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Every railroad in the USA should be nationalized, modernized and much of it transformed into commuter railways. This article is a perfect example of the ineffic

Every railroad in the USA should be nationalized, modernized and much of it transformed into commuter railways. This article is a perfect example of the inefficiencies of mass infrastructure created by the "free market"; which was entirely created by the US government anyway.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago
1. "Nationalized" doesn't necessarily get you "modernized". It gets your money supply controlled by Congress. 2. "Much of it transformed into commuter railways"? You seem to have no idea of how much of the US is rural. Commuter railways don't make sense in rural areas.
- RyanAdamas 3y ago
  You seem to have no idea why those places are rural.
  - coffeebeqn 3y ago
    You seem to have no idea how many square miles of empty land exist in the US
    - RyanAdamas 3y ago
      You think that land would be inhabited if it had commuter trains? You think the large cities which require a dense population for tax collection and often act as the hub for these transportation networks, perhaps have an incentive to fight nationalization and expansion of publicly held lands into housing developments? Roosevelt set aside hundred of millions of acres of land not for eternal preservation, but for future development by generations that would otherwise not had land considering the industrial barons of his time would have completely demolished it.
      - thunderbird120 3y ago
        >You think that land would be inhabited if it had commuter trains? Yes, considering the distributed nature of the US's population pre-dates the car. Go look at a population density map from 1900. Tons of primarily agricultural small towns spread out over an enormous area. Back then most small-ish towns in the middle of nowhere probably did actually have commercial rail because there were no other options. It's just that when the other options did appear, rail went into terminal decline because it was simply a terrible way of serving those kinds of areas when cars and trucks exist. Even today when the spread is less driven by agriculture, people still prefer lower density housing because being stuck in an apartment building sharing walls with god knows who else stops being fun really quick. People like having a bit of space of their own.This results in lower population densities as a result of people's preferences about how they would like to live. Rail is a good means of transporting high volumes from one node to another. It is good at that and it should be used in that context. It is not good if you try to shoehorn it in as a replacement for all other means of transportation as some groups seem to be inclined to do.
      - pessimizer 3y ago
        The large cities you're referring to are usually large because there was a train connecting to a port.
thunderbird120 3y ago
Complaining about inefficiency and suggesting transforming most of the US's very efficient private freight rail system into nationalized passenger rail in the same comment is certainly an interesting position. The nationalized systems seen in the EU seem to be associated in dramatically higher cost for freight transportation, not lower[1]. The reason the rail companies stopped offering passenger rail services in the US was that nearly every one of them was absolutely hemorrhaging money by the end and the only reason they'd kept them that long is because the government made them do it. Transporting people by train in most of the US is laughably inefficient and inconvenient next to the car due to the low population densities across most of the country. There's a reason nearly the entire country switched to using cars for transportation almost the instant that it became possible for them to do so. [1]https://etrr.springeropen.com/articles/10.1007/s12544-013-0090-4 https://etrr.springeropen.com/articles/10.1007/s12544-013-00...
- woodruffw 3y ago
  I think the article addresses most of these points: the collapse of passenger rail in the US is largely attributable to inefficient line division and competition (the "Alphabet Route" between Chicago and Baltimore, for example[1]) as well as domestic policy shifts around subsidized transit (in favor of larger subsidies for automotive manufacturers, highway construction, etc. in correspondence with subsidies for suburbanization). Low population densities can be misleading; much of the US is highly urbanized, and dense urban centers would be very efficiently connected by rail service were we to improve it. I for one would almost certainly make more trips to cities in Ohio, Illinois, etc. if it was a < 6 hour high speed trip rather than an overnight one. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Route https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Route
  - jcranmer 3y ago
    > Low population densities can be misleading; much of the US is highly urbanized, and dense urban centers would be very efficiently connected by rail service were we to improve it. I for one would almost certainly make more trips to cities in Ohio, Illinois, etc. if it was a < 6 hour high speed trip rather than an overnight one. The contours of a successful HSR system in the US and Canada are roughly as follows: The core linear corridors of DC-Boston (densest US population) and Detroit-Quebec City (that's 10/15 largest cities in Canada). Combine these with an east-west Boston-Toronto and north-south Montreal-NYC spine (timed interchange at Albany makes too much sense), as well as several other small feeder routes I'm not mentioning. A Midwestern knot centered on Chicago with lines to (in ccw order) Minneapolis, St. Louis (maybe to Kansas City), Louisville (and thence to Nashville I think), Cleveland, and Detroit (not sure how to squeeze in Cincinnati and Columbus). At this point, you might consider connecting the tendrils to the northeast system as well. CAHSR, with connections to Las Vegas and Phoenix. Texas Triangle. Maybe Portland-Vancouver. Nashville-Miami via Atlanta, and Atlanta-DC via Research Triangle in NC.
onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
They could just be more regulated like the power grid - which isn't perfect, but it's also fine.
jcranmer 3y ago
