11 ms·
So you build more rail
by 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 agoIt doesn't have to. How much do our freeways cost us? esp with externalities?
- cyberax 4y agoFreeways 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 agoThe problem is that 1 mile of rail can move a lot more passengers than 1 mile of road.
- sixstringtheory 4y agoWhat 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 agoWell, 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.
- dragonwriter 4y agoBART (mainline) runs a maximum of 10 car trains, with a “crush” (maximum) capacity of 200+ per car.
- cyberax 4y agoHave you ever walked past a 20-car train? It's way too long for commuting. There will be no way to build platforms for it unless you're doing a full green-field build.
- snovv_crash 4y agoEurope has plenty of double-story trains. I agree 10 is about the limit otherwise the station sizes aren't people friendly.
- cyberax 4y agoThe calculations on that page are not correct. First, the average car occupancy is not 1, it's 1.5 on average. Second, the lane capacity is 1900 cars per hour (that's maximum at around 45 mph, btw). So this works out to 8550 people per hour. A realistic scenario for commuter trains (that would replace a freeway) is 1 train every 10 minutes, and even this is pretty tough. So you have 6 trains per hour, and to match the throughput you'd need 1425 people per train. Most train platforms are maxed out at well below 10 cars (Caltrain is 6 cars), 20 car trains are just pure nonsense for commuting. So for 10 car trains it'll be around 150 people per car. Caltrain cars are 130 seats per car ( https://www.greencaltrain.com/2014/05/keeping-up-with-caltrain-capacity-needs/ https://www.greencaltrain.com/2014/05/keeping-up-with-caltra... ), with another 40 standing places. Basically, a perfectly run commuter train system is _just_ barely comparable with a regular 6-lane freeway. Sorry train fans, but trains are not that great for commuting.
- judge2020 4y agoCorrection, trains specifically. Subways and light rail are immensely higher ROI (as in, benefit vs cost) within a city since it effectively forces people close together, while a 6-lane-on-each-side highway isn't economically feasible for all of the high-traffic areas.
- richardw 4y ago> Sorry train fans, but trains are not that great for commuting. Quick comparison: more people (3.6m) go through Shinjuku Station in Tokyo than the daytime population of Manhattan, at 3.1m. Only half of those travel into Manhattan, using all modes of transport. When things get extreme it’s hard to just double the road network and parking into a single location. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjuku_Station https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinjuku_Station
- cyberax 4y agoThis station is served by 12 lines. So presumably that's 24 tracks. This means that one track would need to carry a bit more than 150000 people a day on average. A 6-lane freeway can carry around 100000 people a day. As a sanity check, the infamous Katy Freeway carries 350000 cars a day, for about 600000 people. It's 14 main travel lanes wide. So yep, trains are not that efficient compared to freeways.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago> And CO2 emissions are being fixed by switching from gas cars to EVs. Not reall, rail is 9 times more energy efficient than road vechicles. Thats why its cheaper to have a diesel locomotove move freight than to pour the same diesel into trucks. The whole reason rail exists is thsa its the most efficient form of tranportation on land.
- bluGill 4y agoThere are a lot of assumptions in the idea that trains are more efficient than road vehicles. Trains tend to carry more heavy bulk goods like coal, if they had more light things the numbers would change. Trains get a lot of efficiency from running very long trains, but that only works out when you have a lot of things going the same way, if you had smaller trains from each warehouse (which now is done by truck) that would reduce th efficiency. Yes trains have some efficiency advantages, but in similar service the difference is small. You only get those advantages when you use trains for things that trucks cannot do at all.
- mikepurvis 4y agoThe very long trains of mostly goods like coal are not an inevitability, though— it's a result of rail companies implementing PSR in response to some pretty specific incentives, see: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/opinion/business-economics/freight-train-mismanagement.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/opinion/business-economic... A number of YouTube video essays argue the sides of this as well, here's one based around Sen. Sanders confronting a rail CEO in the wake of the recent Ohio derailment: https://youtu.be/e4w0q5NzCwA https://youtu.be/e4w0q5NzCwA
- cyberax 4y ago> Not reall, rail is 9 times more energy efficient than road vechicles. If you're hauling coal at 35 mph. For people-moving application it's not that more effective: https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint
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- babypuncher 4y agoYou're comparing dollars-per-mile of infrastructure when the more important metric is dollars-per-passenger-mile. You can build 1 mile of freeway for not much more than 1 mile of rail, but that mile of rail can serve considerably more passengers.
- cyberax 4y agoThat works only in cities (where you can't build freeways anyway), but not for commuter trains.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y agoWhy? What makes commuter trains different?
- mikepurvis 4y agoTwo other factors that aren't coming up in this analysis are long term maintenance costs (highways in Ontario are constantly being resurfaced) and land use opportunity costs (it's simply not viable to run six lanes of freeway into most CBDs, and doing it with grade separation leads to raised highway eyesores or insanity like Boston's Big Dig). In any case, as others have pointed out, we don't have to argue hypotheticals here— China, Japan, France, Germany, etc have all shown that frequent-service electrified passenger rail is perfectly possible and an incredible public good.
- 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 agoTrains 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 agoBut 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 agoAtlanta 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 agoI 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 ago91,000 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 agoRoughly 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 agoIt's unfortunate that passenger rail has deteriorated so much in the USA. The city of Atlanta takes its name from the Atlantic railroad!