LogFAQs > #961880024

Revelation34 posted...

Because America is too huge to do a massive rail system.

https://www.russiantrains.com/en/page/high-speed-trains-russia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Russia#/media/File:HighSpeedRailWaysOfRussia.png

Russia has 82% more land area than the US (counting Alaska and Hawaii, so that number should really actually be bigger because it's a given than an American high-speed rail system would only serve the contiguous states) with 43.7% of the population, which works out to less than a quarter of the overall population density.

If Russia can put serious effort into developing useful passenger rail transit instead of relying almost exclusively on highways and personal cars, the US is not "too huge" to do something comparable. As others have said, China is also larger than the US (by a fairly small margin overall, but especially so if we only count contiguous states), but they at least have the advantage of having triple the population and therefore higher density to work with, so that isn't necessarily the fairest comparison.

Moreover, I'm not exclusively talking about massive, long-range rail systems. I'm talking about city-scale rail and other forms of public transit that make not having access to a car more viable for everyday travel. I'm talking about suburbs built around transit hubs so people drive for 5 minutes to spend an hour on a bus or train instead of spending an hour driving. Cities built around public transit and active transportation instead of 6-lane highways. Instead, single-occupancy vehicles are the expectation and the norm around which everything is designed, which can be attributed almost entirely to the propaganda from the car and oil industries that convinced America that that is true freedom and the only real American way. Even now, you get people like the Koch brothers actively lobbying against efforts to improve public transit anywhere in the country because they make so much more money when people have to buy/use cars.

All of which boils down to the point that Covid is not remotely unusual in the extent to which politics, the media, and public perception influence how much money certain people can make off of it. Some people are going to make money off of preventing it, others are going to make money off of allowing case numbers to explode and treating them, others are going to make money off of burying the victims. There's absolutely no reason to distrust Covid mortality statistics to any greater extent than any other mortality statistics.