That’s absolutely false. The feds only own small, short rail for passenger services. Other than that they own the northeast corridor from Washington DC to Boston. All other rail is directly owned by the rail companies. The feds really should nationalize the rail and have these cartels pay to use the rail. That way the fed can actually make sure the rail is in good condition and stop these big chemical spills.
They own several sections of track and you forgot to mention that it's the most popular publicly owned transit in the US. It's not insignificant. And similarly they still maintain interest in the transcontinental railroad they just do not gain a profit or have complete control. You also fail to note that the federal government owns Amtrak so how exactly was what I said "completely false".
Sorry, “the government runs some passenger lines so it’s the government’s fault that private companies on privately owned rail regularly create environmental disasters” doesn’t check out.
No that's exactly the problem I think it is. If they're mandated to turn a profit the federal government then has a perverse incentive to have weak regulation that allows greater profit margins.
Wrong again, the most popular US public transportation would go to the New York City Subway. At 2 billion rides a year compared to Amtrack’s about 23 million rides a year. It is insignificant compared to the hundred and sixty thousand miles of rail in the US. Amtrak only owns 750 miles of track. So you tell me is .4% of all the rail in the US significant?
The only interest the feds maintain in US rail, aside from owning amtrack, is in regulating railroads and transportation. Those agencies would be the federal railroad administration and the surface transportation board, along with state regulators in some states.
What you said is completely false, as you said “the feds still technically own large portions of the rail system” and I’m telling you that .4% is not large portions of the rail system.
“They own several sections of track and you forgot to mention that it's the most popular publicly owned transit in the US.” I don’t know how you came to the conclusion that I said the New York subway is federal. I said that it is actually the most popular public transportation in the US.
Okay cool some countries have less than 1000 miles of rail, I’m sure I could have figured that out on my own. But the US has 160,000 miles and 750 of that is, guess what, .4%. So yes it’s fucking small compared to the total rail in the US. My idea of large is not skewed in the slightest, 160,000 is much bigger than 750, simple maths. Yeah short lines are a thing, and guess what, they are not long. It honestly makes no sense that you are comparing amtrack to countries that don’t have much rail, when the entire conversation is about US rail. Like I can say that the US has more miles of road than Cuba, but that has no impact on how many of the roads are paved vs dirt in the US. That’s pretty much what you are saying.
Let me put it this way, there was approximately 245 billion miles traveled in 2021 for European passenger rail. While for the same year amtrack had 12.1 million miles traveled. Which if you do the math is .005%.
How exactly is state regulated state funded subway relevant to federally regulated partially federally funded railroads? It's not in my opinion but if you're going somewhere with it I'm intrigued.
Correct, it's not gigantic but for a federal rail system even the "small" Amtrak section it in itself isn't small.
Nope, I think it's skewed. If you think that small section isn't enough for governmental interest in lack of regulation I think you're absolutely mistaken.
Much like how the NYC subway is in no way related to federal rail or federally regulated rail. I don't even think mta handles hazmat in any way at all whatsoever so how does it matter in relation to chemical spills?
Again, I think you're simply not willing to connect the dots.
Btw that's 137000 miles of publicly funded highly regulated passenger rail which by your account we have 750 miles. And you claim I'm bringing up irrelevant stuff.
They are both passenger rail. It’s relevant because I responded to your claim that amtrack is the most popular public transportation. It’s not, NYC subway is. How is that not relevant?
That’s still small, you can’t compare a small country with fewer people and little rail infrastructure and draw relevant conclusions. So when you properly compare to countries that have populations and rail infrastructure that is comparable you can draw relevant conclusions. Which is why in my last response I chose to compare it to the EU.
I never talked about lack of regulations and the Feds interest in it. That would be you projecting. And also the lack of regulation is because of the 4 main rail companies that lobby to keep it the way it is. Not because of the government’s interest in the lack of regulation.
I never claimed that the NYC subway moves hazmat. They are passenger rail not freight.
Idk what “dots” you want me to connect, but you definitely need some better reading comprehension.
I honestly do not understand how you think that US rail is publicly funded. It is not. The railroad companies own the railroads and maintain them.
There is 750 miles of rail that amtrack directly owns. They have cost-sharing agreements with states that they operate in, on lines less than 750 miles. Anything over 750 miles receives federal financial support. So the 750 miles that amtrack directly owns is publicly funded. And the rest that they use from the railroad companies gets some public funding. But that is still less than 22,000 miles compared to the 160,000 miles of US rail.
