Maybe Our Railroads Need Some Robber Barons - Is Florida’s Brightline a remedy for our ailing rail system?
Maybe Our Railroads Need Some Robber Barons
The only thing that "needs robber barons" is an empty guillotine.
["Angel" by Sarah McLaughlin starts playing in the background]
[Fade in: B-Roll of sad, emaciated, juvenile guillotines doing chores in a squalid shanty town.]
Narrator: [Voiceover] For less than one dollar per day, you could help feed a starving guillotine like Pierre, or Jacques or Gabriel. They haven't done anything wrong except be born into a community without access to the nourishing blood of the ultra wealthy that they so desperately need. So please, call today. You'll be glad you did.
"Maybe we need industrial tech bros telling us how to live so we can get one progressive change?"
"Okay, I just got this great new idea. You know how freight by truck is so much more expensive than by ship? I think I figured out a way to get the costs down and apply it not just to freight, but transit too. I just saw a YouTube video on physics. We need to reduce the rolling resistance, for starters. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking hard, smooth wheels would slide all over a road of the same material. However, I took one of my private jets to lunch yesterday and took a walk on the Via Appia Antica. It has these cool little grooves carved by centuries of wagon use. They would even help guide the carts! Now you might say that still leaves the problem of having a big, expensive road. I got you covered. We take the inverse of that arrangement. Instead of recessed, curved groves and flat wheels, we use raised, flat strips (or rails, if you will); curved, convex wheels and ditch the rest of the road entirely. We'll save billions on this road made of rails and that's just a start! What's the most expensive part of the truck? The tractor, that's right! So now that our rolling resistance is down by a lot we can pull more trailers. I call them "Carry-All Retention Sytems" or "CARS" for short. Also, the harder surfaces means we can use bigger, more powerful engines. We could have a tractor trailer arrangement longer than several trucks, kinda like how a bridal train is sometimes longer than the dress itself."
"Do you hear yourself? Rail, Road, cars, train."
"Uh, oh. Did I just invent trains again?"
"Yeah, it's like the third time you've done it. Unless you can come up with something that'll add value to trains, I think we'd better move on."
"Umm...AI? We put an AI on the trains, in the trains or maybe in the control centers?"
"Ugh, goddammit! I'll assemble the investors."
Yeah, definitely need to run some more high speed rail through the middle of towns that don't have the safety guards to handle it.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article308679915.html
Edit for the people who still think Brightline is fine:
The only death rate on trains I care about is deaths from the train crashing/malfunctions/etc. You know.. Things the train/train operator are actually, legitimately responsible for.
People being fucking stupid and going around barriers and getting hit and killed should not be held against trains.
Trains are not hiding in a bush waiting to jump out and get you when you least expect it. They are enormous fucking things, stuck to rails, and the only way they are gonna get you is if you are a momentously self centered idiot (you know, you're average american) that tries to put yourself in a place where common sense and barriers tell you not to.
Then again, it doesnt matter to anti-mass transit propagandists who love to seize upon any opportunity to say "THIS IS TOO DANGEROUS/EXPENSIVE/UNAMERICAN, WE NEED MORE ROADS AND CARS INSTEAD"
I think developing high speed rail lines in the US is still a good thing. The US is severely lacking and behind other countries in that regard.
What I'm gathering from the article is this:
So am I reading that correctly? Seems as though these issues are supposed to be addressed by the government.
Romero saw a slow-moving freight train and drove around the gates to try to beat it. A police report said Romero was ‘oblivious’ to the fact that a much faster Brightline train was approaching from the other direction.
I wouldn't say a lack of safety guards nor the train itself is to blame in this instance.
Nope, the issue 99.99% of the time is, and will always be, stupid entitled assholes.
Thankfully its a self correcting problem, since their population will slowly diminish and, perhaps with luck, one day go extinct.
Yeah, seriously, what a moron.
But I guess in the article most deaths are from pedestrians crossing the tracks in areas away from street/pedestrian crossings. Still not necessarily a smart move, but I guess people are not realizing how fast the high speed rail trains go vs regular trains.
Do you even know how many people are killed by cars each year? This is nothing compared to that. Most cases cited here are because people acted completely recklessly. The same can't be said about many car accidents.
I was going to say, of all places, Florida has got some of the worst geography and city planning for this type of project.
The private-public partnership that was responsible for building the US’s original railroads also depended on work camps / slave labor on stolen land.
I wonder how they made them so cheaply?!
Plenty of work to be done, but this country doesn’t actually want to pay labor. Money goes to speculation, not work.
Billionaires: "So you're saying we either have to give up gambling with other people's money or labor laws? Hmmm...So, uh, how many slaves you need?"