Trains are more efficient and less polluting than other transportation modes

I’ve visited Europe many times and I do like how the region is so easily accessible without a car, largely because of trains, but there are many more factors outside of just having trains. European cities are far more walkable and accessible without a car. For decades the US has just not been built up in this way so just dropping trains in doesn’t suddenly make them preferred and thus viable. The reason people drive small/medium city to small/medium city is because once arriving in that city they now need transportation while there. Currently the most convenient and cost effective way to do that is to simply bring the car you already own for moving around in your home small/medium city. If the US is going to move to an environmentally friendly passenger rail system it is going to take a MASSIVE cultural and shift in mindset to reshape cities across the country. Many of which are broke. I’m not saying it’s impossible or an unworthy goal. I simply think it is an extremely unlikely goal until mindsets shift and realize things need to be done differently.

Most of the US freight rail system isn't electrified because the capital expenditures of doing so would be very large, and its return on investment in terms of direct monetary savings wouldn't materialize for many, many years. Since externalities aren't priced in, diesel-electric locomotives haul most trains in the US.

More passenger rail isn't really being built in the US, because the capital expenditures of doing so would be very large, and its return on investment in terms of direct monetary savings wouldn't materialize for many, many years. Since externalities aren't priced in, the responsibility for transportation is largely distributed to individuals, who make daily use of road vehicles on roads that the governments fund, and travel long-distance by commercial airlines that make use of airports that governments support.

The main reason US cities rely on automobiles is because the "job watershed" of a private automobile exceeds the job watershed of train systems everywhere in the US, even New York City. The job watershed is the number of jobs within commuting distance, whatever your tolerance for a commute is, given a transportation modality. In some cities the automobile job watershed is 100x larger than the transit job watershed. Transit systems, especially train systems, in most US cities are hub and spoke systems, centered around terminals in places like midtown Manhattan and the Chicago Loop. If you superimpose that hub and spoke model on top of an employment "contour map" that seeks a level (due to the desire to minimize rents), you'll see that there's a fundamental mismatch between what employers and residents want and the transit network. Rather than a unipolar peak at the transit hub, both employers and residents want to minimize rents which drives sprawl and transportation webs, as opposed to hub and spoke models.

Transit has a future with ride sharing and bus rapid transit since those modes use a cheap, flexible network as opposed to an expensive, rigid rail network. Unfortunately, if you wish rail to become more important, its use is actually declining and has been for decades.

No mention of China. They built 16,000 miles of high-speed rail in 15 years. They’ll be at 24,000 miles by 2025.

The low/medium speed maglevs also seem interesting:

https://gbtimes.com/china-tests-new-generation-of-maglev-tra...

A 70-100 mph maglev would be useful in a few large cities.

My wife and I took a trip to the middle of nowhere in Wales last fall. Train to Cardiff from London, then from Cardiff to our little cottage in the Pembrokeshire coast, I drove for 2+ hours in a rental car, learning to drive on the left.

The day after we arrived, we learned we could have caught a train to Fishguard, a tiny village nearby, and then the local bus would have gotten us within a ten minute walk from our rental house. It probably would have even been faster and cheaper than the car we rented. It sure would have been less stressful for me.

It's not just that the cities are more walkable. It's a whole culture that says cars should not be required to live a full life.

What I found interesting is that in the US the government had a huge role with developing the rail network while in the UK it was entirely done by the private sector.

I'm from the Netherlands where the rail network started out as a state owned company. It then got privatized by splitting ownership horizontally. Meaning one company owns the rail network while other companies provide train services on top of that network. This in contrast to Japan where ownership is split vertically. Multiple companies owning sections of the network including the train services. It amazes me that the Japanese model is able to achieve their famous punctuality. To see multiple privately owned companies working together in perfect harmony. In the Netherlands the railway system still needs state funding every year. I don't see how we could ever transition to the Japanese model. Which is a shame.

I think the optimal solution needn't and shouldn't be government designed.

