Imagine all the problems that would be solved if someone invented a car with metal wheels, maybe one that can hold hundreds of people, goes really fast, is quiet and efficient....
Eliminating car culture is non optional if we want to save the planet.
Trains are far more heavily subsidized than autos, for example, on a per-passenger mile basis. Studies that account for the full bore of taxes which apply to personal vehicles (sales tax, excise tax, gas tax, registration fees) show that cars provide significant net income to government far exceeding infrastructure outlays.
I think that trains being less fuel efficient than cars with 2 occupants also is a good reason why “non-internalized negative externalities” have a hard time helping trains catch up in the final accounting.
If you can cite a study which supports your claim I would be very interested to read it. However, I don’t think the science of accounting for PM2.5 tire and brake dust is at the point where we can calculate the economic cost.
Meanwhile, are you including in your thought process any of the following?
- Public land permanently dedicated to roads, highways, parking lots, etc
- Parking minimums in zoning codes
- Police resources dedicated to traffic enforcement
- Wars of aggression fought to preserve oil prices
- Oil industry subsidies
- Innocent deaths and crippling lifetime injuries caused by automobiles
- Massive declining public health due to sedentary lifestyles (sitting on your butt in a driver's seat)
Public land will be permanently dedicated to rails and stations and things, if you want to cover the same area with transit access, you'll need similar, if not the same public land.
Parking minimums are not about being pro-car so much as being about anti-poor. This is a subsidy to entrenched interests, not to cars.
Police make money from traffic enforcement. Many departments get their whole budget from that. Many towns get their whole budget, above and beyond the PD, from it. Eliminate cars tomorrow and you bankrupt a huge percentage of non-major cities and all small towns.
Wars of aggression over oil are likely over due to fracking and oil sands, but I'll grant that they were bad while they were happening. Now, how are your predominantly diesel trains going to be powered without oil?
Oil subsidies are a problem. I would love to see congestion pricing and an end to all subsidies for transit, trains, buses, cars, bikes and pedestrian behaviors. We do not and never will again live in that world.
Deaths due to automobiles are at a record low per passenger mile and continuing to fall. Every time we make roads and cars and esp new cars more expensive, these rise as people limp their dangerous old clunker along a bit more. Weirdly, the requirements for safety technology cause people to drive older, less fuel efficient cars and the requirements for better emissions cause people to drive older, less safe cars all due to rising prices. Perhaps we should subsidize the removal of old cars (cash for clunkers)?
I don't think you can blame sedentary lifestyles on driving. That's a step too far -- it's a factor, but it's by no means the biggest or the most consistent. I doubt that we'd be able to attribute anywhere near enough health problem to only and specifically long commutes to even really price this externality.
2) Phrase it as you may, parking minimums raise cost of housing and/or disperse the cities increasing distances traveled, turning cheap options of walking or cycling into requisite car travel, which again widens roads, increasing distances...
3) No idea if true. Even so, less cars and less oil should leave more available resources for more useful things. Bad funding schemes are an argument, but I would consider it a sufficient one.
4) Yes they were bad. Probably still are. Trains can be electrified and no idea how that relates to wars.
5) I agree car subsidies are bad. Not sure about feasibility or seriousness of proposed end on pedestrian subsidies. Would you stop building sidewalks? Roads?
6) I will deflect to a more pressing concern and argue car travel inflicted pollution collectively does significantly more harm to health and quality of life of most residents, than the few, yet no less tragic traffic accidents.
How about we don't incentivize car usage, including all the reasons that make it convenient, useful and often almost unavoidable, like zoning, parking, wide roads, cheap fuel etc? Car is a car, and in this instance, newer cars may be even worse polluters with their tire particulate.
7) Sedentary life style is not about length of commute. If you don't own a powered personal transporter, you will almost certainly either walk more or cycle more or at least stand on your motorized scooter as you do want to get somewhere.
