mitigatedchaos:

nuclearspaceheater:

afloweroutofstone:

Big if true

Definitely true.

See, this is the actual reason for rail. We can split to population into 16,000 walkable towns of 20,000 residents at a density of roughly 4,000/km2. Each will be situated on about 612 km2, and separated by about 13km in distance (the radius of the town itself will be around 1.25km).

Each town will have a single rail depot in the center with N/S and E/W lines. Buses will connect to this depot, with the short distance allowing for a trip duration of 5-10 minutes.

Trains will move at an average of around 60-70km/h, including 5 minute stop times, for about a 15 minute hop per town. This provides the population of a sizable city within a 30m-1h commute range – for every town.

A high speed express service traveling at 150 km/h might increase the reachable population to closer to 2 million. (Somewhat less due to headways and transfers.) In two hours, maybe 7 to 9 million.

Every town in America could have the network power of New York City.

There is of course the small matter of the cost of the trains, the town construction, issues with not all sites being ideal for all industry, limiting the town populations, etc, but those are just details to be sorted out later.

Tags:

#that one post with the thing #war cw? #discourse cw? #story ideas I…honestly I might actually write this #maybe…*pokes search engines trying to get a better sense of what 4k people/km^2 looks like* maybe sprawl it out a bit more #a big part of the point‚ in terms of the world I’m building here‚ is that #it lets people do the carlessness thing and the network-power thing *without the sensory overload of dense cities* #the towns I’ve been in with populations of 10k – 20k seemed to be pretty much the perfect size #the 1k – 5k towns I’ve been in were a little too small but they were close #the 100k – 200k cities were somewhat too big #Toronto was *way* too big #I’ve never been to NYC even though I used to live less than 100 miles from it and that’s probably for the best #(*looks at NYC on Street View* wait WTF this basically looks like downtown Kitchener) #(did I pick the wrong part of NYC?) #(is the idea just that it’s downtown Kitchener but it keeps up that pace over a larger area?) #((okay I guess to be fair the NYC buildings do look somewhat taller)) #((but the amount of overwhelmingness at ground level looks like it would be about the same)) #((so‚ like‚ not great‚ but not *quite* to the point of curling up in a little ball)) #((I’d still pick‚ say‚ Wellesley-but-with-a-train-station over Kitchener any day)) #tag rambles #geography #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see