Triplicate-Squid

I have a lot of worldbuilding-related thoughts, but they mostly go in circles. For a long time, the biggest problem has been... OK, this'll take a while to explain.

I sometimes have to remind myself now that the original point of my worldbuilding was railways. That is, I'm interested in designing fictional railways, and the world around them. Originally this was geofiction set in the mostly-real world. However, these projects then merged with something else I'd been doing; "alternate personal", imagining alternate lives, alternate personal experiences I could have had. This big shift happened in 2014 -- "What if I imagine myself there observing these railways and places?" On some level, that was what I'd already been doing. Anyway, this gave my railway and worldbuilding projects new purpose, but also new problems. Some aspects of this world(s) would be difficult or impossible to observe for someone physically there inside said world. How to reconcile that with my overwhelming emphasis on firsthand observation?

More importantly, something else crept in. I am... passionately ideological. I have social-political-etc views that are very much not the default of the society around me. I'm so political I can't participate in real politics because I'm off the spectrum. Anyway, I increasingly realized that, since the main purpose of alternate-personal worldbuilding is to allow alternate-me to be able to observe AND CARE ABOUT the things I'm interested in, I needed to prevent bigger concerns from getting in the way. In other words, I need a society I don't have to worry about. This defeated the idea of real-world geofiction. My beliefs are, among many other things, (some form of) anarchist and communist. I need a world free from governments, bosses, money... Nowhere in the real world is like this (and that in itself baffles me).

Now, the critical problem. My desire for a world I'd be comfortable living in comes into conflict with my desire for a world that's interesting to observe from my hobbyist perspective. I initially assumed "If you eliminate the artificial complexity of modern society, the world and what people in it do will mostly LOOK similar", and I relied on that. I increasingly realized that wouldn't be the case. A functioning anarchist, communist, communal society wouldn't look much like the societies I know. Their cities, for example, would be built very differently without private property or even individual living.

There's also the problem that I have no idea how to implement some of my socio-politico-economic ideals because some of them seem contradictory, so I can't even visualize the world I want!

(Some of this may be hard to understand due to little context. Much is quotes from my notes to myself and previous discussions with friends who know what I'm talking about. Anyway...)

(continued from part 1 and part 2)

