7 ms·

But… why couldn’t we just build more and better trains?

by barbariangrunge 3y ago

flappyeagle 3y ago
[flagged]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
soligern 3y ago
[flagged]
zdragnar 3y ago
Trains aren't a panacea for transportation. They work well in some areas, less well in others, and not at all in many. You still have to get to and from the stations themselves, and the dependability of transportation arriving on time and proximity to your destination plays a big factor. The metro area I went to college in had a light rail train that ran from downtown to a popular tourist destination. To get there, though, you needed to catch a connecting bus ride. It is a 15 minute trip by car, but an hour by bus+train. If the bus ran late, it would actually be faster to ride a bicycle all 13 miles. The metro area cities want to add more trains because it is the progressive thing to do, but ridership on one of the lines is abysmal, and the other lines aren't utilized as much as they could be because people feel unsafe on them and are disgusting- smoking cigarettes, drinking hard alcohol, food all over the floor, loud music, the occasional gang posturing or aggressive pan handling were all cited by locals in a survey as to why they chose to drive instead.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  Back during my first trip to China, a bunch of retired military guys would hang out at subway stations offering rides from the station to your house for 5 jiao or one Kuai in a gas powered tuktuk. I imagine electric ride share bikes could do the same thing today if they weren’t being abused all the time.
- LeanderK 3y ago
  I actually see autonomous cars complementing trains very well because they can be used for the last mile problem (getting people from the train station to the destination they actually want to arrive at). They are also available for areas poorly served by transit/inconvenient connections. But I don't see them making more impact on somebody who's already driving. Traffic will still be traffic and walkable cities will have to limit that. It's the same car after all, just driven by a computer. All those current issues for heavy car-dependence won't be solved by autonomous driving.
- mrweasel 3y ago
  > It is a 15 minute trip by car, but an hour by bus+train I have the same issue. Due to location and geography I'm looking at a 90 minut bus ride, with at least one change of bus. If I need to drop the kid of at daycare, you can add 30 minuts, because I have to get of and wait for the next bus. So I'd have to leave at 6:00 to be at work at around 8:00, I then need to leave no later than 15:30, pick up the kid at 17:00 and be home at 17:30, assuming that everything lines up perfectly. There's nothing left of the day and my child has spend 10 hours in daycare... and I haven't worked a full eight hours. It's a 15 minute drive to the office.
- jokteur 3y ago
  You are underestimating how much trains and public transportation can do. Public transportation is abyssimal in the US, so I get why you think that it may not solve many problems. If you take a look at Switzerland which did public transportation right, you will see that even in low densities areas, it is very much possible to get around by public transport. The canton of Graubünden (area: 7105.44 km2, density: 28/km2) has more train lines and bus lines than the city of Atlanta (area: 353.04 km2, density: 771.3/km2). Switzerland has a lot of tiny villages, evenly spread around. We don't have crazy dense cities, and certainly not large cities. While public transport does not solve every trip and every commute, it is a solution for a significant percentage of the population. You can get to remote areas for hiking, leisure, ... You can find bus lines that connect one village of 30 people to another village of 100 people. They may not be frequent (4x a day), but they allow for tourist to go hike to remote areas, visit nice places, ... Also, public transit is clean here and very safe. For some numbers: a decent amount of people commute by public transport (up to 50% in certain areas), and an even larger percentage of people use public transport for leisure activities (>70%). In an ideal world, you would have decent public transit inside cities and around, pedestrian friendly cities, bike sharing, and fery vew (robo)taxis in dense areas. This makes the cities confortable to live in (less noise and polution). Also, intercity transit is very important (by train, highspeed train or plane). Then, in rural areas you would have robotaxis that can get you anywhere you want. The remaining vehicles on the road should be work related vehicles.
hibikir 3y ago
More and better trains are great... when they are connecting very dense areas that have a lot of traffic. Madrid's subway is great, and so is rail to nearby towns, and high speed rail to Seville, Valencia and the like. But the value of rail drops precipitously as density decreases. In the US, we are basically allergic to the density required to make trains good. I look at, say, St Louis to KC: a route of ideal length for high speed rail. But on both sides of the train, the density just isn't there, so people would drive themselves to the station, and rent a car on the other side, and suddenly you might as well have driven yourself across. But sure, rebuild dense enough as to make subways, trains and walking the best modes of transportation, and the world would be pretty nice. it'll just cost, say, a few trillion to rebuild US cities that way. And the people that live far from the city center, and whose land values would probably drop massively wouldn't be all that happy.
syntheweave 3y ago
As scaling kicks in, it'll be the cheapest transit that can be added at margin within car-centric environments. Still centrally administered, professionally operated and maintained just like a bus fleet. The modality is something that can be tinkered with to take bigger or smaller loads and correspondingly save space and fuel per trip. The incentives are basically aligned to stay cost-competitive. These are things that were never the case with taxis and privately owned cars.
