On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 2:41 PM, Craig Paskett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Also the switch from horse to motorized transport used the same basic > infrastructure.
Nonsense! Utter bollocks, in fact. You ever try to drive a car on a horse path in the rain? You'd wait a long time for it try out... The state of roads in most of the world was pretty well non-existent prior to the automobile (and to a lesser extent, the bicycle, which also requires better roads than a horse cart). Yes, there a handfull of good coaching roads in some densely populated places, and roman relics in parts of Europe. Beyond that, there wasn't much. There certainly wasn't an actual *network* of connected roads until well into the 20th century. And in densely populated areas, look at pre-auto city centers compared to post-auto ones. No car parks in pre-auto centers, nor too many 12 lane expressways, either. The various automobile associations (AAA in the US, RAC and AA in the UK, etc) were founded largely to agitate for decent all-weather roads. The first cross-USA trip in a car wasn't done until 1903. It took two months. You could do it in a train in a week; probably less if you picked the times right. Today, you can do it in a month, on a bike, if you're lazy. > Most proposed new transport tech involves a major investment in sometimes > radically different >infrastructure. It will be a long time before we see > anything new taking the place of wheeled, >powered vehicles on a large scale. Depends. Current ground (road, not rail so much) transportation infrastructure is amazingly inefficient, and ignores all sorts of costs as "external" to make it appear to make sense. If you add in those costs, you get some truely shocking numbers -- like the real cost of shipping a semi-load of goods from NY to CA is 100 times what the trucking companies charge you. That's adding in things like the amazing subsidies trucks are given, costs of traffic congestion, and other, fairly straight-forward to calculate costs, but not some fairly substantial but-difficult-to-value costs, like the cost of increased air pollution, and the contribution to global warming. Make people directly bear those costs, and suddenly spending a few trillion building mag-lev trains seems cheap. -- David Scheidt [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
