Pretty sure their point is that, in aggregate, trains are a much more fuel efficient and cost effective than transporting the same goods a comparable distance in trucks. The amount that some people burn idling is insignificant in comparison to these savings over longer distances and higher volumes of goods transported. Given this, the transportation companies are unlikely to switch away from rail transport any time soon.

Honestly, your problem is just shitty planning by your local community if you can get trapped without means of escape while freight moves through, and they are suggesting you guys might want to invest in building a way around this with some of that fancy bridge, overpass or tunnel technology we have these days. Why would anyone else involved inconvenience themselves and others that rely on the rail to do business, just because your locality refuses to address an issue that just impacts you and the folks that live around you?

This is like arguing against having an electric grid anywhere, just because you frequently lose power in hurricanes when trees knock down the power lines, while ignoring the fact your town could literally just bury them, as they do to address this problem in many other places.

You can do this to an extent with kanji, as well, it’s just something that really only gets easier the more you study Japanese, though. When you start getting more proficient, you can usually have a pretty good shot at guessing the pronunciation and something of the meaning in context, but the difficulty is certainly really front-loaded.

Of course, then you have some kanji that just have 100 different readings and you just have to go memorize those, so there’s certainly room for improvement.

3 seems pretty reasonable to me, assuming you start the lessons much earlier in schooling than we currently do now. Perhaps not mandatory, but I think requiring 2 and having the option for more is reasonable enough. There are plenty of countries that begin English lessons in what would be elementary schools, then add a second European language in middle school alongside continued English classes, and have the option to do a 3 language for students who are interested/would need them for their academic plans.

Of course, if it was just two years of four different languages, that would be a waste of money, IMO. If kids started doing Spanish in 4th grade and were expected to keep that up through high school graduation, and could add German or Russian or something in middle school, it seems reasonable enough to me. You won’t be cranking out kids fluent in several languages that way, but I would expect you could get much better results than we currently do in the first foreign language, plus give them a decent foundation in the second, should they need it/decide to continue learning after 6 years of classes.

Honestly, it probably comes down to taxes. Many Americans are rabidly opposed to any proposal that will increase their taxes by any amount, regardless of the reason, and a lot of school district funding is based on local property taxes. Coincidentally, home- and business-owners who would have to pay that increased property tax are able to have an outsized influence on local politics. No politician is going to raise that proposal for funding foreign language classes.

As sad as it is, learning to speak another language just isn’t seen as that important by many. They don’t need to use anything other than English in their daily lives, and many citizens don’t even have a passport, much less travel abroad.

In addition, aside from Spanish, many areas just lack the resources you would need to be able to develop your language skills from “I get good grades in my highschool German class” to “I can actually use the language in normal interactions with native speakers.”

Think of your local bookstore and libraries. How many if them have a section of books you can just browse in a language other than English or Spanish? For anything beyond Spanish, how often do you see or hear another foreign language? Would you be confident you could find enough conversation partners to use that language even semi-frequently?

Yes, the internet opens up a lot of doors in terms of resources, but you need to be personally invested in learning the language to make them work. Unless there’s a community with great reading lists at various levels for your target language, just searching and browsing bookstore websites aimed at native speakers is kind of tough for being able to just browse and find something that catches your eye and seems on your level, especially compared to just browsing the shelves in a brick and mortar shop. Also, those books are generally much more expensive than English books, for obvious reasons.

Yes, I would be hyped to learn my local school district was going to start teaching the kids 4 languages from elementary through high school, but it’s just going to be wasted money if you don’t have the auxiliary elements outside the classroom in place, or a plan to at least put them in place while rolling out these classes. Otherwise, you’re just going to get a bunch of yokels coming out of the woodwork to say “My boy don’t need to speak nothing but 'American!” And complaining because little Billy ordered 4 books off Amazon.de and it ran them 120€, only to show up and have Billy realize these books are way harder than he thought they would be and he actually needs to order more books with simpler language to get started.

Yes, little Billy could pirate the shit out of the books and stuff he needs and find a discord chat or forum to get in free practice with speaking and writing, but not all students will be motivated enough and tech savvy enough for us to assume this will be a viable method to get results in general.

I don’t think it’s an impossible task to get students quality language instruction that gets them on track to proficiency in a given foreign language. It’s doable, and people manage to do so all the time. The issue is more that people often don’t see the benefits of it in their daily lives where English suffices for everything, and they most certainly don’t see enough of a benefit that they wouldn’t collectively lose their shit over a proposed property tax hike intended to adequately fund foreign language instruction in the local school district. They’ll gladly fork over a few million dollars in tax money to trick out the football field, but to hire enough new teachers to have kids start learning French in 3rd grade and continue until graduation? Not a chance in hell. Ditto for French-language media purchases for the school library, or any other auxiliary purchases that would facilitate a genuine attempt at teaching and learning a foreign language.

Even for a wealthier state like New York, often thought of as more progressive on stuff like this, the actual requirements are a joke. You can just take a year of a language in 8th grade, pass the local test that meets the curriculum’s criteria, and never touch it again all the way to graduation from high school. At least when I was in school, they would at least try to dissuade you from not continuing it at least one more year to get on track for some sort of special diploma, but you could just opt out if your parents gave the okay to your guidance counselor.