Porque no los dos?

Rabbit hole incoming: If you have to pick one, I suppose it depends on what metric you are trying to maximize. One doublestacked intermodal train car takes two long haul trucks off the road. One Siemens Venture passenger train car takes 74 people, or about 50 cars at 1.5 people per car, off the road. You can generally run longer freight trains than passenger trains, but 25x to normalize for VMT (which could be used as an approximate measure of direct health impacts from driving: crash risk, elevated blood pressure, obesity. It could also be used to approximate societal impacts of car culture: real estate dedicated to surface parking, voting bloc size that supports car-centric planning and development regulations) is probably excessive. On the other hand, if we normalize for emissions (hard to find data here, but as far as I can tell trucks are on the order of 10x as emissive), that gets us down to 5x train length, which is about on par (northeast corridor trains are typically in the 1/6 of a mile range, and median freight train length is somewhere in the 1-1.5 mile range from what I could find), and if we use infrastructure damage/maintenance cost (trucks are about two orders of magnitude worse than even today’s SUV saturated passenger car market, I’m assuming without reason or evidence that damage to steel rail infrastructure between a freight and a passenger car scales significantly less harshly for the sake of simplicity), things look downright strongly in favor of freight traffic. At the end of the day, it probably just depends on which use case has more unmet demand on a case by case basis. Of course, both pale when compared to the opportunity that high speed rail gives to take short haul flights out of the sky, but that is another set of analysis and does partially correlate to the elevated infrastructure cost of high speed rail vs conventional rail.

FYI, I’m pretty sure “at the behest of” means “as requested by”, but it looks like you meant something more like “to the detriment of” or “at the cost of”

This makes one of the “solutions” from the article: “A law was introduced at the end of 2023 that will eliminate the need for permits and environmental impact assessments for bridges that are being widened to add lanes as part of renovations.” look particularly shortsighted. Infrastructure is a maintenance debt that we are reckoning with, so we will make it easier to build specifically bigger infrastructure so that in 25 years we will have an even bigger problem to solve? Not to mention the concept of induced demand meaning that those lanes are going to increase the amount of vehicles using the bridge, which would be exactly the kind of thing that should get an environmental assessment, versus repurposing some lanes for sustainable transit or building a separate bridge for those modes

Radiation does not by definition make things it impacts radioactive, and most of the lingering effects that we associate with radiation have to do with radioactive particles that are left behind by the atmosphere. Since there is no particulate matter traveling between the sun and Mars (photons not withstanding), the surface of Mars would not be expected to acquire radioactive properties from an acute solar radiation event like this one. However, an entity on the surface of Mars would be exposed to radiation from the Sun, much more so than an entity on/near earth and it’s magnetosphere (Mars’ thin atmosphere and distance from the sun probably helps reduce that disparity relative to something in say low earth orbit, but I don’t think it fully equalizes or shifts the scales). I am not an astrophysicist, so there’s at least a 20% chance I got part of that wrong.

Because it was the smallest unit of currency and the comment said the fees “should be” not “should be scaled by” or something to that effect. I first assumed it was dollars, but used pennies when it was obviously going to be too large. Idk, I guess that is where I went wrong, but it seemed like a reasonable assumption to make at the time that the formula was expressed in some denomination of currency

Am I doing the math right on this? Assuming your unit of fee is pennies: a 2600 lb bmw i3 (one of the smallest evs on the US market) would cost $351.5 million dollars to register. Even my 40 lb bike, if it was charged, would cost $1280. I’m all about car ownership being more expensive, but this seems…extreme

Low key convinced this started out as “monster hail” and then got butchered by an AI or like 5 Google translate passes

Competing with J-Pheg

Easy. His, erm, broad stature makes him an easy whipping target when it comes time to drive the capitalist pigs and their market stands out of the temple

The fact that you mixed up the Dakotas in your comparison to cities really emphasizes your point