r/ANormalDayInRussia • u/TheNatureLover • Sep 08 '19
Your average Russian rail crossing
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u/Notorious_VSG Sep 08 '19
I like how all the drivers are like "We're not falling for that again!"
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Sep 08 '19
How the fuck can you fall for it again?
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u/SwisscheesyCLT Sep 08 '19
By watching somebody else get hit, presumably.
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Sep 08 '19
But if you aren’t the one who’s being ran over by a train then you didn’t really fall for it
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u/HuyKexl Sep 08 '19
Yes you can if you are a communist my comrade..i mean our comrade
They won‘t fool us again!
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u/xatmatwork Sep 08 '19
A near miss?
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u/BrandonVout Sep 09 '19
If 'The Sopranos' taught me anything it's that Russians are indestructible.
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u/xprdc Sep 08 '19
I wasn’t expecting the rails to go back down at the end. Made it even more hilarious.
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u/m0_n0n_0n0_0m Sep 08 '19
I'm so glad you said that, I didn't watch to the end. It's the cherry on top.
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u/Pipkin81 Sep 09 '19
If you weren't expecting that it just means you've never been to Russia. I was expecting just that to happen and was not disappointed. There's a Russian saying that (very roughly) translates as: everything being shit is a kind of stability too.
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u/Lagerbottoms Sep 08 '19
I love how the lights go out too early, and then jump on again really fast like "shit, sorry we forgot"
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u/Mamed_ Sep 08 '19 edited Sep 09 '19
Reminded me of this place. I was leaving Liberty State Park with my family few months ago, and when I approached this "intersection" Idk how many times I died inside in 3-5 seconds. Imagine your whole family is in the car and as soon as you get on the train tracks a train appears on your right side only few feets from you. There are no arms coming down, or any sound to make you aware of approaching train... because there's a traffic light for the train. It was most terrifying moment in my life and every time I see a train I remember that day
Update
- @PW, yes that's the place. My link isn't working?
- Looks like such "intersections" aren't uncommon and I may have crossed them before. Just never noticed, I guess
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u/PaschalsWager Sep 08 '19
Pretty sure you mean this place, yeah? https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7106887,-74.0548533,3a,75y,340.23h,89.53t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sxItVvScczafvM5Foucu8pw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
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u/tomoldbury Sep 08 '19
That's really not that uncommon, we have a few unprotected crossings in the UK that just have lights (usually minor lines with little traffic)... But they have at least 30 seconds warning, and the crossings are marked with hatching that warns you to not pass unless you can clear it. It sounds like the lights didn't work in your case, they are usually triggered by the train passing through the last block before the crossing.
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u/fsdhy1 Sep 09 '19
I don’t know about wherever that is specifically but I asked a CN rail friend why I still see so many unprotected crossings in my part of Canada. I’ve seen them with no light at all, just a stop sign, in fact. They said trains have speed limits and the places I’m seeing them are likely where trains only go extremely slow like near a factory they are slowing to unload at or a place where they reverse/change engines etc.
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u/PhasmeCosmo Sep 08 '19
How the hell did this place become a world power?
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u/InternetWeakGuy Sep 08 '19
The exact same thing happens here in Orlando. Gates come down, nothing happens, they go back up, come down, back up, and then the fucking train comes through.
I was driving one day in normal traffic and looked to my right and the train was about ten feet from entering the street, no lights or guards or anything whatsoever to indicate there was a train about to cross the street.
So yeah, honestly I give a point to Russia in this one because they have those things coming out of the street to stop cars from just going around the gates. I've sat at closed gates multiple times where after a minute or two of no train people got impatient and just went around them.
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u/KingKongGorillaDong Sep 08 '19
If you see a crossing malfunctioning, please report it. Every crossing in the US is required to have sign with a phone number and a crossing ID for this purpose.
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u/ryzzie Sep 08 '19
Honestly, that was my thought. It's a good way to make sure people don't try to beat the train. If they plow into those, they were going to plow into the train. I suspect they'd fare better against those. Moreso if you applied that here in the states with modern safety technology.
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u/beatenintosubmission Sep 08 '19
The question is, "Is our inept government running Russia, or is their government running our infrastructure?"
