I think that ignoring this central issue may kind of be the point. ISTM that this whole thread is basically a libertarianism argument in environmentalist-argument clothing.
The purpose is to undermine support for mass transit as a public good, on the basis of an unrealistic superficial comparison between public and private transportation in terms of fuel efficiency, while ignoring crucial structural differences between them.
Yes, and that American love for RVs and big SUVs is gonna be replaced with a new love for electric cars with their two seats, no cargo space, and 50 mile range* just like we stopped loving gas guzzling land yachts in the 70s.
*The stereotype of what an electric fleet means to too many.
It’s long past time that we give up on this notion that there’s a bright and shiny future just around the corner . . . if we can just drag enough people into it kicking and screaming.
Too many Americans are not going to give up their ICE cars unless you can guarantee them an electric car that can take them to aunt Gurdy’s house 3,000 miles away on a single tank of electricity . . . despite the fact that they’ve only taken that trip once, to attend aunt Gurdy’s funeral 18 years ago and ignoring that no one in the family has needed to travel more than 100 miles in a single day since.
Which is partially why I brought up the 2009 Cato paper above. It closely follows the editorial trajectory (aside from making fun of Obama’s “medium speed rail”) as the OP, and in fact could have been written by the OP: let’s show how rail can’t compete with cars when in fact each transport mode has a different purpose. It’s a propaganda exercise masquerading as concern about energy usage, and ultimately argues “big government stuff never works” rather than discussing rational transportation planning.
Money idea: if autonomous trucking gets going, it would get cheap for people with non-autonomous RVs to drive up on the trailer of a self driving semi and put them near their destination.
CheapER than at present, certainly. But “cheap”? I’m not sure it’s ever going to be that cheap to get your RV hauled by another vehicle, compared to the cost of driving it yourself.
For one thing, I would expect there to be quite a difference in insurance rates between semis hauling empty RVs as freight and semis providing what’s essentially long-distance passenger ferry service for vehicles with human occupants.
True, some concerns there. But think the other side: your RV insurance could go down if you promise to only drive it a half hour to the pickup, half hour to the campsite. And this would allow people to use their RV into later age, after they get less comfortable maneuvering through gas stations and parking lots on the trip. (eta: what am I saying? plenty of younger people feel nervous about that in an RV)
My thought was of electric cars having rail-gauge inner wheel flanges and hitching hardware such that a driver could hook up with a train of electric cars to make a rail-fed-car-motor-driven semi-mass-transit system for getting your car hundreds of miles to over there without using the battery or the driver’s attention. It might even be sophisticated enough to perform live releases so that the cars tagged for this here destination would not force the whole train to stop.
Trains, of course, have places to unload your bladder, which your car that you are riding in does not, so that would limit the length of a non-stop run (you might, of course, be able to use a bottle, but the operator could not be seen as condoning/requiring that).
I don’t know what the Biden proposal is thinking about funding sources, but some of the current service, while operated by Amtrak, are funded by the states they are in. For examples I am familiar with, the services between Portland and Spokane, Emeryville (Oakland) and Bakersfield, Kansas City and St. Louis, and Oklahoma City and Ft. Worth are all funded by their respective states.
In addition there is state funding to provide more than the once-a-day service Amtrak provides over the same route, Seattle to Portland, Emeryville to Sacramento, and San Diego to San Luis Obispo as examples. I think that’s what the tan lines on the map denote but my old eyes can’t read the legend.
It may well be the administration is expecting the stated to pony up for all those weird connections like Los Angeles to Las Vegas or OKC to Hutchinson.
The Empire Builder runs between Portland/Seattle and Chicago: the two halves join/split in Spokane. It might not be unreasonable to have more routes that split and join like that in order to broaden the reach of service.
Do most of you here agree that one day we will have fully self-driving cars? I’ve been a skeptic from day one, but even I will admit we’ll have them sometime in the future. Not ten years maybe, but thirty or forty isn’t right out.
If we get them, I imagine a travel expoerience like this:
It’s 2048. I’m in San Fransisco, and I need to get to LA. I pick up my phone and call an autocar, and five minutes later it pulls up in front of the house. I get in, enter my destination in LA, and close the blinds. The car drives off and a screen shows me current speed, map location, and ETA. The autocar has saloon seating with a pull-up desk, so I sit up, get out my laptop, and connect to the internet using the Starlink connection in the car. I can even attend meetings while driving.
