216
3 people in Madhya Pradesh, India, died while stuck in a THIRTY TWO hour traffic jam along an intercity highway.
(www.bhaskarenglish.in)
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2025
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Why's there a lot of India focused content on fuckcars for the past few days? Genuinely curious! First, there was this post regarding an incident on Uttar Pradesh and now this.
That's mostly my doing. I live here, and I have to bear witness to my people becoming more and more carbrained by the day as the government bends over backwards to cater to corporations and rich people with fancy cars at the expense of the gigantic majority who rely on public transit, bicycles, or just walking to get to where they need to go. I hate it.
Given the size, wealth, and density of India, I expected the list of underway and upcoming train projects to be much longer and ambitious. Of course, the hyperloop project is... special.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_rail_transport_in_India
I also expected there to be more high speed rail going on. There's at least one actual HSR route being constructed, but a very long list of "maybe nots" built up. Once the single route goes into service, India will have 300km more HSR than the US does (which is zero):
https://themetrorailguy.com/high-speed-rail-projects-in-india/
The latter two are heavily tilted in favor of the ultra-rich elite (who prefer to fly or drive) and major cities (packed to bursting with people, overloading existing transit systems), and then there's rampant greed and corruption to contend with.
The current government isn't focusing on the trains ordinary people need (local trains with lots of unreserved compartments), because these are subsidized and run at a loss. They are running IR like a private company, trying to build vanity projects and put out more luxury trains with surge pricing so they can make money. Also replacing historic stations with crimes against architecture.
Mamata Banerjee ran the rail ministry for five years without raising the ticket price by one rupee, and she's, well, Mamata Banerjee. How come the current geniuses can't do this?
We happen to have a public-sector-only rail system, with low ticket prices on most trains. I don't know how much it costs to keep the majority of routes, subsidized as they are. Maybe the vanity projects with high-ticket prices will help with that. I believe the bigger expenditure perennially has been on personnel, as IR has lakhs of employees. That can't be wished away.
The metro rail projects are separate entities, I guess IR only provides oversight.
Rail is only about a century old. I didn't know we had historic stations. More like Mughal-era and British-era holdovers.