To see countries like Norway where the state is subsidizing electric cars. Then meanwhile it's the state owned company Equinor still extracting huge amounts of oil for export. That oil might not get burned in Norway. But it's going to be burnt somewhere regardless how clean the energy in Norway is. Achieving clean transportation in one country doesn't mean we're solving the CO2 problem if the states are still allowing oil to be extracted and exported to other countries.

The problem is perhaps best solved by achieving renewable energy sources. Either through electricity or producing renewable (combustible) fuel sources.

Roads are obviously worse but I’m not sure about airplanes.

They’re measuring energy per passenger/km but I think ignoring the cost of building the infrastructure (the “get data” link is down). For roads and railways infrastructure investments are huge, both initial construction and then maintenance. Not only in dollars, in CO2 as well.

Rail requires significant investment to overcome the last mile problem, meaning the problem that often you need to walk the last mile from the station to your destination. Some may scoff at this but it is a major deterrent. Combine this with ride sharing apps and rail transit use has actually declined in the US in the past several years.

My biggest issue is train costs. I live in Edinburgh, and I can fly to London in 6 weeks for £19, or I can get the train for £160. The overall travel time is roughly the same, but at 6 times the price it can be very hard to justify. Especially when you have to travel with more than one person.

The figures given in on the site are taken from actual usage and so include the fact that buses tend to stop and go more than trains, are less likely to be full, etc. That's a useful view but it's good to look at the physics based maximum efficiency when full view too. I really, really recommend Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air[1] for getting a good sense of the numbers right now the chart on vehicle efficiencies[2]

[1]https://www.withouthotair.com/

[2]https://www.withouthotair.com/c20/page_128.shtml

This is rather obvious and has always been a major advantage of rail. The problem is the capital costs and real estate requirements of building the rail lines, especially when locations are far apart and there's already existing infrastructure that needs attention.

I find interesting that all these analyses of transportation modes generally fail to take into account the bootstrap and maintenance cost of the infrastructure. Roads are absolutely awful in terms of carbon cost, why isn't there more that takes this into account?

I think one of the biggest issues that prevent making things better for passengers isn't necessarily the cost of building the infrastructure, but the acceptability of the status quo. The benefit to going with rail isn't dramatic enough to inspire urgency.

I really think it would be useful to completely eliminate most vehicles from city centers. Only mass transit would be allowed, and walking/cycling would be prioritized over that. People would go to one of the parking lots (which would also be train stations) outside the city and take mass transit to go to some common hub of the city. Since driving directly to your destination is no longer an option, catching a train closer to your house and improving mass transit automatically becomes important, and lower pollution and traffic within cities will improve many aspects of city living. Also, since roads would be much smaller, buildings can be built more densely, which improves walkability and livability of cities.

However, people are currently addicted to cars, so the conversation will likely never happen.

As others have stated, the layout of a city presents enormous issues WRT public transport rollout.

If you take a train into a major metropolitan city like London you're sorted. You have a plethora of transport options available. For an area of at least five miles around the mainline station you come in to, buses are very frequent, a subway probably exists, other trains will exist, taxis/Uber will be easy, and so on.

Contrast that with taking a train to a random Northern town in the UK. You can get there, sure. Now what? You're miles walk from anything, it's all a big car-like suburban layout unless the specific thing you're visiting happens to be in the old town.

I generally tend to drive when visiting family for that reason alone, because otherwise it takes four or five times longer (not an exaggeration at all) to get anywhere once you're there. A 10-15 minute drive could be a 50 minute bus journey.

Sounds good, but it's hard to see into the details. In the US,cars & light trucks constitute about 18% of energy use. But what percentage of that use is for travel that could move over to rail? (I'd wager that driving around town is the biggest chunk.)

Further: should all US cars go renewable electric, that seems preferable to diesel-electric rail emissions. The railroads got hit hard back when autos came along a century ago, something similar might happen here.

