Private car ownership is a better everyday solution for almost anyone who can afford it, which includes the vast majority of Americans. If buses tried to compete with cars, they would lose. The only remaining niche for the bus is as a public accommodation for the poor, disabled, and elderly, or occasionally in dense city centers.
At least that’s what I think. But if you’re right, and there’s a version of bus transport that’s viable without subsidy, then there should be a market opportunity for a private business to provide that type of bus transport. This actually exists for long range intercity buses already, but you’d think it should be possible inside of some cities. I haven’t looked into this in a lot of detail but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was effectively impossible to try and start a private bus service in most cities, specifically because that would reduce ridership of city transit and threaten all of the unionized public sector jobs in that system. In which case the bus system isn’t really even for the poor and elderly anymore; it’s for the transit workers union, which undoubtedly is a player in city politics.
But this comes down to how your city is planned. Amsterdam and the Netherlands in general is making it much less attractive to be a driver, for example. Public transportation has its own dedicated roads and even entire regions where cars aren't allowed, bicycles are first class citizens that take equal if not more consideration when streets are designed, streetside parking is limited and getting even more so with basically every city having as a goal the reduction of the number of parking spaces.
Of course, there's still plenty of drivers, but the nice thing is that you have options here. Why would I want to drive if I can just take the metro, or tram, or train, or hell just cycle? Within Dutch cities cycling is often much faster than any other mode of transport, and the great thing is that everyone uses the cycling infra, young or old, rich or poor, able bodied and otherwise.
I think it isn't as absolute as you suggest, and that it depends on city planning. I own a car but in the city I live it is not a better solution for everyday trips. Walking, cycling, or bus/tram are all far more convenient - it is only when leaving the city that the car becomes better.
(Even then, it depends on the destination - if it's to another city then the intercity trains are still better but for 2+ people it ends up being the premium/expensive option and the car is cheaper.)
Buses are implicitly subsidized by road maintenance spending. Road wear and tear occurs according to the fourth power of axle weight, which effectively means almost all of the wear and tear is incurred by the heaviest vehicles, which include buses.
Roads still need maintenance even if nobody uses them, so a significant portion is split evenly across all traffic.
Busses are light compared to 18 wheelers and other heavy equipment, they also replace many cars and SUV’s which keep getting heavier.
Finally that rule of thumb isn’t really that accurate, “A 1988 report by the Australian Road Research Board stated that the rule is a good approximation for rutting damage, but an exponent of 2 (rather than 4) is more appropriate to estimate fatigue cracking.” Rutting really isn’t that significant in most cases, but can instantly destroy road surfaces when fully loaded construction vehicles etc drive over something once.
>They don’t replace nearly enough cars and SUV’s to make up for the difference in fourth power of axle weight
A modest bus holds 40-50 people. Most commuter traffic is single driver, single vehicle. I don't know to which power the difference in axle weight would have to be to surpass the efficiency gains of replacing 40 to 50 American sized SUVs with a city bus, but I suspect it's more than four.
By 1066, not quite. That was an invading army led by the King of Norway to press his claim on the throne of England. I’m sure many of the soldiers in that army had been Vikings but at that time they were soldiers of a Christian king, which would have been considered much more legitimate than being a heathen raider.
I guess the Normans were also of Nordic descent but they had given up the Viking way of life a century before.
“Viking” isn’t a matter of heredity though. If your grandfather was a bricklayer, you’re not a bricklayer as a matter of heredity, you have to actually lay bricks. Likewise, if your grandfather was a viking, you have to actually go raiding and pillaging to be one yourself. Which is not something you’re likely to do if the king of France gave your grandfather an entire duchy in exchange for a promise to stop doing that sort of thing.
Much like pirates and gangsters, Vikings are cool if you consider them from an aesthetic as opposed to moralistic perspective. Everyone has evil ancestors, but some of them were cool.
The samurai didn’t survive the Satsuma Rebellion but they were admired and respected even by many of the people who fought against them in the following decades. You don’t even have to be Japanese to think samurai are cool, they just are, even if, in practice, you wouldn’t want to actually live in a society with them.
One of our big exports. Germans were obsessed with American outlaws (Karl May). And I am of the opinion that this is what the Nazi's were thinking when they invaded Poland and Russia. They wanted to create and settle their own variation of the "wild west". Hard to explain to people in 2025 how captivating the American frontier was to a European in 1910.
This piece seems a little confused about what it’s actually reporting on.
It’s well known, to the point of near-cliche, that the word “Viking” didn’t refer to a nationality or ethnicity. It meant something akin to “raider”. The ethnic group is usually referred to as the Norse, at least until they start differentiating into the modern nationalities of Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese.
