>>1866382>>1866407I agree, picrel is a meme and we're going to spend the next decade wasting insane amounts of money to coddle the car-dependency of previous generations as some kind of grand bargain on climate change only for those same people to betray the pact as soon as a long enough recession starts.
That said, if we manage to thread the needle on that obvious-but-inevitable-betrayal, interurban passenger rail will happen. We get just enough EV adoption that "price of gas goes up" doesn't cause immediate political coups, price of air travel and long distance personal vehicle trips goes up while interurban rail stays about the same, people see rail ticket prices show up in their search results for airfare and start thinking, "Why am I paying more?"
We're lucky that there's enough political will to subsidize our battered rail industry in the mean time, so that it's alive for the moment that inflection point happens. Heck, Canada might even been investing in expanding its passenger rail network and I hope the US can achieve some of the same in the next five years.
