6 ms·

Man, if only we could use some of that for passenger rail... Being able to go from Atlanta to Savannah without a car would be awesome.

Analemma_ 4y ago
It's a nice idea but keep in mind that any freight which gets displaced from rail thanks to passenger cars would have to go by truck instead, probably with a massive increase in net emissions. Having passengers and freight share track in the US is probably not a win for the environment; passengers would need separate track instead.
- babypuncher 4y ago
  So you build more rail
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > build more rail Passenger rail doesn't tend to break even on long-distance dedicated routes, even taking into account externalities.
    - iknowstuff 4y ago
      It doesn't have to. How much do our freeways cost us? esp with externalities?
      - cyberax 4y ago
        Freeways are amazingly cheap. 1 mile of new 6-lane freeway on level terrain is about 3 million: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/27/how-much-does-a-mile-of-road-actually-cost https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/27/how-much-does-... Amazingly, railroads are not much cheaper. The current costs of tracks are estimated at about $2 million per mile, and this is without taking into account all other necessary rail infrastructure (such as sorting yards, maintenance facilities, etc.). And CO2 emissions are being fixed by switching from gas cars to EVs.
        adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
        The problem is that 1 mile of rail can move a lot more passengers than 1 mile of road.
        sixstringtheory 4y ago
        What is the route capacity for a lane of freeway vs a rail line? I assumed it’s the opposite, since a freeway has continuous throughout while a rail line is discrete, but I don’t have a good intuition for comparing the scale of each mode.
        dragonwriter 4y ago
        > What is the route capacity for a lane of freeway vs a rail line? I assumed it’s the opposite, since a freeway has continuous throughout while a rail line is discrete According to this book (which provides assumptions and calculations supporting) [0], 10:1 in favor of rail, as a conservative estimate. https://eng.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Industrial_and_Systems_Engineering/Book%3A_The_Art_of_Insight_in_Science_and_Engineering_(Mahajan)/01%3A_Part_I-_Organizing_Complexity/01%3A_Divide_and_Conquer/1.02%3A_Rails_vs_Roads#:~:text=How%20does%20the%20capacity%20of,capacity%20of%20a%20train%20line%3F&text=This%20capacity%20is%20ten%20times,single%20fast%2Dflowing%20highway%20lane https://eng.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Industrial_and_System....
        cyberax 4y ago
        > A rush-hour train may consist of 20 cars The author is smoking some hard crack.
        AnimalMuppet 4y ago
        Well, BART has no problem running 9-car trains. I don't know if that's rush hour or not, but I've seen them. If the rest of the math is right, that still gets you 4.5-to-1 in favor of rail.
      - waterheater 4y ago
        >How much do our freeways cost us? esp with externalities? Rail also has cost, including externalities. For example, as a wise person on the Internet once said, "Trains take you from a place you don't live to a place you're not going to." The "last-mile problem" is a non-trivial factor to building train networks which by definition is not solvable by more rail. You're considering a cost analysis. A more complete analysis is the benefit-cost analysis (BCA). If the benefits outweigh the costs, the project is a net positive for society. Asking only how much our freeways cost us avoids consideration of the known benefits. Here's a BCA from 2021 which investigates a highway project, so you can see exactly how much freeways benefit and cost us: https://www.mdot.maryland.gov/OPCP/I-81BCA_Report.pdf https://www.mdot.maryland.gov/OPCP/I-81BCA_Report.pdf >It doesn't have to. That's a nice sentiment, but sometimes the energy required to reform is higher than expected losses. The entire Amtrak network is kept afloat because of a handful of lines in New England between DC, New York, and Boston. Amtrak basically runs a loss everywhere else.
        babypuncher 4y ago
        > Trains take you from a place you don't live to a place you're not going to. Airplanes have the exact same problem, but I don't see people saying we should stop investing in airports. For long distance travel, I don't think it's a huge problem that you might need multiple modes of transit to get all the way from A to B.
        bluGill 4y ago
        Trains are too slow for long distance travel. They are useful for short and medium distance travel, but for such trips travel time to the station becomes more important. If this isn't made convenient people will quickly decide their car is better: it goes when they want to go, and goes directly to where they want to be.
        waterheater 4y ago
