I heard about one in Japan that had only one person riding it each day. They cancelled it after she graduated high school.
Japan is just about the most different society from the US you could have picked though. Japan is a very high trust society whereas the U.S. is in the process of transition to a low trust society. Many (even very mundane) government actions that people readily accept in Japan would be met with fierce opposition in the US.
There’s opposition in Japan too. They just break through it, by legal means, extra-legal means, and if that’s too slow, throwing a bunch of money at the problem. Same with Korea, same with China. Trust has nothing to do with the economics of being able to operate trains.
Opposition in those countries is a tiny fraction of what you see in the US, where half the population of the country fiercely opposes anything and everything the other half tries to do.
China forcibly relocated millions of people to build the Three Gorges Dam. I doubt you’d ever see that in the US today.
I mean we did it to build the hoover dam. The legal mechanisms to do so still exist. The political will doesn’t because mass transit is bad for oil and car manufacturers.
The US of the 1930s is just as foreign of a country as China or Japan today, if not more so. You overestimate the ability of car manufacturers to generate political will. This is a societal-level breakdown in trust in political institutions that goes way beyond transit issues. There are millions of Americans who want nothing more than to burn their government to the ground and rebuild it in their own image. Watch some YouTube videos of city council meetings over almost any issue and you’ll see people who look like they need to be restrained before they pull each other’s hair out.
I heard about one in Japan that had only one person riding it each day. They cancelled it after she graduated high school.
Japan is just about the most different society from the US you could have picked though. Japan is a very high trust society whereas the U.S. is in the process of transition to a low trust society. Many (even very mundane) government actions that people readily accept in Japan would be met with fierce opposition in the US.
There’s opposition in Japan too. They just break through it, by legal means, extra-legal means, and if that’s too slow, throwing a bunch of money at the problem. Same with Korea, same with China. Trust has nothing to do with the economics of being able to operate trains.
Opposition in those countries is a tiny fraction of what you see in the US, where half the population of the country fiercely opposes anything and everything the other half tries to do.
China forcibly relocated millions of people to build the Three Gorges Dam. I doubt you’d ever see that in the US today.
I mean we did it to build the hoover dam. The legal mechanisms to do so still exist. The political will doesn’t because mass transit is bad for oil and car manufacturers.
The US of the 1930s is just as foreign of a country as China or Japan today, if not more so. You overestimate the ability of car manufacturers to generate political will. This is a societal-level breakdown in trust in political institutions that goes way beyond transit issues. There are millions of Americans who want nothing more than to burn their government to the ground and rebuild it in their own image. Watch some YouTube videos of city council meetings over almost any issue and you’ll see people who look like they need to be restrained before they pull each other’s hair out.