Get me dat yellow line! Pop into NO in 2 hours, get hammered en Vieux Carre, nap on the ride back? SOLD.
6 hours to El Paso? And I could finally afford to visit the west coast?!
So many ways to pay for this. Haul for Amazon, UPS, FedEx, USPS, all of them. Use passenger fees for ongoing maintenance.
This could be the next iteration of the interstate highway system. Ya know, that thing that made America’s economy explode by connecting us?
And if we took many passengers, and at least some freight, off the interstates, less maintenance costs.
Keep freight and passenger trains on seperate tracks for the most part otherwise you end up like Canada where passenger trains have to yield (delay) to let the frieght pass.
Yeah, because of this it takes me 8 hours to make a trip to Seattle by train when it takes 5.5 hours by car. That entire trip is in the US, too.
Unfortunately for us Americans, the railway industry was privatized long ago, and they consistently lobby for things to only move in their favor.
My programmer’s dream is to use a geodata map of the US with population and visitor statistics to make a slime mold map to use as the transit model.
Geodata because I want it to account for terrain in addition to population and visitor data.
I also want to include the national parks system in it just because it can revitalize the whole thing with stationside hotels for people to leave their junk at while they’re in the parks.
Haha yes it also bothered me that the slime mold didn’t have to consider the ferocity of the Rocky Mountains.
I don’t fully understand what all that means but I like the sound of it and hope your dream comes true
Thank you!
Basically a slime mold map is simulating a blob that forms a network of centers and bridges based on the location of “food”, and supposedly in the process demonstrates the most efficient network of transportation between those locations.
Its applications for public transit were realized when trying it out with an actual slime mold revealed a map very similar to the actual layout of the Tokyo metro system, hence the name.
So the theory is that you can simulate transit stations by putting “food” at those locations and the slime mold simulation will organically draw a map of an efficient transit network for you because it’s a stretchy little slime that just wants food.
