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

(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

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