It's not relevant because they do not do hazmat at all, Amtrak rails are shared with commercial rail often including hazmat.
Yes you can, I can compare an apple and the planet Venus. You're confusing inability with inanity and you're still wrong, it's a reasonable comparison.
Agreed, it was my point and you can't seem to absorb it and on fact are arguing that the conflict doesn't exist because "Amtrak small". The 4 main companies that lobby a regulatory agency soft on actual regulation because of perverse federal incentive.
I didn't say you did, I said NYC subway is a shit comparison because it doesn't take part in the subject of the conversation. Tomatoes are delicious too but it's entirely irrelevant because it's not related to the subject in any way.
The feds own track that they find federally, are you actually too dense to accept your own position? Then you subsequently explain how exactly rail is publicly funded. Amazing.
I just can’t even. Like I explain how something like 23,000 miles of rail gets some public funding and you say that’s the entire 160,000 miles of rail. The only federal rail is the rail owned by amtrack, which is 750 miles.
I’m done. You’re too fucking dense, with the reading comprehension of a fucking brick.
I literally answered all of that in my last comment.
Clearly. The amount is irrelevant, the incentive to not be regulated to make more profit is the save as any private company but private companies don't own and control regulatory agencies, the federal government does.
You didn't, and haven't. You're simply shitty at connect the dots. Apparently perverse incentive to you is a ok.
Holy fucking shit. The rail companies own the rail. Two federal agencies regulate rail and cargo on rail. The private companies that own the rail have an incentive to keep costs low. They do this by maintaining the rail as cheaply as they can. They also lobby the government to keep regulations relaxed so they don’t have to maintain as much. The government doesn’t care one single bit about the cost to maintain rail, their only incentive is taking the lobby money. Like maybe you should figure out how to connect the dots. And again reading comprehension is not your strong suit.
Sure, most of the rail aside from the 750 miles we both agree is 100% federally owned. You're being obtuse.
Why do you believe a for profit company ran by the government has any less motivation to have limited regulation for the purposes of making a larger profit.
No, it’s not fucking federally owned. ONLY THE 750 MILES IS FEDERALLY OWNED. Again reading comprehension. I never said amtrack has any less motivation to have limited regulations. You are constantly shoving words down my throat that I never said, somehow coming to conclusions that are not even close to what I am saying. I’m just going to block you so I don’t have to deal with the mental capacity of a brick.
Ahhh, yes I see. I’m too used to doing that part in my head and just slapped a percent on the end when I didn’t actually do that here. When I saw your last comment I instinctively went that’s like 50% how did they mess that up?
dude im pretty sure disney world could arguably be classified as a private transportation company with how much transportation they have in their campus.
Of course amtrak is the most highly rated public transit system, it's the only fucking one that exists.
That's what beginners think is the secret. The real secret is not holding people accountable and shielding them from litigious liability. Companies would regulate themselves if they had to pay for EVERYTHING the second they screw up.
American passenger trains are absurdly bad, I tried to book a return between two neighboring cities and evey single thing about it is stupid and expensive. I would have had to book the exact train which is annoying anyway but to make ot worse any at a useful time are are all insane prices and the train stations were both awkward and stupid. We might have to kill time waiting for our exact train but we can't do it near the station because theres nothing there.
You guys need to start acting upset that china is so fad ahead and get everyone charged up to update the railways.
I've taken the Cardinal four times and the only upsides were no TSA inspection (which they're talking about changing) and no size limits on luggage. Other than that everything was a fucking nightmare. Like, overflowing toilets with turds sliding around on the floor of the bathroom, 8 hour delays, departure time at 3am... bad. The first time I took it for the experience, the second time I took it because, "well shit happens right? Maybe it was a fluke." It wasn't a fluke. The only way it would be worth it would be if tickets were like $30.
Everybody gives the German rail flak for being late all the time and for 100 years-old technology and lacking personnel. But rail crashes are really rare. You gotta give them that. The switches may be operated by hand, but they’re safe.
I worked as a conductor for a little while. It's a law that anything containing hazardous materials HAS to move after a certain amount of time. I personally toured over 100 cars of hazmat from one end of the yard, through town, and back around into the other end of the yard so we could say it moved.
That's scary stuff, ammonia's no joke. It sounds like if the wind was blowing the other way several people could have been teargassed to death. Imagine if that happened in a city...
