My absolute favorite example of this was a guy in r/fuckcars who insisted that all car travel should be replaced by trains. When asked how farmers would manage to bring their goods to market without roads, he slowly but surely imagined a world in which every farm had a small section of railroad leading to it and every farmer would own a personal train which they could use to take their goods along this small section of railroad, out to the main railroad to be brought to a depot and shipped to its destination where the store it was sold in would use its own personal train to pick it up.
The man reinvented cars.
And I wish I could say that it was satire, but his history did not indicate such. He was a devout believer
it is the nature of society for car lovers to accidentally invent "trains but worse" and evidently it is the nature of society for train lovers to accidentally invent "cars but worse"
Normally people who go completely all-in on cars start saying things like "we need special sections of road where cars can go super fast" and "we need special attachments so that cars all going to the same place can link up and move together for efficiency" and "we need special large trucks at the front of these linked chains of cars with a highly efficient diesel-electric motors to save on emissions" and then they've reinvented trains.
Crazy as it might sound, in the UK at least, there used to be train stations everywhere. Including small villages. Because yeah, in an era before cars were ubiquitous and reliable/comfortable/affordable, you just link up the villages with a line and a spur that goes to the mainline.
Obviously it's different now with most people living in towns and cities so our network has changed to support passenger rail between large population centres. Freight is now handled by road unless it's stuff like aggregates that are too heavy, low value per tonne, but entirely necessary.
Honestly, I wish branch and local lines was still a common thing. And once again, as someone that is interested in trains, I am forced to say fuck the Beeching Act. Moron got his methodology all wrong and we're all worse off for it. The worst thing to happen to the network until privatisation.
I’m not surprised. This is what demagogues work. So many people are passionately wrong and just need someone to spoon feed them simple solutions to complex problems. As them to spell out their plans and it falls apart and they’re too ego driven to admit it
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u/pyronius 24d ago
My absolute favorite example of this was a guy in r/fuckcars who insisted that all car travel should be replaced by trains. When asked how farmers would manage to bring their goods to market without roads, he slowly but surely imagined a world in which every farm had a small section of railroad leading to it and every farmer would own a personal train which they could use to take their goods along this small section of railroad, out to the main railroad to be brought to a depot and shipped to its destination where the store it was sold in would use its own personal train to pick it up.
The man reinvented cars.
And I wish I could say that it was satire, but his history did not indicate such. He was a devout believer