I’ve visited Europe many times and I do like how the region is so easily accessible without a car, largely because of trains, but there are many more factors outside of just having trains. European cities are far more walkable and accessible without a car. For decades the US has just not been built up in this way so just dropping trains in doesn’t suddenly make them preferred and thus viable. The reason people drive small/medium city to small/medium city is because once arriving in that city they now need transportation while there. Currently the most convenient and cost effective way to do that is to simply bring the car you already own for moving around in your home small/medium city. If the US is going to move to an environmentally friendly passenger rail system it is going to take a MASSIVE cultural and shift in mindset to reshape cities across the country. Many of which are broke. I’m not saying it’s impossible or an unworthy goal. I simply think it is an extremely unlikely goal until mindsets shift and realize things need to be done differently.
I normally live in Europe. At the moment I'm in Baltimore. The city's downtown area (around the inner harbor) is perfectly walkable. Nearby DC is also perfectly walkable, while driving is a nightmare. These two cities should be well connected by rail but they're not. People would drive to a parking lot beside a metro station and get into the city that way.
Two cities can only be linked effectively by rail when there aren't stops between them. That's impossible in America, where suburban areas are the political battlegrounds while cities are single-party fiefdoms.
Washington-Baltimore is actually a very good connection by rail--you'll have a train at least once an hour--except that the station for Baltimore is in the wrong location. Baltimore Penn Station is located far to the north of the city, well outside the Inner Harbor that's going to be the center of tourism and visitors.
What happened is that, historically, Baltimore-Washington was mainly served by the B&O, whose Baltimore station would have been right next to Inner Harbor (Camden Yards is essentially built on old railroad property). When passenger service was consolidated into Amtrak, the Northeast Corridor instead chose to use Pennsylvania Railroad trackage instead of B&O from DC to NYC, and the freight trackage in the corridor consolidated onto the B&O tracks instead. The resulting residual commuter rail line has the standard commuter rail/freight rail politics going on that limits the number of trains that can transit the route.
For comparison, in the UK there are around 8 trains per hour during peak times between London and Cambridge (around twice the distance of DC-Baltimore). I'd imagine there are cities that have even more per hour in central Europe.
Although according to Google Washington DC has 700,000 people and Baltimore 600,000. Probably a more realistic comparison would be Bristol and Southampton/Portsmouth where there is realistically 1 train an hour (technically 2, but the second one has a change and runs 8 minutes after the first one).
Comparing trains from London is not really fair because virtually every train in the south ends up in London eventually. Somewhat tragically, I once tried to take a train from Watford to visit Hatfield House, some 14 miles away. I think it took me 3 hours getting in and out of London :-)
> Although according to Google Washington DC has 700,000 people and Baltimore 600,000. Probably a more realistic comparison would be Bristol and Southampton/Portsmouth where there is realistically 1 train an hour (technically 2, but the second one has a change and runs 8 minutes after the first one).
OTOH between Macon (pop 34000) and Lyon (pop 500000) there is up to 4 trains / hour at commute times (1 an hour otherwise), over a slightly longer distance.
London has a population of over 8 million and 14 million for the metro population. I was trying to pick something that had even close to a similar population density of of Washington Baltimore in the UK. Comparing to London is like comparing to NYC.
Part of the problem with starting that here is that many railroads have to just stop roads dead for 5-10 minutes every time they go by. Even if it's a fast train and it's 2-4 minutes, that would cause a crazy traffic increase here, because you've just lost between 27 and 53% of your roads' capacity.
I don't know this area at all, but apparently there is a commuter rail service (as mentioned) from Camden Yards, which still has a station, to Washington. But it takes an hour and a quarter, where the Amtrak train takes 45 minutes.
This is depressingly familiar situation in the UK too (not sure about the rest of Europe). Usually, it's not politics that prevent more useful connections being made, but a lack of investment to do the necessary small bits of engineering.
Baltimore resident who commutes by train here. There's actually a line that goes to DC right by inner harbor- the Camden Line as opposed to Penn Line at Penn station.
As a consequence trains from Baltimore run a bit more often then once an hour - though I don't take Camden Line (It's for losers) so I don't know what the overlap is exactly.
Neither the metro or the lightrail reaches Penn. I don't know who designed the routes. Better connections between DC and BWI would better link the cities but they can't even maintain a bus line. Meanwhile, there's a billion dollar for the Silver line...
You’re wrong about the Baltimore light rail not reaching Penn Station. See the Camden Yards - Penn Station light rail line, it runs a few times/hour. https://www.mta.maryland.gov/schedule
Sounds like you're referring to the University of Baltimore/MICA light rail stop[0], where you have to get off if heading south or heading north but not on the Penn line, to catch the 'Penn Station - Camden Yards' line. I mean, it's in the name of the light rail line...it lets you off right at the station[1].
The real criticism of the light rail is that there's really _only_ one line, north to south. And the (part subway) metro train serves a similar route, NW to east side of downtown.[0]
99% of all the light rail "lines" ride the same track. The Penn-Camden "line" veers off the main tracks right at that Mt Royal stop (MICA/UB), and only goes to Penn, then back to the main line at Mt Royal, then headed to Camden Yards. It's probably the least common "line" to see.
Didn't the US car companies actively lobby against and destroy the budding streetcar transport in most cities? I admit its not exactly rail, but you do have trams / streetcars in many European cities too - like Amsterdam. I would think they would be a much preferred public transport option than everyone driving their own car.
Culture is not something which happens automatically - sometimes its driven by corporates, and the stronger the incentives for the corporates, the harder to resist, until the only one capable of doing so is the government.
This is a rather popular lie that ignores the facts on the ground at the time. No, the US car companies did not lobby against or destroy the streetcar industry, the growth of the suburb and government policies that promoted such growth managed to do that all on their own. The auto manufacturers just set themselves up to take advantage of this decline and the shifting of subsidies to road construction.
In this case culture (the shifting demographics that led to the initial growth of the suburb and the self-perpetuating cultural enshrinement of same) is what led and government/corporations followed.
With all due respect - I don't understand this. Why would suburban growth not work with tram / local train lines that could be extended? It worked in London - one of the largest cities in the world which had to plan way ahead of time due to its historically narrow streets. I've lived in suburban London for >7 years, and frankly the only time I really needed to use the car was only to haul grocery home. Almost any other travel (including to work) was always achievable with the tube/bus - some combination of these.
What the ground truth was then isn't recorded in history. There are post-facto interpretations. I would argue if the incentives were laid correctly, there was no reason for suburbanism to necessarily lead to growth in automobile consumption.
The US motor companies had a massive clout. Given a choice back then (and the big roads due to the post-war expansion) it possibly made it easy to convince people that a car was a superior and more personal form of travel (think pre-ubiquitous air-conditioning). That's when you need government to think ahead, especially at the local level.
1. A lot of existing big cities post-WWII did, in fact, grow commuter rail out to the expanding suburbs. If you live in the suburbs (say Westchester County in NY) and work at a bank in Manhattan, there is pretty good rail service.
2. But, a lot of the suburban expansion also included companies locating out in the suburbs. For a variety of reasons (including "white flight") a lot of cities became unpopular places for professionals to live so it made sense to locate companies where the people were. NYC almost went bankrupt. Boston was losing population into the 90s. So, for a significant period of time, you had a lot of people dispersed around suburbs (and still do) and that's hard to accommodate with transit.
In Boston, for example, there was not a single major tech employer in the city by the mid 90s or so--when Teradyne moved out--all the "Route 128" companies and others were in the suburbs/exurbs. (I would bet that, at least leaving out biotech/pharma, most tech employment in the Boston area is still in the suburbs--as indeed it is in the Bay Area.)
A variety of both direct and indirect things. Low interest rates for home purchases, especially veterans (GI Bill). Road construction especially the interstate highway system. Low-cost suburban development, e.g. Levittown. The fact that there was lots of land to build suburbs on.
> European cities are far more walkable and accessible without a car.
A really weird experience I had while visiting CA (SSF specifically) was seeing a fast food place - I think it was Wendy's? - that wasn't reachable by foot in any clear way. Similarly there wasn't any obvious sidewalks or bike lanes on the highway between Brisbane and SSF, and while that _is_ as 2km walk, I'd still expect it to be _possible_.
I mean, I've been there for a week, and I'm sure it's possible to work things like that out if you live there longer. Maybe there's an entrance to the county park I didn't notice, or I don't know, a tunnel. But where I live, walking is far more intuitive than that. A tram might help, but it won't solve it.
I currently live in Austin and the general infrastructure here is atrocious. There are many places that are inaccessible as you've mentioned by walking and biking in America is incredibly dangerous.
Most cities in the US are simply not equipped to deal with any sort of large population growth due to the incredibly bad infrastructure we have in place and zero motivation to improve it.
That seems very true to me. As an anecdotical data point: I lived in Munich for over 30 years, and never drove. Did not even have a driver's license.
I then moved to the Bay Area, and now I'm driving everywhere.
Even to towns that I could actually reach with BART (which are not many), I would then face the problem, as you laid out yourself, to actually get around there.
Excuse my ignorance, but my foreigner layman's opinion is that your cities ain't broke, the US is the richest nation on Earth. Y'all just need to tax better and spend wiser.
Please elaborate. If everyone is a millionaire, nobody is. Thus, it's impossible for everybody to be rich. The alternative to some people being rich is nobody being rich. If nobody is rich, everyone is poor.
Part of it is the US has a lot of land. Japan is one of the more extreme examples but they have ~8.7x people per unit of land. That makes a big difference on the kind of buildings and transportation you build.
Here’s the thing, you could say the same for many small or population dense countries, this is because Japan is population dense but most of the population still live in very concentrated areas, Osaka, Tokyo etc.
One begs to ask the question, Why do Americans need to live so sprawled out? I think the difference is not just one of geography, it’s cultural. It makes sense for Japanese to live in close quarters and there are benefits and negatives for doing so.