Something I noted several years ago: "I've long been angry to see that, in most developing countries, cars are common in cities and rare in rural areas. This is exactly the reverse of how things should be, and I'm sure this contributes to increasing inequality in countries like China. So of course, in a world run as I want, it would be the opposite. Automobiles would preferentially be shipped to small towns. Small, low-density areas can't gain as much efficiency from transit and from sharing vehicles, so they need more relative to population to get a comparable level of convenience. And in my world, that's what they'd get, because said vehicles wouldn't be bought by those people and communities for themselves. That's what collectivism is. This is about recognizing that the same product can have different value to different people even if they don't have different amounts of stuff to trade for it." That shows what I assumed at that time: that car-sharing was a practical and cost-effective means of travel. Also, I once asked a friend this: "If car sharing rather than personal ownership was the established business model, what would be technically different about cars today? Particularly, would electric cars dominate? My reason for asking that: Electric cars have a higher initial cost but lower operating cost (electricity is cheaper than gasoline, they have fewer moving parts and thus less maintenance). Personal cars aren't being used the majority of the time. Shared cars get higher usage, so the economics are shifted." "I continue to wonder about this, and about extending the question to outright collectivist societies. I don't have adequate information to answer this. Electric cars definitely are lower maintenance / higher reliability. Modern electric cars tend to have a lot higher initial price than comparable-performance internal-combustion cars, but would that be true if they were produced in larger quantity? And I'm talking about an earlier era, IE, no expensive lithium/etc batteries, only lead-acid (or nickel-iron). Electricity is "cheaper" than gasoline; that is, it's cheaper to buy the amount of electricity to run an electric car a given distance than the amount of gasoline needed to run a similar car the same distance. But for this, and for the previous point about initial price, how are these economics altered by a collectivist world? It doesn't have individual property, isn't based on exchange, and thus has no prices. It does have production costs they'll be conscious of, but 1: those only consider labor, not supply and demand, 2: all labor is valued equally, 3: the "cost" they care about isn't just to the producer directly but to society, IE, all of what we call "externalities" are automatically part of the cost. The principal disadvantage of electric vehicles is range, and this was far worse in the era I care about for the purposes of this question. In one way, this disadvantage is much less for shared vehicles. Individuals rarely use their car's maximum range; its capability has to be sized for the extreme trip, not the average. With shared vehicles, maybe they'd simply use electric cars for short trips and IC cars for long trips. But in another way, it's far worse for shared vehicles! Personal cars aren't being used most of the time anyway, so using that time to charge batteries is essentially free. For shared vehicles, you want to use them as much of the time as possible. With battery charging, IIRC, typically taking significantly longer than the amount of driving time you get from a charge, this seems catastrophic. The only way around this is to have battery-swapping stations. A significant infrastructure, but it would be cheaper overall... maybe. At least I can say the collectivist society would've standardized batteries and charging stations long ago, not having proprietary designs." "Something I can predict more confidently: Historically, shared cars would have led to microcars dominating. Remember, most car trips only involve one person. In the modern era, sharing rides would mean larger cars would be coming (back). Organizing such shared rides would probably have been impractical in the days before mobile phones and computer networks." My friend's response included roughly "That doesn't make sense. Why would cars carrying more people have led to smaller cars?" I really don't get how people managed carpooling for anything other than regular commutes (or if they did at all). I also discovered https://getpocket.com/explore/item/electric-cars-are-changing-the-cost-of-driving which strongly suggested to me that a world focused on fleet vehicles would favor electric cars NOW, but what about 50 or 100 years ago? This is actually related to the previous questions. The viability of electric cars depends on how cars are typically used, and I haven't figured what that would be in a collectivist / communal world. Given the low performance of historical electric cars, they could originally only have been used as city cars, and does such a world have any way to use cars in cities!? Then I was able to describe in more detail the assumptions underlying my microcar prediction: In a world without individual cars, transit would likely be much better, more extensive, would be used for far more trips. In that world, I expect few people would carpool for, say, commuting to work. That's what scheduled transit is for. Cars would be used largely for the unscheduled trips, for on-demand transport. So my assumption, I guess, is/was that there'd be a lot of demand for 1-person vehicles, a lot of demand for ~10+ person vehicles that fall outside what we call "car", little demand for ~3-6-person vehicles. I don't know how to determine if that's a reasonable outcome, because I have trouble imagining how shared cars would be used... I suppose my total lack of knowledge of how people use real-life car-sharing services hurts here. But the way I want and expect shared cars to be used... I don't see how to make it work without robot cars, forget about a tech level before car phones! I expect to take one car to the store, leave it in the lot (which isn't very big, because....), someone else coming out right after I go in takes that car and drives it home, and when I come out, I take a different car sitting in the lot and go home. The goal is minimizing the time cars sit unused, but the problem: How do you guarantee there'll always be a car on hand when you want one? In practice, their movements will be randomly imbalanced, and lots of repositioning moves will be needed. Those are exactly what I want to avoid, because the whole premise of "cars mainly for unplanned trips" implies I don't need to organize anything to have a car where and when I want it! I expect the majority of passenger-trips are on buses / share taxis. Urban roads will often have transit service frequencies measured in seconds. Thus, taking the bus is actually very convenient for a lot of trips, even unplanned. Despite needing to pay a driver, it's still probably cheaper per person-trip than using even a shared car, as long as the bus is mostly full, and I expect that they would be in this world more often than in ours. So the only reason for the less-cost-effective smaller vehicles to exist at all would be if they were more convenient at least some of the time. Given that transit wait times are often negligible, the car's speed advantage isn't as great as in our world, but it still exists: the car doesn't have to make scheduled stops along the way, and you can go direct door-to-door. BUT that speed and convenience advantage only exists if the car happens to be right here, right now, when you need it! If you have to walk any distance to find a car not in use, how is that different from walking to a bus stop? I can't figure how to get even one-person microcars in convenient places often enough, let alone multi-person cars, unless they're robotic and can reposition themselves, and I'm talking about how things would develop before even car phones! That seems to defeat any idea of unplanned trips other than on scheduled routes, because with no easy way to contact a moving car, you can only pick up people at prearranged locations. And, paradoxically and frustratingly, the situations it would be "easiest" (IE, least impossible) to find shared cars would be the ones they're least needed. Finding an empty car would be easiest near the busiest destinations, except those would be the best served by transit! Cars should be more for low-density, particularly rural, routes. Finding an empty car would be easiest near the busiest destinations, except those would be best served by transit! Cars should be more for low-density, particularly rural, routes. Given that transit wait times are often negligible, the car's speed advantage isn't as great as in our world, but it still exists: the car doesn't have to make scheduled stops along the way, and you can go direct door-to-door. BUT that speed and convenience advantage only exists if the car happens to be right here, right now, when you need it! If you have to walk any distance to find a car not in use, how is that different from walking to a bus stop?

