Because of lane space. A train only has one track. Roads are at least 2 lanes, thus wider. Roads through mountainous areas require more excavation of the mountains themselves, which is costlier and potentially more harmful to the environment. More flat area, more road area, less incentive for trains.
It’s a very farfetched theory. England and most of northern France and Germany are not mountainous.
As has been pointed out, a sophisticated train network existed throughout Europe long before cars were even invented.
The “Oldness comparison” that I’ve dwelt on the most is that Monty Python’s Flying Circus is now way older than World War II was when MP was originally broadcast. It makes their referencing of it both more understandable and more risktaking, as it would be fresh in the minds of the writers as well as older viewers who had the opportunity to get offended.
MP is only slightly younger now than Scott of the Antarctic was when MP was broadcast. That one actually doesn’t shock me, since I usually place the Antarctic expeditions slightly later than 1911.
Going back around to shocking, MP is only a little more than a decade younger now than the Victorian Era, with its primitive filmmaking, was when MP showed.
Yes, MP was first broadcast in 1969, WWII ended in 1945, so only 24 years prior. Well within contemporary memory for many.
So WWII was about as close to the initial broadcast of MP as the Clinton impeachment was to today
I suggest you read Novelty’s post above to see why that isn’t true. (You also need to visit rural England if you think roads are always at least two lanes wide).
Look, we’ve explained that the US has a lower population density, there’s more flat area, and inner city bus and train routes routes are impractical, disconnected and take longer to navigate than by car. Sorry you can’t identify with these reasons. Maybe the Australians Dopers can explain it better.
I don’t think mountainous terrain in general favors rail over cars - rather, the other way around, most of the time.
The possible exception would be if you have an extremely mountainous area that nonetheless contains a decent size population. Their effective population density would be higher than it looked on paper because they’d be forced into valley cities rather than spread out amongst the plains. This may be true for some places in Europe, but I can’t think of any that I know enough about to comment on.
Exactly!
WWII explains a lot of the disparity between Europe and North America when it comes to public transit. The money used to rebuild Europe after the war was mostly public money, much of it acquired from the US through the Marshall Plan. That money was used to rebuild and update public transit systems; not to buy people personal vehicles. Meanwhile, in the US you had a rampaging consumption economy where Hitler’s wet dream of national highway systems and every family owning their own car was adopted enthusiastically by the government, Detroit, Madison Avenue, and this new creature called a teenager. So enthusiastic in fact that in some places like Southern California, they began demolishing rail lines and other public transit infrastructure to make room for more freeways and gas stations.
That explains why you take the car over public transport, but it doesn’t explain WHY your inner city public transport is such a car crash ('scuse pun). The truth is, as Elmer suggests, the car took over in the heady growth of 1950s USA, so government stopped investing in public transport. If you don’t have the government investing in large capital projects, then you’re on your own. And that’s where cars come in.
Elon Musk’s estimated net worth is around $296 billion. That’s higher than the GDP of all but 40 countries on earth.
The underlying social political economic climate (individualism + capitalist consumerism above all else) in the US is very different than in Europe (strong socialism). Which IMHO is the most impactful way of explaining the dearth of effective public transportation.
But it did. It built the Interstate Highway System. A system built ostensibly as a military necessity (Eisenhower was enamored by Hitler’s Autobaun) was the US government’s contribution to runaway car culture.
The long arc of musical careers kind of shocks me sometimes, realizing how early some of them peak. We just passed the 30th anniversary of U2’s Achtung Baby album, as well as Nirvana’s Nevermind. 30 years before that, the Beatles hadn’t even started putting out records. Nevermind was the long overdue success of punk rock into the mainstream…Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols was a whole 14 years old at that point. You could have ben in university and remembered that whole interim period.
My first concert was the Beach Boys at the Ottawa Exhibition in 1983. As I think some members are still touring, and they started recording in the early sixties, I saw the Beach Boys in arguably the first third of their career. And they were already an oldies nostalgia act at that point.
This point has come up a lot in threads here I think, that certain decades are so seismic culturally that they seem to have gone on forever. American Graffiti came out in 1973; its tagline was “Where were you in '62.” and it heralded a huge age of 50s nostalgia. That’s like a movie coming out this years asking “Where were you late in Obama’s first term?” Once and a while the meme goes around pointing out that Dazed and Confused, set in 1976, was released in 1993. With the same gap, how different was 2005 from today?
Consider the Sixties. Most people will think of two things: the civil rights movement and Vietnam. Here’s where the catch comes in - some remember it as being that “everything in those topics happened” in the Sixties.
If the start of the civil rights movement is dated at 1954 (Brown v. Board of Education) and the end of Vietnam is dated at 1975 (fall of Saigon) then, in defiance of mathematical convention, “the Sixties” lasted 21 years.
I’ve heard many versions of the truism. “The sixties started with the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and ended at Altamont.” “The sixties started with JFK’s assassination and ended with Kent State.” They all carry some weight, I think.
It’s very romantic (in the classic sense), but I always loved that speech by Peter Fonda in The Limey:
“Did you ever dream about a place you never really recall being to before? A place that maybe only exists in your imagination? Some place far away, half remembered when you wake up. When you were there, though, you knew the language. You knew your way around. That was the sixties. No. It wasn’t that either. It was just '66 and early '67. That’s all there was.”
The different eras within the decade are definitely held in different regards. Mike Myers said, when creating Austin Powers, that his ideal sixties were the pre-hippie, Carnaby Street colourful era. Dana Gould has said many times on his podcast that he would have loved to live in L.A. in 1965 or so, before the Summer of Love trappings landed in full force.
That’s doesn’t really make sense.
Roads don’t “require more flat area” than railroad tracks. Unless you are talking about specialized cog or funicular railroads designed to climb steep inclines, railroads typically require shallower grades and larger curves than roads.
Building car-centric cities is more practical in the USA because most of our cities weren’t firmly established hundreds of years before the invention of the automobile as they were in Europe. European cities (and older American cities like Boston and lower Manhattan) are more dense with narrower roads because they evolved organically to accommodate pedestrian and horse traffic. Many of them originated as villages or medieval fortified towns.
Interesting bit of perspective, much of the United States West of the Mississippi was laid on the Public Land Survey System, also referred to as a “Jeffersonian grid” of 1 sq mile sections. That’s why most of the US looks like a giant patchwork quilt from the air.
I don’t know how to explain it any better. 1 car lane is about as wide as a train track. 2 car lanes is twice as wide. Highways can have as much as 12 lanes. That requires more flat area. Why is that so difficult to understand?
I think the emphasis you’re putting on ‘flat area’ is making it sound like mountainous regions are naturally train friendly and car averse. America simply has more area, and cities are generally built with lower density making them car friendly. Per person, you absolutely need more area devoted to roads when mass transit is underemphasized. This is hard to do in Europe, but easy in America, and it’s not inherently because of the mix of mountains and plains.