Look at France, Germany, Belgium, UK
Etc they’re allrelatively population dense countrirs with far more hopeless train networks.
Yep, rail road is hard to scale down, so it's very expensive to connect every single home to rail road.
Also, rail roads are not walkable, so they cannot be shared with pedestrians, so this limitation forces create two separate roads: one for pedestrians, bicycles, cars, etc., and second one for rail transport. Trams can be mixed with regular road traffic, but trams cannot use regular rail roads because of different construction of rail road.
Also, rail roads are prone to Single Point of Failure problems. To prevent SPF, multiple redundant routes must be built, with lot of expensive junctions between them.
Also, you must schedule your travel.
So, we need something which 1) can be shared with regular road traffic like trams, 2) can deliver loads of cargo efficiently like rail or metro, 3) can be connected to every house like regular road, 4) can be navigated by any car at any time of day or night, 5) be cheaper than regular road for road, cart, maintenance, recycling, 6) can provide power to carts, 7) can provide navigation and scheduling service to carts, 8) be with low delay (fast).
Regular road is 1,3,4,±8. Uber is 1,3,4,5,7,8. Aero-taxi is 1,3,4,±5,7,8. Trams is 1,2,6,7. Metro is 2,6,7. Rail is 2,5,6,7.
Also gas taxes in the US are far lower than in much of Europe. Gas tax is 5.9x higher in Germany than in my state of NC, for example. Gas tax is what funds a lot of infrastructure development.
At the dawn of the age of rail, Germany had double the US population in an area about the size of Montana. There were a lot of people who wanted to move around way before cars were a factor, so you see much, much better rail systems in Europe.
Probably a bigger factor is that, in the early 1940s, virtually the entire infrastructure of Europe was destroyed. In March 1945, there were no operational bridges across the entire length of the Rhine river. All of that infrastructure was rebuilt in the late 1940s and the 1950s to then-modern high speed standards; by contrast, the US has to make do with infrastructure upgraded at great cost around the 1910s.
Before WWII Great Britain, Germany, and France all had about twice the rail they have now . After the war, cars and trucking made a big difference and system length decreased fairly steadily as a result because lots of track got rebuilt as roads.
Europe also had a big military imperative to build railways pre-WW1: Trains let you move your forces faster, so you can build up a concentration of forces in one location to attack or reinforce a defensive line.
So no state in continental Europe wanted to be on the losing side of a railway gap.
This is probably a much bigger factor than usually thought. Military necessity will trump budget constrictions and property rights. Railways pre WW1, roads during and after WW2 and in preparation for the Cold War.
Most of the US freight rail system isn't electrified because the capital expenditures of doing so would be very large, and its return on investment in terms of direct monetary savings wouldn't materialize for many, many years. Since externalities aren't priced in, diesel-electric locomotives haul most trains in the US.
More passenger rail isn't really being built in the US, because the capital expenditures of doing so would be very large, and its return on investment in terms of direct monetary savings wouldn't materialize for many, many years. Since externalities aren't priced in, the responsibility for transportation is largely distributed to individuals, who make daily use of road vehicles on roads that the governments fund, and travel long-distance by commercial airlines that make use of airports that governments support.
> Most of the US freight rail system isn't electrified because the capital expenditures of doing so would be very large, and its return on investment in terms of direct monetary savings wouldn't materialize for many, many years.
There's a decent amount of mainline freight rail that was electrified 100 years ago but has since been ripped out. It turns out that electrification has a lot of operational constraints that make it a less-clearly-good proposition.
One obvious constraint is loading gauge issues--you need about another 2 feet of clearance for the wires. And if one bridge or tunnel along your entire route isn't high enough, you can't move along the double-stacked containers. You also need a lot of infrastructure for the tractive power substations, and if you don't have enough of them, you literally can't run more trains if the traffic demands it (and too many means infrastructure costs you're not benefiting from). The operational inflexibilities of electric locomotives in partially-electrified systems should have course be obvious.
That said, there are substantial benefits to having electric motors driving your wheels... which is why virtually all diesel locomotives are actually diesel-electric locomotives: electric locomotives that use a diesel generator onboard rather than hooking up to electrical catenary or third rail.
Thing that solves those issues are battery powered locomotives. This idea generally invites disbelief but when you run the numbers it works because the power to weight requirements drop as vehicles get larger.
The result you can use overhead lines where safe, cheap and convenient and avoid them where they are not, like rail switching yards.
Reminds me of the old fireless steam locomotives. Instead of boiling their own water to make steam, they had reservoirs that were filled with steam from an external boiler. Not practical for long-range travel, but good for switching yards and other local uses.
It's crazy to me that people still scoff at the idea of batteries being a serious power source for things, but you're right, they do, even though there are 100MWh batteries deployed already with 1GWh batteries being approved and nearing deployment.
The experimental locomotive discussed in that link has 2400kwh of battery (probably significantly less in practice; you don't want full discharges). The diesel-electric locomotives they'll be working with generate about 3,000kw for as many hours as they have fuel in the tank.
Maybe (hopefully) batteries will get better, but I wouldn't go dumping my money into electric locomotive startups just yet.
The point they were making is that the train would go on batteries for the bits of the route which can't be electrified (e.g. too low tunnels), the track would otherwise be normally electrified, the battery would only be necessary to cross between electrified sections of the track.
Similar to the battery-equipped dual-mode trolleybuses increasingly getting developed / deployed[0] allowing both point-charging at stops and more independence from overhead line (so trolleys can more easily be rerouted, or can serve increasingly longer sections without overhead lines).
[0] they've existed since the 30s but mostly electric / ICE
That is basically my entire argument, hybrid battery units remove a bunch of pain points with electrification. Like having over-head lines in you switching yard, lines through tunnels, on curves, bridges and grade crossings.
I think someone else brought up that with electrification you could also put traction motors in rail cars like is done often with commuter rail systems. And there is actually no need for the battery to be part of the locomotive either. Think old steam trains with a coal car.
You don't need power for the whole trip. If most of it can be electrified with wire and you only have small patches which cannot (like the tunnel mentioned) current battery technology is up to the task. We will introduce that here in the near future for a new tram line going through a park (where we don't want overhead wires).
I dearly hope not. A 1 GWh battery stores 1/10th the energy of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb, and will release it incredibly spectacularly should it ever catch fire.
I don't want that thing anywhere near a train... Or where I live.
Peak electrification in the US was in the 1930s and began falling in the 40s, but the Class I railroad route miles were almost 2.5x that of today. Electrification generally came about to reduce the impacts of steam traction (e.g. in cities and tunnels), to gain more power on grades, or to reduce the opex on high-traffic routes vs. steam.
In the decades after WW2, diesel-electric propulsion boomed, viable again after wartime shortages were over, simpler to maintain than steam, and more flexible than electric. This was well before double-stack trains got started in the 80s, but now that double-stack is widespread in the US, overhead electrification does present another operational hurdle.
One possibility is a diesel-electric locomotive that also has a pickup on the top. That way part of the lines can be electrified, and the diesel fills in the gaps.
Batteries are now a viable option. They can pull power from the overhead lines or third rail when available and run on batteries when power isn't available. The LiFePO4 batteries are a drop-in replacement for existing diesel generators, so producing them is easy.
For a single small passenger car without any grade, maybe.
From that video: 90kw/hr of battery. At peak power output of 180kw, you could run that for 30 minutes.
The ubiquitous GE Dash-9 used in freight service here in the US generates >3000kw and can run all day. They're also usually run in multiples to pull long heavy trains.
I wouldn't expect to see battery powered trains in the US anytime soon, except maybe short passenger-only lines on the east coast (which are probably viable for electrification anyway).
You, strangely, ignored the parent's point that you would just be using the batteries to reduce the amount of overhead wires you need, i.e. one would have opportunity to recharge several times a day.
(It's not helpful to focus on the specifics of a proof of concept--unimportant in this discussion about what is feasible--versus the fundamental figures of merit of the technology... Unless one is prepared to make the case that the specifics are the limits of the technology.)
There are 100MW power, 100MWh energy lithium ion batteries installed already (with 1GWh on the way). There's no technical reason you couldn't have battery powered trains. The "batteries are too weak" argument is dead.
A tesla powerpack is 50kw, 210kwh, and weighs 3500lbs.
A freight train that would normally be pulled by four 3,000kw diesel electric locomotives would need 240 powerpacks, and could run for four hours before needing a full recharge. Those powerpacks would weigh 420 tons - the equivalent of say, four fully loaded freight cars, and cost around $25M (plus whatever the locomotives cost).
The diesel-electric locomotives are a couple million each, ready-to-run.
Ah hah you say, you only need the batteries between catenaries! How fast do you think you can charge those batteries? If you can charge the same as the full discharge rate, then you need 50% of your track to be electrified, and you need it every four hours (assuming you're willing to risk full discharge cycles). Trains don't move very fast, so that's pretty closely spaced. And even worse, you now need electrical infrastructure with twice the capacity - you need to charge the battery and move the train.
Sure there's no technical reason you couldn't do this, but the economics are not looking good. Batteries are too weak.
Why assume 4 hours with a recharge? I'm thinking closer to max 15 mins without a recharge.
This would allow skipping electrification in some tunnels; in rail yards; on track segments shared with non-electrified trains; and anywhere that it's too hard to run electric lines.
Sure... but now you're only saving a small percentage of the total electrification cost, and paying for increased cost, complexity, and maintenance of locomotives. It's not an obvious win.
> Furthermore, it makes zero sense to compare "3000kw x 4 hours" since diesel electric locomotives can run for N>>>4 hours.
This is simply you reframing the conversation from using batteries to allow hybrid electric trains to use short sections of non-electrified tracks to hybrid electric trains won't work because they don't have the range of a diesel locomotive.
I'm going to put this down as you're unwilling to argue fairly and thus lost this argument.
You're not comparing hybrid against diesel-electric, you're comparing hybrid against fully electric. The cost of putting batteries in your rolling stock might or might not be higher than electrifying the last 5%. Either way, it's small compared to the cost of electrifying the 95%.
