Sam, your example of SF to LA is almost exactly analogous to Tokyo to Kyoto. Both trips take 5.8 hours of driving, robocar or not. For the Japan trip, you can instead take the Shinkansen, which arrives in 2 hours. Big difference!
I’ve made this trip on the Shinkansen and it’s impressive. You buy a ticket online; when you arrive at the station, trains arrive every 15 minutes, there’s almost no waiting to board. The train is comfortable, your assigned seat is spacious and very much like airline seats with good leg room; they recline, there’s a small table for your laptop or a meal. Someone comes by with a food cart (with pretty decent food). And you get to watch the countryside zip by at 150+mph.
Or you can sit in a cramped vehicle for almost six hours.
My point was more about the irony of saying you can’t predict where people are going to move - while predicting (“the pattern”, he said) they’ll continue to move where one survey says they’re moving now (smaller Southern cities - some that are going to be underwater sooner rather than later).
…as Interstates?
But that’s OK, y’all will all have (electric) flying cars in the future, no doubt. “We won’t need roads”, as the man said.
Another problem with High Speed Rail: It pulls CO2 emissions forward in time. A train that takes 20 years to build means 20 years of heavy industry to build it, and only then does it start to save CO2, if it actually saves CO2 at all. in the meantime, you’ve raised the country’s CO2 emissions.
Yes, no future car could possibly get around that. And car sickness is just motion sickness, and plenty of people get it on trains, planes, boats, and cara.
I didn’t predict anything. I simply pointed out that the trends today are what they are. They ate very different than the trends 30 years ago, and I expect them to be different (and unpredictable) in the future. We have no idea how or where people will want to live in the future, but as of today, all the forces are aligning to make cities less relevant. Work from home is here to stay for many people. satellite internet is making it easier to work from rural locations. COVID has accelerated development of tools for remote meetings. Education is becoming decoupled from location through remote learning. Distributed package delivery is taking the place of malls and stores.
All of these trends enable the spreading out of the population. In the meantime, COVID restrictions are eliminating the lifestyle advantages of cities, and even after the pandemic is gone there is no guarantee people will just go back to their old lifestyles.
We are in a period of perhaps the most rapid change we’ve ever seen, and we live in an increasingly digital and distributed world. Giant industrial projects to build passenger trains seems… antiquated.
One more thing: Regime risk. One of the reasons giant multi-decade government projects become such a mess is that each successive administration changes the requirements or outright cancels them. NASA has gone through multiple grand projects (Constellation, Ares, SLS, etc) and still hasn’t been able to fly a new manned rocket since Shuttle was designed. It’s Orion capsule is grossly over budget and plagued with problems. The Superconducting Supercollider was cancelled after billions were spent on it. California’s HSR is a debacle. Yucca mountain failed. No new nuclear plants have been built for decades after the last ones were endlessly stalled. Boston’s Big Dig was a quagmire.
But I’m sure that 20-30 year nation spanning, hundreds of billions of dollars Democratic wish-list trajn system will survive five to seven administrations and be delivered on time and on budget. Because there’s a first time for everything.
I’m only refuting your assertion that no one would prefer trains to cars. Plenty of people prefer trains, and there’s no reason to believe this will change. I get carsick frequently, but I rarely get trainsick. I expect there are lots of folks like me.
There are reasonable arguments against certain rail expansions or policies, but this is not one of them.
Your cite didn’t show any rural flight, just a change in size of current preferred city. I don’t see how that makes cities, as a concept, less relevant.
The private car I am talking about would be more like a personal business jet than a car. If cars are auto-driving, You will see rapid development of amenities formthe people in the car who no linger need to drive.
Let me ask you: Would you still take the train if your other option was a private limo with full connectivity, comfortable seats,a mini fridge, and complete privacy? Especially if it’s one that picks up you and your luggage at your home and drops you off right in front of your destination?
Would taking a car be so bad if you could do everythjng in the car including taking meetings and working? Or sleeping?