$66 billion a year in use taxes including fuel, excise, and registration.
That’s just the direct revenue. If you want to include externalities, you also have to include economic activity enabled by these investments, and the taxes on those activities.
Just the auto sector alone produces $60 billion of income tax revenue for state and Federal governments.
But that’s not even scratching the surface of total economic activity supported by the national highway infrastructure, or state and local infrastructure, which arguably holds up double digits percentages of GDP. State income taxes rise and fall based on their infrastructure investments.
Even the Big Dig (at $14 billion in cost I assume due to massive fraud) eventually not only pays for itself but is massively profitable from a combination of vehicle cost savings and in future revenue streams from increased economic activity enabled by the new infrastructure and added prime real estate. [1]
A lot of people die or are injured on the highways. Did you also attempt to measure the lives bettered and saved because of those same highways?
An informed discussion balances positives and negatives of any activity, along with the positives and negatives of a proposed substitute.
There’s a reason why infrastructure spending is one of the very few things which garners almost universal support from all political parties.
[1] - https://www.edrgroup.com/library/highways/economic-impact-ce...
There’s a difference between direct revenue & expenses and second-order effects.
As a second order effect, roads are necessary for something on the order of $10 trillion of economic activity in the US.
It’s a high price to pay to be sure, for the modern world. I look forward to self driving technology significantly reducing that number over the next 10-15 years.
[1] - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/motor-vehicle-crashes-u-...
I'm not talking infrastructure externalities, I'm talking about environmental externalities, especially (but not exclusively) tailpipe emissions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTA_Rapid_Transit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ohio_railroads
You are on to something though, in that Columbus, the largest city in Ohio, and several of the other major cities are not served.
The major cities of Columbus, Akron and Dayton do not have Amtrak service. Columbus is the largest metropolitan area in the U.S. without passenger rail service. Columbus last had service with the National Limited in 1979. Dayton (which lost service in 1979) and Akron (which lost service in 2005) are the eleventh and twelfth.[2]
In my opinion I think rail would displace a great deal of airline traffic because air travel security is such a chore, airlines have done their very best to squeeze out every last nickel and concerns about how green air travel is or is not. Add in the fact that there is far more room per passenger in a train and with dining cars (which are slowly dying) the food can be much better.
The biggest downside to rail travel in the US is the rail lines are owned by and geared for freight train operators. You really need completely separate lines (as you have in Japan) to compete on speed, but then competing on price would be difficult since it means building entirely new infrastructure. It could require government subsidy and in the current political climate that seems unlikely.
If you're going within a city, then home->dest time is roughly equal to home->station->train->station->dest, so if you're going to use a car anyway then you might as well just drive all the way, with more comfort, privacy, and convenience. Stations within walking distance are not realistic except in very dense urban areas like NY (which already has subways).
If you're going between cities, traffic is actually not much of an issue so it's again the same equation. Once distance increases to the point of a train being faster (even with stops), air travel then starts to become a better option.
Rail requires density. American cities are very spread out and internally sparse internally. Last mile is a serious problem, and that's before considering politics, real-estate, security and defense issues, pricing models, taxes, and other factors. Meanwhile roads are cheap and give people ultimate flexibility.
We would all love better transport, but pretending it's simple just because some other country somewhere has some trains isn't very useful.
That depends entirely on the distance traveled; no one is suggesting a replacement of transcontinental flights with trains. But there's plenty of medium and short haul flights (for example) that would be far more comfortable on a train with little difference in total travel time once you've factored airport security overhead.
I'll give you a practical example: my wife and I live in Houston and regularly visit New Orleans. It's a one hour and five minute flight on Southwest which is one of the few airlines that still allow two suitcases per passenger for free. That's a five to six hour drive if I choose to go by car and with rare exception I choose to drive. I'm happy to trade two to three more hours on the road versus the hassle of dealing with the airport.
>Passengers will trade better wifi, food, space, etc, in exchange for longer travel times but only up to a point.