Note that the eastern seaboard (with its bridges and tunnels and topography) is getting electrified; the long and flat midwest is not.
You just did it again. Used specifics from one application to pessimistically (and wrongly) apply to the technology generally. Also, you keep assuming the 4 3000kW locomotives will be running flat out, which is a terrible assumption (and would cause a conventional locomotive to quickly deplete its fuel, if not destroy its engine).
Here, I'll do it for you. Good Panasonic cells get about 250Wh/kg, or 0.9MJ/kg. Assume an electric-optimized locomotive would be able to achieve about half its weight in cells, with a useful energy density of 0.45MJ/kg. Assume about 1 locomotive for every 9 cars, and with each car weighing the same as each locomotive. So the whole train's effective energy density is 0.045MJ/kg.
The "rolling resistance" of a typical train is about 0.002, conservatively. That is a weight of 1 kgf has a resistance of 0.002kgf. (EDIT: This is a good assumption that works up to 60mph, the speed limit of freight trains, but at the typical low average speed of freight trains, it's actually about half that value: https://slideplayer.com/slide/4696076/15/images/12/Freight+T... )
That's enough to go from the center of the continental US to the coast on a single charge. (and from what I understand, 1 engine for every 9 cars is not uncommon)
If we have one engine for every 4 cars, you can now cross the continental US on a single charge. But remember, the discussion was about multiple recharges per trip, so there's WAY more battery here than you actually need.
And to just give an idea of the power available, 130 tons is a typical car laden weight. 65 tons of Panasonic cells gives you 16.25MWh of storage. Cells like that can discharge their cells about 12 minutes. Lets make it 30 minutes, conservatively. That gives a power at the cell level of 32500 kilowatts, ten times your 3000kW locomotive. Batteries are plenty powerful.
(And the cost is offset easily in fuel costs, as long as the battery is given the usage of about one full cycle at least once a week.)
You might point out energy requirements for braking and climbing hills. But remember that one of the greatest advantages of battery-electrics is regenerative braking. Most of the energy consumed in increasing elevation can be recovered on the way back down.
(As far as costs go, the battery pack should--including the price of industrial electricity and typical costs for automotive batteries at scale--pay for itself in fuel cost savings in about 500 cycle-equivalents while the cells should last at least 1000... meaning the overall added cost is potentially negative... meaning it's a market opportunity.)
Can you even transfer close to 3000 kW through any overhead wires or third rail systems? It seems like 25 kV is the max voltage overhead lines run at. That's 120 A that you need to transfer through a sliding conductor. That sounds problematic to me, but I don't really know for sure...?
And if you are proposing using batteries to reduce the amount of overhead wires you need, then the average power you need to transfer while connected to the wires increases, not decreases.
If we take the hypothetical electric locomotive with a battery pack, it would probably decrease the peak load on the lines. You only need maximum power at acceleration and climb. The battery is perfectly capable at helping with the peaks, while recharging during the cruise when the power demand is low.
A TGV can take over 12MW. It uses a single contact feeding the two power cars at each end of the train to avoid problems with oscillations in the overhead line at high speeds.
I have also thought of that. For example, a 10MW locomotive with CAT C32 as a backup diesel would be a good freight combo. CAT C32 has an intermittent duty rating of 1800hp@2100rpm and continuous duty rating of 1350hp@1800rpm. You would still have more than 1MW of power in tracks without OHLE.
You are correct to point out that governments subsidize roads, making this an unfair compare. Trucking is built on the highway system, a massive capital expenditure which is completely paid for by taxpayers as a gift to the trucking industry. Massive capital expenditures are often part and parcel of transportation infrastructure; what's different here is the political will to fund it.
Calling it a gift to the trucking industry implies there wasn't originally a strategic motivation to getting it done and that individuals don't also greatly benefit. Trucking is a business with razor thin margins so that "gift" very much gets spread around. Sure cars are bad for the environment but pretending that the interstate system doesn't greatly benefit basically everyone in the country is foolhardy.
Nobody said the interstate system doesn’t benefit people. I merely pointed out it invalidates the argument that investing in green transportation infrastructure is too costly because “the capital expenditures of doing so would be very large, and its return on investment in terms of direct monetary savings wouldn't materialize for many, many years.”
Trucking pays for fuel costs in addition to a road use tax I believe, I know they tear up roads, especially overloaded dump trucks etc, but without an alternative there’s really no better option. If and when they go electric, then you’ll start to see some legislation around miles driven etc which I believe California has looked into since they aren’t getting the federal or state tax rev share off of the fuel itself coming out of pumps.
Trucks should pay for the damage they cause to the roads but that would put prices up which would be unpopular even though it should result in lower general taxation.
Another issue is the local public transportation in most US cities isn’t adequate so travelers want to transport their vehicle with them. Although, rideshare services help alleviate this issue.
Until they have a good reason, the major freight railroads (BNSF/UP/CSX/NS/CN/CP/KCS) will continue to be all-diesel. Also, as emissions requirements have gotten more stringent they've moved to rebuilding older power (which gets around the current Tier-4 requirements instead of buying as much newer motive power. In fact, a number of the most recent-gen units have been stored as they're often 15% less efficient than the previous generation (Tier-3).
I do believe a move to electric with catenary is inevitable, most likely via 50KV/50HZ to allow for greater distance between substations. However it won't happen for some time until legislation mandates it.
Power density is the main issue. There are some experiments with batteries, for sure, but you can't really create the same density of stored energy as diesel that would actually fit on a frame and can be recharged in some semblance of a normal time.
IIRC it was bandied back and forth but you'd only get a few hours of peak load, vs a diesel which can run at peak power for days before running out of fuel.
IIRC it was bandied back and forth but you'd only get a few hours of peak load, vs a diesel which can run at peak power for days before running out of fuel.
The USA have very long distances, unusual for other countries. A few hours are more than enough for short travels. Anyway, recharge times are irrelevant if you could change them easily.
No they’re not. Availability. A locomotive that’s charging isn’t pulling a train. They’re like airliners, they don’t sit around idle for long periods. Too much capital tied up in them.
I wonder if batteries, motor and third rail connections could be added to the flat cars that carry shipping containers. Skip the engine all together, and make trains fully dynamic. Probably not worth the cost.
It would be kinda cool to see a long train split in half , front and back taking different routes.
It would be kinda cool to see a long train split in half , front and back taking different routes.
That happens all the time here, in Spain. Some trains from Madrid to Andalusia travels to Seville with two locomotives, one in the front, another one in the rear. Then half the train goes on to Cádiz, half to Huelva. Oh, and it's sometimes very long, forty passengers cars + 2 locom. + several restaurant cars.
I guess the same happens with other routes. It's all electric, of course. Rail here is cheap, very confortable and fast, 250 km/H in all high-speed network.
Edit: actually, now that I come to think about it, it seems most high-speed trains have locomotives in both ends. Maybe so they don't have to turn around? The splitted train could use four then.
Turn around is also solved with a special car that has a driver cockpit for remote control of the locomotive on the other end. But some high speed trains like the Velaro (also running in Spain) don't even have locomotives anymore, they just have cockpits at each end of a multi-car segment, and all the motors, transformers and so on are distributed along the whole length of the train.
I think that GP meant with "Skip the engine all together, and make trains fully dynamic" would be something where every single car could be autonomous and they just connect together (on the go?) for slipstream and traffic control. This is both real (segments are joined primarily for traffic control, "cars" already have their own motors etc) as it is far away (the individual cars of a segment are joined together at the factory and form a single articulated unit)
Fast yes, cheap not at all. Conventional (not high speed) trains in Spain are cheap, but there are fewer and fewer of those. If you want to travel cheaply you mostly have to take a bus. Most trains here are now only for the rich.
I guess your definition for "the rich" is "not poor":
57€ for a 700 km travel is cheap compared to a car that will take x2 the time, unless you are OK with burning double the money on fuel and ignoring speed limits, of course risking fines and license suspension.
A full car will be cheaper if you ignore the cost of the car itself + maintenance and saved time. Families use to travel by car on holidays only because they need the car for short trips during the holidays, not because it's cheaper.
Buses were dirty cheap, I haven't even looked at the prices in the last twenty years, I had enough unconfortable eight hours travels when I had no alternative.
I am comparing high speed rail to conventional rail. High speed tickets are at least twice as much. The price of a bus is similar to the conventional train which is disappearing leaving the bus as the only cheap alternative. You are probably not poor.
Totally possible, locomotives tend to work out to around 20-25 hp per ton and that's just the locomotive. So you need proportionally smaller batteries than you would with a car.
And when you start digging up the capital cost of locomotives you find they can easily absorb the cost of batteries.
There are experimental train engines with pantograph for mainlines and batteries for the "last mile" the issue is that for freight you often have heavy trains which need lots of power, pulling the required batteries would need lots of power as well, not to mention charging times.
More likely in the short term are electric engines, with a Diesel generator for the last mile (i.e. Bombardier TRAXX)
Interestingly, trains today are technically diesel-electric, where a diesel engine is feeding a generator, which feeds traction motors on the axles.
So putting in a battery would "just" mean swapping out the fuel tank, engine, and generator. Probably the biggest issue I could see is, the battery would have to be able to handle extremely high currents to get the consist moving. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMD_SD90MAC shows a power output of up to 4.47 Megawatts at full engine speed (for the EMD 265).
That seems US specific. Of course it wouldn't make sense to use the batteries for that case, but maybe it would be cheaper for you than electrifying the network.
I know it sounds dangerous, but, haven't anyone thought of electrifying by just using the two rails as conductors, one rail per pole? So no need of third rail or catenary. I suppose the expense would be isolating all the axels! This is the method used by model railroads by the way.
Some other issues are that high speed rail is not green, and it is not affordable either.
So far as adding more passenger rail lines, it isn't easy. For instance, plans for HSR in California are unrealistic because you don't save any time from SF to LA unless you can go from downtown to downtown. Sure you can build track in the Central Valley, but it would be pretty hard to take enough land by eminent domain to build a track into the cities even if these people were not the most feared NIMBYs on the planet.
