this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2024
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Yes I'm familiar with riding trains, both in and out of the us. It is enjoyable but it is much slower than just hopping in my car and going straight to where I'm going. For the sake of those trips where I'm hopping around between states and coming back in a single day I would not want to have to do it by train. When I'm going out of state and staying out of state for a couple days train is perfectly fine and as long as the Amtrak lines up with my schedule I generally will
Do you want those states to have living things in them in fifty years? Do you want exterior temperatures under 105f/40c most days?
Because you can't have both that and cars. This isnt me being your mom, this is me telling you youre the reason I don't bother with savings, because I have an inkling what the world is gonna be in twenty years if we don't fix shit now, and I'm not eager to see that shit.
Have you actually looked at any of the studies the majority of our greenhouse gases are coming from? Transportation is only a small piece of it. If your goal is to stop climate change then there are significantly more important things you could be targeting. Fuels used for generating electricity, as byproducts in the manufacturing of goods, and the clear cutting of forests all contribute significantly more to Greenhouse production than Transportation does.
That's not to say we shouldn't reduce Transportation emissions still, which you seem to think I'm not advocating for but I clearly am because I am saying I want better public transportation and I want to be able to use my car less often I just don't want it taken away from me entirely. But using it as an argument for the removal of cars is weak because it's not even one of the largest contributors
Wow you really want to fuck your car, don't you?
Like I'm for reducing agriculture emissions(going vegan), I'm for increasing rail to the point flying feels absurd (and getting rid of it, mostly), and I'm for not burning fossil fuels for any reason. But the future where we just switched to electric cars abd everything else is the same? We (or our grandparents) walked past that door, carter admin or Chevy volt at the latest. Its underwater now.
The ecological cost of cars (break and tire dust in our lungs and water-thats where most of your microplastics come from) producing and moving tons of material for every 1-5 hundred pound human, black pavement that won't let water through, and just the sheer wasted space, we can't afford it anymore. Its not worth it.
But its not all bad! Trains are cool as fuck, and crazy efficient per joule-a filthy diesel train belching clouds of smoke is cleaner and greener than an electric car running on clean nuclear/wind power, so imagine what we could do with overhead wire/third rail?
And yeah you might have to walk a block or two to the train station, once robust transit gets put in, but you'd get your steps in, and honestly in Los Angeles most people walk at least that far to their cars anyway.