The time to travel between Houston to New Orleans would be two to three hours by high speed train. That's competitive with the Southwest flight and fast enough I'd seriously consider versus driving myself. In fact at those speeds I'd start looking at longer trips either to Mexico, farther West to Arizona, New Mexico or Colorado or farther East to tourist destinations there. At least for me it would increase my travel options and I'd be sure to take advantage over it over flying.
Adding a train line requires an immense real-estate investment, likely with lots of battles with existing land owners who don't want to sell. After that, you're stuck with that route whether it makes money or not, and how many riders really travel between those cities in the first place?
This is the problem with CA's high speed rail line. They ended up placing both ends in the middle of nowhere when even the LA->SF route would have barely gotten the ridership needed to work.
Planes can reroute all the time and independently control schedules and payloads to account for actual passenger demand, while also only needing an airport on either end which already exist.
If a train was built, you'd be paying 10x more for a ticket than the airline. Is that something you would do? Something many others would do?
https://www.archives.gov/files/education/lessons/anti-rail/i...
The same arguments against rail can be made (for example) against new roads and exactly for the same reasons: they just go one place, you have to fight land owners to put them in and what if no one uses them?
Adding a train line requires an immense real-estate investment, likely with lots of battles with existing land owners who don't want to sell. After that, you're stuck with that route whether it makes money or not, and how many riders really travel between those cities in the first place?
Planes can reroute all the time and independently control schedules and payloads to account for actual passenger demand, while also only needing an airport on either end which already exist.
If a train was built, you'd be paying 10x more for a ticket than the airline. Is that something you would do? Something many others would do? Just to get there at basically the same time in the end?
The upshot of this is that quite a modest train network could easily serve 50%+ of Americans. Once that's done, then you can come back and complain about how it's hard to run trains to that one guy who lives in a shack somewhere, and I'll agree with you.
Think of it like the interstate highway system. Yes, not every single American has a highway running to their door. But a heck of lot of people make daily use of the system and 100% of the population benefits from it.
Obviously, it makes sense for those who do but most of America is sprawly and isn't designed for rail transit efficiency.
I'd appreciate good quite rail but it isn't anywhere near feasible in these sprawly landscapes.
but MOST of the people do live (or around) densely populated areas, no? (just checked - google says 82% of US population is in urban areas). Addressing issues for most of the people first would have the most impact.
50% of the US population live in just 35 metropolitan areas (Los Angeles, CA; New York, NY; Chicago, IL; Philadelphia, PA; Washington, DC; Detroit, MI; Houston, TX; Atlanta, GA; Dallas, TX; Boston, MA; San Bernardino, CA; Phoenix, AZ; Minneapolis, MN; Orange County, CA; San Diego, CA; Nassau, NY; St. Louis, IL; Baltimore, MD; Seattle, WA; Tampa, FL; Oakland, CA; Pittsburgh, PA; Miami, FL; Cleveland, OH; Denver, CO; Newark, NJ; Portland, OR; Kansas City, MO; San Francisco, CA; Fort Worth, TX; San Jose, CA; Cincinnati, OH; Orlando, FL; Sacramento, CA; Fort Lauderdale, FL) that together have 173328 square miles. That is a density of 654 inhabitants per square mile or 253 inhabitants per square kilometer. Compare that with the 232 inhabitants per square kilometer in Germany, or the 118 inhabitants per square kilometer in France. And yes you can live without a car even in rural Germany (at least if you don't have kids).
The 20 densest metropolitan areas contain 25% of the US population and have 400 inhabitants per square kilometer, comparable to the 416 inhabitants per square kilometer averaged over the Netherlands.
The lack of public transport in the US is not a density problem. That is just the excuse because people don't want to change.
And before anybody says "but the density in German cities is much higher": I lived for years in a German district with a density of 217 inhabitants per square kilometer, without needing a car.