There is existing right-of-way into both SF and LA Union station though, and the HSR plans intend(ed) to use this. Sure, you can't run the HSR at full speed on existing track, but this alone is not necessarily a deal-breaker.
The main reason US cities rely on automobiles is because the "job watershed" of a private automobile exceeds the job watershed of train systems everywhere in the US, even New York City. The job watershed is the number of jobs within commuting distance, whatever your tolerance for a commute is, given a transportation modality. In some cities the automobile job watershed is 100x larger than the transit job watershed. Transit systems, especially train systems, in most US cities are hub and spoke systems, centered around terminals in places like midtown Manhattan and the Chicago Loop. If you superimpose that hub and spoke model on top of an employment "contour map" that seeks a level (due to the desire to minimize rents), you'll see that there's a fundamental mismatch between what employers and residents want and the transit network. Rather than a unipolar peak at the transit hub, both employers and residents want to minimize rents which drives sprawl and transportation webs, as opposed to hub and spoke models.
Transit has a future with ride sharing and bus rapid transit since those modes use a cheap, flexible network as opposed to an expensive, rigid rail network. Unfortunately, if you wish rail to become more important, its use is actually declining and has been for decades.
The reason of automobile dominance is more that unlike other countries, we went all in on highways and just actively dismantled existing rail infrastructure. And then to salt the wounds, our parking requirements are so high that in many suburbs I've been in, the ten minute walk from the front door of Walmart to the bus stop is ridiculous.
Rail does better when congestion is high and density is high, but in most of America high density or even medium density is either illegal to build or requires so much parking because of zoning that it does not pencil out financially.
The quickest thing America could do to encourage dense construction is to stop the requirement of parking with new construction. Developers do not need to be told a minimum to build, they will build what the market will bear because if they underpark their buildings no one will rent units or office space.
"Developers do not need to be told a minimum to build, they will build what the market will bear because if they underpark their buildings no one will rent units or office space."
The problem with this boils down to
1) That ain't exactly true; in sufficiently-dense cities people will still rent spaces in underparked buildings
2) If you underestimate the demand for parking, it's way more difficult to add parking after-the-fact
I do agree that parking lots are absurd wastes of space, though. They're cheaper than parking garages, sure, but they suck on pretty much every other metric. Parking garages are much more space-efficient, and if every building was built atop a parking garage (even just one or two levels), that'd cut down significantly on both the need for parking lots and the need for street parking.
1 and 2 are fine, because if enough people need parking spaces then someone might develop their lot with a parking garage that there is market demand for.
Structured parking is extremely expensive; 19K per spot for an aboveground structure [1]. I've heard 30K per spot for underground parking. And parking garages are generally terrible for the streetscape and building, and are difficult to convert to other uses if say, autonomous cars get rid of the need for it later on.
If you're building parking based on demand for free parking you'll never build enough unless you want buildings too far apart to walk to the bus stop or their house, which just drives the need for parking up. Pricing parking is a very effective way of managing spaces so that some proportion of them is always free; in my current city, Seattle, new buildings cannot hand parking to residents or workers free with the unit or job, since many people are car-free and all bundling does is socialize the cost of parking. As a result even with no parking requirements many garages are overbuilt (out of town developers not used to developing for local conditions) and the well located ones do a brisk trade in monthly passes and day parking while the residents are out parking their cars at their job.
> someone might develop their lot with a parking garage that there is market demand for.
My point is that if there's market demand for it, it's usually because something's already built there and it's too late to build a parking garage without tearing stuff down. The exception is if you started with a parking lot.
> parking garages are generally terrible for the streetscape and building
Eh. A lot of SF buildings seem to have no trouble building shops in front of them and more shops / offices / residences on top of them. The garage I park at almost every day has a small grocer / convenience store in front of it and (what I assume to be) offices on top of it, and it's got three levels of parking.
> and are difficult to convert to other uses if say, autonomous cars get rid of the need for it later on
That seems far-fetched. Yes, it might reduce demand somewhat, but it's wasteful to not park (gas costs money, and batteries don't last forever), and electric cars might actually drive demand for parking up if the parking spaces include charging capabilities (and in the future I'm envisioning, that could very well be literally every parking space).
> If you're building parking based on demand for free parking
That's not what I'm advocating. Charging for parking is totally reasonable, especially given the expenses involved as you've pointed out.
Of course, quite a few businesses do take on the cost of parking garages themselves, whether by offering access for free or by validating customers' parking passes after-the-fact. They do this because they believe it'll attract customers (and it certainly attracts me).
Which is fine. There's no need to require building parking garages. There's certainly no need to require such a ridiculous amount of parking that store lots don't even fill up on Black Friday, which many jursidictions do. [1]
Many places outside the US, and some inside, do not mandate parking for developments. In fact, Manhattan has an absolute parking cap.
I guess it depends on area. I've lived in considerably more underparked places than overparked - places where except for anti-peak (valley?) times, parking availability is perpetually at or near zero. This would include most of the Bay Area.
Note that "underparked" includes "inadequate parking near the target structure"; underparking can still happen even when sprawling parking lots go unfilled if it's an absurdly long walk from far away parking spaces to, say, the Wal-Mart surrounded by said sprawling parking lot. Given a parking lot and a parking garage with equal numbers of parking spaces, you'll likely find that the parking garage will be much more fully-utilized, since folks don't have to walk as far to an elevator.
(Not to mention the rather severe methodology issues in that particular article; the instructions for that bit of activism don't include controls for time of day, most glaringly.)
I think this also has to do with EU cities being much older, and "grew up" prior to automobiles even existing/being wide-spread. American cities/sprawls are designed around the automobile (and maybe some sick idea of "the american dream" pushed by early industrialists)
You are correct but there are also plenty of case studies in automobile-dependent cities that went all-in on transit, but that was usually due to a crushing and unbearable level of crowding thats simply not legal in any US city.
All of that is interesting but the article, and GP, were talking about interurban transportation, not commuting to work. The flexibility of bus networks (using road infrastructure that would needed anyway for commerce) is desirable to be sure in metropolitan areas, but not as applicable or useful to inter-city routes.
Yes, rail is suitable for arterial transportation. However intercity transportation by rail is crippled in the US because there are very few intracity rail networks to receive you at your destination, for the reasons I outlined.
>both employers and residents want to minimize rents which drives sprawl and transportation webs, as opposed to hub and spoke models.
I don't think this holds up empirically? The US is home to some of the highest rents in the world. Mid-sized US cities have way higher rents than major cities like Tokyo or Paris.
Or maybe this is the idea, but if so it has failed miserably at letting people on the lower end of the spectrum be able to rent stably
"The most affordable major housing markets are in the United States, with a moderately unaffordable Median Multiple of 3.9, followed by Canada (4.3) and Singapore (4.6). Ireland and the United Kingdom both have Median Multiples of 4.8. The major markets of Australia (6.9), New Zealand (9.0) and China (20.9) are severely unaffordable (Table ES-2)."
This study is focused on price to buy, where a huge segment of the population are renters.
This is the core issue with so many of these reports. Focusing on buying already rules out a huge segment of the population (incidentally the ones who have trouble surviving!), and ignores the fact that rent/buy ratios are very different between markets.
US buying prices are relatively low because of how the entire economy is based around home ownership. But almost half the population rents.
There is a connection between prices and rents that can be warped temporarily and be permanently different in certain locales. However if you look at the table in the link below, the price-to-rent ratio clusters around the median for most places.
In the US currently it's slightly more favorable to be a renter than a buyer compared to the historical price-to-rent ratio. If anything most of the deviations from the norm are towards making buying more expensive than renting.
The problem with buses is that they're typically slow compared to even subway/metro rail (let alone inter-city). That doesn't mean they're not the right fit in a wide variety of scenarios (for example, they're about perfect for small/medium cities that can't afford to invest a whole lot in intra-city rail, and they're the only viable option for smaller cities/towns that aren't already stops on a larger inter-city rail line), but they're not necessarily the right fit for a large city with more ground to cover (even with dedicated bus lanes, buses can only - safely - drive so fast, and that speed is typically less than rail). The phrase "bus rapid transit" is kinda nonsensical/oxymoronic; there's not really much that's "rapid" about buses.
Ridesharing is slightly more promising, since the smaller vehicles can drive a bit faster and don't have to stick to specific routes. Unfortunately, because they're smaller, they don't carry as many people, so they're less suited for heavy load (i.e. lots of passengers trying to go from the same place to the same place).
Rail is probably the most efficient, but also the least flexible and the most expensive (the expense can be mitigated somewhat if you're proactive about building tram rails into your roads, but not all roads warrant that, and by the time they do it's likely already too late; plus, that doesn't do much for older cities).
The ideal would be something like the following:
- High-speed rail between cities
- Metro rail between major parts of cities (and/or between cities and suburbs/satellites)
- Full buses on fixed (or at least firm) routes to transit centers in neighborhoods/suburbs/satellites that don't have metro connections of their own (connecting to nearby metro stations, the high-speed rail hub, and/or other bus stations)
- Minibuses on more flexible routes for intra-(neighborhood/suburb/satellite) transit (between neighborhood minibus stops, to nearby macrobus/metro/rail stations, or to specific minibus stops outside that particular "zone" in rare cases where a point-to-point really is faster and enough people are trying to do it)
All this would be controlled by a rider walking up to some sort of kiosk (or using a smartphone app), picking a destination, and getting a route calculated on-the-fly (for kiosk users: probably printed, or if we wanna be real slick, dispensed on an e-ink display that'll update if the route changes).
Bus rapid transit (BRT) refers to reserving lanes along existing roads strictly for buses, and doing so along stretches with few controlled intersections, or even changing the timing on stoplights to ease the flow of the BRT vehicles. BRT is much faster than traditional bus mass transit.
