True, if you’ve got a car right at hand at your origin and a place to put the car at your destination. Absent those conditions, you’re still looking at one extra trip to get from the origin to the car (or to bring the car to you), and to dispose of the car at the destination. With a self-driving car there’s still only one trip for the passenger, of course, but the car still has to be moved to and from the passenger.
Absolutely, but again, that’s presuming that all those “people” will be the kind who have one of those cars on hand in the first place, and a place to put it when they get to their destination.
Self-driving cars are a great alternative to mass transit for people whose trip requires getting from one suburban driveway or parking lot to another suburban driveway or parking lot several hours away. But it’s never going to be realistic in major transit hubs to replace, say, every 35-person busload of people (which can be driven and parked in the same footprint as two or three cars) with 35 individual cars.
If you have fleets of self-driving cars for hire plying back and forth on schedules like minibuses, that would be considerably more feasible, but probably still significantly more resource-intensive and more expensive than genuine mass transit. Thirty-five separate engines instead of one, seventy separate windshield wipers instead of two, one hundred and forty separate wheels instead of six or ten, and so on.
Individual-vehicle long-distance (or short-distance, for that matter) travel is intrinsically always going to be wasteful in comparison to multiperson-vehicle alternatives. Its one big advantage, for people who already own an individual vehicle and have ample places to put it wherever they go, is its unparalleled convenience.
I don’t have a dog in either camp, but this whole discussion seems to be ignoring the great bane of highway travel. Traffic. Even self driving cars aren’t going to solve that problem unless everybody on the road is using them and they are programmed to coordinate with each other and move at one standard speed. Like a train.
Combine that with autonomous vehicles and you have essentially autonomous trains that can form ad hoc on the roads and highways, leveraging extant infrastructure in a more flexible manner than rail does.
Small steps are being taken with trucking in which a lead vehicle still has an actively engaged human driver but several vehicles behind following as a platoon, closely following, controlled by the lead.
The vision is a driver enters their destination and the vehicle automatically enjoins an ad hoc virtual train, disconnecting automatically when its your “stop” and taking you door to door. For the autonomous application the highway distance portion with V2V communication is the least challenge. And there is a separate safety argument to made for V2V in any case.
Hard numbers based upon apples to oranges. All the cars in your figures are electric, but the trains are diesel . But not all cars are electric, and they are electrifying the trains.
Not surprisingly, some people agree. Texas Central Railway is planning on running Shinkansen trains between Dallas and Houston starting as early as 2026. As best as I can tell, the value proposition is that it’s an option that’s in between flying and driving, where cost and time are the tradeoffs. Driving is pretty consistently about 5 hours between the two, and flying is an hour in the air, plus all the associated TSA stuff. Cost is about $200+ for a flight, and driving is however much gas it takes you to drive about 250-300 miles.
So if TCR can get you between the cities in 90 minutes for $50-75, they’ve got a winning proposition I suspect.
One reason Japan has been so effective if that their federal government can do more stuff than ours. The HSR in CA has been handicapped by huge amounts of NIMBYism from private landowners, cities and counties. This have driven up the cost immensely . Whereas Japan can just draw the route, get public, etc input, then go.
The train is a system. Once you design it and start building, you are stuck within certain parameters. For example, if you want an electric train you need different infrastructure. If maglev becomes a great solution in a decade, you’re out of luck.
Yes, there is some room for innovation with the locomotives during the time before you need to order them, but there are no really large gains on the horizon for that. Trains already have about as low a rolling resistance as you’re likely to get without maglev, there isn’t a lot of room for aerodynamic improvements, and the engines are simple and efficient. The innovations I see in trains have nothing to do with overall efficiency, but more to do with trying to get diesel out of the mix in favor of fuel cells or some other tech.
Efficiency in trains is generally determined these days by the efficiency of the system. Delays, trains running empty, scheduling conflicts… That’s what people are trying to improve.
Maybe some weight reduction in passenger cars is possible, but it could also be that U.S. trains need heavier cars because they work harder and are subject to harsher environments. Do you have a link to these plans? I’d like to see the details.
