Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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Makes sense. I've lived in three Australian cities and getting around on bike, bus, and rail is much easier than driving. Plenty of friends I met never even got a driver's licence.
But as you get away from a city centre, things become challenging. By the time you've left a city region, you enter the Australian sprawl of nasty climate and nothingness between bits and pieces of civilisation peppered around the national map.
It's a land where one state would be the ~~16th largest country~~ (I forgot about WA) 10th largest country in the world. A place where I almost all cities, you can fit several European nations in between your's and the next closest.
It's car use and costs on roads reflects its low population having a density per square kilometre comparable to the scarcist places on the planet. But if you are in a city—at least those I was in—the infrastructure for not having a car is great. You're really punished for driving a vehicle in one, yet many still do and are miserable every morning and afternoon.
Feels like trains between cities would be way cheaper.
They're definitely used, but there's a massive mountain range in the way down the entire East and South coast. And it ain't subtle either. You're at sea level, then suddenly climbing very steep.
It's called The Great Dividing Range because that's what it does.
But if you're not needing a vehicle to get around, just going city to city on the same side of the ranges, train is good. High speed rail would be excellent. Australia is a perfect candidate for it since so many kilometres need to be eaten up getting between places and where it's flat, it's real flat
Famously, trains cannot cross mountain ranges. Only cars can do that.
The article is talking about on-costs to the national economy, not what is achievable in physics or not. Same concept of the fuel expenditure in space programs exiting the atmosphere.
Desoite it's reputation, Australia's geography makes its flora, ecosystems, and fauna very fragile.
Overcoming a mountain range four times the size of Great Britain for a population density that's 1.3% of just one Great Britain doesn't make financial or, in Australia's case, environmental sense. They're still trying to fix up the mistakes they made to the environment during colonialism, plus the modern globalisation ones.
Energy for recommending train solutions is more efficiently directed to countless other places. Else we may as well be mentioning Liberians could just get a Costcobto solve their issues.
Like cars. Famously energy efficient cars.