u/Only100percent

Short article looking at the shortest streetcar systems in the US. Why they're so short & why they were built. Was curious though, what's the template to fix these systems? Just copy Kansas City with extensions or should new lines get built to make a system?

Milwaukee's Streetcar currently does about 2,000 riders a day, downtown, on basically the same small route since 2018. An extension toward the Buck's stadium and Walker's Point never happened.

The linked article argues for going further than either of those and running it north through downtown all the way to UW-Milwaukee instead (turning it into a spine rather than a loop) and giving MCTS something to feed into downtown instead of duplicating coverage.

Is that really the right idea for an extension or should they start with a few smaller extensions so they can get state funding approval?

Ethiopia just opened 11+ gigawatts of solar manufacturing capacity, on par with some mid-size countries, but the cells aren't staying in Ethiopia. The company ships them to a module plant in Houston, to dodge US tariffs on Chinese components. Ethiopia has no domestic capacity to turn those cells into finished panels for its own market.

Meanwhile, less than a third of Ethiopia's rural households have electricity.

How does a country actually capture local benefits from manufacturing investments like this, instead of just being a pass-through point in someone else's supply chain?

Short write-up suggesting that Minnesota should build out a cheaper Dutch-style regional rail system, independently and with a pilot plan, to avoid the pitfalls of Federal financing and inter-state agreements in the short term. Should states try self-financing their own regional systems first or try to build inter-state HSR?