The article pointed at this 'Transportation Energy Data Book' (PDF) available), which is largely petroleum-oriented. https://cta.ornl.gov/data/download37.shtml. Throws a lot of data out, but no big picture in there. It DID note that US rail freight uses about 1.1% of petroleum, which might be impressive?

Article reminded me of this YT video from Wendover Productions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9poImReDFeY. It covers many of the same topics with specific numbers used for comparisons in fares and fuel usage.

Trains might be more efficient in terms of energy, but sadly they are much more expensive (here in germany), than going by car. (except for some special fares)

And the car goes anywhere, anytime and the train does not. So no wonder, also here, for most people the car is the choice number one.

Just as important is the ease of using trains but, in some cases, this just doesn't happen.

I would often travel from St. Louis to Chicago for business and would think nothing of taking the train but I quickly realized how unreliable it was. A cold day froze the tracks making my five-hour ride a twelve hour one. When commercial traffic refused to let us pass through a couple of times, waiting for a pass through was the straw that broke that back and no longer think once about taking the train when my car gets me there just as fast at a more convenient time.

Not that they don't make mistakes, but trains are another thing China got right and get very little credit for internationally. 25 year plan, baby. In the words of Bezos: Still day 1. Ha!

Why are they so expensive then?

Here in New Zealand, I can drive most places cheaper than I can take a train. That's one person per vehicle vs a train car full of people. I just can't figure that one out.

Today US, I believe, is at point of no return. I highly doubt we will see any considerable train system modernization, comparable to the Asian nations, EU, or, maybe, even Africa.

>When journey times are less than four hours, people usually prefer to travel by train instead of alternative options, such as air or road.

I'm sure the airport security theater plays no small part in this. Would you rather sit on a train for four hours or spend two hours at an airport, get treated like cattle, get told you can't bring X Y or Z past security, get felt up by a stranger, and in a cramped tube for an hour? I'll take the train every time.

A pedelec (human-electric hybrid) on dirt roads is considerably more energy efficient (Wh/km/passenger) than trains even before factoring in the embedded energy of the vast infrastructure rail needs.

This article is irritating in that it doesn't give a balanced and useful view of the transportation trade offs. Very likely the author is aware of them but chooses to sweep under the carpet what doesn't suit his narrative.

A few observations to balance things out. First, rail is not the cheapest way to move freight, ships are by far, but rail is a distant second.

Rail obviously requires a lot of upkeep on the tracks, in addition to fuel and maintenance, whereas ships and planes have very little cost to maintain the fluids they travel in.

Electric transport on highways will quickly become very much cheaper than it is now because electric motors are much more efficient than fuel motors, solar and wind electricity costs are dropping precipitously, maintenance of electric motors is much less than fuel motors. Yes the roads still have to be maintained and heavier trucks mean much more maintenance.

Clearly, optimal transportation and shipping requires a hierarchy of trade offs that depend primarily upon scale. Two large cities that are 200 miles apart (eg New York and Boston) can support the overhead of a passenger rail connection. On the other hand San Francisco and New York, while large are too far apart, while another pair of cities might be 200 miles apart but the city populations are too small to support the rain infrastructure.

At the other end of the scale, an individual might take their bicycle on a 2 mile trip to the post office but would take their car on a 2 mile trip for the week's groceries.

Between these two extremes is a hierarchy of trade offs and there is no "one size fits all". Not even close. Rail is not the solution to all our transport problems. Neither are cars or bicycles. Each has its niche. If ships had legs then they might come close but unfortunately they don't, not to mention they are kind of slow.

So it's complicated but some trends might be usefully be predicted. Short haul flights will likely become cheaper as these planes become electrified and both energy and maintenance costs drop significantly. Trucking will become electrified and will compete even more effectively against trains and planes unless there is a labor shortage. Trains will continue to do what they are good at, long haul of heavy commodities and passenger service on intense routes. Electric cars will have lower fuel and maintenance costs so automobile miles will increase.

