That is what I expect how things will be done. High orbit saves you not just from the fine dust, but also all the Δv you'd need to land people and get them up later.
That can be different from supporting these terminals though. Which is why a citation would be nice: so you can drill down into why they think this is bad. Maybe you disagree, maybe you agree, but until you understand the issue you cannot form an opinion. You may even agree with all their reasoning and still favor closing the terminals because there are considerations they are not considering.
(I consider myself a transit advocate, but I'm not sure if I'll write up my thoughts: that would take a lot of time/effort to put into words. In any case you didn't ask that question)
It depends on the kind of transit advocate you are. To me it appears that with the amount of investment the government has already and continues to put into the automotive sector (building infrastructure, keeping laws that keep them pretty protected, etc), inter-city transit is handled pretty well by the private sector.
You have all sorts of private inter-city bus services (megabus, boltbus, etc. and of course the Chinatown buses that have connected Chinatowns across the country for decades) that work pretty well to keep costs down and are pretty efficient.
The government can step in to require certain minimum labor protections and safety and maintenance standards, but I don't think there's much need for govts to actually run inter-city buses.
In larger cities with a lot of buses governments should create an open bus depot where all the different private operators can rent gates (much like an airport), so there's a centralized location where services such as food, drinks, taxi services, public transport, etc., but this could very easily be a profitable venture that would not require govt. support (other than requiring inter-city buses to use the depot).
I'd rather have govt support other inter-city services where it currently does not put much investment in, such as rail.
> Why wouldn't transit advocates be in favor of more support for intercity transit?
The solution for intercity transit is obviously trains and aircraft. The primary disadvantage of intra-city trains is the expense of building a rail line to less traveled parts of a city, but nearly every city already has at least one intercity rail line.
The reason intercity passenger trains aren't more popular is that Amtrak charges almost as much as a plane ticket costs but then gets you there much slower. Which is in part caused by low ridership, which subsidies for intercity buses would only make worse.
It's not just price. Amtrak routes cover a tiny fraction of the routes that greyhound does, and likewise only a fraction of cities/towns have airports. At least in the past, Greyhound was often bundled with Amtrak to complete trips.
Many of the existing freight rail lines aren't suitable for passenger use even if there was demand to support them, and even if they were the are still tons of town with no rail passing through them. Using the highways we've already built and are going to maintain either way is more efficient than building out completely different infrastructures for public transit and personal transportation.
Eh. Amtrak has routes to most regions and Greyhound doesn't have routes to most ultimate destinations. Typical bus or train trips are you get a ride to the station from a friend or Uber and then the people you're visiting pick you up at the station on the other end. If the station on the other end is five minutes drive or fifteen minutes doesn't really matter, because it's too far to walk either way.
The problem here isn't intercity transit, it's intra-city transit. But that isn't the one Greyhound solves.
Low ridership is also the reason many cities with tracks don't have passenger routes.
No it really doesn't, and even if it passes through a region, the routes are often pathological, like in the worst case a trip from Denver to Dallas having to pass through Chicago or San Francisco.
> If the station on the other end is five minutes drive or fifteen minutes doesn't really matter, because it's too far to walk either way.
That is very minor problem compared to the issue of the nearest Amtrak stop being literally hundreds of miles further away compared to the nearest greyhound stop.
> Low ridership is also the reason many cities with tracks don't have passenger routes.
There are other reasons, in particular that running freight and passenger trains on the same rails has many scheduling issues that makes the rails worse for both users.
> No it really doesn't, and even if it passes through a region, the routes are often pathological, like in the worst case a trip from Denver to Dallas having to pass through Chicago or San Francisco.
The west is why it's "most" rather than "all" regions. But the places Amtrak doesn't go are the same places where local mass transit is abysmal or non-existent and everybody has a car. The reason there is no direct passenger route from Denver to Dallas is that anybody going there would drive or -- because everything is so spread out in the west and that's still a 12 hour drive -- fly.
> That is very minor problem compared to the issue of the nearest Amtrak stop being literally hundreds of miles further away compared to the nearest greyhound stop.
But it usually isn't, especially anywhere that anybody would be using either of these modes of transport.
Okay, so Greyhound goes to Daytona Beach and Amtrak "only" goes to DeLand, but they're <25 miles apart, and your destination may be some other town in the region rather than one where either of them have a stop.
> There are other reasons, in particular that running freight and passenger trains on the same rails has many scheduling issues that makes the rails worse for both users.
It's all down to ridership. If more people used them then you could justify more sections of parallel track that allow trains to pass each other or travel in opposite directions at the same time.
>The west is why it's "most" rather than "all" regions
Not just the west. I live in Jacksonville, FL, an 8 hour drive to New Orleans, and just 6 to Atlanta, but I'd need to go through Washington DC to get to Atlanta or through Chicago if I wanted to get to New Orleans (on a train the whole way).
They still have routes through all of those cities, and the reason it's circuitous to get from Jacksonville to New Orleans is that there's a line that goes directly there but it's suspended. They're making efforts to restore it, but the process is unsurprisingly full of politics and bureaucracy.
The line is "suspended" since Hurricane Katrina hit NO and even with the new infrastructure funding is not set to be re-opened. 18 years later it's fair to say we've moved past "suspended".