I will make one prediction for something you’ll lkkely see in the future: Suspension that actively cancels road vibration and potholes and such, just as a gymballed camera mount can keep a camera perfectly still no matter how much the holder of the camera moves.
The combination of cheap IMU sensors and powerful batteries makes that a no-brainer in the future, I’d think. Cars could be the smoothest form of transportation around. In fact, there is already a simple version of that becoming more common with magnetorheological dampers that adjust suspension stiffness constantly to absorb impacts from the road. Heqvy trains on steel wheels cannot do that.
The real point of high speed intercity rail is less about cars, and more about short to medium length airplane flights. If there’s a way on the horizon to electrify a commercial airliner, I haven’t heard of it; AFAIK, they’re going to be running on petroleum-based jet fuel indefinitely. You can have all the nuclear power plants you want, and you’ll still have that CO2 being generated.
High speed rail has the capability of doing away with at least a decent fraction of that. NYC to LA, no. DC to Chicago, sure.
If it was as fast as high speed rail (and HSR was an option, which it likely will be on my most frequent train trips – DC to NY or other US east coast trips), I’d consider it. That doesn’t seem likely.
How does the size, weight, and energy consumption/fuel efficiency of this private limo compare with the Tesla you’ve used for “real numbers” (or even the fleet average of current passenger cars)?
Or, probably even more competitively – trips that are a bit shorter, and thus could really be in the wheelhouse for rail. Chicago to Detroit or Cleveland or Minneapolis, for example.
Maybe it’s because I’m an extrovert, but I like that there are other people on trains. Especially long-distance ones. You meet interesting people, they usually have a bar - with a barman! - and the seats are plenty comfy.
Ask yourself: Why do we have cities? Why do we crowd together and pay exhorbitant prices for land and housing?
The traditional reasons are because of economic efficiency. Cities create industries that depend on large concentrations of workers. Or, they are hubs of trade and commerce. Cities could concentrate schooling and make more resources available to students. Cities are centers of culture with museums, etc. Cities allow people to socialize, to meet and marry, to enjoy nightlife, etc.
All of these are under attack from technology and the pandemic. If pandemics become the new normal, you will see massive flight out of the city. It’s a hell of a lot easier to tolerate a lockdown on your 1-acre rural property with a large house than it is in a 400 sq. ft. apartment on the 30th floor of a high rise.
But the main reason people live in cities is because that’s where the jobs are. But if you can work at home, that’s no longer relevant. And if your social life moves onljne, you don’t need the city for that, either.
If you are working remotely, and your kid is being educated remotely, and restaurants in the city are seen as risky places, and you can buy anything you need onljne and have it delivered within 24 hours, soon you start asking yourself, “Why am I paying half a million dollars for this place (or spending $2000/mo on rent) when I can be doing the axact same thing from a much nicer place in a small town for half the money?” Lots of people are leaving cities now because of that math, and COVID accelerated the trend.
Also, the big cities are rapidly becoming worse places to live in. Crime is skyrocketing, they are all in huge debt, taxes are going up, and quality of life is declining.
There will still be cities, as there are lots of things they still do that’s necessary. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the population 30 years from now is much more distributed. Small cities might thrive, and the big ones might die. Or maybe the opposite will happen - the future is unpredictable. But if I had to bet, I know where I’d put my money.
And you get there in nearly 1/3 the time vs a car. I know: I did it.
My trip was basically walking from my friends home in Kugahara/Ota/Tokyo 15 minutes to the local train, Kugahara station. 15 or so minutes later I was at the Shinkansen boarding area (I want to say at Kamata, but I don’t remember exactly). Two hours later I was in Kyoto. I stepped out of the train station and took a cab 15 minutes and I was at Fushimi Inari shrine:
A private limo where you tap ‘pee break’ on your phone and it stops at the next rest area. Or if you are hungry you tell it what you want, and it finds the nearest place and drives you to it.