From childhood, something seemed wrong whenever I heard about people designing, for example, electric 'city cars'. That is, small, short-range, possibly not even capable of highway speeds, recognizing that a lot of people never drive beyond the city they live in. Makes sense if you don't look any deeper, but I could quickly see something wrong. If you're trying to save energy on in-city trips, why use individual cars in the first place? I now suspect that a collectivist world would want cars almost exclusively for intercity travel! I expect that service frequencies for scheduled intercity travel will be less than in-city (but will that be true? It's true in the real world, but I don't know how to accurately model the collectivist world!), and with trip times being longer, the time penalty for finding a vehicle is more worthwhile. However, intercity buses aren't as much slower than individual cars as city buses are because they make fewer stops out in the country. And intercity trains may be faster than cars... but only if highway speeds are the same as ours or slower.

Some time later, I found this paper about robotic cars, and it points out some important things. https://www.itf-oecd.org/sites/default/files/docs/15cpb_self-drivingcars.pdf 36 pages, so I won't ask you to read it. Trying to summarize... They focus on technical aspects and only mention economic aspects briefly and without analysis. This is good for my purposes, as avoiding questions like "Who pays for any of this?" lets the conclusions be applicable to any world, and in particular to my goal of collectivist societies that don't bother to define who pays for anything! Focused on how robot cars could replace personal cars in, as an example, Lisbon, Portugal. Lisbon proper has over half a million people, with around 1 car per 5 people, less than typical in North America. It's poorly laid out for driving, more for the opposite reason than in a North American plains city like Calgary. Here, the "old" areas are more gridded and new areas are rambling suburbs. Lisbon is an old European city, so particularly the inner city was made long before cars, with often-narrow streets at all manner of angles. Thus, parking capacity is limited. It has a heavily-used subway system. They assume for simplicity that everyone will still be using the existing road network to take the same number of trips to the same places as they do now, ignoring how a world of robot cars would change lifestyles and urban planning. They analyze both 1-person microcars and share taxis the size of ordinary cars. It turns out that microcars are unworkable for the level of traffic congestion they'd create, while share taxis seem workable. Thus, I'll focus on the latter. They do reference another study of a smaller town which suggested that 1-person cars would be workable there, and reading further, I can see how these aren't contradictory. They assume that buses are also eliminated, deeming Lisbon's buses hardly worth keeping since their average occupancy is only ~20% and, though they don't explicitly say so, why would anyone ever choose to take a bus when they could get almost anywhere more conveniently by robot taxi? They focus on cases where the subway is retained, though, and so will I because, again, keeping the subway is what allows road congestion to remain manageable. They assume that all non-motorized trips remain non-motorized. That's obviously not going to be true. Most of the shortest car trips will become foot trips because the few-minute delay to call a car that's not already there will make driving not worthwhile. But I'm more thinking about the other side: Because this system is available to people who aren't currently car owners, many trips that are currently on foot will be motorized because it's convenient and affordable. They default to allowing a maximum wait time of 5 minutes when you call for a robot car to pick you up. Under those conditions (robot share taxis with wait limited to 5m, no buses, still subway), the number of (passenger) vehicles needed is only ~10% of what it it now. However, total vehicle-km travelled increases slightly, by 6% overall and by 9% at peak times. This is manageable, while most other scenarios lead to much larger increases in vehicle-km. Why do vehicle-km increase with shared vehicles? Part of it is from eliminating buses. More importantly, it's that the reduction in vehicle-km from sharing vehicles is mostly cancelled out by the empty trips the taxis make to pick up passengers or return to their bases. They find that share taxis of ~5-person capacity will likely dominate the fleet. This means that average vehicle occupancy isn't as high as I hoped for with shared, particularly