pcurve 3y ago
We could just retrofit exisiting road infrastructure to be more autonomous car friendly. Standardized signals, sensors, etc
xnx 3y ago
Self driving cars are effectively "more and better trains". They also go wherever you want whenever you want, don't subject you to other passengers, and are less expensive per passenger mile.
ericksoa 3y ago
You know what is more controversial than letting robot cars drive around? Trying to make a new train line literally anywhere in the US. You are better off buying a bunch of robot cars, tying them together with a rope, and starting a company to run hacker trains on city streets and charge money. In fact, in SF, if the protestors were clever, they'd just get together tie a bunch of cars together and create their own train. What are they going to do, arrest you?
- jrockway 3y ago
  I think that robot cars are likely the end of cars. They will lure people off of public transportation, especially those that don't have the up-front capital / borrowing ability to buy their own car, but whose commute times can be improved by driving. This will lead to a lot of congestion. And then congestion ruins it for everyone, humans and AIs alike. (Congestion is already what enables public transportation. No commuter rail system can compete with the speeds of a car on the freeway at 3am. But, people start work at 8am, and EVERYTHING competes with the speed of a car at 8am.) Eventually people will say "you know what, I guess I'll just live closer to work". Congratulations, you just invented cities. With land being used for humans and not automobile storage, mass transit becomes more viable. Thus, the car's death warrant is signed.
bitsage 3y ago
I’m of the same mindset. A cab is still a cab to me, even if it’s autonomous. We’ll still have to deal with traffic all the same. Uber and Lyft showed us ride share even worsens congestion in cities. As a result, in dense locales, taking the train can often be quicker and cheaper than hailing or ordering a ride during rush hour. While other developed nations show us it’s possible to reduce our accident rate per mile driven, we could also make progress on reducing the time spent in a car. So many suburbanites drive the whole way into the city for weekend trips here in my city because their local commuter rail stinks. I see missed opportunities all around. If cities are increasingly considering offloading public transit burden off to private entities, they might as well consider introducing the private sector into rail…
- treis 3y ago
  >We’ll still have to deal with traffic all the same. It's not the same because the time can be productive or used for leisure. Plus far less stressful and tiring than driving.
  - bitsage 3y ago
    Well I could say the same for a human driven cab or transit. My rides are often too short to do anything productive anyways. Even if I were driving, I could listen to a podcast for leisure, same as when I take other forms of transport.
mrweasel 3y ago
Because it's a very expensive way to move relatively few people? Trains great if you need to move a large number of people between few destinations, less so if you have a smaller number of people or many different destinations. The city next to where I live cancelled their light-rail project, because it's insanely expensive and yields no benefit over busses, in fact busses are more flexible. If your distances are short enough trains again make no sense. You also still need to get people from the stations to where they actually need to go. It's rare that a train station is your end destination. Busses work, but they are a little slow, taxis are faster because they normally go direct.
SanderNL 3y ago
And how do I get to the trains? It takes me about 30min to get there, no matter what method I use and I actually live in a city. Then waiting for some train, ten-twenty minutes is not unusual, then riding it, leaving the station. It’ll easily be an 2h experience to travel what would be at most 30min in a car. Getting basically anywhere in NL with a train is an automatic 2-3x slowdown, unless you happen near some public transport hotspot and your destination is actually near the station. It’s also uncomfortable for all kind of reasons, to be honest.. but I’ll take that if it wasn’t such a waste of time. I don’t see any way of improving this as well. What would you propose? Demolish housing to make place for tracks?
bradleyjg 3y ago
Taxis enable train use. When I fly to London for work, I take the Heathrow express to Paddington and then a short cab ride to my hotel. If I had to switch to the underground and then walk, I’d just take a taxi the whole way or rent a car at the airport.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
Sure, but it would cost a few billion. For just modestly sized stretch of rail and a couple of stations and trains. Waymo is of course not cheap but they can do a lot with a few billion. Rail just isn't cheap. Privately funded rail tracks are basically not a thing in most countries. Just too expensive to be interesting to normal investors. Especially if they are looking for ROI measured in years rather than decades/centuries. Governments spend on rail because of the wider economic effects it has on their economies. Not because exploiting rail roads is particularly lucrative or even profitable.
- pinko 3y ago
  While there's some truth to this, the myriad externalized costs of a car-based city may dwarf the apparent "savings". Once you consider the dollar and social costs of car pollution, parking, accidents, etc. it isn't so simple.
_e4c8 3y ago
Unfortunately, in order to do that you would have to rip out the core of American identity, individualism and capitalism.
eunos 3y ago
American society in general despise public transport ouside NYC
HDThoreaun 3y ago
It turns out most Americans don't want more and better trains. So you'd have to convince them.

