its side of the Yucatan Peninsula in just five years.
Money in politics is the real reason the US doesn't have high speed rail yet still has a shitty digital panopticon.
It's because those camera were just thrown up and not cunsulted with by townships. They didn't even bother trying to do things the legal way, they just banked on getting permission later.
Who'd a guessed a ginormous and expensive public infrastructure project that requires meticulous long term planning and the acquisition of literally thousands of privately owned pieces of land (often through long and expensive legal processes, sometimes spanning various different jurisdictions) takes longer than bolting a couple thousand plastic boxes onto poles, or building what's essentially a large-ish industrial facility?
I am a big fan of rail transport. Use it more than my car because it's just better. But let's be real.
Corruption does speed up the build process. Create a secret rail line plan outlining the land that will need to be bought, they allow a select few of the wealthy to buy up all that land. Then announce the construction plan letting the new land owners sell their land to the state/government at huge mark up. No need for public debate, expensive legal process just good ol' corruption getting the job done.
What is this? The New Gilded Age?
This image has nothing to do with fuckcars, but promote more USA politics over cameras.
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.
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...
using every trick in their book to circumvent regulations and to continue building
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.
And they're not so small
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.
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rocks rocks everywhere so let's all play a game
Why aren't private companies pushing trains? They could make so much money. No?
adolf muskrat made a killing pretending to push trains.
A company in Texas tried, but the state government deliberately killed it.
Way more profit in selling everyone a depreciating asset you make them completely dependent on so they can never go back
They make more money selling cars. Think of how many cars are needed now that everyone needs their own personal one vs trains where 1 can transport hundreds of people.
Because it is a complex business model. Well actually two. Freight railroads work by transporting a load of freight from one location to another one far away. Massive long trains can easily transport as much as a 100 trucks. So scale makes it worth it, but for a lot of cargo it is truck -> train -> truck, which means you need a certain distance to make it significantly shorter not to go by truck directly. So a freight railroad needs to build a long railroad to make it worth it and that is a huge initial investment.
For passengers you can see the model in Japan. Basically it is a real estate company improving its land value by offering a better rail connection.
Both require a lot of money.
And even in Japan, isn't it a bunch of conglomerate companies fighting each other and most of them not actually making and profit from passenger rail?
Not really, no.
Although there is one example in the U.S: Brightline
Because railways cut through the landscape and cameras don’t. Lots of people get up and protest against plans to put a railway through their neighbourhood. For safety it needs to be completely fenced off, otherwise the speed of the train needs to be heavily reduced through that area.
A fenced off section of track is a completely impassable barrier to pedestrians that needs expensive accommodation (bridges or tunnels) to get around.
I mean that's part of it....... but not the whole picture. States are more than willing to utilize eminent domain when some company wants to install a new 6 lane tolled expressway.
Seriously. These comments, I swear. They've already tried or have used imminent domain to get the stupid ass data centers built.. It's not a pipe dream, they just can't fathom it being used for something better than privacy invading bullshit. Crazy people.
Yeap, the government has pretty sweeping powers to build infrastructure when they want too. The public transit sectors just don't have the ability to write the same checks that fossil fuel and car lobbyist regularly make.
Hell most cities don't even have any art deco buildings that they built in the 30s because they all got bulldozed to build highways in the 60s. It wasn't long ago that we were completely reshaping cities around certain kinds of transportation systems, it's not impossible.
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