        >Airplanes have the exact same problem, but I don't see people saying we should stop investing in airports. Fair point. We should then see if air travel holds a key advantage over rail travel in the USA. As I see it, the answer is in both space and time savings, both of which minimize cost and maximize benefit. The time savings are particularly pronounced, especially over distances greater than, say, a few hundred miles. Happy to elaborate on the savings in more detail, if you desire such. >For long distance travel, I don't think it's a huge problem that you might need multiple modes of transit to get all the way from A to B. That is, of course, your opinion. I'm sure there are tens, if not hundreds, of millions of Americans who will strongly disagree with you because they are, in no particular order: feeble, disabled, terrified of a particular mode of transit, hurried, cost-conscious, traveling with multiple young children, etc.
    - bluGill 4y ago
      But it does very well at medium distances while you find all over.
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > it does very well at medium distances Depending on density. I'd wager the Atlanta metropolitan area is just about crossing that threshold, i.e. they should built it now.
        danielvf 4y ago
        Atlanta does have trains, and in fact has the 8th most annual riders of any US city, right behind the Bay Area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARTA_rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARTA_rail
        JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        I guess MARTA is between municipal and regional rail, sort of like BART. I meant for connecting the Atlanta metropolitan area to its region, not intraconnecting.
        elif 4y ago
        91,000 daily riders according to that link 2,000,000 daily vehicles on this Atlanta transit system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_285_(Georgia) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_285_(Georgia)
        bluGill 4y ago
        Roughly speaking the density of the US east of the Mississipi and the far west coast is dense enough. The rocky mountains and Alaska really bring our average density down.
        Symbiote 4y ago
        It's unfortunate that passenger rail has deteriorated so much in the USA. The city of Atlanta takes its name from the Atlantic railroad!
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  You have that backwards. Low occupancy vehicle travel is the most wasteful form of personal transit. Rail passengers displaced by freight become low occupancy vehicle trips. In my state, a commuter rail coach car has about 180 seats. Let's be cautious and assume 50% occupancy. That's 90 people, and based off the US passenger car fleet averaging 25mpg, they collectively would have used 3.6 gallons of gas per mile. An eighteen wheeler gets 5-10 miles per gallon. Even assuming just 5mpg, the passengers in that one coach car would have used eighteen times more fuel than the truck hauling a container would. Furthermore: freight and passenger use of rail are not mutually exclusive uses. Freight is in theory far less sensitive to scheduling, and like a lot of trucked freight, can happen during times passenger use is low. But because industry has squeezed their supply chains to the hair of breaking under "just in time delivery" to minimize warehouse space and the like...which bit us pretty severely in the pandemic...freight companies are optimizing for shareholder profits and own the tracks. So they prioritize their freight over passengers. Result? Passenger service is riddled with service issues, leading to less passenger use, which is fine as far as the freight companies are concerned, because they can move more freight. The core problem is that critical infrastructure is being run privately by for-profit publicly traded companies.
- TYPE_FASTER 4y ago
  Adding passenger traffic does not necessarily require displacing freight traffic. Here's a document that contains a map of current rail density: https://www.dot.ga.gov/InvestSmart/Freight/GeorgiaFreight/Task%203_Georgia%20Rail%20Freight%20Modal%20Profile.pdf https://www.dot.ga.gov/InvestSmart/Freight/GeorgiaFreight/Ta...
  - elif 4y ago
    But things like "okay now wait on this random section of tracks for 3 hours because of a pass and traffic down stream" are routine on freight lines, but obviously not desirable for passenger rail.
    - uni_rule 4y ago
      Unless the train is overly long (an actual problem) passenger rail always gets priority.
    - Symbiote 4y ago
      They are routine on American freight lines, where there are a lot of single track lines and political issues between the freight companies and passenger trains. https://openrailwaymap.org/ https://openrailwaymap.org/ shows (if you zoom in far enough) that at least some lines around Atlanta are only single track. https://www.trains.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/multi-track-main-lines-map.pdf https://www.trains.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/multi-trac... suggests most of them are. It isn't a common issue in Russia or China (similar rail freight use to the USA). Double tracks means no waiting for opposing trains, and it's then straightforward to fit passenger trains, which stop at stations but go faster, between constant speed freight trains. It does mean twice as much track must be maintained to a higher standard than freight-only track.
samstave 4y ago
[flagged]