But… why couldn’t we just build more and better trains?

flappyeagle 3y ago

[flagged]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

soligern 3y ago

[flagged]

zdragnar 3y ago

Trains aren't a panacea for transportation. They work well in some areas, less well in others, and not at all in many. You still have to get to and from the stations themselves, and the dependability of transportation arriving on time and proximity to your destination plays a big factor. The metro area I went to college in had a light rail train that ran from downtown to a popular tourist destination. To get there, though, you needed to catch a connecting bus ride. It is a 15 minute trip by car, but an hour by bus+train. If the bus ran late, it would actually be faster to ride a bicycle all 13 miles. The metro area cities want to add more trains because it is the progressive thing to do, but ridership on one of the lines is abysmal, and the other lines aren't utilized as much as they could be because people feel unsafe on them and are disgusting- smoking cigarettes, drinking hard alcohol, food all over the floor, loud music, the occasional gang posturing or aggressive pan handling were all cited by locals in a survey as to why they chose to drive instead.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago
Back during my first trip to China, a bunch of retired military guys would hang out at subway stations offering rides from the station to your house for 5 jiao or one Kuai in a gas powered tuktuk. I imagine electric ride share bikes could do the same thing today if they weren’t being abused all the time.
LeanderK 3y ago
I actually see autonomous cars complementing trains very well because they can be used for the last mile problem (getting people from the train station to the destination they actually want to arrive at). They are also available for areas poorly served by transit/inconvenient connections. But I don't see them making more impact on somebody who's already driving. Traffic will still be traffic and walkable cities will have to limit that. It's the same car after all, just driven by a computer. All those current issues for heavy car-dependence won't be solved by autonomous driving.
mrweasel 3y ago
> It is a 15 minute trip by car, but an hour by bus+train I have the same issue. Due to location and geography I'm looking at a 90 minut bus ride, with at least one change of bus. If I need to drop the kid of at daycare, you can add 30 minuts, because I have to get of and wait for the next bus. So I'd have to leave at 6:00 to be at work at around 8:00, I then need to leave no later than 15:30, pick up the kid at 17:00 and be home at 17:30, assuming that everything lines up perfectly. There's nothing left of the day and my child has spend 10 hours in daycare... and I haven't worked a full eight hours. It's a 15 minute drive to the office.
jokteur 3y ago
You are underestimating how much trains and public transportation can do. Public transportation is abyssimal in the US, so I get why you think that it may not solve many problems. If you take a look at Switzerland which did public transportation right, you will see that even in low densities areas, it is very much possible to get around by public transport. The canton of Graubünden (area: 7105.44 km2, density: 28/km2) has more train lines and bus lines than the city of Atlanta (area: 353.04 km2, density: 771.3/km2). Switzerland has a lot of tiny villages, evenly spread around. We don't have crazy dense cities, and certainly not large cities. While public transport does not solve every trip and every commute, it is a solution for a significant percentage of the population. You can get to remote areas for hiking, leisure, ... You can find bus lines that connect one village of 30 people to another village of 100 people. They may not be frequent (4x a day), but they allow for tourist to go hike to remote areas, visit nice places, ... Also, public transit is clean here and very safe. For some numbers: a decent amount of people commute by public transport (up to 50% in certain areas), and an even larger percentage of people use public transport for leisure activities (>70%). In an ideal world, you would have decent public transit inside cities and around, pedestrian friendly cities, bike sharing, and fery vew (robo)taxis in dense areas. This makes the cities confortable to live in (less noise and polution). Also, intercity transit is very important (by train, highspeed train or plane). Then, in rural areas you would have robotaxis that can get you anywhere you want. The remaining vehicles on the road should be work related vehicles.

hibikir 3y ago

More and better trains are great... when they are connecting very dense areas that have a lot of traffic. Madrid's subway is great, and so is rail to nearby towns, and high speed rail to Seville, Valencia and the like. But the value of rail drops precipitously as density decreases. In the US, we are basically allergic to the density required to make trains good. I look at, say, St Louis to KC: a route of ideal length for high speed rail. But on both sides of the train, the density just isn't there, so people would drive themselves to the station, and rent a car on the other side, and suddenly you might as well have driven yourself across. But sure, rebuild dense enough as to make subways, trains and walking the best modes of transportation, and the world would be pretty nice. it'll just cost, say, a few trillion to rebuild US cities that way. And the people that live far from the city center, and whose land values would probably drop massively wouldn't be all that happy.

syntheweave 3y ago

As scaling kicks in, it'll be the cheapest transit that can be added at margin within car-centric environments. Still centrally administered, professionally operated and maintained just like a bus fleet. The modality is something that can be tinkered with to take bigger or smaller loads and correspondingly save space and fuel per trip. The incentives are basically aligned to stay cost-competitive. These are things that were never the case with taxis and privately owned cars.