Perhaps the sum total of all this will mean that medium and smaller sized cities will become more competitive vis a vis their larger cousins over the next 50 years.

...When studying the carbon cycle of trains, they never study the externalities properly. Ground footprint of tracks, maintenance, high-speed, I do grow tired of improper studies.

Deisel freight trains are huge poluters with regard to particulate matter (PM). This actually causes cancer as opposed to CO2. Reducing PM without impacting fuel efficiency significantly is possible but requires investment. https://www.epa.nsw.gov.au/-/media/epa/corporate-site/resour...

Same goes for diesel trucks / busses. This type of change throughout the world would really improve people’s lives immediately.

Trains solve a different problem. They are no good at transporting more stuff than you can carry. Also, they do an excellent job spreading infections.

For now, yes.

Electric vehicles backed by sustainable power, when we reach that distant but ever-nearing goal, will be pretty good. Not as fast as flying but maybe we’ll get practical commercial passenger electric aircraft at some point.

On the delivery of goods side of things, the Tesla Semi should also be a game changer. Efficient and door to door.

For trains, I’d love to see how much could be done with, say, a dedicated power (battery) car per pure electric locomotive. I’m not claiming this would be a win; it might be too heavy. But it would be interesting to know.

How does it compare to electric cars?

Bicycles are quite the pollutant

Since were on the subject of proposing insane and impractical solutions to global warming ive been contemplating ways we could somehow still use up all the oil and yet not contribute to global warming.

One crazy idea is that we build a space elevator out of carbon nanotubes, and then make a core component of it act as a pump to suck up oil and water from sea level all the way up into the outer regions of our atmosphere and then we run the steam powered electrical generators up there and send the electricity back down the elevator.

Now this might sound crazy but lets seriously consider what we have to gain by this.

1. Physics are totally on our side in space. In a steam powered generator, the steam turns one side of the turbine and then must escape out to ensure too much back pressure doesnt build up and grind things to a halt. Along with this steam we also expel out the greenhouse gases generated from burning the fuel with it.

The thing is once we expel the steam and CO2 it goes out in a mixture and we cant really do a whole lot to sustainably trap it, store it until it cools off, and just reuse it, and all the while figure out some way to separate out the greenhouse gases and try to do something with it so we dont have to just release it into the air.

The thing is, burning oil to produce steam in space solves a lot of problems like this for us due to the physical properties how things work in the vacuum of space vs where there is no atmospheric pressure.

1. If you expel a mixture of steam and C02 into the cold vacuum space the water vapor will rapidly turn into liquid and then solid while the greenhouse gases remain gaseous. This leads to easier methods of filtration and water recycling.

The C02 is forced out into space and the water stays to be sent back down.

2. Wait, sent back down?

Yes because to make the pump work up without too much energy being required to suck it up against the power of Earth's gravitational pull (think of this like trying to suck a think milkshake through a straw a mile long) its best to utilize the downward pull of gravity to aide us in the process. Thus creating a vacuum.

3. When we run out of oil we can send up nuclear fuel next and just shoot the spent highly radioactive fuel that's no longer useful to us into space too.

4. The electricity generated can be used to power the electromagnetic elevator up and down.

5. We'll need a space elevator to make solar sails work anyways. We might as well utilize it to generate energy in every we can.

6. If any of this manages to blow up on us the explosion happens hella far away from us.

7. Surface level renewable power sources like wind, hydroelectric, and solar are all things we can utilize effectively assuming we build it in the most optimal place. (my best guess is somewhere in the ocean just south of Alaska)

Once again, Americans are "discovering" things other civilized countries knew and implemented for a long time :)

Under Siege 2.

Cycling is cleaner than any of them. So what?

Trains are a messy, loud and dangerous way of moving stuff. But yes, it's fuel efficient. But so fucking dangerous and primitive in so many ways.

Rail needs a lot of technology, and then it will be amazing. I don't think it's thsy far off.