I am agreeing with most of that but calling slave trade in Africa “effectively nonexistent”, before the Europeans is misleading at best. It was orders of magnitude smaller, as Europe basically industrialised slave trade but it was far from an alien concept and the European slave trade was also employing older systems to its end.

Total Worth doesn’t matter. What matters is revenue and profit and that is the basis for the fine.

Is it you, Steve?

That space data center might end up dumping more waste into the oceans with all thise launches but certainly more into our atmosphere.

Via radiation into space. All you need is a radiator, the weight of a battleship (or worse). Yes, the idea is crazy.

Weight is always the issue with lifting stuff into space. Volume might merely be an additional issue.

I am not happy about this ruling but I also really like disinformation. The court did not rule that “Private Jets Now Count As ‘Green’ Investments”

You keep ignoring my point but let’s try it with a concrete example:

Sydney-Newcastle: ~190 km project length, incl. 70-155 km tunnels, covering both sides of the urban Sydney area, all underground.

So this project would include one of the most central and also challenging parts of a potential HSR network. Cost estimates are somewhat elusive but I found talk of 90 bn AUD. Now, there is a lot to unpack there.

First of all, when we compare that to the current project Lyon-Torino, technically not HSR but still designed for 220 km/h, comparable to the tunnel section in the Sydney-Newcastle plan. It comes also with 100 km tunnel (much of it an actual base tunnel) and 170 km of non-tunnel parts. Price tag: 11 bn EUR ~ 17 bn AUD. Or let’s look at the 55 km Brenner base tunnel, designed for 250 km/h, one of the longest base tunnels involving very tricky geology. Price tag is similar 8-10 bn EUR. So even if we compare the rough Sydney-Newcastle plan with very expensive and challenging cross-border rail projects, across the Alps, in other high income, high regulation countries, we are talking about multifold higher per km prices. How come? Likely for similar reasons as in the US or Canada, political and legal reasons. At least in the US, the overhead of any rail infrastructure project is enormous and overshadows the actual construction costs. Extreme bureaucracy, very pro-nimbyism laws and the requirement of minimal or even no negative impact on car traffic during construction. This can be seen when we are looking on the tunnel length in the Sydney-Newcastle corridor. What is commonly reported is on the very upper end of tunnel usage. There is a reason for that and that is also political and legal. While highways were bulldozed through urban areas, rail projects are are rather pushed underground on the entire length, not even using any existing corridor on any of it, until the very end of suburbia and even then. Now, one can debate of course pros and cons of that. There are good arguments for the tunnels, also for speed and operation but it adds a lot of cost. However, even if we don’t debate the tunnel length, the costs are astronomically high in comparison to projects in other high income countries, that are not part of the English speaking world.

PS: Even though your own video pretty much is all about the lack of political will and the requirement of it to be at least almost profitable. It also can’t manage without mentioning the oh so low Australian population density, when that does not matter at all. What matters is the corridor and in this corridor with pretty perfect distances of Sydney to Melbourne and Sydney to Brisbane there is a corridor population of 12 mio. That is perfectly fine for such an HSR corridor. I mean the report is contradicting itself when it is first talking about how Sydney-Melbourne is the second busiest aviation corridor in the world and then later talking about how there is no population for HSR, when the HSR would be highly competitive with aviation on such 3-4h corridors.

I am not downvoting for content but debating style. You started off with ad hominem and then added not a single ( or a few) well defined argument but a video with dozens one liner arguments that cannot be addressed without writing half a book.

But maybe I am indeed in the wrong instance for that and it is indeed a wrong expectation on my side.

So what? It depends on the kind of mobility impairment, if rail is suitable. Good rail and transit systems accomodate people in wheel chairs just fine, if you are impaired in other ways and can’t use a wheel chair you still got plenty of options. The Netherlands show that transit oriented cities are actually better and safer for people with limited mobility.

Yeah, thanks for confirming my argument. The video is pretty much bringing up the arguments I’d expect. But it really shows how weak they are when they complain about distances being too far when they are actually perfect for HSR and yes, it is enough if individual relations are close enough. That is how many HSR networks work.

But sure, Australia is the only country with mountains and suburbs. And kanguruhs are an unsurmountable issues for rail, but not for highways.

It all boils down to ideology. Weirdly enough it was not impossible to build inner urban highways though, which required much more space. But then, unlike road infrastructure, rail is required to be proftibale and that is why Australia remains underdeveloped and its airports overloaded.

Add to that wavering back and forth with financial support a generally hostile legal environment towards HSR projects and generally hostile laws to building important large national infrastructure, balooning costs on any infrastructure project. I would not be surprised if more money would have to be spent on bureaucracy and judicial things than on actually building that thing. That is not much different from the US where they need to pay multiple times more per km than in other Western countries with comparable corridors.

That’s nice and all but I was not talking about Fox News at all. Maybe have a look at who is posting what? Also, you where responding to a rhetorical question. I think you did not get the point I was trying to make there.

And now check for news about limit road access, bridge closures etc in all of Europe. There are plenty of those too? Indeed.

The Netherlands have not torn down their cities to the ground even if their cities were pretty car centric in the late 1960s. Of course If you cry for the failed city highway in Utrecht for example that has been replaced with a gracht and scaled down to a regular street, that transformation is a catastrophe for you.

Cities change over time, if you change them away from being car only, that doesn’t need dramatic sudden changes but can be achieved with gradual changes over time.

Also LA has not torn down or destroyed much of its city, just because it has rebuilt a rail transit backbone again (far from perfect or complete but quite substantial already)

https://noe.orf.at/stories/3360361/

It must be great to have all that freedom, like the freedom from having universal health insurance:

That’s the thing. Car orientation shapes how places look and function, but so does tranist orientation. What you consider a downside is actually driving that. Because transit focuses movement along hubs and spokes, this enables walking oriented infrastructure. And walking oriented stores at transit stops enable fast shopping. You can easily shop even daily when all it takes is maybe 5-10 additional minutes on your way home. In car oriented hypermarkets you can’ even make it to the back of the store in that time.

Like I said, your opinion seems to be formed by a car oriented society and you appear to struggle to imagine an alternative. If you need to watch your finances you can find all those fresh produces at urban discounters in transit oriented cities. Buying those without the need for a car is actually less costly than having a car and buying the cheapest worst kind of food.

That is the thing transit oriented cities generally enable that. I m well aware that not every city is transit oriented. I am not saying people living in these places have a choice. I am saying urban planers have a choice to change how the cities look for the next generation(s). You mentioned the Netherlands, they are a great example for that. 2 generations ago they were very car oriented following the US lead. Not 100 years ago, 50 years ago.

No arguments? A pity.

it seems it wasn’t me who didn’t read your own source:

“Every federal government since this time has investigated the feasibility of constructing high-speed rail with speeds above 200 km/h, but to date nothing has ever gone beyond the detailed planning stage”

Even the US has come further already than that.

They make it worse, artificially or in other cases create it from scratch where there wouldn’t be any without scalpers. In any case they do not add value and are a solution to a problem they either cause or make worse.