This is a horrible idea, for several reasons. First, much of the country is never going to be capable of having efficient passenger service. There is no way you can make a viable passenger route between Chicago and LA; the distance is just way too large. Second, passenger and freight rail just doesn't mix. A lot of European countries look at the US rail market and ask themselves "how can we move that much freight by rail?" Third, nationalized rail has not worked out well in the US. The article here already talks about Conrail (the nationalized corpse of Penn Central) a little. But Amtrak's stewardship of the Northeast Corridor has been abysmal--here is a linear corridor about 500 miles long connecting 4 of the top 11 largest cities in the US, entirely in public hands, with no freight traffic running along it, and yet we still lack a proper 220mph high speed rail with frequent service along the corridor. US commuter rail systems generally suck even harder than that, and again, they are already all publicly owned anyways (and many of them can't even use the excuse that they rely on track owned by other people). Finally, if you read the article and particularly some of the comments closely, you'll notice that the problem here can be boiled down in simple terms to "cost minimization in one domain creates secondary consequences that have problems elsewhere"--given the size of the US, even a nationalized system is going to have internal business unit divisions that will keep the same underlying problems. The comments give some examples of such intra-service turf wars causing solutions to not work out. As an addendum, I assume by "entirely created by the US government," you're referring to the land grants to railroads. Well, land grants to western railroads--the eastern half was built out before they started giving out land grants. And the land grants were only given out during a short ~30 year window. I don't have the exact number on me right now, but I think it was about 40% of the US railroad mileage that was awarded land grants. Hell, one of the transcontinental lines received no land grants whatsoever.
- fatnoah 3y ago
  > The article here already talks about Conrail (the nationalized corpse of Penn Central) a little We're still spending a lot of time and money recovering from Conrail's stewardship of the rail network. Lines closed or single-tracked, etc.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  The speed on the northeast corridor probably has a lot to do with the sort of track available, no? Making high speed rail grade tracking in the US is totally unprecedented. Grade separations. Smoother and larger curves. All of this demands eminent domain. We’ve seen how expensive this land acquisition process can be in rural California. I imagine in the much more urbanized east coast such high speed rail building would be even more costly and time consuming than its been in the middle of California.
nradov 3y ago
What a terrible idea. Our freight rail system is the envy of the world. Why would we wreck it with government control just to serve a small number of commuters?
- saalweachter 3y ago
  I want more passenger rail, but would like to pile on that the US rail network is freight in a way not seen in Europe. When I looked at the numbers some time back, the US had something like 10x more freight rail than Europe [per capita], and Europe had [at least] 10x more passenger rail. (I suspect the difference is two-fold: our major river network doesn't connect our hinterlands to our population centers in an efficient way, and our country is big enough to have a continental divide within a single economic zone.)
  - jcranmer 3y ago
    > (I suspect the difference is two-fold: our major river network doesn't connect our hinterlands to our population centers in an efficient way, and our country is big enough to have a continental divide within a single economic zone.) My guess is it's scale. Chicago is the third largest city in the US, and yet it's 600 miles from any ocean-going port (the Great Lakes doesn't really count, since it's not practical to navigate for any interoceanic shipping). There's smaller cities in the interior of the US that are even further from the oceans. By contrast, in Europe, it's hard to get more than 400mi or so away from a major port.
    - saalweachter 3y ago
      Chicago used to ship to the coast through the Great Lakes. The Erie Canal connected the Great Lakes to the Hudson River, and that trade made both New York and Chicago what they are today. But railroads became a thing and they just built a new one that followed the same route as the canal. You can also ship down to the Mississippi from Chicago, but again you're dependent on a canal to bridge the gap to the navigable waterways.
e4e5 3y ago
Moving freight for long distances is a lot more efficient than moving people for long distances.
ch4s3 3y ago
So instead of moving all of those good by train you'd prefer they all switch to trucks which emit far more carbon? All for your fervor dream of connecting rural counties with no population to a commuter rails system that no one would use in most of the country. If you disagree, I'd suggest you take Amtrak from St. Louis to Chicago and see how empty it actually is, you'll probably get your own car.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  > I'd suggest you take Amtrak from St. Louis to Chicago and see how empty it actually is I've taken it dozens of times. It's not even vaguely empty. Largely because the train starts in Chicago. It takes a bit to get to less full stretches. edit: in my head I was thinking Chicago-St. Louis. The answer is actually simpler - the train is relatively empty from St. Louis to Chicago because it is the last leg of the trip. Chicago is the end of the line.
  - mthamil 3y ago
    I've taken it multiple times and it's always a full train.
SoftTalker 3y ago
Look at Amtrak if you want to see a nationalized rail service. Outside of a few northeast lines, it's a complete disaster. It's hard to imagine how a national passenger network could be worse.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  I must be crazy for enjoying taking the train, I've never even taken them in the northeast. The only disaster I see is that we're not building high speed lines, and that passenger trains take a backseat to anything that the oligarchs who own the lines want to run through.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago

1. "Nationalized" doesn't necessarily get you "modernized". It gets your money supply controlled by Congress. 2. "Much of it transformed into commuter railways"? You seem to have no idea of how much of the US is rural. Commuter railways don't make sense in rural areas.

RyanAdamas 3y ago
You seem to have no idea why those places are rural.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  You seem to have no idea how many square miles of empty land exist in the US
  - RyanAdamas 3y ago
    You think that land would be inhabited if it had commuter trains? You think the large cities which require a dense population for tax collection and often act as the hub for these transportation networks, perhaps have an incentive to fight nationalization and expansion of publicly held lands into housing developments? Roosevelt set aside hundred of millions of acres of land not for eternal preservation, but for future development by generations that would otherwise not had land considering the industrial barons of his time would have completely demolished it.
    - thunderbird120 3y ago
      >You think that land would be inhabited if it had commuter trains? Yes, considering the distributed nature of the US's population pre-dates the car. Go look at a population density map from 1900. Tons of primarily agricultural small towns spread out over an enormous area. Back then most small-ish towns in the middle of nowhere probably did actually have commercial rail because there were no other options. It's just that when the other options did appear, rail went into terminal decline because it was simply a terrible way of serving those kinds of areas when cars and trucks exist. Even today when the spread is less driven by agriculture, people still prefer lower density housing because being stuck in an apartment building sharing walls with god knows who else stops being fun really quick. People like having a bit of space of their own.This results in lower population densities as a result of people's preferences about how they would like to live. Rail is a good means of transporting high volumes from one node to another. It is good at that and it should be used in that context. It is not good if you try to shoehorn it in as a replacement for all other means of transportation as some groups seem to be inclined to do.
    - pessimizer 3y ago
      The large cities you're referring to are usually large because there was a train connecting to a port.