I'd take a 100mph maglev to LA from San Francisco if it meant faster than airport boarding, on-time departure and arrival, and a seat where I can put my legs up for the same price or less than a flight.
Which was exactly my experience with the international trains in Europe. It was almost discombobulating, walking in the front door of the station, to the platform, and onto the train in about five minutes.
For what it's worth, the Interstate Highway System and connecting roadways also receive special financial and political consideration, often and infamously to the detriment of working class/politically-disadvantaged middle class (and often minority) communities.
At the time, the alternative to the interstate were local roads which took 2-3x longer[1] (and probably at least 2x more expensive factoring in time, gas, and lodging), or commercial aviation which was crazy expensive[2]. What's the alternative to HSR? Planes which are in the same ballpark in terms of speeed and cost.
Japan’s first high-speed rail went operational in 1964. I imagine if the US soon followed in half a dozen cities, rail would be looked upon quite differently today.
Everyone is constrained by economic considerations. It's not like China has unlimited money. They are just choosing sectors and making bets on what to prioritize and what to ignore, same as everyone else.
You're right, but it's still relevant to note whether something is successful on its own accord, or whether it's being propped up by the government. If something can't be profitably done in a country as dense as China, there's no hope of it ever working in the US. At that point you might as well go with planes and spend the savings on carbon sequestration methods instead.
Rail is publically funded pretty much everywhere (i.e. it doesn't make a direct profit if you factor in infrastruture costs). Just because the market won't pay for it doesn't mean that it isn't worthwhile.
Japanese rail is almost all privately owned and operated, to the best of my knowledge. It makes its profits off of capturing the increase in land value by being the landlord around its rail stations. That model is illegal in the US so rail has to be subsidised.
>Rail is publically funded pretty much everywhere (i.e. it doesn't make a direct profit if you factor in infrastruture costs).
You could argue that there are positive externalities to building high speed rail that make the public funding worth it. For commuter trains it's reduced congestion and cheaper housing (allowing people to move to the suburbs). Thus a train service can operate at a loss while still making money at a societal level.
What purpose does high speed rail serve that isn't mostly covered by planes?
The big problem with planes is that an hour long trip takes three hours. 1 hour to enter the airport, 1 hour to fly, 1 hour to exit the airport.
Sometimes you can drive somewhere faster than you can fly there, entirely because of all the setup and teardown implied by a flight. It’s this intermediate distance travel where high speed rail really shines.
Anything can be said to be “worthwhile,” a political rather than an economic characterization commonly followed by handwavy appeals to unidentified stakeholders, intangible dividends, and vague but supposedly urgent need.
If customers are unwilling to pay the asking price for an offering, the value proposition is off. Perhaps the model is bad, the price too expensive, or the terms old-fashioned. “The market” is individuals seeking mutually beneficial trades: greedy capitalists and greedy consumers. If the trades aren’t happening, the necessary mutual benefit is not present. Forcing people to render services or accept services for terms they wouldn’t voluntarily agree to is not freedom.
> If the trades aren’t happening, the necessary mutual benefit is not present.
Then why does the US governement fund roads? Because there's a collective bargaining / coordination problem. It benefits us overall if we have them, but that doesn't mean that a profit could be usefully generated from maintaining them, or that this is the best way of running the system (we want to maximise use of the infrastructure, not discourage use with high usage tariffs).
The is fundamentally an economic argument, albeit one that recognises value beyond monetary value.
In the early days of the U.S., privately funded roads run for profit definitely existed. There are government-run toll highways that make money in excess of their maintenance costs, which suggests it should still be possible, if the government didn't already have the prime routes.
At any rate, the interstate highway system was a project to make the transportation network more robust for the purposes of national defense, inspired by the German autobahn. Centrally planned solutions to make the U.S. more like Europe won't always have the expected consequences.
Second, China's population density is not high compared to inhabited parts of the U.S. Eg. even though most of California is uninhabitable, it has 50% higher population density.
I'll file that under "being propped up by the government"
> China's population density is not high compared to inhabited parts of the U.S.
I have no doubt that there are profitable HSR lines in china, just like there are in europe. The question is whether we would still get an "impressive" number if we cull all the non-profitable ones (the one stretching to xinjiang come to mind).
My wife and I took a trip to the middle of nowhere in Wales last fall. Train to Cardiff from London, then from Cardiff to our little cottage in the Pembrokeshire coast, I drove for 2+ hours in a rental car, learning to drive on the left.
The day after we arrived, we learned we could have caught a train to Fishguard, a tiny village nearby, and then the local bus would have gotten us within a ten minute walk from our rental house. It probably would have even been faster and cheaper than the car we rented. It sure would have been less stressful for me.
It's not just that the cities are more walkable. It's a whole culture that says cars should not be required to live a full life.
Yes and no; as a Brit I would probably have chosen a car for that trip, because local buses are infrequent and unreliable. Trips other than via London are often easier by car.
The UK never really had the space to develop US-style suburban sprawl, even in its designed car-centric new towns like Milton Keynes.
Yeah. People I know in the UK outside of London generally own cars. And my personal recent experience with doing long distance walks in England over the past few years is that, while it's mostly been possible to get to the beginning and end of routes with public transit (because the routes are chosen with that in mind), busses can start to get scarce and, in practice, I've ended up taking taxis at times. I've also had to take a taxi when I've needed to skip a day walking for some reason--or gotten a ride from an inn owner.
The UK is certainly better than the US in general for having transport options but you get outside of cities and it starts getting a lot harder to efficiently travel around without a car.
I've driven left-hand automatic and manual in England and I was fine in such locations as Trafalgar Square (within ULEZ now) and BFE Worcestershire. Once I learned the pedals aren't switched it became 300% easier.
Contrary to popular opinion on Internet forums, almost all car trips in the US are less than thirty miles long and about 80% of all trips are less than ten miles long despite the country being pretty big.
What I found interesting is that in the US the government had a huge role with developing the rail network while in the UK it was entirely done by the private sector.
I'm from the Netherlands where the rail network started out as a state owned company. It then got privatized by splitting ownership horizontally. Meaning one company owns the rail network while other companies provide train services on top of that network. This in contrast to Japan where ownership is split vertically. Multiple companies owning sections of the network including the train services. It amazes me that the Japanese model is able to achieve their famous punctuality. To see multiple privately owned companies working together in perfect harmony. In the Netherlands the railway system still needs state funding every year. I don't see how we could ever transition to the Japanese model. Which is a shame.
I think the optimal solution needn't and shouldn't be government designed.
To see countries like Norway where the state is subsidizing electric cars. Then meanwhile it's the state owned company Equinor still extracting huge amounts of oil for export. That oil might not get burned in Norway. But it's going to be burnt somewhere regardless how clean the energy in Norway is. Achieving clean transportation in one country doesn't mean we're solving the CO2 problem if the states are still allowing oil to be extracted and exported to other countries.
The problem is perhaps best solved by achieving renewable energy sources. Either through electricity or producing renewable (combustible) fuel sources.
You are now comparing a star-form rail network in the Netherlands that runs in a country of 300km by 400km to a fish-grate network that runs in Japan.
Also, the famous punctuality comes from the Japanese High Speed train network, a network purpose built for a single model of train. There are no intersections, road crossings or freight or slow trains on that network.
Obviously any Dutch train would also fare well on a purpose built track.
But our tracks are shared with trains from the NS (Dutch Rail) as well as trains from the German (Arriva) and French (Veolia) operators, the German (ICE), French (TGV) and British (EuroStar) High Speed trains, thousands of tons of freight from DB Cargo and several other regional players.
You're just comparing Apples and Oranges when you compare our open, star shaped rail grid to the Japanese purposebuilt Shinkansen
I'm not just comparing the Shinkansen. I'm comparing the whole Japanese network in its entirety. It isn't just a fish-grate network. It expands deep into the rural areas where it's highly integrated. Indeed they have multiple forms of trains and railways optimized for each purpose.
If you take the train in Japan you might pass through numerous operators and types of railways. It's why it's so complicated to buy a ticket there.
I'm comparing rail networks with rail networks and different forms of ownership. Why wouldn't I be allowed to make that comparison?
You are allowed to compare it but just make sure to compare the right numbers. The stereotype 'apology for 20 seconds delay' and stuff are all from high speed trains. Not from regular tracks.
>In the Netherlands the railway system still needs state funding every year. I don't see how we could ever transition to the Japanese model. Which is a shame.
Other than that you seem to see the Japanese system as some end goal that we should all try to achieve: but the Dutch system is already in the top 3 of punctuality as it is today.
It does require some subsidies, but then so do roads or the military. It's just because it's not there to make a profit but to be an enabler of economic growth.
It's also a cultural thing in Japan to be honorable with the service you provide. If a critical connection in Japan gets delayed it can have huge impact. Thanks to the vertical split of ownership you can always blame a specific operator for some outage. In Holland we often see a blame game where the operator blames the network owner. The network owner pretty much has a monopoly here.
> the Dutch system is already in the top 3 of punctuality
I've oftentimes tried to find such numbers but have never been successful. There's some efforts that attempt to compare European countries (I think Holland is not 3rd here). But not worldwide comparisons. The problem is also that countries have different ideas on what constitutes a train being "on time".
Meanwhile in Europe 76% of all freight transport is still happening on the road. In Holland 72% of all private person-kilometers are happening on the road. Switzerland has an amazing rail network which is state owned (although it started out from privately owned companies). But also in Switzerland 75% of all person-kilometers are on the road.
Let's say we'd want to get those trucks off the road and onto our wonderful railway network. I think it wouldn't even be possible. Could we run all those freight trains on the same railways as the passenger trains? We'd probably need separate specialized lines. Then we need to quadruple its capacity to accommodate for all the road kilometers.
How much would that cost? Perhaps it's cheaper to subsidize electric vehicles.
I'm not particularly against trains. Fine if it's viable. But I don't see how it will become the answer to the global warming problem. Also because of the other arguments mentioned in this thread (The hub and spokes model being inefficient).
Roads are obviously worse but I’m not sure about airplanes.