I lived in a small town of 4,500 people without a car too. Same for a 20,000 person one. Same for a 160,000 one. Same for a 600,000+. I've done it in multiple 1+ million cities too.
It doesn't mean your quality of life is the same as it would be with a car.
Regardless - I don't think comparing Germany to the USA with population density is going to work. A lot of Germany is clustered with high density. You can put a million people in 1 square mile, leave 999 square miles empty and it'll have the same population density as any other 1000 square mile 1000/mi region.
Sprawl is the issue with the USA. That 600 habits per square mile goes out forever whereas in Germany it has a tendency to fall off exponentially.
If you go to places like Norway then you'll notice they won't even let people build outside their city proper. Once you get outside Oslo, it turns completely green and there's just road and rail. Almost no houses until you get to small dense towns. In comparison to the USA where the houses go on and on and on and on and on and on. The lots just get bigger and bigger whereas the homes in these other countries tend to stay the same size and so does the property.
For intercity, trains quickly start competing against airlines which are better for most domestic travel because the US is so big.
Usually we would have taken the subway, but for whatever reason I was feeling lazy this time so we drove. It was almost a half-hour trip across downtown through the tail end of rush hour, and then ten minutes of circling the block looking at parking lots and garages that were already full, and then another ten minutes of walking back to the venue from the street parking we finally found several blocks away.
And no, the solution is not "build more parking", the solution is to further incentivise mass transit use. For example, in this case, I probably would have been dissuaded from driving if Google Maps had not only incorporate traffic delays into its estimate, but also highlighted that the apparently plentiful nearby parking lots were all likely to be full at the time of my planned arrival.
Unless you within walking distance of a station, you're going to get in a car anyway and at that point it's usually faster and cheap to drive. That's the fundamental calculus that prevents large-scale train construction in CA cities.
The reality is, most of the people around us attending the event got there by some combination of transit, walking, and uber/cabs. And we should have too; we'll know for next time.
Density and last mile is the critical factor. Most cities in the US are too spread out currently.
Three of those four fail to address the tire issue, which is at the root of this problem.
That could work, or you know, we could continue research and development of tires with better PM2.5 ratings and vehicles that run on sustainable energy.
I wonder which could be done without a multi-trillion dollar hit on the global economy?
Bicycle tires are made of and release much less rubber than cars.
Would require a lot cleaner cities. Clean bare feet could become a sign of affluence: "I'm so rich, I only walk where it's clean."
I take the bus, I'm trading a bit of time for the convenience of having someone else drive, and a forced exercise program walking to the bus stop. Several times a month I need to go someplace where the bus doesn't go without an unreasonably long walk.
Update: I've also stayed several months in Chile, which based on GDP, HDI, and Gini Coefficient, is a more developed country. Fuel is twice the price as in Panama, pedestrian infrastructure is well maintained, and the car driver culture in terms of following rules is the opposite of Panama. Mom and pop shops are the norm there, everywhere I went.
It'll be a long time still before this actually gets to any kind of production use, unless regulation steps in.
https://www.theprch.com/this-vs-that/fuel-efficiency-planes-...
>In the fuel efficiency information provided below you’ll see that trains are unexpectedly low, but this data can be a bit misleading because it’s from research that only studied trains in the US. There are two things to note:
>1) Americans don’t utilize trains as a mode of transportation very much in comparison with European and Asian countries. This brings fuel efficiency down because there are less people being transported per train moving.
>2)Trains have varying fuel efficiencies themselves. They are powered by either a normal combustion engine using diesel fuel or an electric motor. The efficiency of electric trains is highly variable because of the source of electricity. Electricity from a coal fired power plant will be much less efficient then renewable resources such as hydroelectric, wind, or solar.
That's rare. The vast majority of traffic is 1 person per car, which completely changes the results here to make it worse than the rest.
We're doing a fine job of emptying the rural areas, heh, so I see no reason this isn't possible.