That route at the top would make any high speed rail pointless. You would never get up to a speed to make it worth while. All to stop at places like Castle Rock population 2500. Going down to Eugene and Salem would make sense, but with the intent that they places would aim to grow in size considerably.
Places like Gresham to Forest grove are better for the Portland tram network, they are just part of the one metro area, they are not different metro areas like Seattle and Portland.
You can cut some of those out then if you think they don’t make sense. It was a quick and dirty example I came up with from my minimal knowledge of Oregon/Washington geography (not nothing but not exceptional) and tracing a route through Apple Maps. Anyone with better knowledge of the local geography can take a second pass and come up with something more reasonable.
You do want some local service at some in-fill stations though between the major destinations, even run express and local service, but as long as you can park your car at a station, having a station that the more suburban/rural parts slightly off the beaten trackway can go to still makes it accessible to more people in the State.
Yeah absolutely! A local service that works well alongside a high speed intercity one would be greta, though may be better to build after the main route (don't want some small stations slowing down the main route build).
For the East/West corridor slower speed trains at the same stations allowing transfers would be preferable (cheaper and quicker to build, with minimal speed impact) to high speed rail.
Ah, express and local service are terms of art used by at least Caltrain that I may or may not be wrongly assuming is more widespread (although another commenter below mentioned it’s used by the Shinkansen services in Japan as well which I think I knew but forgot). They have their “baby bullet” service which amounts to: these set of trains in particular skip a bunch of stations along the way, and the local service just serves all of them.
You can run them on the same tracks with the same stock. You have e.g. the 9:00 express train depart from Portland serving a subset of the stations between it and Seattle and maybe the 9:15 departs and serves all of them followed by another express at 9:45. Each stop shouldn’t add more than 2 or 3 minutes between terminuses, if the service stops for a generous amount of time at each one.
And then yeah, you have your regional transportation agencies to serving the metro areas along the way more comprehensively.
> I don’t see trains having a huge advantage over a clean grid and EV fleet. And the latter is much easier and faster to build.
The latter requires building millions of individual cars, each with large expensive lithium batteries, plus the road network and upkeep of that. Then building green energy, solar, wind, nuclear, hydro, plus storage!
The other includes building some train tracks and trains.
The planning system must be utterly dysfunctional, and the government incompetent when it comes to large projects, or tender for them, for the first to be anywhere near easier than the latter.
We already have road networks and power grids. They need upgrades, but moving to clean electricity generation makes sense regardless of what we use for transportation. And sure, millions of cars need to be built, but they'll be built anyway. If not EV's, then traditional ICE vehicles. And those are built by various private companies and sold directly to individuals. Comparing the difficulty of an existing industry to continue doing what it's already doing to a giant public infrastructure project just doesn't seem to make much sense to me.
Not OP, but there are not enough resources for all of North America, Europe, China and India to live the lifestyle of the average US person. So I guess they are hopeful that India won't reach that level of consumption.
Very wrong. I do hope they reach this level of consumption. But don't do it by relaying on cars as a primary means of transport. The car market should stay small even as the economy grows.
This can be achieved by systematically ban cars from cities. By investing far more into trains then into highways. By having good public transit even to remote places. And by encouraging small vehicles when necessary.
I have no idea whether that's true, but it is not necessary for the comment to say "to each their own" for the commenter to have just been expressing a personal preference. They weren't making an "argument".
Since it seems I wasn't clear, the parent comment we're currently discussing has been considerably modified compared to what it was at first. You're free to disagree, but in my opinion the original tone of their comment very much did make an argument. But I do suppose you could label every comment as just a personal preference, because that's what they are at the end of the day.
Apparently specifically because of the food issue they weren't generally worth the trouble. ACOUP has a good post about it [1]. TL/DR: For the amount of fodder and manpower you need for one elephant, you can have a lot of traditional horse calvary.
The replacements for some of those poisons (large amounts of artificial fertilisers) are animal products. In a world without artificial fertiliser you need to have animals to produce fertiliser.