robotic, vehicles, only around 2.5 people. That is, taxis are running in a mix of states from full to empty. It's not worth using bigger vehicles because, most of the time, they won't be able to find enough people in the same area going the same direction at the same time. This is made obvious by graphs showing that vehicle occupancy will vary over a day, with higher levels in rush hours when more people are going the same way at the same time. IOW, ride sharing is only beneficial in high-traffic situations. Something they don't say explicitly but that I can conclude by putting together several things: Larger, busier cities will have slightly higher average occupancy than this example. In smaller lower-density cities, not suffering from congestion and with little opportunity for ride-sharing, microcars would probably be the preferred robotic vehicles, being cheaper to run under those conditions. It's instructive to look at where and when the increase in vehicle-km, and thus road usage, occurs. Main roads show negligible increase, while local roads show a large increase. That's why the traffic level for the share-taxi scenario is manageable, because it's usually main roads that get congested while local roads aren't being used to capacity even in rush hour. Think about why secondary roads, particularly in outlying areas, show traffic increases. Someone travelling by personal car from outlying residential areas to inner areas will get in their car that's already there, drive it to the destination, leave it there, and get back in for the trip home (or to the next destination). With robot taxis, the car isn't at your door, you have to call and it will drive to you, most often empty. And when you reach your destination, instead of leaving the car parked, it drives off in search of new passengers. This is devastating, as I hoped for 10:1 reduction in vehicles in cities without robotics. I think I can see the problem, why my previous assumptions and goals for the convenience of transportation might have been reasonable and yet different from what this paper suggests. I was thinking about cities perfectly designed for non-private vehicles, high density throughout, "perfect" grids -- that doesn't require the roads to be straight, but I mean that every road is a through road, no dead ends, loops, or even T-intersections (except outside the city). In a city like that, it hardly matters anymore whether transit is scheduled. Vehicles simply shuttle back and forth along every road. Every road is a transit route, I hoped for frequencies measured in seconds at least at busy times, and vehicles can stop anywhere. To get anywhere, you can get on a vehicle going one way, get off at an intersection, transfer to a vehicle going crosswise, and get anywhere in the city with no more than a couple minutes of waiting and walking. The whole concept falls apart, though, if urban density isn't uniformly high enough to make absolutely every road into a transit route with very frequent service. That study is about putting robot cars into a "legacy" city with areas built for private cars and areas that predate cars. It points out that typical residential areas don't have anywhere near the level of traffic needed to expect to find a vehicle close at hand on short notice. I didn't expect (at least non-robotic) car sharing to be practical in rural areas, and it turns out that large areas of a typical city are, for practical purposes of transport, more "rural". So how does one ever introduce shared vehicles before robotics and achieve any practical gain from it? Cities designed for private cars are poorly laid out for car sharing. Even if cars were never private, pre-automobile cities are also poorly laid out for car sharing.

This is the paradox I'm struggling with: I can assume the actual maximum speeds of a car and a bus on the same road are similar. To get an end-to-end time advantage over a bus, you need to be able to take a door-to-door route that minimizes stops and walking. For a vehicle with a large number of passengers like a bus, the "door-to-door" premise doesn't help, as it'll have to meander to so many destinations that it'll still be making lots of stops and taking a very indirect route that takes longer. Thus, faster travel has to be by smaller vehicles with fewer passengers, so that, on average, the time penalty for the vehicle to divert to pick them up and drop them off is less than the time penalty the riders would face walking to a fixed route. But with few passengers, the economics of a dedicated driver can't be justified; it has to be a carpool, not a taxi. But with no dedicated driver, a vehicle with no passengers can't move to pick up any passengers!