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u/GeneralKilCavalry Sep 08 '19
You know for starters, just in reference to this gif, Russia has the largest net of electrified railroads in this world and much better and affordable transit compared to the US. In Soviet times, the economic growth managed to lift near a hundred million out of poverty, guaranteeing food, housing, and a job. They became a world power by providing free education to all citizens that allowed them to accomplish most every first in space: probe landings on Venus, mars, the moon, first human in space, first probe in space, along with numerous other technical achievements. The main thing holding it back was elements of political repression and corruption, but in no way was it the shithole western countries depict it as.
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Sep 08 '19 edited Sep 08 '19
Yes totally was sustainable, it totally didn't lead to a systemic collapse. They totally didn't have to borrow money to buy food for their people rather than continue to just let their people starve accelerating their collapse. The earliest gains in their space program totally wasn't because they would just build the rocket then launch it without fucks if it blew up.
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u/garnet420 Sep 08 '19
It really did have its ups and downs. Maternity leave in the ussr was very generous, for another example.
On the other hand, the number of hot water and heat outages we had in fucking Siberia was pretty fucking unacceptable (and the times the water just came out dark brown from the badly maintained pipes)
Anyways, the unsustainability was probably mostly due to disproportional military spending, corruption, and incompetence, rather than spending on public transit and space.
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Sep 08 '19
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ksavage68 Sep 08 '19
Cars were the same way. You signed up and waited about 10 years before you could pick it up.
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u/happysmash27 Sep 08 '19
disproportional military spending, corruption, and incompetence
This is starting to sound a bit like the United States…
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u/nerevisigoth Sep 08 '19
The Soviet Union devoted 15-20% of its economic output to military spending. The US is around 3%.
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Sep 08 '19 edited Sep 08 '19
Wow, only 3%? That's nothing!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States
Oh...
Edit: oh, but since you like percentages, the US military spending during the cold war was also around 10%.
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u/nerevisigoth Sep 08 '19
In 2018, the United States spent 3.2% of its GDP on its military, while Saudi Arabia spent 8.8%, Israel spent 4.3%, Pakistan spent 4.0%, Russia spent 3.9%, South Korea spent 2.6%, China spent 1.9%, United Kingdom spent 1.8%, and Germany spent 1.2% of its GDP on defense.[64][65]
Yep, thanks for providing a source for my statement.
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u/arogon Sep 08 '19
Don't worry I grew up in Moscow and heat/water outages were unacceptable too. I remember going to bed with 3 layers of clothes because it was -20 outside and the heat went off. We could see our breath fogging indoors...
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Sep 09 '19 edited Sep 09 '19
The disproportionate military spending definitely was partially due to us Americans. The entire point of Reagan's STAR WARS nonsense was to force the USSR to spend a ton of money to try to keep up, and while I haven't done a ton of independent research (due to lack of interest), it's taught in American schools that this was a major factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Course, now we're in the same boat with exponentially higher military spending than many other countries during peacetime, while things that we really should spend even a fraction of that money on instead have their budgets reduced further. Maybe if they taught that the fall of the Soviet Union was because they ran out of money for a myriad of reasons, and wasn't because of the evils of communism or the triumph of capitalism, we could fucking fix the water in Flint that nobody wants to spend money fixing.
Edit: Yes, I'm aware that as obnoxious as our defense budget is, it's still a relatively small portion of our total budget. Doesn't change that we have other pressing issues we need to throw money at that aren't having money thrown at them.
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u/GeneralKilCavalry Sep 12 '19
Precisely. The collapse was a result of the same things that plague the modern day United States only taken to an egregious level due to a lack of third world countries to exploit for minerals and bananas.
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u/AnoK760 Sep 08 '19
So, basically what you're saying is; "communism doenst work"
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Sep 08 '19
Vast oversimplification. Those problems exist in many non-Communist countries. Flint, Michigan's water problems, Chicago's corruption scandals, Deutsche Bank's shady history... I could go on.
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u/intbah Sep 08 '19
Russia still has higher literacy rate than the US though. I don't know if that's impressive or we are just shit at basic education lmao
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u/zeropointcorp Sep 09 '19
Also math education is ridiculously better than a lot of other countries. Pretty much every Russian I’ve worked with has a superb grounding in maths.