The optimal for this would still be much less animal farming, and a massive shift in how and where it is done. But removing all animal products would be counter productive. (Perhaps this is what you meant by plant based though).
How much of this "less raw brainpower" is due to age, and how much is due to potentially having a less focused mind? I have massively noticed issues with my concentration, and I don't think it's due to age, so much as to watching Youtube and reddit.
I guess what I'm getting at is it's sometimes hard to untangle what changes are due to getting older, and which ones are due to the world changing. For me it's boredom, I used to have long boring summers, and get bored on weekends in the 90's and early 2000's. I haven't been bored in years. Is this because of the internet? But I'm not bored when I don't have access to the internet now, so maybe I just enjoy some peace and quiet now I'm older.
As far as maintaining focus goes, I had a lot of trouble doing so after 40.
I wrote a small program[1] to help me maintain context between different projects, and I'm now more productive than I was in my 30s.
[1] I tried all the personal task management and task tracker tools, even wrote a few of my own. It turned out that my brain works differently to how the tools want you to work. My new tool which works well to keep me on track matches how I work.
IOW, now I don't have to adjust my brain to the tool, the tool is already adjusted to my brain's process.
Can you give some details on your tool? I've played the "productivity app whack-a-mole" game, too, and always walk away empty. I just stick with a pen and paper, but I'd love a digital solution.
I'm conflicted; on the one hand I would like to let the world know about it, but on the other I can see how it would be easily dismissed as useless when there's literally no docs about it.
I think I shall make a small example usage (terminal only) to demonstrate how it helps me, then post a show HN tomorrow or Saturday (depending).
I'll reply to your post again once I post the show HN.
it sounds like it's gotta be catered to your workflow. i wonder what this is like, i work out of sketch books and paper+pen a lot. project context seems like a good thing to be able to preserve and replicate between the various frames. elon mentioned that context switching was one of the more costly plays
> project context seems like a good thing to be able to preserve and replicate between the various frames.
Believe it or not, I actually named the executable 'frame'. However I'm unwilling to share it[1] until I have a good 5m explanation (it's all shell-based).
[1] Well, announce it, anyway. It opensource anyway.
> You can bet your life I was in my car and speeding down the street to get him out ASAP within 60 seconds of receiving the text.
"Road traffic crashes are a leading cause of death in the United States for people ages 1–54"[0]
I wonder if you speeding in your car increased the likely hood of death for someone more than collecting your son from a rumored school shooting. Not saying you were wrong to do that, obviously this is something that comes to the front of your mind when something is wrong at a school. The disconnect between risks we find acceptable, and those we don't is interesting though.
Some enterprising individual should figure up how many highway miles driven with a kid in the car it takes to exceed the annual risk from school shootings. I bet it's not many, but nobody thinks a thing of driving their kids around.
USDOT says 1.34 deaths per 100,000,000 miles driven. Assuming 32mph average speed[1] that's 1 death per 2,332,089 hours driven.
There were 40 students killed in school shootings in 2022 [2]. Assuming 50M students and 2K hours/year in school that equates to 1 death per 2,500,000,000 hours spent in the classroom.
The difference is a factor of 1,072 meaning that if you drive with your kid for 2 hours, you have exposed them to a higher risk of dying in a traffic accident than an entire year of risk from school shootings.
The structure wouldn't be able to passively stay together. If it was to be destroyed then it would burn up in the atmosphere like anything else. It is not made of a magic non-existent material that is infinitely strong. Of course if you had a massive dense asteroid attached that would not, so it makes sense to be careful with what is around it. But the orbital ring itself would break up and be no more dangerous than a bunch of satellites of similar mass.
Also it would not be an "Ultimate target" for "terrorists". Terrorists are violent political activists, not super villains that want to destroy the world. I doubt, for example, that the new-IRA would get a united Ireland by destroying orbital infrastructure.