I'm very worried that a collectivist society simply wouldn't bother trying to have on-demand or very convenient transportation, because I haven't been able to see how to do it, and I'm concerned they won't see a need to! To elaborate... The viability of any type of transport with non-personal vehicles, scheduled or responsive, is dependent on density of demand for travel. Pay careful attention: It's not about number of people in an area, but number of person-trips, or even more so person-miles travelled. And that's where I expect a collectivist society would be lacking. They won't have urban sprawl due to lack of a land market, won't have low-population-density cities like those on the North American plains. But now come various other effects of collectivism and communal societies... Lack of land values and interchangeability of housing will mean most people live near their workplace, within walking distance. If they live farther away, they'll normally choose to live on scheduled transit routes, and remember what I said about streetcars: In the collectivist world, there's no danger of the service being withdrawn while demand still exists, and as long as those commuters live there, the demand will remain. I also realized something that will greatly reduce that other staple of modern daily life, the shopping trip. In an individualist exchange-based world, delivery is a (minor) luxury, but that's because work done for yourself isn't priced but work done for others is. A communist society doesn't make that distinction. Most things that can conveniently be delivered will be, as that's less work for society as a whole. Having goods delivered reduces the number of trips taken and distance travelled, but that's not even the important part now. It's that switching to delivery switches those trips from being "passenger" trips to "cargo" trips. This isn't an arbitrary legal classification. I mean that delivery will usually be done by freight vehicles, not able to also serve as passenger vehicles. Thus, delivery will reduce the demand for travel on passenger vehicles. Something I observe my father frustratingly doing all the time points out another way the collectivist world will be more efficient. For services and for goods that can't practically be delivered, people often won't have to go as far because there's no price difference, no comparison shopping, so you can most often go to the closest provider. Thus, not fewer person-trips, but fewer person-miles. I can probably think of more ways, but you get the idea. I expect the outcome would be people, on average, spending less time than in our world on regular trips but having to spend more time for any less-routine trip. That is, the collectivist world would probably lead to people locating their homes, "businesses", etc. to minimize distances and thus travel times, but that mostly helps for trips you expect to be doing frequently for years. Without actual high speeds, travel to anywhere other than the most conveniently located places wouldn't be easy. And this is devastating. I hoped that collectivism would lead to a better world. In this case, what I mean... I vaguely recall reading that the average time people spend travelling per day hasn't changed much for at least centuries. As more forms of travel are introduced, people use them to travel farther, so no time is saved in the long term. IOW, it seems the amount of time people are willing to waste getting to places doesn't change. And that's exactly what I want to change along with the overall societal change! Just like I want and expect a collectivist society to reduce work hours, I want and expect it to reduce travel hours across the board. And the fear I mentioned is.... Once they can make the majority of trips without on-demand transport, providing such transport for the minority of trips for which it would be most helpful probably wouldn't be cost-effective. In fact, any transport other than walking might not be cost-effective. The total labor spent supplying that transportation would probably exceed the time it would save to the end users, and in a collectivist society that doesn't distinguish work done for yourself from work done for others... In the collectivist world, you'll normally have the opportunity to locate yourself more conveniently than in our world with "free-market" housing. Almost everyone will be able to accomplish commuting and other routine tasks without personal vehicles or taxi-like services. But what about the times you want to go somewhere else that doesn't happen to be so conveniently located? A major way the collectivist world will save people travel distance, and thus time, is through increased interchangeability of things where users don't benefit much from distinctiveness. That doesn't help for products, locations, activities... where distinctiveness is important! (Quite a while ago, I noted some things about how I wanted and expected model railroading to be in a collectivist world, and it all relied on trivially easy transportation. I may make those public in other posts...)

In short, I have huge problems visualizing urban planning and lifestyles in a non-exchange-based world, which I'll have to go a lot more into in future posts.

continued from

I was looking up something about Calgary Transit, and it led me to start figuring...

Working from memory and in rough figures:

In the USA, the average car owner spends... was it $5200/year? to have and use a car, and travels 14000 miles. Convert to units that'll be comparable to Calgary Transit figures, use ~$1.33Can/US, that's >Can$6900 for ~22500km, ~~31centsCAN/km.

