Re:Spain's plan to ban domestic flights where you can take a...
by Manuel_D on Tuesday February 27, 2024 @03:46PM
(#39529662)
In WWII there was no interstate highway nor widespread air travel. And yes, most 5K towns are not too far from other 5k towns. But a town of 5k residents doesn't have enough people to justify investing in passenger rail. Hence why countries with lower population density (like the US, Canada, Australia, etc.) don't have much passenger rail demand. If it were due to politics, why is train travel ubiquitous in densely population countries, but not sparsely populated ones? We should expect to see a relatively random smattering of train-dominant and car and plane dominant transportation irrespective of geography. Instead, we see that sparsely populated countries don't have widespread passenger rail regardless of politics. I guess it's a coincidence that the fossil fuel conspiracy [1], just happened to take hold in sparsely populated countries like America, Canada, Australia, etc. and not densely populated ones.
What changed was the massive subsidies directed towards private vehicle usage. Those rail connections disappeared because they couldn’t compete with the heavily subsidized highway system on all but the busiest routes. This also means that things can change if we start taxing carbon or require vehicle users to pay for their infrastructure.