On 3/6/2014 10:11 AM, Dave Cole wrote: > Isn't most of the difference tax? > Your mass transit systems are very good in comparison to the US. > I can catch a bus to get me around town but the bus stop is 12 miles > away which defeats the purpose of using a bus in the first place. > > If I want to catch a passenger train, I need to drive 40 miles to catch > a train that only goes to Chicago or Toledo (nothing goes north or > south). And the train comes by once a day and is oftentimes late by as > much as 8 hours. (seriously) And there is no train station. (Think > of parking your car in a field and waiting up to 8 hours for a train > that stops on the tracks... more than a little crazy.) > So for me, getting around by train or bus is not viable. A bicycle > would be more practical. Hence most Americans (at least in flyover > country) get around via a car.
The USA has the 3rd largest population, behind China and India, but it's spread out over a much larger area than India. For the vast majority of the country, mass transit is pointless because there's not the population density to support it. Canada has about the same population as California, so they're far less dense than the left coast. ;) To illustrate just a part of the largeness, the entire current human population of Earth could fit within the State (or Republic) of Texas and every individual would have more than 1,000 square feet of land. (That's not counting area covered by water.) If you want to be more generous and give every person 2,000 square feet of land, and cover the Earth, that's around 81 billion parcels. SciFi misses this mark constantly. Let's pack people in tight, 200 square feet per person. Cover the planet with four levels of building, bottom floor for services, power generation etc, top floor and roof for growing food, middle two floors for lebensraum, with 50% of the space taken up by hallways, HVAC, plumbing, electric, public spaces etc. The number, trillions. IIRC it comes out to over 270 trillion 200 square foot parcels. Worlds like Trantor (Foundation book series), Coruscant (Star Wars), and Helior (Bill the Galactic Hero) are ridiculous because as depicted they'd have room for an astoundingly huge number of people. The Spinward Fringe book series has a space station with a walkable area half that of Earth yet people live in super tiny apartments. The TV series "The Event" had an alien race plotting to kill off most of the humans to make room to move in as they escaped a nearby star about to explode. How many aliens? Two billion! Could drop the lot into Alaska or Siberia or large chunks of China or Africa and nobody would notice - if they kept to themselves. Habitable planets are large places. Really mind bogglingly large when it comes down to the numbers. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Subversion Kills Productivity. Get off Subversion & Make the Move to Perforce. With Perforce, you get hassle-free workflows. Merge that actually works. Faster operations. Version large binaries. Built-in WAN optimization and the freedom to use Git, Perforce or both. Make the move to Perforce. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=122218951&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