thunderbird120 3y ago

Complaining about inefficiency and suggesting transforming most of the US's very efficient private freight rail system into nationalized passenger rail in the same comment is certainly an interesting position. The nationalized systems seen in the EU seem to be associated in dramatically higher cost for freight transportation, not lower[1]. The reason the rail companies stopped offering passenger rail services in the US was that nearly every one of them was absolutely hemorrhaging money by the end and the only reason they'd kept them that long is because the government made them do it. Transporting people by train in most of the US is laughably inefficient and inconvenient next to the car due to the low population densities across most of the country. There's a reason nearly the entire country switched to using cars for transportation almost the instant that it became possible for them to do so. [1]https://etrr.springeropen.com/articles/10.1007/s12544-013-0090-4 https://etrr.springeropen.com/articles/10.1007/s12544-013-00...

woodruffw 3y ago
I think the article addresses most of these points: the collapse of passenger rail in the US is largely attributable to inefficient line division and competition (the "Alphabet Route" between Chicago and Baltimore, for example[1]) as well as domestic policy shifts around subsidized transit (in favor of larger subsidies for automotive manufacturers, highway construction, etc. in correspondence with subsidies for suburbanization). Low population densities can be misleading; much of the US is highly urbanized, and dense urban centers would be very efficiently connected by rail service were we to improve it. I for one would almost certainly make more trips to cities in Ohio, Illinois, etc. if it was a < 6 hour high speed trip rather than an overnight one. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Route https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Route
- jcranmer 3y ago
  > Low population densities can be misleading; much of the US is highly urbanized, and dense urban centers would be very efficiently connected by rail service were we to improve it. I for one would almost certainly make more trips to cities in Ohio, Illinois, etc. if it was a < 6 hour high speed trip rather than an overnight one. The contours of a successful HSR system in the US and Canada are roughly as follows: The core linear corridors of DC-Boston (densest US population) and Detroit-Quebec City (that's 10/15 largest cities in Canada). Combine these with an east-west Boston-Toronto and north-south Montreal-NYC spine (timed interchange at Albany makes too much sense), as well as several other small feeder routes I'm not mentioning. A Midwestern knot centered on Chicago with lines to (in ccw order) Minneapolis, St. Louis (maybe to Kansas City), Louisville (and thence to Nashville I think), Cleveland, and Detroit (not sure how to squeeze in Cincinnati and Columbus). At this point, you might consider connecting the tendrils to the northeast system as well. CAHSR, with connections to Las Vegas and Phoenix. Texas Triangle. Maybe Portland-Vancouver. Nashville-Miami via Atlanta, and Atlanta-DC via Research Triangle in NC.

onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago

They could just be more regulated like the power grid - which isn't perfect, but it's also fine.

jcranmer 3y ago

This is a horrible idea, for several reasons. First, much of the country is never going to be capable of having efficient passenger service. There is no way you can make a viable passenger route between Chicago and LA; the distance is just way too large. Second, passenger and freight rail just doesn't mix. A lot of European countries look at the US rail market and ask themselves "how can we move that much freight by rail?" Third, nationalized rail has not worked out well in the US. The article here already talks about Conrail (the nationalized corpse of Penn Central) a little. But Amtrak's stewardship of the Northeast Corridor has been abysmal--here is a linear corridor about 500 miles long connecting 4 of the top 11 largest cities in the US, entirely in public hands, with no freight traffic running along it, and yet we still lack a proper 220mph high speed rail with frequent service along the corridor. US commuter rail systems generally suck even harder than that, and again, they are already all publicly owned anyways (and many of them can't even use the excuse that they rely on track owned by other people). Finally, if you read the article and particularly some of the comments closely, you'll notice that the problem here can be boiled down in simple terms to "cost minimization in one domain creates secondary consequences that have problems elsewhere"--given the size of the US, even a nationalized system is going to have internal business unit divisions that will keep the same underlying problems. The comments give some examples of such intra-service turf wars causing solutions to not work out. As an addendum, I assume by "entirely created by the US government," you're referring to the land grants to railroads. Well, land grants to western railroads--the eastern half was built out before they started giving out land grants. And the land grants were only given out during a short ~30 year window. I don't have the exact number on me right now, but I think it was about 40% of the US railroad mileage that was awarded land grants. Hell, one of the transcontinental lines received no land grants whatsoever.

