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Joined 21 days ago
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Cake day: May 11th, 2026

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  • iocase@lemmy.ziptoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worlddam
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    22 hours ago

    Lol this is the 1887 version of tech bros reinventing railroads.

    What’s more efficient than one person driving a car? Carpooling!

    In fact, if we made the car driverless it could hold even more customers.

    Although we probably want to make designated roads where only driverless cars can go. That makes coordination and safety far easier.

    We probably want signals specific to these roads that only the driverless cars need to be concerned with.

    And you know what has lower rolling resistance than rubber on roads? Metal. If we make the wheels out of metal we would get insane fuel efficiency

    Except now that rips up the road so we need to pave the road with metal too.

    That’s actually expensive so maybe we just pave directly underneath where the wheels go

    If we’re going to do all of this we need more passengers. Maybe we attach cars together and run them on a schedule? That should work for the most people?

    Maybe we can run all of this on electricity too! No gas needed! With our metal wheels that’s some insanely low energy costs!


  • iocase@lemmy.ziptomemes@lemmy.worldIt's so beautiful 😍
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    1 day ago

    Daily reminder that if a road is designed to last 15 years, by definition that means you need to replace 1/15th of your entire road network each year. If you can’t replace that much you fall behind… And things break and stay broken.

    It also takes longer to replace the roads you can work on because they’re more damaged than you planned for when you built them and planned out the lifecycle, meaning you end up even further behind.

    Also the economic benefit of a road mostly happens when it’s brand new, or upgraded to carry heavier traffic it couldn’t before. That’s an actually return on investment. Replacing anxexisting road to it’s old state is replacing a broken window in broken window theory. It doesn’t cause lasting increases in economic activity.

    All of this is to say, fuck cars. I hate them. I hate how much we spend on infrastructure that rots and gets invoiced by rent seeking construction companies and municipal and provincial/state governments being complicit in rent seeking with these companies.

    I wish we had more trains and less sprawl. It would cost a lot less and would actually be sustainable. Oh well… The hard way it is…









  • iocase@lemmy.ziptomemes@lemmy.worldRoad rage
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    2 days ago

    Trains and trams and busses.

    God I wish… It costs me $250 a month for my car and I own the fucking thing (if you include maintenance costs) so I drive to work twice a day, five times a week, and try to get errands done during my return commute. I might drive once or twice on the weekend, and there are about 4.4 weeks per month on average. That means I spend $5.28 every time I drive. That is WAY MORE THAN TRANSIT COSTS!! Especially if we spent the money we spend on roads and cars, instead on trams or busses

    For reference I also pay for car centric stuff through my utility bills. 10-30% of my utilities might be effectively me paying for the externality of ripping up roads to replace buried infrastructure, that then needs to be paid for AGAIN using my taxes when potholes form over prior ground disturbance, and paid for AGAIN when the road fails early and needs to be ripped up to fix the subgrade.


  • How what if we built a parkade? We could charge $40 per stall but have 10 or 20 times more cars in the same land!

    The sheer volume of cars would saturate the bridges and tunnels in and out of Manhattan, meaning that people would drive just to park, just to drive and queue to leave. The useless mindless illogical economic activity we would be creating would spike GDP so high! It would look great for the economy!