How much does transit actually cost? Calgary Transit figures, but not all from the same year, but anyway... Upcoming budget ~$700M/year, ~3000 employees. Since I don't think drivers, maintenance crews, etc. typically make >$200K/year, this suggests most of their expenses aren't in paying their own workers but in buying stuff from outside, counter to my initial expectations. Tickets are >$3, but average fare actually earned is ~$1.50 due to passes. The cost to CT per passenger trip was $10 at one point, but that includes some level of pandemic disruption probably making that worse than usual. They aim to get that cost down to $6 in a few years. How long is the average trip? It was almost 15km when the cost was $10, but is that typical of other years? And how does that divide between bus and train?

Can transit be made competitive and profitable? I'd long thought "If car sharing rather than ownership predominated, it would be." My reasoning: Car owners have fixed costs and marginal costs. It becomes more economical the farther you drive. For individual owners, the cost of an extra mile is low. If cars were shared, you'd be paying your share of the fixed costs based on usage. This would make the cost of an extra mile higher, so transit would hopefully be competitive. The above example figures wreck that. The cost (not just marginal) for a car with one occupant is ~30-33c/km. The real cost of transit is something like 40-66c/pass-km or possibly even higher. If it weren't hugely subsidized, few people would use it. But there seems to be a way out... but wait.

CT fleet of 1100 buses and >200 C-Train cars. Somewhat under 300K passenger trips / (week)day, buses count for more than half of that. Think what that means. Not all buses will be available all the time, but let's say that they have 1000 buses available for at least 10 hours/day. In reality, many of those will be unused in slow periods, but I'm talking what's possible. Now, if there are at least 10000 bus-hours of service possible per day, and say ~150000 bus passengers, that's ~~15 boardings per hour per bus. If the average passenger rides for, say, 20 minutes, the average bus is carrying ~~5 people at any given time! And if actual occupancy is higher due to buses not running when they could and that number of passengers being concentrated into fewer trips, that doesn't mean the buses are being used any more efficiently... With a full-size bus having ~40 seats, they might have only 1/8 occupancy. Personal cars are often criticized as being inefficiently used because most seats are usually empty, but in practice (in Calgary at least) this situation is worse with buses! THAT'S why transit is uneconomic.

So, for transit to achieve its potential, the most important thing is to push up average occupancy. Since buses on some routes are routinely loaded beyond seating capacity at peak times, it's obvious that an increase can only be through greatly increasing use at off-peak times. And thus, I suspect that making transit economically self-supporting will depend on changing schedules. I don't mean transit schedules, I mean work and life schedules. For all the claims of the decline of the 9-5 workday, the continued presence of rush hour shows it's still largely a reality. Shifting how people's lives are timed to reduce the peak in transport demand would allow more efficient use of transit. It sounds like a tough job to get average occupancy somewhere around 50% which I anticipate is necessary for viability, and fares probably still won't be able to be as low as the artificial values we get in reality.

...But if car sharing becomes prevalent, that'll drive up utilization of cars, improving their economics. If ride sharing becomes prevalent, they'll improve even more. Something I looked up before (more on that later) suggested robot cars could offer a factor of 4 improvement in economics. I don't know how close human-driven ride-sharing can come to that, and once robots are available the economics of buses shift somewhat as well, but... I'm guessing optimally used (non-robotic, as I'm focusing on society and organization here, not near-future technology) transit might be able to get real cost in the 10-20c/pass-km range, and probably not the bottom of that. Cars with ridesharing might get 8c/pass-km.

Oh, that's the other part I forgot to note. That cost given for car ownership is actually the price paid by the user, so it doesn't account for subsidies. However, I looked up something about US expenditures on roads... I forget the value, and I think I'll have to look up more, but it was far lower than I anticipated, suggesting that the real cost of cars isn't as much higher than the price as I expected.

That's all quick notes; I hope they're somewhat comprehensible.

Why am I noting all this? I was trying to figure what forms of transportation the collectivist societies I want would use. A critical problem in doing so is that such societies wouldn't measure costs the same way individualist capitalist societies do. They'd have no money, but that's not even the point. They'd value all labor equally. They wouldn't run on supply and demand, so unimproved resources (IE, land) would have no cost. Etc. How does all this affect the viability of different technologies, etc? I don't know! But anyway, I have good reason to be concerned that a collectivist society wouldn't have the good public transit I've always expected it would. However, I also have reason to suspect it might not have need for cars, for any passenger motor vehicles! I mentioned that at the end of the previous post, but it'll be in the next one that I get around to it.

