i don't want to be too philosophical about this, but:
i love history and it's lessons, but at the same time i prefer the future.
we tend to cling to the past, historical lessons, historical figures, but this usually hides our own insecurity about the future. i think there is a lot less to be learned from our past that can improve our future than many people believe. but we continue digging up our past, hoping to learn more about ancestors, when in fact we simply don't know the future, and this scares us.
> what increasingly seems like a vanity project
"climate change", "people working from home", "less cars", etc etc
Not sure if the linked articles covers it due to the paywall, but according this article [1], the estimate that carbon emissions to build it would exceed emissions is possibly overly pessimistic. Such as predicting that air and car travel will get cheaper over time and rail travel more expensive
Although if the estimate is accurate I would still hazard a guess that it could be a net positive if it successfully increased capacity/speed to the point where people considered it a viable alternative to air/car journies and it was combined with policies to reduce the costs of rail travel/discourage air and car travel where possible
I wonder if studies are systematically underestimating modal shift because it's impossible to quantify the cultural shift from a generation that saw car travel as a sign of upward mobility to a generation that sees unnecessary car travel as tasteless and harmful.
i don't want to be too philosophical about this, but:
i love history and it's lessons, but at the same time i prefer the future.
we tend to cling to the past, historical lessons, historical figures, but this usually hides our own insecurity about the future. i think there is a lot less to be learned from our past that can improve our future than many people believe. but we continue digging up our past, hoping to learn more about ancestors, when in fact we simply don't know the future, and this scares us.
> what increasingly seems like a vanity project
"climate change", "people working from home", "less cars", etc etc