Macaroni (and a shot of espresso)

but i am a bit peeved to this day that one of their members gave me feedback about my comic "othering cis people" and other members were like "yeah its so uncomfortable how this comic others cis people". i did not respond to this feedback bc i simply didnt know where to start

anyway heres a comprehensive list of the things the spiderforest collective offers to its members:

discord server

they reblog your posts

a good day makes good sleep

starting with a lil treat gets the work done

More things to do is less overwhelming

don’t make a plan just get in there

Incredible addition

I saw others (@eightyonekilograms I think?) posting about this article, and I was planning on making my own take on it so I gotta get that moving I guess! This article is a permutation of a point I've seen floating around US train circles every few years; the desultory state of US passenger rail is a result of our very good freight rail system, and those systems trade off inherently. Passenger rail and freight rail use the same tracks, but demand different things from those tracks; build structure, wear-and-tear rates, timetables, etc. Having both of these systems be chugging along full steam ahead (heh) is inherently very difficult; and the US chose freight over passenger because we are geographically spread out in a way that isn't optimal for trains anyway. To quote the conclusion:

The question “why can’t America have trains like Europe?” assumes the comparison is apt—but it isn’t. America has the world’s most productive freight rail network, and the cost is slow passenger trains. The equilibrium we have is neither an accident nor a failure but a choice, one made incrementally over fifty years, which has delivered real value. Whether to unmake it is a decision that we should make with clear understanding of what would be gained, and what would be lost.

The core fact above as a story of US rail policy in the 1970's is absolutely true - but the article is overreaching on how much it explains. To start, most high speed rail lines in the world are dedicated passenger lines, and do not carry freight! Japan's Shinkansen doesn't carry freight, Spain's 4000 km of HSR is the large majority freight-free - this stuff has to be for the precise reasons that this article outlines. When people say "US trains are slow", do we really mean the commuter line from Hudson County to NYC? I'm not saying it can't be improved, it can be, but we all know that ain't the sauce - we are complaining about how god damn slow a train from Philly to Boston is. Or San Fransisco to Los Angeles. Or Chicago to anywhere, you are trapped, you can never leave. Other countries built tracks that travel at over twice our "best" passenger trains - and it has almost nothing to do with freight.

The article acknowledges this at the end, but in doing so it just dodges the issue:

Building separate passenger infrastructure avoids this trade-off but introduces another: expense. California’s high-speed rail project, the most ambitious attempt at dedicated passenger track in a generation, has seen costs balloon from $33 billion to over $100 billion, with completion decades away, if it is completed at all. The NEC’s Acela operates on dedicated track only in limited segments; expanding that model nationwide would require investment on a scale American politics has never sustained.

Saying "we could never sustain these investments politically" ignores that California already spent $100 billion on HSR, far more money than the cost of entire train systems in other countries! The money is available if we could build cost effective trains. But we can't, right? California's HSR failure has nothing to do with the "inherent" trade off with freight, it has nothing to do with the ~organic price of HSR; it has everything to do with the government of California failing at its basic function of having state capacity. And this is of course endemic to every aspect of public infrastructure in the US - building a metro station here compared to Europe frequently costs over five times as much. That obviously has nothing to do with freight, right? If freight was the core issue, the cost problems would circle around the freight lines - but they don't, and actually laying track is something we are probably the least bad at. All of this could be improved without a single trade off vis a vis other infrastructure.

Everything above is the main issue, but there is one other point I wanna make: we shouldn't assume US freight dominance is a product solely of our highly efficient freight lines. We absolutely do use freight rail much more than many other countries! Some of it is because we prioritize its efficiency; other parts are because our geography demands it. But another big part is that, well okay how does Japan ship things? About half of it is via trucks ofc, we do a ton of that too. And the other half is via coastal shipping. Can't do that in Idaho, sure, but couldn't the US do that on the East Coast? Why don't we ship goods from NYC to Boston?

Because it is fucking illegal due to the accursed Jones Act! No ship can sail between US ports that isn't made in the US, and we make ~0% of the world's ships! Japan is ofc a shipping world leader, but also has no equivalent restrictions, and neither does Europe - or any country really. Just us, the lone lunatics. Now obviously if it was a ton more efficient to ship those goods, we would find a way, but there are a lot of margins in the middle there where muddling through is the better path. American freight is very often not the best modality for shipping goods. It is the only modality, and so we have been forced to prioritize it. And that is not a "fundamental tradeoff".

I align with their thinking the most, which is why I am linking them, so to super-quickly summarize a few of the biggest buckets:

--- NIMBYism/Localism: The US strongly empowers not only local governments, but involved activists within local communities to block construction projects on state & federal level priorities for their own interests. This just isn't any way to run a nation due to how concentrated costs vs diffuse benefits work for most things, and plagues pretty much everything in the US, including transit.

--- Disempowered Planning Agencies: US project planning offices are often quite understaffed & overly restricted in what they can do; they are forced to outsource most planning & operations to contractors, have to follow political mandates for things like "Buy America", "Union labor only", etc, and generally just can't actually be the boss they need to be to get things done. It both balloons costs via inherent inefficiencies and also via graft from interest groups & contractors.

--- Behind the Technology Curve: This is the hardest part for some people to accept, that the US straight up doesn't have the skills & equipment other countries have due to decades of neglect and no competitive pressure on firms/agencies. Other countries have improved & innovated and we didn't adopt them.

There are more ofc - state vs federal & cross-state projects is a big one - but hopefully that gives an idea. And you can see how things chain; NIMBYism blocks projects, so why hire salaried staffers who can't work? We have Buy America provisions, so yeah our technology has fallen behind since we can't import. And so on.