Greentext

Ok, cool. But I don’t think your experience would still be very good if you were joined by an additional trainload of people riding 4x4s right alongside you. It’d be time to pave over that canyon so that the people visiting it can park.

Completely missed the point. Less "general public" is the entire idea of offroading in remote locations with no cell service or anything else. It takes actual skills to get up there, and the more-skilled people tend to be more respectful of the lands. But I digress.

And trains aren’t mutually exclusive with cars. I might take the train to visit my parents a few cities over, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a highway for the moving truck to drive along when I had to get my stuff over to where I live now.

For sure. I don't disagree with that at all. I've moved across the USA twice, and both times it was more cost-effective to just drive. Paying a transporter to haul a minivan, paying a moving company to ship my family's stuff, and loading us all on a plane to live at the in-laws while we wait for our stuff to arrive - was our first choice. However, I did the math and found that sending my family on a plane while I rented a UHaul trailer and just towed it with the minivan was over $1000 cheaper, despite the 5-day drive I had to do. But I enjoyed it.

No-one is saying no-one should drive a car. Rather, that the right tool for the right job should be used. In the US, cars are used for a lot more than what they’re best at. That you are using them effectively for personal use, is not a reason to also have them used where they aren’t as effective (in this case in comparison to trains, large volume transit of people who are mainly transporting themselves between hubs of human activity).

Absolutely. I just get really fucking tired of seeing the "fuck cars" morons beating a dead horse over and over again with "all cars are bad and should be illegal right now".

In Tokyo, Shinjuku train station routes 3.8 million people to where they are going, EVERY, DAY.

And it's a beautiful thing. The fact that Japan is roughly the size of the entire US east coast and somehow manages with trains just fine is an engineering marvel.

Interstate 5 in the US, the busiest in the country, does a pathetic 0.75 million a day on its busiest strip. And the cost-effectiveness of trains beats out cars waaay before you hit capacity on such a highway.

I don't disagree with this either.

Honestly though, for general "getting around", I just prefer my bikes.