Comment by icantevenhold
6 hours ago
Living in Alaska like this is feels to me way more sustainable than living in a city with millions of people - might be wrong though, I guess it’s a question of scale.
When you say subsidised you mean the state is paying for essentials here?
The cost of bringing a large, heavy and loaded freight train to a standstill in the middle of nowhere so that a single passenger can board is non-trivial.
There’s definitely an economic reason that stations exist.
The ticket they have is subsidised by the money the state-owned corporation makes from freight.
I've seen a couple of videos and I think you've missed some information, at least if we're talking about the same thing. The train is specific for a bunch of flag stop people along it, small locomotive and only a few cars. It might not be as sustainable as walking to the store but it's probably on par with driving an SUV to Costco weekly, especially when a lot of stuff at Costco is trucked not rail.
I just think the following two things are mutually exclusive:
- requiring a private diesel train, operated and subsidised by the government for a economically unviable number of people, in order to survive
- living off grid in a sustainable manner
To me off-grid sustainability isn’t just “carbon neutral”, it’s being able to exist somewhere without assistance from the wider society.
And what amounts to a private train is an egregious amount of assistance, IMO.