fatnoah 3y ago
> The article here already talks about Conrail (the nationalized corpse of Penn Central) a little We're still spending a lot of time and money recovering from Conrail's stewardship of the rail network. Lines closed or single-tracked, etc.
kjkjadksj 3y ago
The speed on the northeast corridor probably has a lot to do with the sort of track available, no? Making high speed rail grade tracking in the US is totally unprecedented. Grade separations. Smoother and larger curves. All of this demands eminent domain. We’ve seen how expensive this land acquisition process can be in rural California. I imagine in the much more urbanized east coast such high speed rail building would be even more costly and time consuming than its been in the middle of California.

nradov 3y ago

What a terrible idea. Our freight rail system is the envy of the world. Why would we wreck it with government control just to serve a small number of commuters?

saalweachter 3y ago
I want more passenger rail, but would like to pile on that the US rail network is freight in a way not seen in Europe. When I looked at the numbers some time back, the US had something like 10x more freight rail than Europe [per capita], and Europe had [at least] 10x more passenger rail. (I suspect the difference is two-fold: our major river network doesn't connect our hinterlands to our population centers in an efficient way, and our country is big enough to have a continental divide within a single economic zone.)
- jcranmer 3y ago
  > (I suspect the difference is two-fold: our major river network doesn't connect our hinterlands to our population centers in an efficient way, and our country is big enough to have a continental divide within a single economic zone.) My guess is it's scale. Chicago is the third largest city in the US, and yet it's 600 miles from any ocean-going port (the Great Lakes doesn't really count, since it's not practical to navigate for any interoceanic shipping). There's smaller cities in the interior of the US that are even further from the oceans. By contrast, in Europe, it's hard to get more than 400mi or so away from a major port.
  - saalweachter 3y ago
    Chicago used to ship to the coast through the Great Lakes. The Erie Canal connected the Great Lakes to the Hudson River, and that trade made both New York and Chicago what they are today. But railroads became a thing and they just built a new one that followed the same route as the canal. You can also ship down to the Mississippi from Chicago, but again you're dependent on a canal to bridge the gap to the navigable waterways.

e4e5 3y ago

Moving freight for long distances is a lot more efficient than moving people for long distances.

ch4s3 3y ago

So instead of moving all of those good by train you'd prefer they all switch to trucks which emit far more carbon? All for your fervor dream of connecting rural counties with no population to a commuter rails system that no one would use in most of the country. If you disagree, I'd suggest you take Amtrak from St. Louis to Chicago and see how empty it actually is, you'll probably get your own car.

pessimizer 3y ago
> I'd suggest you take Amtrak from St. Louis to Chicago and see how empty it actually is I've taken it dozens of times. It's not even vaguely empty. Largely because the train starts in Chicago. It takes a bit to get to less full stretches. edit: in my head I was thinking Chicago-St. Louis. The answer is actually simpler - the train is relatively empty from St. Louis to Chicago because it is the last leg of the trip. Chicago is the end of the line.
- mthamil 3y ago
  I've taken it multiple times and it's always a full train.

SoftTalker 3y ago

Look at Amtrak if you want to see a nationalized rail service. Outside of a few northeast lines, it's a complete disaster. It's hard to imagine how a national passenger network could be worse.

pessimizer 3y ago
I must be crazy for enjoying taking the train, I've never even taken them in the northeast. The only disaster I see is that we're not building high speed lines, and that passenger trains take a backseat to anything that the oligarchs who own the lines want to run through.