Image transcript:
The “what if you wanted to go to heaven, but god said ____” meme template, but here it says, “What if you wanted to walk to get groceries, but city planners said DRIVE”. The last panel is an image of a massive freeway full of cars.
The first high-speed rail system began operations in Japan in 1964, and is known as the Shinkansen The busiest high-speed rail service in the world, carrying more than 420,000 passengers on a typical weekday
– but your chart shows 90,000 per hour.
I’m gonna call bullshit. Biased source is still biased.
The chart isn’t about high-speed rail. High-speed lines often actually have lower capacity than lower-speed rail. For one, many suburban trains are bilevel, which can almost double the capacity per train, whereas high-speed lines often aren’t bilevel. Further, the higher speed doesn’t actually mean you can move more passengers per direction per hour; you’re still limited by how frequently you can run trains, as you need safe stopping distance between each train. Thus, high-speed rail can run faster, but it also needs much more space between trains. Typically the highest frequency train/metro routes can run trains every minute or two. A 2000-person capacity train every 2 minutes is equivalent to 60k passengers per direction per hour.
420,000 a day vs 90,000 an hour.
They would reach 450,000 passengers served in 5 hours.
Last I checked, a day isn’t 5 hours long…
Let’s give you a shot here and say they only operate 12 hours out of the day, that means the busiest train in the WORLD only does 35,000 an hour. But the graph is claiming 60-90k per hour.
If I can point out that very OBVIOUS bias/flaw in the chart, what is the reason I should take it seriously at all?
the busiest train in the WORLD
That’s not the busiest train in the world, though. That’s the busiest HIGH-SPEED RAIL in the world. You’re ignoring all the metro systems and suburban rail lines in the world that serve the massive daily commute market.
Regardless, even the 35k per hour of that rail line is still an order of magnitude higher than cars on roads. Cars, no matter how you slice it, are wildly space-inefficient.
You’re comparing maximum capacity to actual usage… weekday peak hours are like 80% of weekly passengers on most functional rail systems. Very common for the rest of the hours to run half schedules or smaller carriages because it’s simply not necessary, but the network can handle it if required.
![[meme] Being forced to drive isn't freedom — it's a government-mandated lifetime subscription to oil(lemmy.world)](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/13b1a771-76a5-4af4-b41f-4c22fc9165a4.webp){kind=link}