Hi Haris! I’m so glad you’re finding Plain English helpful. Keep exploring the great lessons & keep up the great work!

Interesting! I didn’t know that age ended after WW2. 80 years have passed, and still the transportation is impacted (so are urban landscapes) by economic, logistics and social measure applied at that time, and since then.

The US had a great age of passenger rail transportation that ended after WW2, when so many people got cars and started moving to the suburbs. So now, we have small corridors of good passenger trains, but most of the country doesn’t have train service at all (or if they do, it’s infrequent and slow). However, there are a few cross-country routes that I’d love to take some day. (But getting across the USA by train is ~3 full days on a train.)

yeah travelling by train is awesome. Curiosly, railway network is very sparse in Brazil… decades ago, it simply STOPPED developing. For example, the region where I live (Serra Gaúcha, innerland of State of Rio Grande do Sul) there’s only two railways still in use: one is a turistic route (a few km), while the one is for goods transportations. The chance that kids would never see a train lively, is huge!

Back to the train connecting Italy mainland to Sicily, it’s an experience that I recommend, and Sicily in general is a fantastic place to visit.

Perhaps. the bridge would help develop the economy. I wonder if it’s worth the cost, though. 13,5 B euro of ***planned*** investment + environmental and social costs… And the risk of the project creeping for long as we saw (and still see) with other projects (cathedrals in the desert, as you defined them)

I can’t see a significant ROI. However, I should get deeper into the project scope to have a more founded opinion.

I thought of you when I was putting that episode together. It seems you have probably heard these proposals a few times before. One of the proposed benefits is that better connection with the mainland would help develop the economy. Do you think that’s right?

I’m secretly a train fan (since I was a kid) and I’m jealous you got to go on the train ferry! I didn’t know those existed until just recently.

Last time I went to Sicily was 20 years ago, but I used to visit my mother’s family there since my birth until 2015, every year. When I was a child, during summer the water distribution was rationed: only available for 2-3 days a week, and stocked in big tanks for the rest of the week. It seems that still it is somewhere. In general, Sicily had a huge potential, but economy was underdeveloped in comparison to the rest of Italy. I’d like to be wrong, but I’m afraid that it still is.

I had vivid memories of those trips by ferry, both by car and train. Travelling on a train being splitted was a cool experience at that time. And my family and I went out to the external part of the ferry, seeing the Sicilian coast approaching while eating a good “arancina”

Nostalgia of the ferry apart, I’m not sure the bridge is a priority.

https://www.sicilianicreativiincucina.it/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/arancini-messinesi-2-1170×878.jpg

I agree, they should be able to do it well. And there is always some degree of waste.

In my first draft of the episode, I included a bit about them trying to get the bridge to qualify as defense spending for the NATO target, but I took that part out because I couldn’t find a way to fit it in. But I remember thinking at the time that, with Russia now sending drones into the EU, a bridge is probably not what is meant by “defense spending”. Maybe in different, more peaceful times.