I actually didn’t even include electric vs diesel in the argument. The energy numbers I used were straight up BTU/Mile. I was accused of leaving things out to favor cars, but in fact I didn’t. I left this out, for example, when I could have made the argument that pushing people out of electric cars into trains is pushing them out of zero-GHG vehicles and into ones that burn fossil fuels.
Also, I need to clarify something: I started this thread talking about HSR, because when I did all I had read was article after article telling me that the Transportation Secretary had plans to criss-cross the nation with HSR. And so he did. But it appears that Amtrack Joe has pulled the rug out from underneath Buttigieg and opted to expand Amtrack across the nation instead. So I suppose we should really be debating the Amtrack plan rather than HSR at this point. Luckily, the numbers I used for efficiency earlier were numbers for Amtrak.
The question is, are they more efficient? Electric is nice in that it gets rid of some fossil fuels, but my original point was that trains simply won’t be more efficient than cars by the time this is done. In fact they are already less efficient than the average car if you could just put two people in the car.
But given the mandated fuel efficiency standards coming up and the rapid shift to electric cars, it won’t be long before the average person driving cross country will do so more efficiently in a car than by train. That’s assuming no further improvements to electric cars, but clearly there are still lots of improvements to be had. Everything from this day forward gets worse for trains.
Except, as I noted, the fact that at least tens of millions of people are still going to need or prefer some kind of mass transit for medium- to long-distance trips (and short-distance as well, but that brings in a bunch of other transportation alternatives) rather than operating a personally owned individual vehicle.
Comparing the superficial efficiency of any form of mass transit to that of individual car trips, without taking into account the vast differences between them in terms of serving the general public, being a manageable option for densely populated transit hubs, etc., is apples to elephants. Maybe you’ve also got in mind the potential development of other genuine mass-transit options, like electric long-distance buses in platooned fleets such as DSeid was talking about. In which case, fine, let’s hear it.
But it is not an adequate argument against passenger rail development just to say that individual electric car trips could potentially wind up being more fuel-efficient per passenger mile than train trips. Individual car trips are not feasible as a complete replacement for trains or other forms of mass transit.
@Sam_Stone, Kimstu’s argument is the important one. What should transportation look like in the future? A fleet of Teslas and nothing else is ridiculous.
However, at present, that is also a problem for train travel. I have taken Amtrak across the west numerous times, a trip of over 1500 miles for me, and the train has to lay over in sidings from time to time to let BNSF or whatever line we are on charge on by. This can accumulate an hour or two over a scheduled 40+ hour trip.
There is a chicken<->egg situation here. We have, at most, one train a day on the route I use. That not only limits passenger options but also slows the train down because it has to stop at every scheduled station, some of them only 20 miles apart. If there were several runs a day, the trains could alternate the smaller stations, cutting travel time down by hours and improving efficiency, because it takes a lot of juice to get a furlong of train going again after a stop. Faster service, even by a little, would make the train more attractive, filling more seats.
Rail travel could be more attractive if it had better support. Making airlines pay duly for the dirt they pump into the skies would most certainly level the playing field.
I see some space between “no new routes at all” and “everything on Amtrack’s wishlist”.
LaHood as an informed outsider has the following as his expectation.
And a current official portrays it as
Some that wishlist may make the cut. Some not.
City center to city center modern trains have lots to offer, especially if those cities the have good other public transportation. The existing system clearly need updating and improvements with a disciplined eye on value for the investment.
The issue out here is the SP owns the tracks and they screw Amtrak every opportunity. SP is run by total assholes. Time to nationalize the freight lines too.
This may be a bit circular, but Japan also has much more of a “train culture” than America. America is a cars-and-airplanes culture. It’s harder to sell the idea of trains and high-speed shinkansen in America than in Japan, just like how Japanese aren’t as in love with road tripping in RVs or big SUVs like America.
Although I think it could be argued that the US had much more of a train culture back before the interstate highway system than it does now. “City of New Orleans”, anyone?
AFAICT it’s a fairly standard argument of modern libertarianism that US passenger rail is intrinsically inefficient and should be divested from, but the full reality is somewhat more complicated.