Step 2: dig up the road at midnight
Just 'cause it's in the ground doesn't mean it's not worth stealing...
At best the cab door will have a normally keyed lock, but there's plenty of glass to break out so that won't stop a determined mischief maker.
I kinda hoped it was like a car’s windshield.
Some operators retrofit in plexiglass or in rare cases bulletproof material, but that is for special applications.
> Winston Churchill once said, “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else.” [Laughter.]
I hope we will do the right thing soon and begin working on a robust public transit infrastructure.
I think the problem, as always, is money. The US housing market is supposedly worth USD 30T+ What will happen to all "money" currently in the suburban ticky tacky [wiktionary] houses? If we have high density housing with maglev trains in major city centers, will that "suck" more money from the rest of the United States?
It looks like about 7% of the US housing market "worth" is in New York (City) while about 6% of the US lives here. Seems reasonable. However, what if there was some constellation of "high density" city centers all connected together by reliable high-speed trains? Will it cause the suburbia to lose value?
I am just thinking out loud. I don't own a house so I don't have a horse in this race. Maglev supposedly costs up to a hundred million dollars per mile, which looks very attractive considering a road cost one to two million dollars per mile lane, so four to eight million dollars for a mile of a standard US four-lane street/road.
[wiktionary] (US) Cheap, low-quality building material, especially as that used to make conventional suburban housing of a uniform design. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ticky-tacky
[US housing worth] The total value of U.S. homes was $45.3 trillion at the end of 2022, down 4.9% ($2.3 trillion) from a record high of $47.7 trillion in June. (redfin, https://www.redfin.com/news/housing-market-loses-value-2023/.... )
[New York housing worth] Among metropolitan areas, the New York City metro remains the country’s largest real estate market by value, but by a narrowing margin. The NYC-area housing market is valued at $3.51 trillion, with the Los Angeles metro right behind at $3.27 trillion. (zillow, https://www.zillow.com/research/us-housing-market-total-valu.... )
There's a potential depending on how far out the it extends.
Using property as an investment vehicle is a major problem in the US. It compels property owners to support policies that retain or increase their property values (e.g. NIMBY).
There's a symbiotic relationship between commercial and residential property. Locality to commercial real-estate creates demand for residential property and scarcity of residential property increases the value of residential property.
The pandemic closed commercial real-estate and made a lot of people and organizations realize they don't need to be present in the office. This is disruptive to the market as whole because the value of both commercial and residential property is tied to demand for both. That is why there has been such a push towards getting people back into the office.
If people do not need to be in the office, then commercial real-estate loses all value. If people don't need to live near the office then residential property loses some of it's value.
This could have an impact on the demand for transit as well.