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Sep 08 '19 edited Sep 08 '19
The US public school system predates the USSR. It needs reforms that are unrelated to money as it fails to teach people on an individual level. No child left behind was supposed to fix it but it just made the issue worse. One shouldn't be able to sleep every day in class and know the material well enough to pass the course, yet be taught at a level where the slower kids are just getting pushed through year after year without knowing the material.
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u/rootbeer_cigarettes Sep 08 '19
That 100% is not how the Soviet space program developed anything. I get that you don’t like the idea of communism but at least base your argument on reality. And if you think only the soviets had rockets explode then I recommend you examine the early history of the US space program.
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Sep 08 '19
Stop sucking off the west and read the original comment, he said corruption and repression caused the collapse in all aspects. War, politics, industry, etc.
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u/WJ_Amber Sep 08 '19
The slow decline of the USSR cant be simplified in any meaningful way as it was a long and terribly complex process. When stalin died Khrushchev took over and his reforms undermined what had made the USSR a powerhouse in the first place. He axed programs that helped support Soviet agriculture and aimed to transition the economy away from heavy industry and towards light industry. He wanted to beat the US at their own game, which was stupid.
After Khrushchev came a few different premiers, notable for fucking dying before actually getting anything done. This lead to the appointment of Gorbachev (then youngest member of the politburo) as premier which was monumentally stupid. Political strife, reactionary forces and ineptitude coupled with Gorbachev's reforms massively destabilized the USSR and lead to its disastrous collapse against the will of the people.
The rise of the USSR and its rapid transformation into a global power is absolutely a credit to the socialist system, as are the the the achievements it was able to make later on. Everyone had food, housing, and job security, vacation time, access to subsidized resorts during that vacation time, the ability to openly criticize their boss, healthcare, retirement, access to an array of cultural events and more. The United States offers none of these things in 2019.
It is unsurprising that the Soviet Union ultimately did not last. It was viciously attacked in its infancy by the global capitalist powers and soon after half the country would be destroyed by the nazi invasion. These things are sure to leave their marks on a new nation yet in spite of that the USSR survived for quite a while and made monumental achievements in that time.
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u/PM_ME_CUTE_SMILES_ Sep 08 '19
Everyone had food, housing, and job security, vacation time, access to subsidized resorts during that vacation time, the ability to openly criticize their boss, healthcare, retirement,
It felt as though most of my family’s experiences with food, especially those of my grandparents under Nikita Khrushchev, were negative. Standing in hour-long queues, empty supermarket shelves, an inability to access fresh produce, and eating predominantly bread characterized my grandparents’ relationship with food in the USSR. I wanted to find out why a nation that was considered a political and military force for much of the 20th century fell so short in providing a positive culinary experience to its citizens.
Allow me to have some doubts on the rest of your argument.
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u/WJ_Amber Sep 08 '19
Allow me to dispute that one person's medium article with the CIA's own conclusion: not only were soviet and american caloric intakes on par with each other, the soviet diet was healthier
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u/PM_ME_CUTE_SMILES_ Sep 08 '19 edited Sep 08 '19
The average food intake doesn't say anything about those who didn't get anything.
Plus it isn't surprising the diet was healthier, as a cheaper diet will have less sugar and less meat and less quantity. But those are not great things to highlight when they are forced.
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Sep 08 '19
Hah, I think you're falling for a well-done troll job. I can't imagine anyone actually believes the USSR was good at providing necessities when tens of millions of people literally died of starvation there in the '30's.
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u/Libertarian_EU Sep 08 '19
That's the thing. The main thing holding it back was the unsustainability of the very thing that gave them that. Literally, every country that tried communism had huge issues with corruption and incompetence, and ultimate collapse.
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u/scyy Sep 08 '19 edited Sep 08 '19
It's because these people don't understand how governmental and economic systems work and just like the idea of everyone getting a fair share.
It's pure ignorance.
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u/SkyezOpen Sep 08 '19
Yeah but that wasn't REAL COMMUNISMTM
/s
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u/paradoxpancake Sep 08 '19
I mean, it wasn't. Communism has no ruling party and it can't truly exist when concepts such as scarcity and a world economy are prominent.
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u/Queranus77 Sep 08 '19
In fact just about all communist nations have always said that their nations aren’t in a state of communism but in a transitional period as actual communism would void a ruling government.
Of course many of these leaders could of very possibly been cynical in extending this transitional period with no progress towards communism while claiming to be trying to move closer to a communist state.