Intercity rail in the US only makes sense in a few places, mostly the corridor between Boston and DC where Amtrak operates the Acela. If Amtrak could just close down their long haul routes and operate Acela by itself, it would be profitable. There’s also Brightline between Miami and Orlando and I wish them success.
Intercity rail makes sense in a lot more places. If Amtrak was as competent as other operators around the world most of the US east of the Mississippi is similar density as Europe and could have great intercity trail.
Rail across the US doesn't not make sense. Even North South the US is too big for rail to make sense. However there are a lot of shorter trips that would make sense via rail if the network existed and had competent operations. That Amtrak only makes money on the Boston-DC routes (or so they claim) more about their bad management and decades of bad decisions to not invest in making anything else worth using.
There's a big difference between "Amtrak's current long-haul routes do not turn a profit" and "intercity rail in the US only makes sense in the Northeast Corridor." There are many metropolitan areas in America that are separated by only a few hundred miles, a very normal and natural distance for a train route. The problem is that Amtrak doesn't currently connect those cities, and/or doesn't run enough service to make those trips viable.
For example, the Cleveland and Pittsburgh metro areas are over 2 million and just over 3 hours apart by train or car. However, there is currently only one train from Cleveland to Pittsburgh a day, and it leaves at 1:54 AM. Obviously, most people will drive if that's the only alternative, but that does not say much about the general viability of inter-urban rail between those two cities.
I never said intercity rail in the US only makes sense in the Northeast Corridor. I think it makes the most sense there but there might be other viable routes. I even mentioned Brightline as another example.
Feel free to read “mostly” for “only” in my response, then. My point is still that even outside of Brightline (East — there’s also Brightline West, LA to Vegas) and the NEC, there are actually a lot of city clusters and corridors in America that would be an appropriate distance and population for reasonably high-ridership train travel. There are clusters of cities in Texas, the Southeast, the Midwest / Rust Belt, Colorado, Northern and Southern California, and the PNW that have all been identified as good candidates for new or substantially improved service. I disagree that this constitutes just “a few places,” as you originally said.
The fact is, Acela is the only proven line. Amtrak could be profitable with enough money left over to invest in improvements if it was first reduced to Acela, but instead they are forced to waste taxpayer money on slow, unprofitable long haul routes.
It’s possible that other viable routes exist, but unfortunately the political environment makes some of them impossible to build. For example, a French railroad operator working on the California high speed rail project bailed out in 2011 due to “political dysfunction”, instead building a high speed rail line in Morocco that finished in seven years. So in some theoretical alternate universe where California was as politically functional as Morocco, maybe they could have a modern bullet train between LA and SF. I’m not holding my breath for that to happen though.
Personally I’m happy to leave the question to private investors. I wouldn’t put any money in your proposed Cleveland-Pittsburgh line but maybe you can prove me wrong. I am also dubious that Texas would be a good candidate for passenger rail; Texas has very good highway coverage and the way Texas cities are laid out, you’d need to rent a car on either end of your train journey anyway so it really makes more sense to drive.
100% correct, I assumed windows also let people do that given text recognition is apparently trivial now (to the extent it's annoying - trying to drag images and get text selection instead is annoying :-/)
Windows has gone sort of the opposite way, copy/paste is now often hindered if the engine recognizes the string to be sensitive or otherwise un-wise to copy to your clipboard.
I've had a few instances on Windows 11 and surrounding software where ctrl-C as well as the context menu entry for 'Copy' were greyed out for this reason when skimming through logfiles, presumably because there was something about the line that triggered the MS "that's a password!" regex; stuuuupid stuff.
@_rutinerad got it - on macOS you can select text in any image, and I just assumed you could do that on windows as well (I figure in the context of linux it would be much more dependent on specific configuration so unilateral assumptions on behaviour would be questionable).
It's honestly annoying as it frequently interferes with dragging images out of safari, except on those occasions when I do want the text when it's super useful. I think the iOS interface just tells you there's text in an image or photo and gives you the option to copy it rather than cursor based selection you get on Mac.
[edit: from other comments it sounds like windows can do this but it's not always present, and not present in all circumstances, which makes me wonder how many cases in cocoa/uikit/swiftui it does not work]
That's literally a feature of the platform. If you open the photos app and type text in it will give you the photos containing that text.
If your concern is "apple is harvesting my data" then no. All of apple's various analysis systems ("AI") are entirely local. This does mean you get a bunch of duplicated work as every device redoes the same analysis but on the other hand it saves you from "how do we defend against a compromised network".
> All of apple's various analysis systems ("AI") are entirely local.
Even if that were true (I couldn't say, and I don't think anyone who doesn't have access to Apple source code and production systems could either) that wouldn't preclude Apple harvesting the results of said AI analysis.
In fact, doing the analysis on users' devices would represent a shift of that processing from cloud to edge, representing a significant savings for Apple or anyone else in a similar position.
Apple's literal marketing message is that they do all the processing on device. It's not a shift for Apple, as apple has never done this analysis in the past, and only started doing the analysis once it could do it locally.
The use cases we're talking about also don't work on a cloud based analysis, as you can't have text selection block on network uploads (generally slower than downloads), and it would require uploading every image you open to apple which would presumably be a lot of traffic, and an obvious privacy nightmare. It would also break for users who turn on the e2ee everything mode for iCloud.
It's wonderful (for Apple's bottom line) that you believe these things. I assume you can show source code and provide access to production systems to verify?