They’re measuring energy per passenger/km but I think ignoring the cost of building the infrastructure (the “get data” link is down). For roads and railways infrastructure investments are huge, both initial construction and then maintenance. Not only in dollars, in CO2 as well.
Arguably, two planes crashed and we put hundreds of planes out of service worldwide just in case until we could fix it.
Also, as someone who's been in an Amtrak derailment: The severity of the derailment matters a lot. Many are small, and trains can go right around them on the adjacent track. Also note that derailments are much less common in countries with more modern, higher quality rail infrastructure.
Trains aren't hurricane proof either so we can take those right off the table. Of the rest, it takes very exceptional storms to blockade an airport for more than a few minutes. Delays that occur because of snow and fog are not because the commercial airliners can't fly in those conditions, but because the ground infrastructure can't clear the snow quickly enough, or because the reduction in visibility means increasing separation requirements on approach to landing and therefore reduces overall throughput. In places where it snows a lot there exists sufficient infrastructure to handle it (Chicago, Denver, Moscow). Even thunderstorms are not typically a big problem for commercial airliners and their airports; the controllers declare holds while the storm passes directly overhead and they're back in business in under an hour. And hubs that systematically are hammered by storms aren't hubs for much longer, a luxury that any railroad executive would kill for.
This is particularly impressive if you compare average airliner delays to average Amtrak delays.
Modern airliners are remarkably good at handling typical bad weather.
Exceptional storms still happen a lot more often than train derailments. It doesn't take a hurricane.
I was in one of the last flights to land at EWR on February 25 before all the area airports were closed for 12 hours. From the ground it was a moderately windy day. In the air, it was scary as hell, and the first time I vomited on a plane, with about a quarter of the other passengers.
There were no derailments or train delays that day.
> because the ground infrastructure can't clear the snow quickly enough, or because the reduction in visibility means increasing separation requirements
Only true for airports in the middle of big flat nothing. If there're mountains around, bad weather or visibility makes landing too unsafe, unacceptably so for commercial airlines.
Even volcanic eruptions crop up with surprising frequency and result in vast disruptions to air traffic. Those disruptions can last for weeks and can shut down a single hub or potentially multiple hubs across a region depending on which way the ash cloud blows.
As an example, every few years the volcano on Bali comes to life and hundreds, if not thousands, of flights get delayed or canceled.
Rail requires significant investment to overcome the last mile problem, meaning the problem that often you need to walk the last mile from the station to your destination. Some may scoff at this but it is a major deterrent. Combine this with ride sharing apps and rail transit use has actually declined in the US in the past several years.
The last-mile problem is also a significant issue for freight rail. US rail companies have been abandoning low-traffic and branch lines for years, because the revenue from the sparse traffic doesn't cover the infrastructure maintenance costs.
Being an efficient user of energy is not the same thing as being an efficient end-to-end mover of goods.
The best freight rail money is in "unit trains", long trains with a single type of cargo with a single destination -- the canonical example is coal trains from Wyoming heading for power stations in the midwest, which makes good use of continent-spanning "trunk" infrastructure and avoids the "first mile" collection expense and the "last mile" disbursement expense. Trains are very good at that sort of thing.
I really want a ride-sharing app that can plan a trip across transit modes, send me somewhere by train, then have a car waiting to take me that last mile.
My biggest issue is train costs. I live in Edinburgh, and I can fly to London in 6 weeks for £19, or I can get the train for £160. The overall travel time is roughly the same, but at 6 times the price it can be very hard to justify. Especially when you have to travel with more than one person.
Why is it so absurdly expensive in the UK? Privatization?
Looks like that trip takes almost 4.5 hours. For comparison, a train trip from Groningen to Vlissingen in the Netherlands (about as far as you can go) takes a similar time but costs only 26.50 euros each way, whenever you get a ticket. It's only about 16 euros if you've got one of the discount subscriptions.
Prices have steadily climbed since BR was privatised, and that puts people off of using rail meaning the prices have to go higher to get the money back.
Agreed--I want to take trains, but when I can fly somewhere and buy 10x the carbon offsets for the difference between the plane/train costs, well...I'm going to fly.
The figures given in on the site are taken from actual usage and so include the fact that buses tend to stop and go more than trains, are less likely to be full, etc. That's a useful view but it's good to look at the physics based maximum efficiency when full view too. I really, really recommend Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air[1] for getting a good sense of the numbers right now the chart on vehicle efficiencies[2]
This is rather obvious and has always been a major advantage of rail. The problem is the capital costs and real estate requirements of building the rail lines, especially when locations are far apart and there's already existing infrastructure that needs attention.
When you think of an American state with a growing population you can take the existing infrastructure as a given and plan for rail for your new capacity. Unless you are willing to say we're just not going to add transportation capacity for our new citizens, you face a choice of road, rail, or air. Rail is often a good choice.
As for "far apart" this seems irrelevant. Ohio has a greater population density than does Spain, but Columbus, Ohio's principal city, hasn't had a passenger train in 42 years while Cordoba, with half the population, enjoys ten trains per hour service including a high-speed train to Sevilla, Madrid, and Malaga. Anybody could build a Columbus-Dayton-Indianapolis high-speed rail line but we lack the will to do it.
Where HSR excels is in being able to service several city pairs on a single line. The Northeast Corridor is a great example: you can have a single train service all pairs of {Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, NYC, Boston} at negligible extra expense in time and money. Thus you can add in stops like Providence, which don't generate all that many trips on their own, simply because it is literally on the way to where you're going.
The problem with the US Midwest is that there's a lot of these third-tier cities, but you have to go out of your way to connect them. Who wants to go between Columbus and Indianapolis--the highway between the two cities is pretty empty. Even worse, the few collinear city triples you can come up with all completely miss the primary destination of the entire region, Chicago. If you want to go from Chicago to Columbus, Indianapolis, and especially Dayton, are not on your way.
> Who wants to go between Columbus and Indianapolis--the highway between the two cities is pretty empty.
This strikes me as the main problem with the mindset around HSR. Consider e.g., Madison, Wisconsin.
Milwaukee would have a much more vibrant and dynamic ecosystem if undergrads/PhD students/professors could get to/from meetings with investors in MLK/CHI and be back for afternoon classes. Or continue internships/meetings during the school year.
There are enormous inefficiencies (and corresponding brain drain) caused by the fact that the region's center of innovation is 1+ hours by car away from the region's center of finance.
An MLK <-> CHI <-> Madison rail line would change the dynamics of the entire state's economy. Simply counting cars on the roads between those cities in the present ignores how HSR changes the entire dynamic in a very qualitative way.
The requirement for colinearity seems like something you made up. And, you don’t gauge travel demand for one mode based on another. They didn’t build the Golden Gate Bridge because there were many people swimming to Marin. Two well-connected cities with robust economies will enjoy strong travel demand.
There are many things that factor into how likely HSR is to be used. Intercity travel demand is one of the chief metrics, but you also have to consider the quality of intracity public transport. Indianapolis and Columbus as a city pair simply does not score very well on this metric; you'd put the billions of dollars investment to much better use elsewhere.
The point about collinearity is that you can make a strong demand by combining many individually weak demands. And this is the problem in the Midwest: the strong demand is Chicago, and it has a lot of moderate demand endpoints, such as St. Louis, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Detroit. But the real strong city pair is Chicago/NYC, which is already at the extreme margins of acceptable time, which means substantial detours to hook up the lesser demand centers is going to kill ridership.
Rail is expensive to build and maintain, and stations even more so. The lack of freedom of a car means the train must stop where people want to go and this creates a lot of complexity in how routes are connected, the size and number of trains, service hours, total throughput, ticket prices, and most critically having effective last-mile transit so people can actually get to the station to use the train.
Ride sharing may fill that last-mile today but overall the US is too big and spread out both between and within cities to for trains to be as viable as they are in Europe where everything is much closer together.
I took the train from Tucson to New Orleans last week. The train cars are 25 years old and in OK shape, the food was edible but overpriced (even with a vegan option), but all above the luggage racks there were streaks of dirt, where vacuuming had taken place but apparently not a complete job. The train arrived about 5 hours late and I felt compelled to apologize to the British couple seated next to me on behalf of the USA, after asking them if nationalized British Rail was this bad in the seventies.
Fun anecdote here. Just last month my wife and I were in Barcelona and we needed to go to Madrid. She had her company buy a plane ticket and I took the train. We left at the exact same time and I took 100% public transportation and she had a car service on both ends and a plane ticket.
I made it to our destination across the town from the Madrid central 45 minutes before she did.
And taken the lion's share of London to Paris, which was also huge. But a combination of high-speed day trains and low-cost air has killed off many of the very long distance trains and most of Europe's sleeper services. So it's a bit of a mixed bag.
I don't think this era is going to last much longer. Something has to give if we want to make any headway on climate goals, and increasing air travel prices is one of the more obvious steps.
Right now train travel is cheap if you plan ahead and have the right discount cards and some flexibility regarding time. Otherwise, not so much. But then again, this is true for flying as well.
Yeah, I don't know. I thought about going from Barcelona to Malaga by train because I love trains, but it was 10x more expensive than one of these low-cost flights.
Ryanair rarely flies directly to or from cities, you nearly always need to make additional connections which makes it pretty useless for business travel.
This won't happen. Maglev is a technology that's actually feasible and fast, and has been under research and testing since the 70s. Chuo Shinkansen between Tokyo and Nagoya is currently under construction and they're basically tunneling in a straight line through all the mountains. This is what everyone should be doing instead of unproven Hyperloop tech.
The Hyperloop idea is over a century old and has never been viable yet, and never will be until construction and energy costs drop by magnitudes. It definitely isn't feasible in any place where a regular railway doesn't already work.
I don't think distance is a relevant factor: train tracks cost about the same as a two-lane highway while having higher capacity. Stations are fairly expensive, but when locations are far apart that's not a significant factor.
The bigger problem is that you can't profitably service low-demand routes with trains. Trains excel on high-demand routes but when you only want to move 20 people per hour a road has much lower operating costs.