To the extent that an elevator would represent both the power and interests of whatever rich entity had managed to construct it, it would be a target for those who want to reduce the power and harm the interests of that entity.
>I doubt, for example, that the new-IRA would get a united Ireland by destroying orbital infrastructure.
The most effective way for the new-IRA to unite Ireland would be to help the UK keep shooting itself in the foot, so that the Northern Ireland citizens get sick of regular Ireland being better off economically, and vote to join it.
I'm more concerned about what's already within our atmosphere and isn't going to burn up. That's a lot of kinetic energy, and nobody says it's going to destroy the Earth, I said it would be devastating.
You're forgetting religious extremists and countless suicide bombers.
It would be cheaper to drop an equivalent massed object out of a plane. Or just use the plane as the weapon.
You break a space elevator at the ground, it floats upwards.
You break it at 30,000 foot then everything above the break floats away upwards, everything below "crashes" down, at a relatively low terminal velocity and thus with pretty low amounts of energy.
An elevator isn't a tower, it's a rope handing from a counterweight in orbit which is kept taut by a centrifugal force. It's anchored at the ground to stop the rock floating away, but if you break that anchor everything above will swing away from Earth
If you have the ability to break the cable at say 100km above the ground, you have the ability to drop objects from that height anyway, don't have to deal with no-fly-zones, and can target somewhere not on the equator.
Want to cause chaos? Get a bunch of heavy dense cheap bits of metal, put them in a high altitude balloon, then drop them over a city. You'll cause more damage to the people on the ground than anything you could do to a space elevator (short of the financial impact of having to resplice it)
If you can damage the elevator at the counterweight end, then you have the ability to drop a "rod from god" and cause more damage that way.
> "crashes" down, at a relatively low terminal velocity
I would like to see an analysis. 100’s of tons of string falling and accelerating the surrounding sheath of air (acts absolutely nothing like a meteorite). A good physics question!
That’s assuming you can’t say detonate a bomb inside the cargo thus resulting in vastly longer section falling down.
Space elevators are inherently create a new safety risk as cutting them at geosynchronous orbit only takes compromising some security and building a modest bomb. Both of which are achievable by terrorist organizations.
Accidentally deleted a bit: Space elevators are inherently a means to reach orbit so they create …
PS: 911 didn’t happen because terrorists suddenly figured out how to build giant aircraft to douse buildings in tons of jet fuel they subverted an existing system that solved 99.9% of the technical problems. Thus by getting a few violent individuals on board with simple weapons simplified things to only needed to fly an aircraft that someone else built, got into the air, and filled with fuel.
That's true-ish, but don't forget that a space elevator is also an enormous amount of orbiting mass all on it's own. So a small bomb can cause it all to come down and wrap around the planet twice.
For a ring with a density of 10kg/m, that kinetic energy is about 5 megatons… spread over 40,000km.
It's negligible when it's that diffuse. Even if it didn't burn up, it's mostly lost to air resistance, with everything over a few hundred meters being limited to about terminal velocity.
Probably still want to engineer it such that destruction is controlled rather than uncontrollable, but the biggest issue with it being destroyed would be no longer having it; the damage would be mostly within a meter or so of where it lands, which isn't great but it's also not devastating unless you happen to be that close.
Think a very long I-beam falling off a skyscraper during construction, not an asteroid.
Assuming the cable is rated for the sudden force changes and won't get split into a whole bunch of smaller pieces that will drop at just their terminal velocities. Think a shower of cable pieces rather than a whip. Not great, but it's likely that most of the energy will be dissipated by the atmosphere.
Not everywhere has the space the the US has. Many places in Europe, especially Germany, the UK and the low countries simply have no space to grow into, the urban areas are basically touching as is.
It is politically unfeasible to turn swathes of these countries into an endless urban/suburban sprawl. Many have a strong agricultural lobby (The Netherlands in particular) and/or have an eye on food security.
Places like Gresham to Forest grove are better for the Portland tram network, they are just part of the one metro area, they are not different metro areas like Seattle and Portland.