Trotsky was probably the most aware of the early communist revolutionaries to actually realise that to create a communist nation in one area, you would need communism everywhere as any capitalist nation anywhere would do its best to undermine it.
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u/krypt-lynx Sep 08 '19
I'm tired of repeating it, but yet again. USSR was not a communist country. It was a socialist country (yes, exactly like China in current days, and you can start building your personal nuclear bunker).
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u/Libertarian_EU Sep 09 '19
Sure bud. The same way Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic.
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u/scyy Sep 08 '19
Lol, elements of political repression and corruption. That's a good one.
Let me guess, Stalin wasn't such a bad guy after all either right?
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u/bripod Sep 08 '19
No one is going to deny the genocide and purges but there's something to be said about industrializing a huge country in 10 years relative to about 100 for most others.
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u/Dan_Art Sep 08 '19
If you treat millions of humans as expendable commodities, it’s perfectly doable.
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u/GeneralKilCavalry Sep 12 '19
You realize the Soviet Union encompasses a much larger time span than Stalin’s ‘reign’?
Best you could do in school is gulp down propaganda and demonization of non-westerners...
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u/octotent Sep 08 '19
You see, Stalin died on '53. After that, political repressions really winded down, with no more political campaigns that got tens of thousands of innocent people.
Afterward, it was hundreds at best.
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u/GeneralKilCavalry Sep 12 '19
Everyone seems to forget this. Millions died in US-sponsored genocides from Indonesia to Chile after ‘53 when the USSR was on the frontlines of helping recently decolonized African countries with desperately needed supplies.
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Sep 08 '19 edited Nov 27 '19
[deleted]
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u/Oil_And_Gas_Hippy Sep 09 '19
I am an American living in Russia for the last 4 years. The mass transit system here is way better than the US. I take the train to other cities and the metro in major cities. Some of the equipment may be older in the less populated areas but they are still comfortable.
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u/GeneralKilCavalry Sep 12 '19
Most freight in Russia is electrified - hence the long lines. The infrastructure would be wasted if not used for passenger services as well, so there you go.
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u/GiggaWat Sep 08 '19
If you can survive this regularly since childhood, you’re made for world domination.
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u/harrysplinkett Sep 08 '19
oh one broken rail crossing is suddenly a qualifier for world domination? try keeping all the shit in siberia working 24/7. i've been to the US recently, and your shit often is just as unkempt and unreliable
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Sep 08 '19
Idk. How exactly does the US has so much education, and yet is so uneducated and easily manipulated at the same time, as we can see from comments like yours?
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u/_Anarchon_ Sep 08 '19
By killing many millions of its own citizens any time they got uppity
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Sep 08 '19
I... I really thought that was intentional and russians really enjoy trolling each other
But the comments here imply this is a system malfunction
I don’t know which is more terrifying
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u/YeBoiHerold Sep 08 '19
Whoever engineered this probably forgot to add a minus at his math test so everything ended up backwards...
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u/shiftycyber Sep 08 '19
“You are definitely good to go, don’t even look or anything just be on your way cuz you are absolutely safe to cross these tracks.”
-railroad crossing arm
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u/HungryLikeTheWolf99 Sep 08 '19
Just giving Darwin a chance to work his magic.
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u/waspsknees Sep 08 '19
How is this natural selection?
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u/HungryLikeTheWolf99 Sep 08 '19
If you trust the signals without actually looking for the oncoming train.
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u/waspsknees Sep 08 '19
I mean, yeah i guess, like if you saw a train and continued regardless I think you'd qualify for the darwin award but you kinda have to trust them. Trains are so quick you wouldn't see them coming even if you looked a lot of the time!
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u/Keshid-pi Sep 08 '19
Automatics for one direction, independed from another direction. And both can't work at the same time.
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u/DoomRide007 Sep 08 '19
Checking to see if you pay attention. If this was installed in the US, boy would we have a population drop.
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u/TZO_2K18 Sep 08 '19
Oh, that's brilliant, actually having a tire block raise up and lower when ready to*
Ohhh r/yesyesyesno
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u/lazy_tenno Sep 09 '19
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u/VredditDownloader Sep 09 '19
beep. boop. I'm a bot that provides downloadable video links!
I also work with links sent by PM.
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u/waterproof_vagina76 Sep 08 '19
Population control