Also, all this points out a major category of chronic struggles in my worldbuilding: I want a better world to live in. However, my worldbuilding projects have always been about making things that are interesting to observe, and interesting in specific ways that I expect. These are different kinds of "want", showing different perspectives on the fictional world. I want to reconcile them, but very often they're in conflict. In this case, it's that I want and expect my fictional world to have most of the types of vehicle from the real world, like cars, buses, trucks, freight trains, passenger trains... and I question whether some of those would / should exist. I expect I'll come back to this subject in many future posts.

I wrote a bunch of journals about worldbuilding, railroads, ideology and utopianism... in 2021. Wanted to write a lot more; I have years of personal notes on these topics, but largely disordered. Trying to make it into an organized series of posts was too hard. I'll resume with less of a plan.

When I imagine trains, I assume high platforms and level boarding, as is common on commuter and light rail systems. I find it weird that this isn't globally prevalent for intercity trains as well. For most of my life, I haven't paid attention to platform heights in photos from different places. Eventually I came to realize that, for my railfan tastes as well, I want high platforms. I realized that one of the big reasons modern European MUs are all ugly and Japan still has some acceptable ones is that Japan has mostly high(er) platforms so they don't feel a push for, and indeed can't use, lower-floored trains. I find the proportions of MUs generally ugly if they don't have a constant level floor above wheel height. This is, of course, secondary to the critical matter of cab design... But on to what was actually on my mind today.

I don't understand why real-world transit systems are systematically pushing for low-floor trams and LRVs. I know these are more technically complex and high-maintenance compared to the simplicity of high platforms. It's particularly odd that many new systems, not limited by backward compatibility with existing low platforms, are going for low floors. Why? "Sometimes there isn't room for high platforms." Where are you that short on space? This was talking about streetcars, as LRVs need land for stations anyway. What gets really weird is vague claims about "psychology" and "urban space". Yesterday I saw the assertion that riders are more willing to use high-roofed low-floor trams, etc. because they feel more like "extensions of the street", or more generally like building interiors which people don't want to feel cramped in. I've ridden low-floor buses. The roof feels pointlessly high when seated. This pointed out something about my goals and assumptions:

I take for granted something that no real urban transit system I know of does. All passengers must be seated. I want to design "civilized" transit. Transit vehicles designed for the same comfort passengers are used to in automobiles, designed for a world where there are no private cars, and instead of that meaning "transit doesn't have to compete", it meaning "transit is so convenient and desirable there's no demand for individual vehicles".

But then I get to something curious I was thinking a little while ago... It seems that a non-capitalist world might have no use for motorized transit at all! More on that in another post.

Some years ago, I wrote

<<

Why I watch Magical Girls (and what I don't like about them)

Good: Mainly female casts.

Good: Cuteness.

Doubly good: Mainly female casts where I don't lust after most of them, finally proving there are reasons beyond sex appeal for a guy to like girl shows.

Good: Superheroes.

Good: Slice of life.

Doubly good: Superheroes that don't spend most of the time in costume and that are often interesting and likable as normal people...

Bad: ... but supers shouldn't have a chance to be normal.

Bad: Relaxed attitude toward dual identities.

Bad: Cliched associations between who they are and what kind of super they are.

Bad: Normal people either don't know monsters exist or don't care, and I don't know which is worse.

Bad: Stock footage.

Doubly bad: Stock footage specifically used for the most important or flamboyant moments.

Theoretically good: Modern-world fantasy.

Bad: Fantasy generally kind of boring.

Bad: Anything done by magic can be undone by magic.

>>

Some years later, I added

<<

one of my general struggles with the genre. The modern Magical Warrior genre, as defined by Sailor Moon, is heavily based on Sentai and other tokusatsu. AFAICT, there's not much difference beyond aesthetics. This is a problem, because while my own aesthetic tastes run closer to tokusatsu, I'm much less interested in it! Why?

>>

and

<<

I'm not a difference feminist. I don't even perceive this "gender" thing [...]

So why am I attracted to a genre that's explicitly gendered? To be more specific, why do expect I'd be less interested in comparable fiction that wasn't gendered?

>>

I'm referring to topics I mentioned in