Waiting 10-30 minutes for a train isn't a technological consequence of rail transportation, it's a symptom of a catastrophically inept transit agency.
What's stopping, say, Caltrain, from running trains at peak frequency all day? Incompetent leadership. They have the trains (which spend all day sitting idle _at_ terminus platforms), the have the crew (who also sit idle during the day), they have the capacity to run more trains off peak. They made a deliberate choice to not run the trains.
You might make the case that running more trains off-peak would increase maintenance costs. But I would wager that such maintenance costs pale in comparison to the cost of building enough platforms at your downtown termini to store trains all day. Moreover who cares about maintenance costs? It's insane to think that public transit should be profitable.
> You might make the case that running more trains off-peak would increase maintenance costs.
Alon Levy has done the math [1] and found that providing extra off-peak service is about 20% the cost of providing extra peak service, since the capital costs and labor costs dominate the actual operational costs.
Today Caltrain can't run more trains because diesel locomotives are too expensive and slow, and the current route has no passing tracks which makes scheduling hard to work in with express trains, which are needed to stay competitive to commuters. When they move to more modern EMU trains over the next couple years, they will be able run with 10 minute headways, potentially down to 6 minutes if you include the blended service with the CAHSR trains.
But that only solves the waiting-for-a-train problem. Regional train line still have trouble keeping up with expressways because of the time needed slow down, wait, and then accelerate up to speed at each station. Lighter rolling stock can make this a little bit better, but not dramatically; BART has always used relatively light EMUs and it still can only average around 55 km/h. Even the most fanciful of Caltrain upgrades would have a top speed of 180 km/h, which means they'd really be lucky to average 100 km/h on a train making every stop between San Jose and San Fransisco. Express trains would be slightly better (perhaps using the HSR trains to do SJ<->SF nonstop in ~30 minutes) but that could only cover a subset of trips. For most trips, if you can avoid terrible traffic, driving will remain faster.
Well, they don't run them all day because of the cost of the use of the trains and the cost of the crews. The crews can't be paid all day to do nothing.
Besides, capital costs of construction and vehicle acquisition absolutely dominates the cost of operation. The problem isn’t that running constantly available service isn’t affordable, the problem is that we lack the political will to make mass transit a meaningful alternative to cars.
I only know about Seattle where they were not paying for no work in the middle of the day. They had a last 2 mile transit van that would take you from your house to the P&R and back for a while. It was because the park and ride was filling up earlier and earlier and so people couldn't get to the bus to ride it. In this case, I know because I asked them how the pay went. They only got paid in the morning and the afternoon, there was no service and no pay in the middle of the day, only during rush hour.
The drivers I spoke to about this didn't like this because there wasn't enough time in the middle of the day to get a different job so they ended up getting a longer than 12 hour day to get 2 4 hour work periods.
What's stopping, say, Caltrain, from running trains at peak frequency all day? Incompetent leadership. They have the trains (which spend all day sitting idle _at_ terminus platforms), the have the crew (who also sit idle during the day), they have the capacity to run more trains off peak. They made a deliberate choice to not run the trains.
You might make the case that running more trains off-peak would increase maintenance costs. But I would wager that such maintenance costs pale in comparison to the cost of building enough platforms at your downtown termini to store trains all day. Moreover who cares about maintenance costs? It's insane to think that public transit should be profitable.
loop is an elitist perversion of transit