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The obvious counter-question is, how come the entirety of Scandinavia went Protestant, even under 2 separate dynasties, as did northern Germany? It couldn't exactly be pure cuius regio eius religio or else the Protestant vs. Catholic division would've been far more of a patchwork than it was on...

This thread in After 1900 talks about stasis in specific modern technologies, like video players. More generally, there's a trope common in genre fantasy of medieval stasis, in which society stays at High-to-Late Medieval technology for thousands of years. My question is about real or plausible...

Except that most of China already came land-reformed, absentee landlords didn't exist in the North and weren't as big a deal in the South as in Taiwan or North India. https://twitter.com/pseudoerasmus/status/1179538772347772930

Wait, why wouldn't the Congress of Vienna not just partition whatever is left of Poland between Russia and Austria?

That's not exactly what happened. In the 1950s and 60s freight rail was in decline too - anything that could switch to trucks did, and a lot of railroads ended up liquidating as a result. Penn Central was famous for passenger rail, but even railroads that didn't have as much passenger service...

Do you guys want me to blog this in a couple days?

This seems really weird... the borders of Switzerland and the Netherlands suggest a POD in 1600-ish or later (the FR-NL border isn't OTL's but could be resolved with future wars), but Genoa keeping not only islands populated by people who ID as Greek but also a big chunk of Turkey populated by...

A couple points: 1. How do you deal with Indian land tenure? China, esp. North China, was mostly a country of individual land-owning farmers even before communism, and communism wiped out whatever was left of the absentee landlords (and in Taiwan, where absentee landlords were a big problem...

Occasionally I talk about ATLs on Twitter - of note, both this and my other recent thread are Twitter reposts. But anyway, I try sticking to historical questions here, e.g. what was the impact of WW2 on city infrastructure?, why did postwar America build freeways alone rather than both freeways...

No, in the North, too, the elite was wealthy farmers who owned their own land. The Historic American Engineering Record is very clear that the elites of turn-of-the-century New York viewed urban living as breeding bad morals and wanted to use the subway to spread ethnic whites into single-family...

If you check AQICN and such, you'll definitely see a lot of pollution in London and Paris, but it's generally on a par with LA, not worse, and German cities are a lot cleaner. And the trend in Europe is away from diesel in the wake of the VW scandal, whereas US air pollution levels are...

There were pretty serious political candidates in the 1910s who were against roads. Generally we're talking about reactionaries, not environmental progressives, though. (The progressives liked roads at the time, and one magazine, I think The Nation, lamented New York subway expansion as...

I love how people here are arguing over things that are specific to US cities without transit, like BRT and US-style light rail, when I keep saying "what if big US cities' transportation evolved like in Berlin and Tokyo?", specifically bringing up various social factors that led the US...

So... I think urbanists today conflate 3 distinct projects that happened around the same time, and had different constituencies; I know I made that mistake around 2010 or so. 1. Road construction outside urban areas, e.g. the Pershing map and the US Highway network. 2. Freeway construction...

Technically the POD is somewhere in the late 1890s, but it's a TL about the 20th century. https://twitter.com/alon_levy/status/1177938487062007816 In OTL, there's a strict separation of urban and suburban rail in North America (unlike in Germany, or Japan); even today there's a culture in...

I tweeted this storm a couple weeks ago: https://twitter.com/alon_levy/status/1181474601504780288 Please don't nitpick the AHC aspect of how the WAllies end the war by February 1945 - the case of interest is how Germany evolves later, with a unified Berlin, an iron curtain roughly matching...

The total indigenous population of Siberia is about two orders of magnitude less than that of China. So no.

...no. You're misinterpreting the statistics pretty wildly. In France, trains have about a 9% market share of all passenger-km traveled, intercity or local. The vast majority of car passenger-km are local. This is not the case for trains, because if you commute by train then you're usually in a...

"A separate system from mainline rail" was actually done in the US, twice: 1. The early-20c interurbans were electrified and ran in street medians in cities in an era when freight railroads were generally banished to grade-separated corridors (like the High Line in NY). They ran on the same...

A good piece of evidence that this is ASB is that the same flattening of immigrant languages happened all over the Americas. Argentinians speak Spanish with Italian influences, but not Italian. Moreover, it's happened across multiple migration waves - in the US that includes the German wave in...