But… why couldn’t we just build more and better trains?
You still have to get to and from the stations themselves, and the dependability of transportation arriving on time and proximity to your destination plays a big factor.
The metro area I went to college in had a light rail train that ran from downtown to a popular tourist destination. To get there, though, you needed to catch a connecting bus ride.
It is a 15 minute trip by car, but an hour by bus+train. If the bus ran late, it would actually be faster to ride a bicycle all 13 miles.
The metro area cities want to add more trains because it is the progressive thing to do, but ridership on one of the lines is abysmal, and the other lines aren't utilized as much as they could be because people feel unsafe on them and are disgusting- smoking cigarettes, drinking hard alcohol, food all over the floor, loud music, the occasional gang posturing or aggressive pan handling were all cited by locals in a survey as to why they chose to drive instead.
But I don't see them making more impact on somebody who's already driving. Traffic will still be traffic and walkable cities will have to limit that. It's the same car after all, just driven by a computer. All those current issues for heavy car-dependence won't be solved by autonomous driving.
I have the same issue. Due to location and geography I'm looking at a 90 minut bus ride, with at least one change of bus. If I need to drop the kid of at daycare, you can add 30 minuts, because I have to get of and wait for the next bus.
So I'd have to leave at 6:00 to be at work at around 8:00, I then need to leave no later than 15:30, pick up the kid at 17:00 and be home at 17:30, assuming that everything lines up perfectly. There's nothing left of the day and my child has spend 10 hours in daycare... and I haven't worked a full eight hours. It's a 15 minute drive to the office.
If you take a look at Switzerland which did public transportation right, you will see that even in low densities areas, it is very much possible to get around by public transport. The canton of Graubünden (area: 7105.44 km2, density: 28/km2) has more train lines and bus lines than the city of Atlanta (area: 353.04 km2, density: 771.3/km2). Switzerland has a lot of tiny villages, evenly spread around. We don't have crazy dense cities, and certainly not large cities.
While public transport does not solve every trip and every commute, it is a solution for a significant percentage of the population. You can get to remote areas for hiking, leisure, ... You can find bus lines that connect one village of 30 people to another village of 100 people. They may not be frequent (4x a day), but they allow for tourist to go hike to remote areas, visit nice places, ... Also, public transit is clean here and very safe.
For some numbers: a decent amount of people commute by public transport (up to 50% in certain areas), and an even larger percentage of people use public transport for leisure activities (>70%).
In an ideal world, you would have decent public transit inside cities and around, pedestrian friendly cities, bike sharing, and fery vew (robo)taxis in dense areas. This makes the cities confortable to live in (less noise and polution). Also, intercity transit is very important (by train, highspeed train or plane). Then, in rural areas you would have robotaxis that can get you anywhere you want. The remaining vehicles on the road should be work related vehicles.
In the US, we are basically allergic to the density required to make trains good. I look at, say, St Louis to KC: a route of ideal length for high speed rail. But on both sides of the train, the density just isn't there, so people would drive themselves to the station, and rent a car on the other side, and suddenly you might as well have driven yourself across.
But sure, rebuild dense enough as to make subways, trains and walking the best modes of transportation, and the world would be pretty nice. it'll just cost, say, a few trillion to rebuild US cities that way. And the people that live far from the city center, and whose land values would probably drop massively wouldn't be all that happy.
You are better off buying a bunch of robot cars, tying them together with a rope, and starting a company to run hacker trains on city streets and charge money.
In fact, in SF, if the protestors were clever, they'd just get together tie a bunch of cars together and create their own train. What are they going to do, arrest you?
Eventually people will say "you know what, I guess I'll just live closer to work". Congratulations, you just invented cities. With land being used for humans and not automobile storage, mass transit becomes more viable. Thus, the car's death warrant is signed.
Trains great if you need to move a large number of people between few destinations, less so if you have a smaller number of people or many different destinations. The city next to where I live cancelled their light-rail project, because it's insanely expensive and yields no benefit over busses, in fact busses are more flexible. If your distances are short enough trains again make no sense.
You also still need to get people from the stations to where they actually need to go. It's rare that a train station is your end destination. Busses work, but they are a little slow, taxis are faster because they normally go direct.
When I fly to London for work, I take the Heathrow express to Paddington and then a short cab ride to my hotel.
If I had to switch to the underground and then walk, I’d just take a taxi the whole way or rent a car at the airport.
While other developed nations show us it’s possible to reduce our accident rate per mile driven, we could also make progress on reducing the time spent in a car. So many suburbanites drive the whole way into the city for weekend trips here in my city because their local commuter rail stinks. I see missed opportunities all around.
If cities are increasingly considering offloading public transit burden off to private entities, they might as well consider introducing the private sector into rail…
It's not the same because the time can be productive or used for leisure. Plus far less stressful and tiring than driving.
It takes me about 30min to get there, no matter what method I use and I actually live in a city. Then waiting for some train, ten-twenty minutes is not unusual, then riding it, leaving the station. It’ll easily be an 2h experience to travel what would be at most 30min in a car.
Getting basically anywhere in NL with a train is an automatic 2-3x slowdown, unless you happen near some public transport hotspot and your destination is actually near the station.
It’s also uncomfortable for all kind of reasons, to be honest.. but I’ll take that if it wasn’t such a waste of time.
I don’t see any way of improving this as well. What would you propose? Demolish housing to make place for tracks?
Waymo is of course not cheap but they can do a lot with a few billion. Rail just isn't cheap. Privately funded rail tracks are basically not a thing in most countries. Just too expensive to be interesting to normal investors. Especially if they are looking for ROI measured in years rather than decades/centuries. Governments spend on rail because of the wider economic effects it has on their economies. Not because exploiting rail roads is particularly lucrative or even profitable.