pcurve 3y ago

We could just retrofit exisiting road infrastructure to be more autonomous car friendly. Standardized signals, sensors, etc

xnx 3y ago

Self driving cars are effectively "more and better trains". They also go wherever you want whenever you want, don't subject you to other passengers, and are less expensive per passenger mile.

ericksoa 3y ago

You know what is more controversial than letting robot cars drive around? Trying to make a new train line literally anywhere in the US. You are better off buying a bunch of robot cars, tying them together with a rope, and starting a company to run hacker trains on city streets and charge money. In fact, in SF, if the protestors were clever, they'd just get together tie a bunch of cars together and create their own train. What are they going to do, arrest you?

jrockway 3y ago
I think that robot cars are likely the end of cars. They will lure people off of public transportation, especially those that don't have the up-front capital / borrowing ability to buy their own car, but whose commute times can be improved by driving. This will lead to a lot of congestion. And then congestion ruins it for everyone, humans and AIs alike. (Congestion is already what enables public transportation. No commuter rail system can compete with the speeds of a car on the freeway at 3am. But, people start work at 8am, and EVERYTHING competes with the speed of a car at 8am.) Eventually people will say "you know what, I guess I'll just live closer to work". Congratulations, you just invented cities. With land being used for humans and not automobile storage, mass transit becomes more viable. Thus, the car's death warrant is signed.

bitsage 3y ago

I’m of the same mindset. A cab is still a cab to me, even if it’s autonomous. We’ll still have to deal with traffic all the same. Uber and Lyft showed us ride share even worsens congestion in cities. As a result, in dense locales, taking the train can often be quicker and cheaper than hailing or ordering a ride during rush hour. While other developed nations show us it’s possible to reduce our accident rate per mile driven, we could also make progress on reducing the time spent in a car. So many suburbanites drive the whole way into the city for weekend trips here in my city because their local commuter rail stinks. I see missed opportunities all around. If cities are increasingly considering offloading public transit burden off to private entities, they might as well consider introducing the private sector into rail…

treis 3y ago
>We’ll still have to deal with traffic all the same. It's not the same because the time can be productive or used for leisure. Plus far less stressful and tiring than driving.
- bitsage 3y ago
  Well I could say the same for a human driven cab or transit. My rides are often too short to do anything productive anyways. Even if I were driving, I could listen to a podcast for leisure, same as when I take other forms of transport.

mrweasel 3y ago

Because it's a very expensive way to move relatively few people? Trains great if you need to move a large number of people between few destinations, less so if you have a smaller number of people or many different destinations. The city next to where I live cancelled their light-rail project, because it's insanely expensive and yields no benefit over busses, in fact busses are more flexible. If your distances are short enough trains again make no sense. You also still need to get people from the stations to where they actually need to go. It's rare that a train station is your end destination. Busses work, but they are a little slow, taxis are faster because they normally go direct.

SanderNL 3y ago

And how do I get to the trains? It takes me about 30min to get there, no matter what method I use and I actually live in a city. Then waiting for some train, ten-twenty minutes is not unusual, then riding it, leaving the station. It’ll easily be an 2h experience to travel what would be at most 30min in a car. Getting basically anywhere in NL with a train is an automatic 2-3x slowdown, unless you happen near some public transport hotspot and your destination is actually near the station. It’s also uncomfortable for all kind of reasons, to be honest.. but I’ll take that if it wasn’t such a waste of time. I don’t see any way of improving this as well. What would you propose? Demolish housing to make place for tracks?

bradleyjg 3y ago

Taxis enable train use. When I fly to London for work, I take the Heathrow express to Paddington and then a short cab ride to my hotel. If I had to switch to the underground and then walk, I’d just take a taxi the whole way or rent a car at the airport.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

Sure, but it would cost a few billion. For just modestly sized stretch of rail and a couple of stations and trains. Waymo is of course not cheap but they can do a lot with a few billion. Rail just isn't cheap. Privately funded rail tracks are basically not a thing in most countries. Just too expensive to be interesting to normal investors. Especially if they are looking for ROI measured in years rather than decades/centuries. Governments spend on rail because of the wider economic effects it has on their economies. Not because exploiting rail roads is particularly lucrative or even profitable.

pinko 3y ago
While there's some truth to this, the myriad externalized costs of a car-based city may dwarf the apparent "savings". Once you consider the dollar and social costs of car pollution, parking, accidents, etc. it isn't so simple.

_e4c8 3y ago

Unfortunately, in order to do that you would have to rip out the core of American identity, individualism and capitalism.

eunos 3y ago

American society in general despise public transport ouside NYC

HDThoreaun 3y ago

It turns out most Americans don't want more and better trains. So you'd have to convince them.