That's a false dichotomy in a lot of the comments here
We do both
Carbon capture isn't so we can continue to use fossil fuels. It's because once we get to 0 emissions we still need to draw down the carbon in the atmosphere
An ounce of prevention is almost always worth a pound of cure but we're still going to want that cure because every extra tenth of a degree we can bring the Earth back to normal is going to be worth it
Nah, we don't do both. Carbon capture projects are bullshit for the most part, see https://time.com/6264772/study-most-carbon-credits-are-bogus/ for example. Some are actually generating more carbon, not less overall. Instead, companies have been using this as a way to "buy" their target metrics, except they are buying offsets that don't really exist. And they use this to market their products as green/net zero products, which incentivizes even more consumption.
So overall this whole thing is most likely a net negative, as in we would be better without them. And honestly is not surprising at all, technology is not magic. It's just people want perfect solutions so we don't have to do anything and the problem goes away, so they keep falling for this bullshit. Case in point, your comment lol.
Carbon capture isn’t so we can continue to use fossil fuels.
But that is literally how it is used in the official plans and projections by governments and the UN. They nearly all plan with an increase of fossil fuel use and later (unrealistic) draw-down to reach "net zero" by the 2050ties or so.
Carbon capture isn’t so we can continue to use fossil fuels. It’s because once we get to 0 emissions we still need to draw down the carbon in the atmosphere
'Carbon capture' technology is stupid. Planting trees and not cutting down any more, that is the way to go. They capture carbon, lots of it. That 'technology' has worked for millions of years.
Yes that is a great solution if we had infinite space and time also if we weren't concerned about the natural world and were happy to destroy all the biodiversity and unique biomes by converting into forests. Oh and if it would actually work of course, but that doesn't matter in feelgood fantasy world.
I love trees, I've volunteered planting trees and donates to woodlands and all sorts of things but they are not going to save us from the mess we're in. They're also not as simple as they should be, management is crucial as there's a surprising amount of things that can go wrong on a large scale which would totally fuck the environment - especially with foodweb issues and soil chemistry.
It's not a straw man, the guy knows what he's talking about. Destroying biodiversity is a major problem with a lot of tree farms and tree planting programs. Tree planting doesn't HAVE to do that but that kind of management is hard to do, like the guy said
Tear down oversized parking lots and ten lane highways, failed "development" projects, hotel deserts and all of those other cemented spaces that are just dead and useless. Just let nature take it back.
It's easy to be glib but the actual reality is far more complex than you want it to be, here's a good simple video talking about the difference between good tree planting projects and bad ones
He doesn't go into the bad very deeply but they're are plenty of other resources if you're interested. The tree planting projects he does talk about are great and beneficial to the climate but their benefits are so much more than the small help they give the environment - is great treed are being planted when done in the right place but they won't save us alone and it's difficult to do
The education aspect is vital, one tool that's got a lot of promise is the node and branch analysis that plantCV does, there are projects working on using that to look at a tree and model it from images to highlight which limbs to cut and where for effective copicing, as well as other plant health info like tracking diseases or pests and providing good eco solutions. If a charity could give access to such a tool to subsistence farmers in their native languages (via an LLM like metas open-source models) that would be far more effective than their current efforts protecting training video onto the side of a building.
One of the best eco solutions though is not longstanding forests it's actually maintained cycles of smaller fast growing plants like willow, hemp, or even biowaste from crops or things like sidewalk grasses from.managed spaces. They collect the biomass using a non destructive cropping method then dry it in a thermal solar collector before burning it, the heat drives a turbine to generate electricity and the smoke goes upto the chimney where a portion of that electricity is used to create an electric charge over a membrain which collects over 90% of the carbon - this is then converted into echems (electronically derived chemicals, lubricants, fuels, or building materials.) These are used then at end of life we chuck them in a hole, ideally a used coal mine so that carbon goes back where it came from.
It's not a choice between eco utopia and tech hell, take a bio recycling center as an example, currently they're incredibly limited with people having to manually remove contaminants which means loads gets missed and we actually end up adding plastic and chemicals to farm fields, the process is slow and results in low quality 'soil improver' which is why to stop total soil death we'd either need to starve as our arable land lays fallow or cover it in chemical fertilizer (which would could make at the carbon capture plant btw rather than the current ugly supply chain) a better option is automation and ai enabled permaculture integrated into human living spaces, cities teaming with life and covered in plants all being maintained by automated tools with their biowaste taken (via underground cargo networks if we're blessed) to have the carbon extracted and useful things made with it.
All of this is possible with the science we know, solutions are still being engineered but if we put nasa levels of effort into it then we could have the start of things in place within five years (the education tools, facility automation, ground broken for at-scale biocarbon extraction plants, and home garden automtion)
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