Analemma_ 4y ago

It's a nice idea but keep in mind that any freight which gets displaced from rail thanks to passenger cars would have to go by truck instead, probably with a massive increase in net emissions. Having passengers and freight share track in the US is probably not a win for the environment; passengers would need separate track instead.

babypuncher 4y ago
So you build more rail
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > build more rail Passenger rail doesn't tend to break even on long-distance dedicated routes, even taking into account externalities.
  - iknowstuff 4y ago
    It doesn't have to. How much do our freeways cost us? esp with externalities?
    - cyberax 4y ago
      Freeways are amazingly cheap. 1 mile of new 6-lane freeway on level terrain is about 3 million: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/27/how-much-does-a-mile-of-road-actually-cost https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/27/how-much-does-... Amazingly, railroads are not much cheaper. The current costs of tracks are estimated at about $2 million per mile, and this is without taking into account all other necessary rail infrastructure (such as sorting yards, maintenance facilities, etc.). And CO2 emissions are being fixed by switching from gas cars to EVs.
      - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
        The problem is that 1 mile of rail can move a lot more passengers than 1 mile of road.
        sixstringtheory 4y ago
        What is the route capacity for a lane of freeway vs a rail line? I assumed it’s the opposite, since a freeway has continuous throughout while a rail line is discrete, but I don’t have a good intuition for comparing the scale of each mode.
        dragonwriter 4y ago
        > What is the route capacity for a lane of freeway vs a rail line? I assumed it’s the opposite, since a freeway has continuous throughout while a rail line is discrete According to this book (which provides assumptions and calculations supporting) [0], 10:1 in favor of rail, as a conservative estimate. https://eng.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Industrial_and_Systems_Engineering/Book%3A_The_Art_of_Insight_in_Science_and_Engineering_(Mahajan)/01%3A_Part_I-_Organizing_Complexity/01%3A_Divide_and_Conquer/1.02%3A_Rails_vs_Roads#:~:text=How%20does%20the%20capacity%20of,capacity%20of%20a%20train%20line%3F&text=This%20capacity%20is%20ten%20times,single%20fast%2Dflowing%20highway%20lane https://eng.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Industrial_and_System....
        cyberax 4y ago
        > A rush-hour train may consist of 20 cars The author is smoking some hard crack.
        AnimalMuppet 4y ago
        Well, BART has no problem running 9-car trains. I don't know if that's rush hour or not, but I've seen them. If the rest of the math is right, that still gets you 4.5-to-1 in favor of rail.
    - waterheater 4y ago
      >How much do our freeways cost us? esp with externalities? Rail also has cost, including externalities. For example, as a wise person on the Internet once said, "Trains take you from a place you don't live to a place you're not going to." The "last-mile problem" is a non-trivial factor to building train networks which by definition is not solvable by more rail. You're considering a cost analysis. A more complete analysis is the benefit-cost analysis (BCA). If the benefits outweigh the costs, the project is a net positive for society. Asking only how much our freeways cost us avoids consideration of the known benefits. Here's a BCA from 2021 which investigates a highway project, so you can see exactly how much freeways benefit and cost us: https://www.mdot.maryland.gov/OPCP/I-81BCA_Report.pdf https://www.mdot.maryland.gov/OPCP/I-81BCA_Report.pdf >It doesn't have to. That's a nice sentiment, but sometimes the energy required to reform is higher than expected losses. The entire Amtrak network is kept afloat because of a handful of lines in New England between DC, New York, and Boston. Amtrak basically runs a loss everywhere else.
      - babypuncher 4y ago
        > Trains take you from a place you don't live to a place you're not going to. Airplanes have the exact same problem, but I don't see people saying we should stop investing in airports. For long distance travel, I don't think it's a huge problem that you might need multiple modes of transit to get all the way from A to B.
        bluGill 4y ago
        Trains are too slow for long distance travel. They are useful for short and medium distance travel, but for such trips travel time to the station becomes more important. If this isn't made convenient people will quickly decide their car is better: it goes when they want to go, and goes directly to where they want to be.
        waterheater 4y ago
