For clarity - merged two tweets together.
These baby urbanist type posts about what we could have drive me insane
We can do a lot better
I'm telling you we literally can't and won't:pain:
Eventually we're going to hit a point at which personal automobiles simply won't be feasible on a national scale. We're already kinda-sorta hitting that point as bridges begin to collapse and hurricanes knock out causeways and such. We've got something like a trillion dollars in deferred maintenance across the national system and its noticeably coming due.
We're also staring down a population crunch, as the olds retire and young people have fewer and fewer children. So a lot of recreational, suburban, and retirement communities simply aren't going to be viable economic projects in twenty or thirty years.
Things are going to change whether the Bidencrats and Trumpublicans want them to or not.
My answer is the same. We can't and we won't pay for it. People have been saying what you're saying for literally 30 years and the only thing we got was this shitty infrastructure deal that pays for like 12% of maintenance needs. That's all we're gonna get under this intractable neoliberal order and everywhere is gonna rot just like Jackson and Flint.
The small cars are because of the narrow city centers designed before automobiles along with more expensive gas prices.
First off, he would be better off comparing Germany yo the north east US region, as they are closer by density and that part definitely needs that number of routes.
On the other hand, the USSR proved you don't need density.
This is a bad comparison. Germany is generally a fairly dense country, whereas Montana is significantly less dense. It should be compared to a state like Texas or California, which have significantly more people.
This is not to say by the way that non-dense places don't deserve good transit, nor that having many trains is a bad idea, rather that Montana probably doesn't need 150 trains per day (at least not yet :train-shining: ). It could do a damn sight better than the current 2 trains per day in the entire state, one each way.
Also, population density is also a part of planning a society, it doesn't happen by accident.
There are places West of the Rockies that are more desolate than the Australian outback.
