Hacker News Reader

Comment by iamnotlarry | Hacker News Reader

Imagine a train with 100 cars that can hold 50 people in each car. Imagine that train traveling from Houston to Austin in 3 hours, making three round trips every 24 hours.

That train could evacuate 15K people a day.

Imagine if each state maintained one of those trains. In a crisis, Texas could borrow trains from NM, OK, KS, LA, AR, MS, and AL. They could move a combined ~120K people per day (no pets).

Planning ahead a week and beginning the evacuation 3 days before the storm, you could move 360K people. That would leave only 4.6 million in Houston.

View on HN

> making three round trips every 24 hours

This is the problem with the transportation infrastructure here in the US. In Japan those trains could easily make 100-200 round trips a day. And there would be a bajillion other train routes to other cities as well.

Seriously, trains? Between two neighboring major cities? Three times a day? That's laughable at best in most parts of the world.

To make 100 round trips between Houston and Austin, a total of about 33,000 miles, in 24 hours, the train would have to average 1,375 MPH.

That's assuming you only have 1 train. Trains leave between Osaka and Tokyo every few minutes at rush hours, and travel at speeds upto 300 km/h. They are timed to nearly 1 second accuracy, monitored precisely by computers, and each station has multiple tracks to buffer the traffic.

Tokyo's station serves 3000 trains daily and some 415K passengers per day as of 2013.

The Chinese high-speed rail system also deals with similar levels of passenger traffic. Shanghai's Hongqiao station for instance has no less than 30 tracks, can hold 10K passengers at the same time, and comfortably serves an average of 210K passengers per day (much more on holidays), and it is only one of a few railway stations serving the area.

Trains scale well if you do them right. Technology has come a long way.

Tokyo and Shanghai has MUCH more people compared to Houston and it makes more economical sense to have more train infrastructure

Tokyo's population is about 4 times that of Houston. So fine, instead of running 3000 trains a day from the central station, you can run at least 750?

That's what life would look like if people in the US actually used trains on a regular basis.

In any case, all I'm saying is that if a massive number of people need to be moved, trains can scale well, additional reserve capacity can be deployed during evacuations, and it's also a lot safer than having hundreds of thousands of people taking to the roads in bad weather.

Googling Houston metropolitan population gives 6.5 million. For Tokyo you get over 37 million. So Tokyo is 5.7 times Houston. Having been both places, Houston is much smaller. Houston also can't build subways, they'd always be flooding.

If you include the entire metropolitan area, then there are many, many more train stations to factor in than just the central stations. But in any case, order-of-magnitude wise you get the idea. Houston isn't that small and many cities around the world with even 1 million people have excellent public transportation.

One word: cars. No other explanation needed. Car culture and car manufacturers' interests play a big part in the current inadequacy (by western standards) of the US infrastructure.

Two words: population density

Tokyo is crammed and that's why trains work great over there. They wouldn't work in US city with suburban sprawl.

suburban sprawl is arguably a result of the obsession with cars

this. A lot of Berlin's public transport infrastructure (a city that definitively sprawls in the suburb, compared to other EU capitals) was built in the late 1800/early 1900. Check density stats for Berlin.

The city I live in is in suburban sprawl mode right now. The main reason is apartments in city cost a fortune if you want reasonable amount of space. For family or hobbies or whatever. 1 bedroom apartment close to city centre == 2 bedroom apartment within city limits == 3-4 bedroom house with proper backyard and garage and everything just outside city limits.

If "population density" was really the dominant reason, then New Jersey would have a public transportation system far better than most countries in Europe.

The assumption was that you have 800 train cars and that you would load roughly 33 cars every 10 minutes.

But let's take your numbers: 415K passengers per day. Let's keep the same three day evacuation period. That's ~1.2 million people. Leaving 5 million in Houston.

Here's the point: Evacuating millions of people over a weekend is a gargantuan task. Magic words like "train", "plane", or "automobile" don't instantly solve the problem.

SHINKANSEN!

what if you adjust for size of country/state and population density before judging, does that help?

It's not only that, it's also the fact that public transportation is bad in most cities in the U.S. You need to have a way to get to the train in city A, and a way to travel after departing the train in city B.

The demand is not there. Most people who live in Austin don't commute to Houston for work, and vice versa. I'd venture a guess to say that even regular business travel for workers out of Austin and Houston is not to their neighbor city, but to the coasts (which are thousands of miles distant, making even high speed rails impractical in most cases, compared to aircraft).

If the demand isn't there, why spend untold billions filling it?

But at this time they know the specifically affected areas where people face the danger of rising waters --but mayor still had not called for evacuation. Not a general evacuation, but evacs from the most affected areas in imminent danger. Even NPR is questioning the present stance[1]

[1]http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/28/546721363/...

> Even NPR is questioning the present stance

The headline has a question mark at the end; that's the extent of the "questioning". The rest of it lists every point made to support the decision to stay. It even notes at the end that both FEMA[1] and the state government not only refused to question the mayor's decision but backed it.

It's not a critical story, and it's disingenuous to suggest that simply because "even NPR" ran an explainer story, that there's some widespread official or credible base of observers "questioning the present stance".

[1] Literally:

> The head of FEMA, Brock Long, "did not question the decision," Reuters reports.

Did you skip:

>But at some point, of course, those floodwaters do become deadly. If lower floors flood completely, Houston's Office of Emergency Management cautioned, residents should never take refuge in the attic unless they have a way out. They could risk being fatally trapped.

I'm not sure what your point here is. Do you disagree with that advice, or do you think it means that a large-scale evacuation is called for? Did you skip:

> Attempting to drive through flooded streets is a common cause of death during heavy rainstorms.

Basically, you are damned if you stay and damned if you drive. Maybe building a float from furniture would work, but I think the Office of Emergency Management knows better than random internet commenters how to handle a flood.

NPr followed up Lieutenant General Honore (of Katrina and Rita experience) and he disagreed with the decision of Houston mayor.[1] And now they are evacuating areas because of impending breaches.

[1]http://www.npr.org/2017/08/29/546978194/with-much-of-houston...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com