> There are plenty of ways to increase capacity on a railway line especially if you can build new rails, but at some point it just gets too difficult. While tr

> There are plenty of ways to increase capacity on a railway line especially if you can build new rails, but at some point it just gets too difficult. While trains are touted as very efficient modes of transportation, and generally beloved by nerds, I'm skeptical, largely because train tracks are so under-utilized. Train tracks take up as much space as many multi-lane highways. On highways, dozens of cars go by every minute. But a train car only passes through at best a few times an hour. I suspect that if you took one mile of train track and one mile of a highway with the same overall footprint, far more people/goods will move through the highway-mile every hour than the train-mile. Don't have data to back this up, just a hunch. But if it's true, then even though trains are far more energy efficient than cars, they're likely far less real-estate efficient. (Also, I do suspect that this is not always true. A heavily trafficked tunnel in/out of Manhattan's Penn Station is probably more efficient real-estate wise than an equivalent tunnel. But that's a very extreme case with super high densities).