>>1987065Why does Switzerland not draw this false dichotomy between low-demand regional services and high-demand commuter services then? Whatever your fallacious appeal to authority, Switzerland actually does exactly that which you say is a bad thing to do, and it does so quite successfully.
Spouting phrases like
>Because resources are finiteover a matter of running some regional trains which costs a fraction of whatever white elephant projects you can imagine is such a ridiculously reductionist position to take. You can make the same argument for absolutely anything that doesn't attend to the most essential necessities. You want a playground for the kids? Wew lad no can do because that one line is running over capacity during rush hour. A museum you say? Nah think of the commuters. Preserving a historic building? While people have to ride crowded trains???
But apart from that, you simply disregard the capillary effect of low-demand lines, which is two-fold: First off, those low-demand lines usually feed into other lines. You close them, the next less travelled line loses patronage. Then you close that one down. And the next and the next. You end up with a skeleton train network. Secondly, there's the issue of actually offering citizens the possibility of moving around everywhere without a car, not just densely populated regions. You can't expect people to ride transit as a habit if they can only move around certain lines.
In any case, what I suggested was a conceptual question, that can not definitely be answered from a technical point of view, and pretending to take a "merely technical" position on it to then argue your ideology is one of the lowest kinds of dishonest argument that there is. Just be honest and say that you don't think that a country should offer transportation as a continuous basic service to its population, but only offer it there where it makes economic sense. Don't hide behind supposed technicisms.