The actual finding here seems to be the discovery of the remains of some Viking raiders who weren’t ethnically Norse. Fair enough. There are also examples of Norse populations assimilating into other cultures, such as the Normans and Rus. Likewise, the traditionally Norse Varangian Guard accepted many Anglo-Saxon warriors whose lords didn’t survive the Norman conquest. So it’s not too surprising that someone of non-Nordic descent might be accepted into a Viking warband.
Iran occasionally attacks Americans in the region or abroad generally, but they don't attack Americans in America despite all of their "death to America" rhetoric (which they are more than entitled to.) If you add up who's fucking with who and who's being fucked with, the imbalance between America and Iran is enormous.
Wikipedia describes it as a “a short-lived Kurdish self-governing unrecognized state in present-day Iran” and “a puppet state of the Soviet Union”. Doesn’t really count as a free and independent state.
This works against relatively liberal governments. It didn’t work for the Tiananmen Square protestors in 1989 or for the intermittent Iranian protestors of the past couple decades because those regimes were willing to suppress those protests with overwhelming force. Fortunately, the Iranian protestors are likely to have some overwhelming force on their side soon.
Fair. I think a better way of putting it is that they lacked the unity to agree to just keep firing on people until they won. A relatively liberal culture is one reason government forces won't do that; in the case of someone like Ceausescu it was more that the generals tended to think his last few years had been a disaster and the rebels had a point.
From my naive observation, the regimes of Eastern Europe had lost their will to perpetuate. (Everybody saw, including party apparatchiks, that the people in the west have better lives. Or at least better goods. :-) )
The cynical take would be that the (smarter) communists in power prepared themselves for the transition, positioning themselves to benefit after the change.
I’m glad it didn’t work in 1989 because China would not have become the technical behemoth it is now if those protests had succeeded. At the same time I don’t want China to succeed and export its brand of capitofascism purely because I don’t think most other countries can find their benevolent dictator. The cognitive dissonance is wild right now.
> because China would not have become the technical behemoth it is now if those protests had succeeded
Taiwan's GDP/capita is 2.6x China's [1]. It grew faster, for longer, in large part through high technology.
Counterfactuals are always hard in history. But we literally have the nationalist government's democratic, capitalist successor kicking in way above its weight class economically and technologically. It's fair to say that if the '89 protest hadn't been massacred, the 21st century would currently be undoubtedly China's to rule. (I'd also put even odds on Taiwan having peacefully reunified by now.)
It’s much easier to increase the GDP per capita for 20 million people compared to 1.4 billion especially when Taiwan started with a 10x higher GDP per capita. If anything they have lost a significant percentage of their lead. I don’t think what worked in Taiwan would work in China because the scale is astounding.
Is that true? The whole point of per capita is to cancel out the linear benefit of 100 million workers being able to outproduce 10 million workers. There are ways for small countries to have a per capita GDP higher than would be feasible for a larger country, but Taiwan doesn’t really do any of those. They don’t have oil or any other particularly valuable natural resources, and they aren’t a tax shelter like Ireland or a microstate with workers commuting across the border like Luxembourg. They have to create wealth the hard way, through labor productivity, just like the mainland. And between the two, the mainland has the potential to realize greater economies of scale.
First, note that Taiwan was initially not democracy, the liberalization started by lifting of martial law in 1987, first parliamentary elections in 1992, first presidential elections in 1996 (this is widely considered the point at which Taiwan became a consolidated democracy)
From your link:
1987: Taiwan 5325, China 300
1996: Taiwan 13588, China 710
---
2024 Taiwan 34060, China 13314
Whatever starting point you choose, China has risen faster than Taiwan.
In fact, there is non-zero chance that if China had a regime change and heeded west's economic 'advice', it would have gone through equivalent of what Russia went in the 90's.
They are doing fine, thank you, doing it their commie way, despite Zeihan and others preaching China's immminent collapse for decades.
At least that’s what I think. But if you’re right, and there’s a version of bus transport that’s viable without subsidy, then there should be a market opportunity for a private business to provide that type of bus transport. This actually exists for long range intercity buses already, but you’d think it should be possible inside of some cities. I haven’t looked into this in a lot of detail but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was effectively impossible to try and start a private bus service in most cities, specifically because that would reduce ridership of city transit and threaten all of the unionized public sector jobs in that system. In which case the bus system isn’t really even for the poor and elderly anymore; it’s for the transit workers union, which undoubtedly is a player in city politics.
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