Comment by compass_copium
19 hours ago
Solidarity. Cars belong in the rubbish bin of history. The Soviet Union had the right idea, as usual--make cars unbearable to drive to encourage public transportation.
19 hours ago
Solidarity. Cars belong in the rubbish bin of history. The Soviet Union had the right idea, as usual--make cars unbearable to drive to encourage public transportation.
I don’t think you’ve ever lived under SU rules.
Yeah, people don't seem to understand that in SU a very small well connected elite gained control over the means of production and abused it for their own purposes.
While not in the SU directly, I got to enjoy public transport in communist Poland for a few years and yeah, you don't want that.
Public transport in communist Poland was horrible because it was severely underfunded. Remember that Poland bankrupted in the 1981 (when the West put sanctions on the country after the Jaruzelski's "coup", and sanctions kiled the economy) the whole decade was kind of surreal in terms of state's lack of funds and decrease of living standards.
If they were communist, why didn't they just print more money?
Communist Sydney trains are awful too
And here we come to the crux of the train issue - elitism. You both find it below your level to use public transport, and you don't want to mix with the 'unwashed masses' - again, doing so would be below your level.
The Soviet Union never had such a goal. Passenger cars universalization was actually a long term goal of the system, but the soviet system prioritized heavy industry, infrastructure and defense over consumer goods.
That was the reason while Ukraine, before the war, was a huge net exporter of electricity. They never got too many or really good cars, but they do sure had plenty of electric generation plants.
The Chinese apparently learned with this, and used and export oriented economy to have the necessary scale to invest both in heavy industry as well as consumer goods.
That works for people in cities, if cities were made to by usable by cyclists and pedestrians. Not so much for people that live in rural areas.
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