        >Airplanes have the exact same problem, but I don't see people saying we should stop investing in airports. Fair point. We should then see if air travel holds a key advantage over rail travel in the USA. As I see it, the answer is in both space and time savings, both of which minimize cost and maximize benefit. The time savings are particularly pronounced, especially over distances greater than, say, a few hundred miles. Happy to elaborate on the savings in more detail, if you desire such. >For long distance travel, I don't think it's a huge problem that you might need multiple modes of transit to get all the way from A to B. That is, of course, your opinion. I'm sure there are tens, if not hundreds, of millions of Americans who will strongly disagree with you because they are, in no particular order: feeble, disabled, terrified of a particular mode of transit, hurried, cost-conscious, traveling with multiple young children, etc.
  - bluGill 4y ago
    But it does very well at medium distances while you find all over.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > it does very well at medium distances Depending on density. I'd wager the Atlanta metropolitan area is just about crossing that threshold, i.e. they should built it now.
      - danielvf 4y ago
        Atlanta does have trains, and in fact has the 8th most annual riders of any US city, right behind the Bay Area. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARTA_rail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARTA_rail
        JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        I guess MARTA is between municipal and regional rail, sort of like BART. I meant for connecting the Atlanta metropolitan area to its region, not intraconnecting.
        elif 4y ago
        91,000 daily riders according to that link 2,000,000 daily vehicles on this Atlanta transit system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_285_(Georgia) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_285_(Georgia)
      - bluGill 4y ago
        Roughly speaking the density of the US east of the Mississipi and the far west coast is dense enough. The rocky mountains and Alaska really bring our average density down.
      - Symbiote 4y ago
        It's unfortunate that passenger rail has deteriorated so much in the USA. The city of Atlanta takes its name from the Atlantic railroad!
KennyBlanken 4y ago
You have that backwards. Low occupancy vehicle travel is the most wasteful form of personal transit. Rail passengers displaced by freight become low occupancy vehicle trips. In my state, a commuter rail coach car has about 180 seats. Let's be cautious and assume 50% occupancy. That's 90 people, and based off the US passenger car fleet averaging 25mpg, they collectively would have used 3.6 gallons of gas per mile. An eighteen wheeler gets 5-10 miles per gallon. Even assuming just 5mpg, the passengers in that one coach car would have used eighteen times more fuel than the truck hauling a container would. Furthermore: freight and passenger use of rail are not mutually exclusive uses. Freight is in theory far less sensitive to scheduling, and like a lot of trucked freight, can happen during times passenger use is low. But because industry has squeezed their supply chains to the hair of breaking under "just in time delivery" to minimize warehouse space and the like...which bit us pretty severely in the pandemic...freight companies are optimizing for shareholder profits and own the tracks. So they prioritize their freight over passengers. Result? Passenger service is riddled with service issues, leading to less passenger use, which is fine as far as the freight companies are concerned, because they can move more freight. The core problem is that critical infrastructure is being run privately by for-profit publicly traded companies.
TYPE_FASTER 4y ago
Adding passenger traffic does not necessarily require displacing freight traffic. Here's a document that contains a map of current rail density: https://www.dot.ga.gov/InvestSmart/Freight/GeorgiaFreight/Task%203_Georgia%20Rail%20Freight%20Modal%20Profile.pdf https://www.dot.ga.gov/InvestSmart/Freight/GeorgiaFreight/Ta...
- elif 4y ago
  But things like "okay now wait on this random section of tracks for 3 hours because of a pass and traffic down stream" are routine on freight lines, but obviously not desirable for passenger rail.
  - uni_rule 4y ago
    Unless the train is overly long (an actual problem) passenger rail always gets priority.
  - Symbiote 4y ago
    They are routine on American freight lines, where there are a lot of single track lines and political issues between the freight companies and passenger trains. https://openrailwaymap.org/ https://openrailwaymap.org/ shows (if you zoom in far enough) that at least some lines around Atlanta are only single track. https://www.trains.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/multi-track-main-lines-map.pdf https://www.trains.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/multi-trac... suggests most of them are. It isn't a common issue in Russia or China (similar rail freight use to the USA). Double tracks means no waiting for opposing trains, and it's then straightforward to fit passenger trains, which stop at stations but go faster, between constant speed freight trains. It does mean twice as much track must be maintained to a higher standard than freight-only track.

samstave 4y ago

[flagged]