* CA talks a lot about replacing cars, and accomplishes nothing.
* FL makes no pretense about being primarily a based car-culture, but successfully implements mass transit where it makes sense
I know the supply chain got messed up, but given that trucks are so crucial to transporting goods (at least here in the US) I would think that trucks remained on the road during the pandemic while individuals driving cars all stayed home during quarantine.
I'm really curious how this conclusion ('trucks are the primary cause of pollution') was reached
> In the most recent year for which data are available, combination trucks made up only 1% of the vehicle population but were responsible for 6% of all vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and 17% of vehicle fuel use.
Given that diesel is often considered "more polluting" you can probably make it work out given a bunch of assumptions that may or may not apply. Trucks are the primary cause of road wear, for example.
Modern diesel engines are less polluting than unleaded cars, thanks to diesel particle filters:
"gasoline cars emitted on average 10 times more carbonaceous PM at 22°C and 62 times more at -7°C compared to diesel cars"
Effectively no FL city has mass transit, unless you want to count South Florida which has a commuter train (Trirail) and the Metro, which are both essentially north-south only. It makes sense to do everywhere, but has been done nowhere.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney_World_Monorail_Sys... [2] https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2020/news20200225
You probably don't like that it's a private company on private land, but that's irrelevant to the question of decarbonation.
So why not compare Disney to Disney and the metros to... well...
Unless you are saying maybe we should pursue more local governments run by a corporation? That also feels wrong, all told. Though, I would grant I don't have enough perspective there to know.
Part of the pitch to getting the Reedy Creek Act passed, was the plans for E.P.C.O.T. (Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow) and the plan to build a new urban development. Those plans were complicated after Walt's death and permanently shelved after his brother Roy's retirement in 1968, but Disney retained its exemptions in spite of never truly undertaking the original plan and simply operated a tax-reduced, virtually regulation-free amusement park, until this year.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reedy_Creek_Improvement_Act [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20140903204555/http://articles.o...
At the least, it is far more complicated than makes sense, and can't really be used as evidence one way or the other for Florida making good choices.
There's only one definition of "mass transit" that matters and it's the one you know CA can't deliver on.
His plans for EPCOT were originally to build an actual planned city using these technologies to manage traffic flow: https://sites.google.com/site/theoriginalepcot/overview/the-...
Your BART number is also in the middle of the Pandemic, back then the daily ridership of the Disney’s monorail was 0, as the park was closed.
Most resent number for BART is (Q4 2022) 146,500 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit
I’m having difficulty finding ridership numbers for Disney’s monorail. The best I can give is 150,000 per day. https://www.tampabay.com/life-culture/2023/05/04/disney-desa... which is something some legislator says while playing politics.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jan/07/california-b...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-speed-...
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-09/californ...
https://ktla.com/news/local-news/poor-decision-making-manage...
But my understanding is that they were feting a plan which left passengers with a 20 mile bus bridge to Bakersfield, and that’s just deranged
Personally if it were up to me I would have started the CAHSR between Bakersfield and LA simply because of the lack of any current rail connection. However this is by far the most expensive portion of the phase 1 plan, and given the lack of funding it is no surprise they started with the cheapest portion.
If you start in SF or LA, you at least have a fast train serving an area with terrible traffic and a population of millions.
Brightline is very successful, part of which is due to having so few stops, something that a public railroad could never get away with politically. The Amtrak trains stop so often that they spend very little time at their top speed.
They had 1.2 million rides in 2022, that's good by any measurement. Pacific Surfliner in Southern California is a wildly successful intercity rail and only had 1.6m rides in 2022.
Some people may use them to commute but it's not primarily commuter rail, would be my guess.
The San Diego trolley has 63 miles of track and 34 million riders in 2022; but that's an entirely different type of rail that serves a different purpose. Even if it eventually reached all the way to Los Angeles there would still be uses for commuter and intercity rail.
Many places in Europe have the various types of rail all sharing the same "lines" or stations, but the ICE is a completely different beast than the Regionalbahn or Regional-Express.
With that said, as you point out, it's a new intercity service that is actually operational, popular, and being used today, which for the US is an enormously rare feat.
It's half-assed compared to what California is building.
Track upgrades and locomotive upgrades are also being done to the Pacific Surfliner which in theory could get it above 120 MPH at some points, putting it semi-officially in "high speed rail" territory.