The official tumblr of amtrak — Was just doing some back of the envelope math to...

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
cincodenada

sherdnerd asked:

Was just doing some back of the envelope math to explain the efficiency of trains to someone. Penn Station in New York saw about 600,000 daily passengers on weekdays in 2019. If every one of those people were to hypothetically drive a modern mini cooper instead (which, at 1.5m by 3.8m takes up an area of 6.4 square meters), it would require 3,876 square kilometres of parking. The combined area of Manhattan, Staten Island, and Long Island is 3,738 square Kilometres.

amtrak-official answered:

ALL OF LONG ISLAND???

cincodenada

I'm a fan of train propaganda as much as anyone but this seemed a bit much to me intuitively and indeed, the math doesn't check out. OP made a classic conversion error: it works out to 3.84 million square meters, but there are a million square meters in a square kilometer, not a thousand. Gotta remember to square your conversions too.

So in reality it's only 3.84 km². That's 10% larger than Central Park (3.41 km²) - a lot of parking to be sure - but not, in reality, all of Long Island.

Filling all of Long Island would take half a billion mini coopers, a number that is...somewhat larger than the population of New York. Trains are efficient, but not that efficient.

amtrak-official

Okay that feels a lot more believable

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Anonymous asked:

to be completely honest and in the most positive way possible, i never checked your actual blog before and only interact with your posts when they appear on my dash, so since my dash is 90% trans autistic women with incredibly niche special interests i always just assumed you were also along that vein of person

Are trains and urban design niche special interests?

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thebirdinator3000 asked:

PLEASE TAKE ME TO A GAY BAR I NEED TO HEAR YOU RAMBLE ABOUT INFRASTRUCTURE

Okay so have you ever heard of Braess’s paradox, basically it is the paradox that the more lanes a road has, the more congested it is. I mean I guess you probably do know that because it’s common knowledge to everyone that isn’t a fucking traffic engineer because of how induced demand works. But did you know that it has been found to work in reverse? Following the removal of the Alaskan way viaduct in Seattle, the city found that traffic on the street went down without having any negative effects on ove…

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Anonymous asked:

Stumbled upon this post tumblr.com/amtrak-official/756979579402452992 while looking for a different one and had to do a double take. It is insane to see a blog with amtrak in its name make the same argument that is made against amtrak year after year, namely that "you are … paying a company that can't manage its own finances to stay afloat." Support or oppose tumblrs push to become user-funded for whatever reasons you like, but don't push such obviously misguided arguments.

Amtrak is a federal service, it should have no expectation of profitability, tumblr is a private corporation with no connection to the government. That right there is a massive difference

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