[throwawaynay]

Are you joking?

Cars and planes are an ecological disaster, I don't know a single place on earth where the ecological impact of public transportation is worse than the impact of cars and planes.

[zdragnar]

And yet, we already have them. Smelting enough steel and moving earth (and forests, and wetland, and prairie, etc) to also add passenger rail to anywhere you could want to go in the sparsely populated rural states would not be a net positive. There are a dozen or so villages within an hour drive of me that each have less than 1000 people living in them. The damage of adding roads and cars is already done. What good would connecting and powering light rail trains between these villages do?

[throwawaynay]

>The damage of adding roads and cars is already done.

No.

We build millions of cars every year, they still consume fuel everyday, they still have to be repaired, they still crash and kill a lot more often than any mean of public transportation.

A few farmers using cars is not a problem, but cities like Austin needing that many cars is outrageous.