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The chipmunks: Daddy longleg needs deez nuts.

Every region should build the public transit it needs and can afford. The most boring, proven transit won’t win beauty or speed awards or attract tourists but gets people cheaply from A to B and boosts the economy. To build a high speed connection, you have a certain economic start-threshold where the investment amplifies the economic output enough to benefit the region and not suffocate it in debt before it can flourish. So I’d expect more high speed rail between economically well faring regions, which increases the ‘euro per person’ but could be the same or less spending relative to gdp or avg. income.

Equality discussion aside: the spending discussion needs to be split in maintenance and expansion. Regions with currently more rail should be spending more on maintenance than those with less. Underinvestment in this area means decay, so to see decay of german rail compared to swiss rail, you need to compare how much they spend on maintenance, and normalize to account for differences in bridges, tunnels, high-speed, low-speed, single track, etc.

Expansion is a differrent beast, especially because the price decreases if you build steadily every year and economies of scale kick in. If only our polititians would get that… RMtransit made some good videos how to decrease the costs of transit expansion.

It would at least be connected to one factor that needs to be normalized for this comparison. The problem is, different countries have different rail density, population density and wealth density levels and if you really want to compare how much ‘value’ is put into rails, you need to weigh that stuff in. That was just the first ‘fix’ that came to mind, but you are right, the full normalization would be more complex. That Luxemburg, a small urban country with high gdp/capita is leading this list, seems completely reasonable, and nothing France or Germany with their wide countryside and poorer urban areas should aspire to catch up to. Disposable income differences: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Living_conditions_in_Europe_-_income_distribution_and_income_inequality#Income_distribution GDP per capita differences: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=GDP_per_capita,_consumption_per_capita_and_price_level_indices

Euros per capita, because Euro per rail-km was too on point for maintenance costs for this lobby group. These numbers don’t even compare, with changes in median income each of these euros can buy different amounts of maintenance. Bad, misleading statistics.

As EU citizen watching from the sidelines, I’m disappointed nobody is rallying for political reforms. The UK government has proven multiple times now it is incapable of governing and policing to adapt for changing realities. I don’t think the UK is ready for any future until painful structural reforms of their parliamentary system and executive. This mess was and is caused by UK politics and they deserve all the anger as fuel to fix their workplace. Until then, an effort to rejoin would occupy the executive for years and make UK life only worse because necessary local policy-making would’nd get the attention it deserves.

I was pretty happy with my lineage-os install that had the play store as the only google service. F-droid for other apps, nextcloud for cloud+calendar. But you need an unlockable phone and a bank that allows unlocked phones for their app.

That is easy in software only, in hardware you would neglect economy of scale. It is more likely it gets sold as an innovation in some form to safe money and face.