I have no clue how many people submit to the steam survey, but I'll assume it's representative.
A quick google suggests steam has about 120 million active users.
Linux went from about 1.4% to 1.9%.
Rough math says Linux went from 1.7 million to about 2.3 million.
Or an increase of 600 000.
That a lot, both in relative terms and in real terms.
Here's a counter example for you.
You own stock in banana company. Over one day the price increases 2x. All the news agency's are talking about how banana surged in price today. Will you then suggest that banana didn't surge in price because it only makes up 1% of the overall stock market?
That's why we're talking about relative percentages.
In your example we would need to know how many trees existed on your road/city before. If there were less than 3 or 4 trees in your city before this, saying there was a surge is likely fine.
Rural does mostly mean farmhouses and houses in the woods. And yes small villages should get a train connection. But remember you're suggesting this is a cheap and easy solution when compared to EVs, what you're suggesting would be very very expensive.
😂 of course. But it means you're talking shit and you're argument is baseless. But of course you're allowed to try to pass off made up realities as fact.
This is where I think you have a skewed picture of reality.
In North America 20% of people live in rural areas.
As much as I wish that was "vast majority" it isn't.
Your simple view of public transit doesn't line up with the realities in North America. I wish it did, but it doesn't. And unfortunately your uninformed arguments are the fuel actual opponents of public transit use to justify their position.
It doesn't help the cause to spread uninformed arguments
This money can be much much better spent. This doesn't really solve anything other then letting oil companies pretend they are doing something with very little oversight.
I guess if you don't include buses in public transit. And pretend that all people live within a 5km walk of existing public transit. You're right.
But otherwise you're just oversimplifiying the situation and vastily underestimating how much it actually costs to build a full team network through rural areas.
Roads don't really go away with public transit, they might need less maintenance overall, but they still need to exist in some form, and roads lasting 10% longer doesn't seem like a huge savings
Parking is mostly privately owned, so saving money on parking doesn't really make more money available to invest in public transit.
While public transit is great. It's a lot more expensive to setup, and even more expensive to make convenient if the city wasn't built with public transit in mind.
It's just not a medium term solution for most north american cities, I do desperately hope that cities will start investing more in public transit, and encourage more dense housing, but realistically that is a 30-80 year timeframe. And that's assuming 100s of municipal governments all get on board. The political lift here is also very large.
The reality right now in North America is, if you're heavily advocating against electric vehicles, all you're really doing is adding support to the oil and gas industry trying to stop the outright ban of ICE cars.
We need to do more public transit, and we need to stop using ICE vehicles.
If the grid is powered completely by coal, and the government has no plans to phase out said coal and the grid is going to stay all coal for the next 30 years. Then yes, in that case EVs aren't a great choice.
But like anything else and the "but the grid is currently not clean" arguments don't really hold water.
This takes time and a lot more money. It's something we should do in parallel, but even if we started this today, any EV sold in the next decade would be long off the road before sizable impactful progress had been made on 15min cities.
Of course, percentage just help show relativity. It's why people can look at a 0.5% increase and dismiss it as not significant.
Would it help if I translated the percentage for you? Linux surged 600000 to 2.3 million.