I think this is also a big issue in state optimization of where to build trains. It is impossible[1] to build a speculative train route to try and gauge possibility so expansion tends to be quite conservative and slow, which is well warranted - additionally there are some compounding usage factors that make line placement hard even for buses.
If a new bus line is made available users are likely going to slowly convert to using it - and an area with good bus service is going to encourage residents[1] that want to take advantage of that service.
[1] In the history of the US, for example, train stations literally grew their own demand in many cases, causing non-existent or tiny towns to grow due to the availability of service.
The difference is that roadways allow anyone to stop whenever and wherever they need to, while a railway requires stations to be strategically placed.
Two major cities with high traffic between them can seem ideal but still not work out because people need effective last-mile transport too, and they have other places where they want go that requires a car.
Never thought of that. Just replace the roads with rails. Remove redundant links in the highway network. Sounds like a job for a graph algorithm straight out of CS 261.
I'm not sure you can just replace highways with railroads. Changing modes isn't completely free--you have to have enough parking for passengers, freight handling equipment for freight, and in some cases, you might have to load entire vehicles onto railcars. This cancels out a lot of the benefits of rail.
But, you can definitely reuse or expand the same right-of-way you had for some of the trunk highways and run rail alongside it.
Elsewhere in this thread and in previous discussions there has been this notion that there isn't the room for rail, buying up the land would be too expensive and so on.
For a lot of the US interstate there is this huge median between the two directions of the highway. In Europe you are lucky if the median is the width of a lane, in the US it can be a vast distance to the opposing traffic. Why they didn't build the interstate system with rail lines down the middle just for service reasons is a reflection on the car mad thinking that went with the era.
If you are driving in a car then you have to hold this steering wheel thing the whole time. Any moment of inattention and your number is up. Rail just automates that problem away, no Elon Musk needed. It should be a no-brainer. You should be able to hop onto the interstate and put your car on a flatbed railcar and zip along at 125mph until your destination, halving your drive time and being able to read the paper for a couple of hours instead of spending our hours holding that round thing. Even if you had to wait half an hour or an hour for the next flatbed train thing then it would still be worth it.
There is usually some power line following an interstate highway. I know that power gets sent along at 100's of thousands of volts but why can't the train tracks be the power 'cables' too? With some redundancy built in.
As it turned out America has just rubber wheeled V8 things trundling along at 55 mph between cities, at every opportunity for efficiency this was denied. The aero of cars in America during the last century made bricks look like the perfect aerodynamic shape.
As a European the state of the railways is shocking. We know from our history books about the golden spike somewhere in Utah and how amazing the transcontinental railroad was. But then, until you go to America, you don't realise that they haven't updated the network since. The smallest branch line in Europe has two sets of tracks, commuter towns have four to let the fast trains through. But then in America you have thousands of miles where it is just the one set of tracks. The land is not a shortage problem and you just wonder why over the last century or so they haven't bothered to put in an extra set of tracks so train traffic can be 'bi-directional'. It makes no sense at all. Then, through the Rockies the train slows down to something like ten miles an hour to inch over some trestle bridge that looks like it is a prop from an old Western movie. But that is fast. The train - Amtrak - will stop off for an hour to let some coal train chunter through on the single line. That would never happen in Europe.
Once I waited 8 hours for a train in America. There were no other trains on the track of the passenger variety during that time. In the rest of the world 8 minutes of delay means you have been badly let down and deserve a ticket refund. 8 hours - really? No wonder nobody travels on Amtrak. It is a joke, a bit like they only put it on for disabled people and didn't get the memo about accessibility.
I sat for two hours outside New Orleans last week watching freight trains cross the bridge ahead of us when we were just 10 unobstructed minutes from arrival. Right now passenger service to Chicago is suspended for the near future because the trestle (which is single track wooden but being replaced by a double-track concrete one of similar height (!)) is at risk of being overtopped by the flood relief spillway - there’s a rail replacement bus to Jackson (which itself had a fire enroute last month). Oh, and good luck finding out about this from Amtrak’s website - all it tells you is the train is cancelled and they’ve laid on a bus.
I find interesting that all these analyses of transportation modes generally fail to take into account the bootstrap and maintenance cost of the infrastructure. Roads are absolutely awful in terms of carbon cost, why isn't there more that takes this into account?
Maybe if you're talking about a specific type of start up cost where toll revenues from initial infra pays for later construction. Probably just loose usage.
I think one of the biggest issues that prevent making things better for passengers isn't necessarily the cost of building the infrastructure, but the acceptability of the status quo. The benefit to going with rail isn't dramatic enough to inspire urgency.
I really think it would be useful to completely eliminate most vehicles from city centers. Only mass transit would be allowed, and walking/cycling would be prioritized over that. People would go to one of the parking lots (which would also be train stations) outside the city and take mass transit to go to some common hub of the city. Since driving directly to your destination is no longer an option, catching a train closer to your house and improving mass transit automatically becomes important, and lower pollution and traffic within cities will improve many aspects of city living. Also, since roads would be much smaller, buildings can be built more densely, which improves walkability and livability of cities.
However, people are currently addicted to cars, so the conversation will likely never happen.
As others have stated, the layout of a city presents enormous issues WRT public transport rollout.
If you take a train into a major metropolitan city like London you're sorted. You have a plethora of transport options available. For an area of at least five miles around the mainline station you come in to, buses are very frequent, a subway probably exists, other trains will exist, taxis/Uber will be easy, and so on.
Contrast that with taking a train to a random Northern town in the UK. You can get there, sure. Now what? You're miles walk from anything, it's all a big car-like suburban layout unless the specific thing you're visiting happens to be in the old town.
I generally tend to drive when visiting family for that reason alone, because otherwise it takes four or five times longer (not an exaggeration at all) to get anywhere once you're there. A 10-15 minute drive could be a 50 minute bus journey.
Sounds good, but it's hard to see into the details. In the US,cars & light trucks constitute about 18% of energy use. But what percentage of that use is for travel that could move over to rail? (I'd wager that driving around town is the biggest chunk.)
Further: should all US cars go renewable electric, that seems preferable to diesel-electric rail emissions. The railroads got hit hard back when autos came along a century ago, something similar might happen here.
The article pointed at this 'Transportation Energy Data Book' (PDF) available), which is largely petroleum-oriented.
https://cta.ornl.gov/data/download37.shtml. Throws a lot of data out, but no big picture in there. It DID note that US rail freight uses about 1.1% of petroleum, which might be impressive?
Development follows transportation, and since the main method of travel in the U.S. has been rubber tires and individual vehicles for the last 80 years, naturally a train can't service a whole suburb or exurb efficiently.
Trains have trouble in the U.S. because the technology allows--even requires-- central planning and authority on an active, everyday basis. If the transportation department goes on strike, we in cars keep driving. Not so for trains. Also it's not a fair fight to have a public decentralized asphalt road system compete with a highly regulated centralized private rail system. It's not a pure technology vs. technology battle-- the political aspects dominate.
Article reminded me of this YT video from Wendover Productions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9poImReDFeY. It covers many of the same topics with specific numbers used for comparisons in fares and fuel usage.
Trains might be more efficient in terms of energy, but sadly they are much more expensive (here in germany), than going by car. (except for some special fares)
And the car goes anywhere, anytime and the train does not. So no wonder, also here, for most people the car is the choice number one.
Does anyone know a study that would look into all the implicit subsidies? Externalities in terms of environmental impact, building of roads/rails from general taxes, direct subsidies. Maybe cars wouldn’t be as cheap if all these things would be taken into account.
Just as important is the ease of using trains but, in some cases, this just doesn't happen.
I would often travel from St. Louis to Chicago for business and would think nothing of taking the train but I quickly realized how unreliable it was. A cold day froze the tracks making my five-hour ride a twelve hour one. When commercial traffic refused to let us pass through a couple of times, waiting for a pass through was the straw that broke that back and no longer think once about taking the train when my car gets me there just as fast at a more convenient time.
Not that they don't make mistakes, but trains are another thing China got right and get very little credit for internationally. 25 year plan, baby. In the words of Bezos: Still day 1. Ha!
Here in New Zealand, I can drive most places cheaper than I can take a train. That's one person per vehicle vs a train car full of people. I just can't figure that one out.
The cost of a train ticket will include the proportional cost of maintaining the rail network, the deprecation cost of the train and the passenger cars, staff to run it, along with a tidy profit.
You are most likely comparing it to the cost of petrol, which is not the full costs of driving a car.
Everyone always forgets to take into account the deprecation on your car, running costs, fixed costs (WoF, rego). For tax purposes, IRD estimates the true costs per km (including fuel) to be 76c.
Using that 76c per km rate, your car trip is suddenly costing way more than the train ticket.
Additionally, there is construction and the maintenance cost of the road network itself. That's all paid for by the government out of your rego and income taxes. Kiwirail is required to include that in their ticket costs, but it's hidden from drivers.
Today US, I believe, is at point of no return. I highly doubt we will see any considerable train system modernization, comparable to the Asian nations, EU, or, maybe, even Africa.
>When journey times are less than four hours, people usually prefer to travel by train instead of alternative options, such as air or road.
I'm sure the airport security theater plays no small part in this. Would you rather sit on a train for four hours or spend two hours at an airport, get treated like cattle, get told you can't bring X Y or Z past security, get felt up by a stranger, and in a cramped tube for an hour? I'll take the train every time.
A pedelec (human-electric hybrid) on dirt roads is considerably more energy efficient (Wh/km/passenger) than trains even before factoring in the embedded energy of the vast infrastructure rail needs.
This article is irritating in that it doesn't give a balanced and useful view of the transportation trade offs. Very likely the author is aware of them but chooses to sweep under the carpet what doesn't suit his narrative.
A few observations to balance things out. First, rail is not the cheapest way to move freight, ships are by far, but rail is a distant second.
