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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 d
by jackcosgrove 8y ago
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.
- reidacdc 8y agoThe 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.
- Symmetry 8y agoI 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.