"Generally speaking, people are much too fast to try to explain [...] things in terms of cultural differences."

This is an important point I might have underlined if I'd written the post today. I think it applies to a lot of stuff besides the desired mode of transport problem.

My main point in this context would probably be that if you want to compare political- or societal structures and decisions - which many people seem to want to do even though it's very hard - you need to know a lot of stuff. Additional information makes it harder to maintain a faulty model.

Incidentally on a related note I may be wrong, but I have the impression that a lot of people living in developed societies tend to assume that environmental constraints are often things that we can just work our way around, that they're just engineering problems, and so are often not important in the big scheme of things. I.e. 'developed societies are past those problems, and being past those problems is part of what makes a society developed', rather than developing. I think that's a potentially very problematic way to think about these things, and I think that that line of thinking may make you overlook important stuff.