To make the trade? Not actually that long. Planning and evaluating take longer, but he’s inevitably not the one pushing the buttons or making the plan, which is also not something that needs to be done for each one.

It takes me longer to move money between my checking and savings accounts.

The concerning thing isn’t the time investment, it’s the active nature of financial involvement in a situation where there’s a major conflict of interest.
Stock trading isn’t automatically problematic for an elected official, but it’s very easy to produce the appearance or actuality of improper conduct.
The safest route is to turn control over to a third party who doesn’t know who they’re managing.

Heh, “here” is the US. We built roads next to nearly all of the train tracks and we don’t have high speed rail.

A pretty normal arrangement:

This is what freeways look like in a lot of cities:

Either that, or elevated. When you get to the suburbs they tend to start putting up sound barriers:

You can also just be on a road so remote that it takes forever for someone to even notice you.

We have a lot of people die every year trying to walk off the highways from getting hit and, in the winter particularly, there’s messaging about not leaving your car because of the danger.

As a result of all that, this is the most light-hearted way of describing how the comment landed:

Mostly I disagreed with the comparative ease you implied for mechanical troubles with cars. I’ve never had or heard of a tow truck getting there that fast outside of things like highway blocking accidents. Holding up the time of repairs and alternative transportation as specific downsides of trains also felt off, as did the remoteness.

https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/amtrak-passengers-stuck-for-hours-on-stranded-train-near-battle-creek/

This is a story more like what I imagine with a train breakdown. The “middle of nowhere” was a half mile from a road, ten from a city and near enough to a city that they got busses in a few hours. It’s by no means nice but it’s not quite “stuck in a mountain pass for the winter”.
In my experience cars often go to places far more inaccessible, so it seems odd to single out trains.

To me the biggest difficulty would be the slowed information flow. When my car breaks down I know exactly how much I can do to repair it before I call or start walking. I have no idea where the mechanical assessment of the train is so I don’t know when to bail.

Edit:

Oh, right: they put fences around the train tracks? They don’t do that here that I’ve seen outside of junctions. Much bigger fences around the highways.

Ah, I see what happened. You had a point about one thing. “No ac on train bad, and if they don’t let you off it’s very uncomfortable”.
You backed that up with a bunch of stuff that didn’t make sense. People responded to that stuff, and you got pissy that no one listened to the part you cared about.

Can you see why maybe I would respond to statements about being stranded when that’s most of your comment? Why an article about train congestion is confusing if your point is “stuck on train bad”?

You can’t get too upset when people respond to the words that you say instead of the points you wanted them to pay attention to.

If you don’t care, why are you putting so much effort into arguing it and getting so defensive?

You’re acting like no one is understanding or accepting what you’re saying. I responded to you saying a train malfunction leaves you stranded in the middle of nowhere for hours, and a car malfunction doesn’t. Which is a a preposterous statement.
You then followed up with an article about skipping optional travel due to possible delays and capacity issues and took that as evidence that the air conditioning was the problem.

You haven’t shattered my world view, you’ve made a shitty argument and then gotten sad when people said it was shitty.

It’s not exactly irrelevant when you brought up repair time and alternative transportation.

I feel like you didn’t read your own article. The AC on the train doesn’t really factor into their warning.
They advised people to avoid the train to avoid congestion of the system because trains travel slower when the rails heat up.
They advised people to defer car travel because roads will be more congested due to heat causing mechanical issues in car engines. They also said if you don’t have ac that it could be actively dangerous.

Listing a big list of cons for one and then saying the other one doesn’t have them really makes it seem like a comparison, particularly when it doesn’t seem like an equally applied standard.

https://www.gbnews.com/lifestyle/cars/weather-air-con-postpone-car-journeys-warning

It adds: “Give yourself the best chance of avoiding delays by checking road conditions if driving, or bus and train timetables, amending your travel plans if necessary.”

This has been echoed by the RAC, which explained that red extreme heat warnings are incredibly rare, and called on Britons to take them seriously.

Data from the organisation states that breakdown volumes are expected to be around 20 per cent higher today than what’s normal for a Monday in late June.

I literally just searched for it and trivially found them.

They’re specifically saying vehicles without air conditioning, while also discussing worsening road conditions, increased risk of breakdown, and a general need to limit travel.

They issue the warnings for trains and not cars because train rails expand in the heat, meaning service cancellation is more likely and deferring optional travel reduces stress on the system.
Any time there is stress on a transit system they advise people to skip using it if necessary.

Your position is not hard to understand. It’s just one-sided because you’re only considering the downsides of one method, and not considering what the same situation looks like for the other.

They usually advise you not to get out of your car for the exact reason they advise you not to get off the train.

I’m not sure what’s exclusive to trains about breaking down in the middle of nowhere. It’s not exactly trivial to get a replacement car either, nor is repair somehow instant.

I get what you’re saying, but it’s way less one sided than you’re trying to convey. My car once broke down on the freeway in a city. I had to wait more than an hour for a tow and then walk home, which took two hours. Had to get random coworkers or friends to take me to work while my car was repaired over the next two weeks.

Oh, and traffic jams are routine for cars.

Nothing is gained by pretending there’s no downsides to any mode of transportation. They all have them. In aggregate though, most people would be better off if we had more available than just “car”.

It seems like you’re arguing that a better way of doing things is hard, therefore not worth doing, or that a century ago was the cutoff for deciding how we do transportation.

The way our stuff is laid out makes it difficult to live without a car. That doesn’t make the car a necessity in the abstract when that layout and design is often the direct product of designing around cars in the first place. It makes the car a necessity in the specific system we have for many people.
“We can’t do things differently because then it’s harder to do things exactly the same” is a weak argument.

Spoken like an upper middle class person

Are you actually using your perception of someone else’s economic class as an argument? When you’re arguing in defense of car based suburban sprawl and buying groceries by the carload?