A historic electric airplane flight landed at JFK with passengers, marking a milestone as Beta Technologies demonstrates the practicality and efficiency of electric air travel.
Not sure what you mean by constant, it is definitely a huge gradient, but the layout of the US vs the EU is so drastically different that at almost every level routes that are well suited to train in Europe are often overwhelmingly inefficient in the US.
Everything from building up routes between major cities to regional and local end up being too low volume to support themselves.
There is at least an argument to be made that some/many routes should be heavily subsidized long enough to allow industry and society in general grow around them, by which time they could become self supporting, but most people don’t realize just how big the US is in land compared to it’s population, and that often results in a lot of ground to cover just for relatively few people each to get to a lot of places.
I understand your point. I just don’t share the pessimism, I come from finland where the population density is less than half that of the US and our trains run fine. That’s why I think the US could both build infrastructure that would bring about different kinds of traffic flows, as well as just build rail infrastructure for current traffic flows that would work just fine.
Don’t know if we can reach an agreement on this topic though. There are arguments both for and against, and we can’t really get closer to the truth without trial and error.
Not sure what you mean by constant, it is definitely a huge gradient, but the layout of the US vs the EU is so drastically different that at almost every level routes that are well suited to train in Europe are often overwhelmingly inefficient in the US.
Everything from building up routes between major cities to regional and local end up being too low volume to support themselves.
There is at least an argument to be made that some/many routes should be heavily subsidized long enough to allow industry and society in general grow around them, by which time they could become self supporting, but most people don’t realize just how big the US is in land compared to it’s population, and that often results in a lot of ground to cover just for relatively few people each to get to a lot of places.
I understand your point. I just don’t share the pessimism, I come from finland where the population density is less than half that of the US and our trains run fine. That’s why I think the US could both build infrastructure that would bring about different kinds of traffic flows, as well as just build rail infrastructure for current traffic flows that would work just fine.
Don’t know if we can reach an agreement on this topic though. There are arguments both for and against, and we can’t really get closer to the truth without trial and error.