On 3/7/2014 5:45 AM, Gregg Eshelman wrote: > 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. > Most I agree with. But a city of 1/2 a million should have a passenger train station with service, but many don't.
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