Bring on the light rail revolution.
North America desperately needs more light rail options. High speed as well, but one step at a time.
They are designed to survive collision with freight trains. In Europe we also have freight trains on our passenger tracks. They're just designed to survive them in a different way - by deforming to absorb impact rather than being rigid to resist it.
Downside is that that's probably where the train driver is. Preventing collisions is definitely the better approach.
Do you have a source?
In Europe, freight rail is less than a quarter that of the US, while passenger rail is much higher than in the US. Where tracks are shared, passenger rail generally takes priority in EU, and vice versa in the US. When reading about European railcar crash standards, I found no evidence that modern design standards include any requirements on crashing into freight trains. Just generic crumple zone requirements.
This is not unique to Europe. The vast majority of America's passenger rail infrastructure is on active fright rail trackage.
Yeah. In a few spots, it's OK, but the majority of it is pretty bad. I take a lot of long-distance Amtrak trips, and sleeping can be hard if you haven't done it in a while and you're not used to it.
I was surprised to find that the Shinkansen in Japan is a pretty rough and unstable run, too.
Americans on the internet like to imagine Japan and its technology as perfect in every way, but the HSR between Tokyo and Kyoto can be almost sea-sickness worthy.
I don't think this is because of bad rails so much it is that the infrastructure is so heavily used, and aging, since Japan was a pioneer in this arena.
Your experience on the Shinkansen is very different from mine. The only explanation I can imagine is that your train was travelling slowly, which can happen - rarely - in typhoon season.
Otherwise, which high speed lines have you used that did not induce seasickness in you?
I’ve taken a few high speed routes around the world. KTX between Seoul and Busan. The entire Eurostar route. Others I can’t remember off the top of my head.
The best experience so far has been Trenitalia between Rome and Naples.
Well anyway it seems to have been just a one-time experience, from which you've managed to deduce both generality and cause.
Again, from experience that's not common, so perhaps a more charitable explanation than system degradation might have been warranted. Certainly the rolling-stock is much newer than the system. The Nozomi you used would have been, at a guess 15 years or younger.
It's ridiculous how few places in the US have even considered subway anymore. Seattle's light rail, for example, is pretty much a subway except for one at-grade segment.
This change will benefit regional systems that are already established but I don't see it making much of a difference beyond that.
Because of the cost of (and in some cases impossibility of) buying multiple-units, passenger railroads here are operated using a locomotive and some railcars; this is very inefficient, especially for commuter or regional rail which stops and starts fairly regularly. DMUs would almost certainly be cheaper and more performant to run.
If you took all the money people spent to buy, maintain, and insure, their vehicles, then topped it off with the money the highway fund put into the roads to support it the cost per mile is one third what mass transit it costing.
light rail isn't flexible to the needs of a changing city. it however appeals to a romantic version of transit that does not exist nor did it ever outside of two or three cities in the world of which only one is in the US though if you push it Chicago can almost count. Instead it benefits politicians who love ribbon cutting and paying off contributors.
We can’t really win the battle with roads. For one thing, we are running out of places to put new roads in big cities, so bandwidth is already pretty constrained. For another, single occupancy vehicles aren’t very energy efficient, nor can they be.
The energy efficiency issue isn't so clear. Single-occupancy vehicles don't run empty, at least until self-driving makes it possible. In typical systems, trains are pretty empty.
Maybe you consider Boston to be a small city? They have some pretty empty trains, particularly the commuter rail. (yes it leaves the city, but that is the whole point of something that we aren't calling a subway)
I haven’t sat on an empty train in a big city in a long time
The reality of the situation is that if you want a city to have more than Oklahoma City levels of density, while not having congestion completely strangle the economy, you need to build rail, or at least invest in usable mass transit. A two-track subway in Manhattan can carry something upwards of 80k people very reliably within twenty feet of right of way; a highway lane only carries about 2.7K per hour.
Silicon Valley's VTA Light Rail has the worst rate of return of any transit agency in the country, if not the world.
Plenty of money and land for pipelines though https://i.imgur.com/IdwIHQB.gif
Tokyo's railway was built up over more than a century, infrastructure takes time.
how do you figure that?
I wasn't figuring. I was summarizing and contexting.