Rail obviously requires a lot of upkeep on the tracks, in addition to fuel and maintenance, whereas ships and planes have very little cost to maintain the fluids they travel in.
Electric transport on highways will quickly become very much cheaper than it is now because electric motors are much more efficient than fuel motors, solar and wind electricity costs are dropping precipitously, maintenance of electric motors is much less than fuel motors. Yes the roads still have to be maintained and heavier trucks mean much more maintenance.
Clearly, optimal transportation and shipping requires a hierarchy of trade offs that depend primarily upon scale. Two large cities that are 200 miles apart (eg New York and Boston) can support the overhead of a passenger rail connection. On the other hand San Francisco and New York, while large are too far apart, while another pair of cities might be 200 miles apart but the city populations are too small to support the rain infrastructure.
At the other end of the scale, an individual might take their bicycle on a 2 mile trip to the post office but would take their car on a 2 mile trip for the week's groceries.
Between these two extremes is a hierarchy of trade offs and there is no "one size fits all". Not even close. Rail is not the solution to all our transport problems. Neither are cars or bicycles. Each has its niche. If ships had legs then they might come close but unfortunately they don't, not to mention they are kind of slow.
So it's complicated but some trends might be usefully be predicted. Short haul flights will likely become cheaper as these planes become electrified and both energy and maintenance costs drop significantly. Trucking will become electrified and will compete even more effectively against trains and planes unless there is a labor shortage. Trains will continue to do what they are good at, long haul of heavy commodities and passenger service on intense routes. Electric cars will have lower fuel and maintenance costs so automobile miles will increase.
Perhaps the sum total of all this will mean that medium and smaller sized cities will become more competitive vis a vis their larger cousins over the next 50 years.
...When studying the carbon cycle of trains, they never study the externalities properly. Ground footprint of tracks, maintenance, high-speed, I do grow tired of improper studies.
Deisel freight trains are huge poluters with regard to particulate matter (PM). This actually causes cancer as opposed to CO2. Reducing PM without impacting fuel efficiency significantly is possible but requires investment. https://www.epa.nsw.gov.au/-/media/epa/corporate-site/resour...
Same goes for diesel trucks / busses. This type of change throughout the world would really improve people’s lives immediately.
However PM is a fairly localized pollution that doesn't spread far. I don't think diesel trains that drive through the middle of nowhere are that bad. Near population centers it would be preferable to switch to electric locomotives.
There's a handful of hybrid trains in Japan that are electric in urban areas and use a diesel generator in rural parts of the route.
A quick search didn't reveal any running North America but considering diesel locomotives have mostly used diesel generators and electric motors since the 70s, it's not a stretch to think about implementation there.
Electric vehicles backed by sustainable power, when we reach that distant but ever-nearing goal, will be pretty good. Not as fast as flying but maybe we’ll get practical commercial passenger electric aircraft at some point.
On the delivery of goods side of things, the Tesla Semi should also be a game changer. Efficient and door to door.
For trains, I’d love to see how much could be done with, say, a dedicated power (battery) car per pure electric locomotive. I’m not claiming this would be a win; it might be too heavy. But it would be interesting to know.
Since were on the subject of proposing insane and impractical solutions to global warming ive been contemplating ways we could somehow still use up all the oil and yet not contribute to global warming.
One crazy idea is that we build a space elevator out of carbon nanotubes, and then make a core component of it act as a pump to suck up oil and water from sea level all the way up into the outer regions of our atmosphere and then we run the steam powered electrical generators up there and send the electricity back down the elevator.
Now this might sound crazy but lets seriously consider what we have to gain by this.
1. Physics are totally on our side in space. In a steam powered generator, the steam turns one side of the turbine and then must escape out to ensure too much back pressure doesnt build up and grind things to a halt. Along with this steam we also expel out the greenhouse gases generated from burning the fuel with it.
The thing is once we expel the steam and CO2 it goes out in a mixture and we cant really do a whole lot to sustainably trap it, store it until it cools off, and just reuse it, and all the while figure out some way to separate out the greenhouse gases and try to do something with it so we dont have to just release it into the air.
The thing is, burning oil to produce steam in space solves a lot of problems like this for us due to the physical properties how things work in the vacuum of space vs where there is no atmospheric pressure.
1. If you expel a mixture of steam and C02 into the cold vacuum space the water vapor will rapidly turn into liquid and then solid while the greenhouse gases remain gaseous. This leads to easier methods of filtration and water recycling.
The C02 is forced out into space and the water stays to be sent back down.
2. Wait, sent back down?
Yes because to make the pump work up without too much energy being required to suck it up against the power of Earth's gravitational pull (think of this like trying to suck a think milkshake through a straw a mile long) its best to utilize the downward pull of gravity to aide us in the process. Thus creating a vacuum.
3. When we run out of oil we can send up nuclear fuel next and just shoot the spent highly radioactive fuel that's no longer useful to us into space too.
4. The electricity generated can be used to power the electromagnetic elevator up and down.
5. We'll need a space elevator to make solar sails work anyways. We might as well utilize it to generate energy in every we can.
6. If any of this manages to blow up on us the explosion happens hella far away from us.
7. Surface level renewable power sources like wind, hydroelectric, and solar are all things we can utilize effectively assuming we build it in the most optimal place. (my best guess is somewhere in the ocean just south of Alaska)
Nationalistic swipes will get you banned here, regardless of which nation you're going after, so please don't. Among other things, it breaks the site guideline against flamebait.
Individual independence and convenience were a goal in American culture the middle of the 20th century, until the externalities of that were understand.
There's some famous interview - can't remember with who - about how at the time getting a car gave incredible freedom nobody had experienced before. It was a big part of how people saw the American dream in the last century, before the impact was understood.
> how at the time getting a car gave incredible freedom nobody had experienced before
It's not just "at the time" - it still does that, and I'm saying this as an immigrant from a society that relies much more on public transport. I'm not disputing the impact, but in these discussions, it's often presented as price that's paid for no gains of note, and that's just not true. Whether they're worth the cost is another discussion.
I sure don't see it that way. Let me know when we invent something that can affordably and reliably take me to the base of mountains for hikes (real hikes, not shitty crowded garbage like Lake 22 or Mount Tam).
> Let me know when we invent something that can affordably and reliably take me to the base of mountains for hikes (real hikes, not shitty crowded garbage like Lake 22 or Mount Tam).
If you visit Switzerland, you'll find this is an extremely solved problem.
Getting to a particular mountain is solved. This isn't a comparison of some tourist experience in a country the size of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area. Its about the freedom to explore our great national parks, etc.
> Its about the freedom to explore our great national parks, etc.
No one's getting rid of that freedom. Cars are still legal and commonly used in Switzerland.
The point is that effective public transportation networks can reduce the need for cars (and the resulting pollution, congestion, noise, etc.), particularly in populated areas. Instead of a family needing to own two cars because reaching the grocery store and kids' school requires a drive, a family might need just one, or even be able to just rent one for a weekend of camping.
One of the best things about the Swiss system is the close integration between different modes of transport, even across different operators. Bus schedules are set up so they drop you off right before the train comes, and they leave just after it drops off its passengers, so you're not sitting around for an hour awaiting a connection.
Can you elaborate on how my feet would help get me to remote trailheads? Even if buses took me directly to the dirt roads, it's often another 20 miles to the trailhead itself. Are you suggesting I take unreliable 3 to 5 hours one way buses and then walk for 6 hours on a dirt road just to get to a good mountain climb?
Yes. Or you could just keep using personal vehicles and complain about the lack of alternatives.
The only issue I have with your plan is that while walking on that dirt road I'd have to deal with people that don't care for pedestrians using their roads meant for vehicles.
Anyone who doesn't get free parking, or doesn't want to spend their time and money maintaining a personal vehicle, but is coerced into doing so by society that was built around them.
Land has been completely irrelevant to the success of the entire information economy and the US still dominates that. It has nothing to do with a “superior moral fiber”, it’s about having an environment that promotes innovation and businesses based on new innovations.
How fast is it? Prior to the first Gulf War, airport security didn’t impose long waits and significantly tilting the balance away from trains. On the freight side, companies have to keep product on the books if it’s on some rail car vs. having been delivered by truck the day before.
The US has extensive rail coverage, where geographically feasible, and has had such since the 1800s. Perhaps the system grew before the present US was entirely assembled, therefore, and could use a rethinking?
None. That's the point. Just because something is cleaner does not make it practical. Passenger rail isn't happening in the USA. It would take huge investment, and flying would always win on route flexibility. Once you build a rail line you're pretty committed to it. Flight routes can be changed on demand. Just get over it. We'll never see widespread intercity rail in the USA.
NYC, LA, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Washington DC, Miami, Philadelphia, and Atlanta.
You could profitably run high-speed rail between NYC and DC, hitting Philadelphia on the way. Amtrak does run a sort of high speed service on this route.
There's a study underway for a privately funded high-speed rail connecting Dallas and Houston.
Miami to Atlanta is at the edge of what might make sense.
Sizable metro areas can decline, Detroit is now 1/3 the size that it was at its peak in the 1960s. The railway station was abandoned.
HSR is a viable alternative to flights. Similar travel times are possible.
Electrified rail is a viable alternative to suburb <-> urban center commutes. Similar/better travel times are possible.
And in both cases rail is much more pleasant. E.g., ICE trains are way nicer airplanes -- anyone who thinks otherwise has never been on an ICE train or really enjoys being punished.
I also prefer DB trains to being a passenger in a car on an interstate. Trains, when well-done, are much quieter, a much smoother ride, have much more comfortable seats, and offer the option to stand up and stretch if you feel like it.
Cycling is never a replacement for either of those two use cases.
> HSR is a viable alternative to flights. Similar travel times are possible.
It's a viable alternative to short-haul flights. Boston to Las Vegas, San Diego, San Francisco, or Seattle is not really competitive by rail, even if the US had any high-speed rail.
Whataboutism is escapist, used to sow discord, and as such is a method of division commonly used to attempt the derailment [ha] of an otherwise useful discussion.
