There’s a giant, glowing, animated LED billboard along a main road near my house that had a PSA about distracted driving on it the other day. It made me angry.
Nice point if view. Ironically we live in times when minding others boundaries is almost common sense. Abusive behavior gets public contempt. But everyone is just accepting manipulative, malicious and intrusive ads.
Goddamn we need so much high speed rail, and yesterday
And so much more standard speed rail too! There’s tons of railroad lines all over the country, and even many old stations still standing. Let’s start building RDCs again (or better, a modern equivalent) and start running passenger services on all of those lines
The challenges are several fold. For one, there’s basically no manufacturers of passenger railcars left in the country. Occasionally a network upgrade will lead to one being spun up for a few years then it’ll shut down once the order is fulfilled because there’s no consistent market for passenger railcars in North America.
I’d propose using a mix of historic British Rail procurement practices and current military contract practices where you put up a pot of money for up for say 3 companies to develop a prototype railcar meeting a specific spec. Make the spec for a fairly basic car and be ready to update station platforms for ADA compliance rather than forcing the cars to be compatible with 20 different platform heights and designs. Then test those 3 prototypes and the winner receives a bonus as the design is purchased by the federal government, and next you license that design out for all manufacturers in the country to produce, followed by an ongoing order of say 48 railcars per year from 5 different manufacturers and you have 248 railcars per year (enough to replace Amtrak’s entire current fleet within 10 years) from 5 different companies (reducing risk of one company mucking it all up) all manufactured with local labor and you have a standard design that is already in active production for other operators to order as well. Repeat this process for more equipment and designs as needed, and suddenly you have a bunch of known standard designs that your network can be built to and you have health competition between manufacturers which will be big enough (because each will have around 50-100 million dollars a year in revenue from that one ongoing federal contract alone) to start performing their own independent R&D to make their own unique stock to try to attract more orders from rail operators
This is what the federal government exists for, making ambitious infrastructure projects like this possible. Policians just aren’t interested in thinking big enough
If you don’t think you can do away with billboards I don’t see how you’d think you could get people to stop using cars. Especially with how many things get delievered door to door these days. You could put every commuter on trains and the roads would still have traffic. I don’t see changing that being any easier than getting rid of billboards and other highly intrusive ads.
I understand that cars serve a purpose. But trains and buses move orders of magnitude more people than cars could ever dream. With a properly functioning transit system (including the aforementioned high speed rails) traffic would clear up (because traffic didn’t happen to you, you are traffic), and fewer distracted operators would be on the road.
And in removing those people from operating vehicles, the distraction of a billboard, and the subsequent potential accidents, are mitigated.
All ads are non consensual and designed to get your attention. So we put them in places like on giant boards along highways. Very cool, very safe.
There’s a giant, glowing, animated LED billboard along a main road near my house that had a PSA about distracted driving on it the other day. It made me angry.
Yeahhhh that kind of on the face irony would absolutely bug me too
Nice point if view. Ironically we live in times when minding others boundaries is almost common sense. Abusive behavior gets public contempt. But everyone is just accepting manipulative, malicious and intrusive ads.
Yet another reason we need to move away from cars. Since the distraction is likely not going away, we need to minimize the safety/distraction issue.
(Goddamn we need so much high speed rail, and yesterday)
And so much more standard speed rail too! There’s tons of railroad lines all over the country, and even many old stations still standing. Let’s start building RDCs again (or better, a modern equivalent) and start running passenger services on all of those lines
The challenges are several fold. For one, there’s basically no manufacturers of passenger railcars left in the country. Occasionally a network upgrade will lead to one being spun up for a few years then it’ll shut down once the order is fulfilled because there’s no consistent market for passenger railcars in North America.
I’d propose using a mix of historic British Rail procurement practices and current military contract practices where you put up a pot of money for up for say 3 companies to develop a prototype railcar meeting a specific spec. Make the spec for a fairly basic car and be ready to update station platforms for ADA compliance rather than forcing the cars to be compatible with 20 different platform heights and designs. Then test those 3 prototypes and the winner receives a bonus as the design is purchased by the federal government, and next you license that design out for all manufacturers in the country to produce, followed by an ongoing order of say 48 railcars per year from 5 different manufacturers and you have 248 railcars per year (enough to replace Amtrak’s entire current fleet within 10 years) from 5 different companies (reducing risk of one company mucking it all up) all manufactured with local labor and you have a standard design that is already in active production for other operators to order as well. Repeat this process for more equipment and designs as needed, and suddenly you have a bunch of known standard designs that your network can be built to and you have health competition between manufacturers which will be big enough (because each will have around 50-100 million dollars a year in revenue from that one ongoing federal contract alone) to start performing their own independent R&D to make their own unique stock to try to attract more orders from rail operators
This is what the federal government exists for, making ambitious infrastructure projects like this possible. Policians just aren’t interested in thinking big enough
Have you considered a conversation with someone like Lina Khan? Even if it’s just to get you talking to the right people in government. I love this!
If you don’t think you can do away with billboards I don’t see how you’d think you could get people to stop using cars. Especially with how many things get delievered door to door these days. You could put every commuter on trains and the roads would still have traffic. I don’t see changing that being any easier than getting rid of billboards and other highly intrusive ads.
I understand that cars serve a purpose. But trains and buses move orders of magnitude more people than cars could ever dream. With a properly functioning transit system (including the aforementioned high speed rails) traffic would clear up (because traffic didn’t happen to you, you are traffic), and fewer distracted operators would be on the road.
And in removing those people from operating vehicles, the distraction of a billboard, and the subsequent potential accidents, are mitigated.
And yes we also need to get rid of billboards.