I did a long road trip over the Christmas break, two days of driving on rural highways (1 lane each way, metres from the wheat, barley, and sheep)
The roads paralleled a railway most of the way, but there’s no passenger rail - only farm produce
I would’ve enjoyed doing the trip by rail, even if it was no quicker than by car. The car stayed parked practically the whole time we were at the destination
Just use the internet. No transportation needed, you can meet with anyone in any world you like, whenever you want in an instant, like teleportation. You can even be who you want to be. With internet you actually never need to leave the house ever again.
Honestly, teleporting devices sounds like something Elon would push for to further derail rail projects. I bet he already has a plan to release one in 5 years.
I wish we could develop it alongside our existing interstate highway system. I also want us to somehow, someway, develop an interstate water system. East of the Mississippi and gulf floods. Southwest is constantly low on water. We would see such massive economic gains from the infrastructure investment
I don’t know about interstate water systems. In Europe something of the kind is already there, but the ecological consequences are pretty bad. Unconnected rivers sometimes have their own species, but connecting the rivers will mean that species from one river can invade the other. This happened when they connected the Rhine and the Danube. I don’t know how big the economic gains would be, but I feel like the world has damaged its rivers enough, with canalization and dam placements.
I would just like to point out that it is not all bad. There are several waterways in europe that have been reconnected in the last 30+ years and that those reconnections have had significant impact on the fauna and flora (in a positive way).
Sure. If I remember correctly in Belgium in the 90s (or early 00) they reconnected the schelde and the leie, two rivers that used to be connected but were separated. The intend was to increase the debit that was missing from de schelde. This had a result of more oxygen in the water, increasing fish population and plant growth. 10 years after there were seals (and at some point even a dolphin) spotted in Ghent.
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