A good chunk of the Iranian diaspora are the old supporters of the monarchy. Under the Shah Iran and Israel were allies. Also a lot of Iranians are strongly racist against Arabs. The fact that a lot of Arabs killed family members, when Iraq invaded them in 1980 and an eight year long bloody war followed, certainly does not help.
Not saying Israels genocide is a good thing, but the Iranian diaspora is probably a bad gauge to judge Iran by.
Oh sorry dollar, I thought you meant RMB, because you wrote so much about China, and just miss wrote that. Also most stuff is not made in China. Share of global GDP of China is like 20% or so.
and Chinese buy foreign products too.
It also means that Chinese workers are underpaid.
East Asian countries also have much lower denominated currencies in general. One USD gives you 158 Japanese Yen or 1505 South Korean Won. Even a Taiwan Dollar is much weaker at 31 = 1 USD.
Currencies are somewhat made up. What matters most is how they move against each other. Usually this is going to balance trade naturally. However it can be manipulated to increase exports for example.
Wealth inequality strikes again.
Angry bollard noises
Bradford has two railway stations and those are pretty close together. They are also 700m apart and do not have track connecting them. In other words you can not use heavy rail for any reasonable journey within Bradford. Leeds is better, but we are still talking trains coming every 30min and six stations within the city and some massive gaps in the network. Similar story for Belfast.
I’m a big advocate for trams and light rail but there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for all cities, cities with different geography, density, etc need different transport.
British cities do have high enough density for light rail and the geography is mostly pretty flat. It is honestly the most obvious way to improve the public transport in cities like Leeds and Bradford in a big way. To be fair Leeds might want to think about a light automated metro as well.
In the EU there are currently six cities with a population over 350k, which lack an urban rail system. Bologna is supposed to open a tram system this year, so it is probably five soon. One of those is Sintra, which technically has a tram line, but it is used with historic cars as a museum service, so I count it as lacking one. Also Vilnius, Plovdiv, Bologna and Varna have trolleybuses. The sixth one is Las Palma, which has only buses and due to being on an island not even a train station.
Heavy rail is for transport between municpalities and everybody has a bus system at least in Europe. For a city of a certain size (200k or so) a well designed public transport system is going to have such high ridership, that a tram or other urban rail system is needed. So a lack of one is a pretty bad sign.
Multi-story car parks make for a decent base for apartment buildings. They usually are built in areas people actually want to go to. What will be more interesting is what will happen with the large parts of cities, which will be abandoned. To make any alternative work well, you need density and that requires giving up large parts of cities, if the population stays roughly constant.
It is mostly suburbs on the Fan Fernando side. Not even that horrible ones by US standards. There are even some apartment buildings close to the current train station.
You missunderstand that. Mass transit has to finance itself, so it is basically capitalism. Cars on the other hand get a lot of support from the government, so it is much more like socialism.
And, of course, the crooked politicians here in Europe are actually following America more than China in this.
That is much less the case then it might appear. Out of the Top10 largest EV makers three are European(Volkswagen, BMW and Stellantis). When you look at wind, Europe has a few of the largest companies in the world. Europe is also basically the only place even attempting to compete with China in batteries, since Trump cut US support for that industry. There are plenty of more niche industries as well, in which Europe has some very strong companies.
Spanish cities are among the worsed, when it comes to cycling modal share. It is very easy to find large streets within cities, which lack any sort of cycling infrastructure. That is not the case for quite a few other countries.
Just to be clear Spain is generally very walkable and has good public transport, but just not cycling.
Not everybody lives in the US and in a lot of countries being able to go to work without a car is normal.
Ford manufacturered turbines for the V-2 rockets as well.
It really is not though. Compared to 1994 there are 50% more passengers and 90% more freight being transported. The main issue is that the network is massivly over capacity and needs to be upgraded. However it is hardly destroyed.
68.4% of Japans population lives in cities(50k+), whereas only 40% of Europes population does that. Not to mention the rural population(below 5000) is nearly three times higher in Europe.