pathetic piss kitten (@kitten)

will Spain (and its people) ever manage to accept that not all infrastructure needs to be like,

the fanciest

the most flamboyant

the latest technology

@kitten no

AV350 goes brr

Spain ramblings

this weekend there was the F1 Spanish GP, in a new circuit in Madrid

beyond all the corruption that will probably be uncovered in some years and how much public funds will be lost because if this: the race was awfully boring. there were only 4 overtakes in all the race. for reference, Monaco's GP, a race held in narrow streets between buildings and cliffs, had 10.

so, yeah, awful boring race. but how? if we had all the cool stuff? street circuits are fancy and usually interesting, so ours surely should have been too (even if we didn't even bother making actual overtaking points). and our crown jewel, "La Monumental", a banked corner! and not only that, but the biggest one we could have imagined! big is always good, so why did nothing actually happen in this corner?

yeah, we didn't bother making it so the rest of the circuit adapted to it, so the drivers always arrived to it with too little speed and at the end there was a heavy braking zone, but we gave it a flamboyant name, and paid every commentator and influencer to say it at least a bunch of times, surely that should have worked

Spain ramblings, public transport

and yes, this is just an F1 circuit, which in the grand scheme of things is... irrelevant

but it's the exact same approach people have with everything, and specially transport

back at the beginning of the century, when Spain was drowning in new money from the construction bubble, every place also started investing a lot in infrastructure. which is good! except, no one really cared about what they were actually building, just about having it

so, for instance, in Madrid itself, the regional government started just bringing subway lines to every corner of the region, anywhere they could imagine, because, you know, living in a city with a subway system, fancy. it even got to a point where they started talking about "the right to have subway"

so now we ended up with a bunch of towns with these gigantic stations, where subways half as long as the platform stop every bunch of minutes, when maybe just a proper bus (or tram!) network connecting a single commuter rail station would have worked even better.

but of course, it doesn't matter, because all these people didn't actually want efficient public transport, they wanted subway. because if the town down the road has it, why are we going to have less than that? it's our right after all

Spain ramblings, public transport

@kitten The same goes with high-speed, it's useful when you want to connect pretty fast between high density cities with a demand

But here we put all the money to high-speed on places where nobody lives instead of improving regional and "conventional" long distance lines (higher speeds, improving their paths, etc) to connect faster to another places

@kitten then you have Toronto's line 5.

Where the trams they bought for it fell out of warranty, and had to be refurbished because they'd been sitting unused for over a decade; parts were worn from not being used.

Some of the stations had actually begun to crumble and needed emergency repairs from sitting unused and maintained during the construction.

... Can we find some middle ground?