So I put in a half-day’s work in the car, have a coffee, and then chill and surf the internet for a bit while I watch a video on the car’s screen. Eventually, the car alerts me that I’m at the destination, and I get out in front of the place. The car drives away, and I’m there.
OR…
I can catch an autocar to a train station, where I will buy a ticket for the privilege of going to the train station in LA, I do this for the privilege of sitting with strangers in a seat for hours, so that I can call another autocar at the other end to drive me to my real destination.
Who in their right mind would do that? Trains could be obsolete almost overnight if we develop efficient electric vehicle infrastructure with self-driving cars. And if they are all electric, they will be significantly more environmentally friendly. Why in the world would you do that? Especially if it’s Amtrak and therefore even slower than driving the car, what with having to drive to and from stations and catch two cars.
And here’s another equally plausible scenario: Passenger trains serve big cities. That’s what they’re good at. But what happens if the people stop living in big cities and disperse more evenly through the country in small communities, acreages and the like? We are already seeing trends in that direction, and COVID has accelerated them. If people don’t have to live in the city to work, and they can get excellent, low latency broadband anywhere in the country, the cities will lose a lot of their appeal.
And specific to trains, a huge number of passengers on Amtrak and the like are business travelers. As we get more comfortable with remote meetings and the technology for carrying them out keeps improving, the need to meet face-to-face goes away. It’s entirely possible that 2019 represents the peak year of business travel. If that’s the case, we could be building trains to nowhere.
Migration patterns are unpredictable. This year’s U-Haul data shows the pattern: people are moving from large cities to smaller ones, and from very populous northern states to smaller rural states.
You are making a very large bet that the need for trains in 20-30 years can be predicted today. In a world where people spread out and live apart more, what you need is a network of roads, so you can support automated delivery of goods. We may find that the entire road system transforms over the ne xt few decades as people drive less by working from home more, and most of the road infrastructure is used by automated delivery vehicles. Not a lot of need for nation-spanning passenger train networks in that scenario.
Freight rail, yes. Efficient freight transport is a far bigger issue in terms of energy efficiency, and the U.S. has the best freight rail system in the world. If you start putting passenger trains on existing track (is that what Amtrack plans?) you risk lowering the efficiency of rail freight. And that would be an economic and environmental problem much larger than whatever passenger trains are attempting to solve.
There is one reason all this money is going into trains. It benefits a whole lot of people that are very good to the Democratic party. Union guys, real estate holders, States looking for federal money, large industrial corporations looking to profit off it, you name it. That’s why there’s always a huge lobbying push for rail expansion as soon as a sympathetic government is in power. But it’s still a waste of money and a very risky investment.
A half day in a car, with coffee, used to be an endless nightmare of pee encrusted gas station ‘‘bathrooms’’ and stinky porta potties but now, there’s the Amazon Pee Bottle!
For a position that’s as certain as your’s seem to be it’s amazing that you have these questions.
The autocar is great because it has saloon seating! The train is awful because you have to share it with other people, eww, ick.
Suppose this autocar that you’ve booked picks up a few other people that are also going to Los Angeles at the same time. Those saloon seats must be there for a reason.
What do you do then?
Where else are you going to poop on this half day long ride?
Uggh, a cramped car vs a train for a several hour long journey? All things equal, I’d DEFINITELY prefer the option in which I can actually stand up and walk around.
Maybe you’d prefer the car, Sam, and that’s okay – but that doesn’t mean everyone would.
Sam, there are a few advantages the high speed train would have over the self-driving car in your 2048 scenario.
First is that the train gets you to your destination 3-5x faster, assuming we’re talking about bullet trains and not Amtrak. Many people would prefer a few hours in a train vs. half a day in a car.
Second is that you could get seriously carsick in the car while trying to do your work on a laptop or something. I don’t mean that facetiously, it can get really bad.
Third is that, as iiandyiiii pointed out, you can stand up, use the lavatory, etc. in a train, eat and drink more, etc.
I somehow don’t see moving to Florida as a long-term trend… I also wouldn’t characterize it as “smaller & rural”, but that’s a lesser nit.
A Fourth may be that the train would be cheaper. An autocar from San Francisco to Los Angeles is not likely to be cheap.
That does however actually support his larger point. Building train lines for where people are now may be foolish as we can reasonably predict that climate change is likely to result in large populations moving, especially from some coastal areas to … somewhere else that we cannot currently predict with any confidence.
Train lines are not so flexible or adaptable to expected changing conditions. We want to position not for where people are but where they will be, and that we can guess at poorly.