LogFAQs > #974956295

dragon504 posted...

Even if inner city was still car based

That's the opposite of good city design. The inner city is the area that's easiest to move away from car dependency and is hurt most by trying to build around heavy traffic. When everything's close together (which is further facilitated by having narrower roads and fewer parking lots), walking and biking between destinations becomes much easier, as does having effective transit routes (whether subways, surface rail, streetcars, or buses).

You're correct that high-speed rail between major destinations (pretty much every pair of cities that sees multiple plane connections per day could have high-speed rail connections) makes a lot of sense because of how spread out those pockets of density are (much more sense than it makes to connect them with car highways), but car-based design is really only suitable for low-density areas like small towns where everyone's farms are a couple miles apart. Cities are designed around cars, thanks to rampant suburban sprawl that makes it ridiculously difficult to service residential areas with transit, but they really shouldn't be because of how hideously inefficient it is.

Judgmenl posted...

Cars exist? You can travel 1000 miles in a day.

Sure, but that's ~14 hours of just driving if you're averaging 70-75 mph, plus breaks, and you have to do all of it yourself unless you've got somebody to share the load (or do all of it for you, in your case). That's very obviously worse than "Sit on comfortable train doing whatever portable activity you want for <8 hours." The only issue there is last-mile transportation, but even in poorly-designed, car-infested hellholes people manage to do that just fine from airports, and train stations are no different in that regard. On top of that, train stations are even easier to integrate into a better-designed city because they don't need so much space to move planes around, so having stations within walking or biking distance of major destinations is quite possible, as is having secondary transit options going from the station to other areas.

jsb0714 posted...

Maybe, but if it doesn't take me where I want to go, fuck it.

There are significantly more roads in the country that don't take you where you want to go than there will ever be train lines, and they're all a significantly larger resource sink than a high-speed rail network would be.