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Comment by justinator | Hacker News Reader

sneaks into the room

TRAINS!

sulks back out of the room

Last mile connectivity is a massive hurdle, though. Getting a railway connection is only a viable option for the very largest businesses. Your average business/industrial park would immediately be gridlocked if you replaced all trucks with trains, and getting trains inside cities is pretty much impossible.

Great option for long distance, terrible option for short distance, probably too much of a hassle for medium distance.

With better last mile connectivity, trains should be the only option. But guess loading and unloading is the weak link along with last mile lack of options.

The problem with trains is that the infrastructure is very expensive, and also wildly unprofitable, and very slow to build.

How does that work, though? Aren't highways crazy expensive?

In what world can 2 metal tracks plus some small foundations be cheaper than 20m width of concrete, asphalt and much bigger foundations?

The economics of rail versus roads don't make any sense to me.

The only way they do, I imagine, is if roads are crazily subsidized.

Not just subsidized, but build and managed by the government!

I studied civil engineering, with a focus on structural, but a heavy geotechnical element and some pavement design and rail desing.

Highways are cheaper and easier because they're usually less investment and planning at once. They have their own downsides, don't get me wrong, but no. Rail is long term, lots of property seizure, usually a single track across a vast distance, etc.

Rail makes sense for a lot of places, but for a country as large as America, it's hard to see the benefits as fast as highways and we need logistics to switch to electric quickly.

That said, to make highways more efficient more places should take a page off of the 407 in Ontario, Canada. The fluctuating pricing keeps the roads in high usage most of the time and it stops tragedy of the commons issues with sinks (the cities that highways dump their vehicles to) and keeps highway economic pricing honest against things like rail and sea.

What about starting to use the rails we already have?

Aren’t most of our rails already used at capacity?

Much of the US rail system sees one train each direction a day or less.

The problem is those are feeder lines; the main lines can be at capacity even if they’re a relatively small percentage of the total rail.

> usually a single track across a vast distance, etc.

This is fairly short-sighted, isn't it? Make no mistake, highways are also long-term and involve lots of property seizure. We could build out railways with more than a single track, but rail is private and roads are public.

>is if roads are crazily subsidized

That is very much reality.

Right but generally the argument goes that if subsidizing roads is worth it, it is probably worth it to subsidize trains as well.

I'm 100% for subsidizing trains, or at least saying that train systems not turning a profit are for the greater good (as I do for public transportation).

One problem with market economies is that if you subsidize one thing, you have to subsidize everything else or there won't be a level playing field.

I suppose, but this hasn’t stopped us from doing this with roads, so I don’t see why we don’t do it with trains.

Highways don't turn a profit. Why should trains?

Trains aren't wildly profitable, but they are profitable when run correctly.

You can't just make an unicorn hockey stick curve train company, it's basic infrastructure like electricity and water.

By chance, not too long after reading this article, I ran across this article on Amtrak struggling to update even our existing tracks along the west coast to meet the challenges of climate change.

I am envious of the European and Asian train systems and wish we had the like in the US, but alas, we sunk trillions of dollars into our interstate system of highways. I don't think we should give up on trains in the US, and would dearly love to see some high-speed rail corridor investment toot suite, but it would be irresponsible to let our current investment go to ruin, even if we decided today to put all our chips on trains.'

I mean, we started with trains, right? And look what happened after we stopped investing in them. Just updating our current train system might be too heavy a burden for the US to bear these days.

What we really need is to prioritize investing in the US at every level, and finding better ways than borrowing against the future to pay for it. After all, it's not that the money isn't out there. Maybe we do need to make it investments rather than taxes. My personal politics are pretty far left, but in the US at least, leftist policies really struggle for traction. I'd rather see us making a better world, even if it doesn't follow my personal plan for getting there.

https://crosscut.com/environment/2023/05/when-it-comes-clima...

(lightly edited)

It'd be awesome if we could get the utilization ratio up. Any given section of highway has a vehicle over it let's say 1% of the time. Rail's utilization factor has got to be 1% of that.

My Sci fi dream is carrier trains, where a car is disaggregated into a pod and a skateboard. But one can drive their vehicle to a train & the pod comes off & mounts onto the train with standard mounting & then gets dropped back onto a rental skateboard at the destination.

Or maybe if we had right sized e-transit with ebikes & small e-cars, we could just ride on/off regular trains, quickly & efficiently.

https://www.amtrak.com/auto-train

It's not a fast nor available option. No one is going to commute this way regularly.

We're talking about trains, and to me, the occasional trip is not the active question: it's what we do day by day. This ain't it.

It really depends on the railway line. A lot of Europe is running enough passenger trains that there literally isn't enough space to add more cargo trains into the mix.

In my country the minimum train-train spacing is five minutes, because any less and a train won't be able to stop if the preceding one has an accident. A substantial part of the network is already being limited by this, and we are seeing more and more quad-track sections.

Your "carrier train" already exists, to an extent. It is called "intermodal shipping containers".

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