We need investments in rail infrastructure to take trucks off the road and to improve safety and to keep goods moving.
For some reason, our railroad are privately owned rather than owned by the states or the fed.
For some reason, our railroad are privately owned rather than owned by the states or the fed.
Who do you think built them? We have the world’s largest rail network for a reason.
I don't know if shear size is a great way to evaluate what method of rail ownership is superior. The US is literally the third largest country on earth so it makes sense that we have a lot of "largests" when it comes to infrastructure networks.
What probably would make more sense would be a rail density metric instead. Something like km of rail per sq km of land would work (but has it's own flaws). But that metric then shows a number of other countries that clearly beat the US despite having nationalised or hybrid rail networks.
A good example would be Japan which has roughly triple as much rail relative to the size of their country and I doubt many people would argue that Japan's rail network is less effective than the US rail network.
If we want to talk freight utilisation, Japanese freight rail usage is low because of the country's geography/generally easy access to water/maritime shipping (since shipping by water is always more cost/energy effective per tonne relative to rail).
So a comparable example in that case would be China who has similar geography, a similar sized country, and a rail network roughly 70% the size of the US rail network (#2 largest network). However China moves nearly 3x more raw mass per year relative to the US and 50% more tonne kilometers per year relative to the US.
Point being that US freight rail is massive because it geographically and economically makes sense for it to be so. Similar networks exist in other countries that take nationalised or hybrid rail approaches yet those countries consistently outperform US rail in basically every metric but shear size.
Is that true? I always thought it was the other way around. Rail has relatively low rolling resistance so I thought it would take a lot less energy to move the same weight by rail compared to water.
Which one is easier to move?
At the same time, swimming speed isn’t very useful for anybody. What are the relative energy requirements to move ten thousand pounds at 30 mph in the water vs on rails?
> Per one gallon of fuel:
> A truck can carry one ton of cargo just 59 miles.
> By rail, one ton of cargo can travel 202 miles.
> An inland barge can carry one ton of cargo 514 miles.
https://www.portoflittlerock.com/2023/10/the-benefits-of-riv...
> The study shows that barges can move a ton of cargo 647 miles with a single gallon of fuel, an increase from an earlier estimate of 616 miles. In contrast, trains can move the same ton of cargo 477 miles per gallon, and trucks can move the same ton of cargo 145 miles per gallon.
> https://maritime-executive.com/article/barge-transport-wins-....
> | transport mode | Fuel consumption |
> | ---------------------- | BTU per short ton-mile | kJ per tonne-kilometre |
> | Domestic waterborne | 217 | 160 |
> | Class 1 railroads | 289 | 209 |
> | Heavy trucks | 3,357 | 2,426 |
> | Air freight (approx.) | 9,600 | 6,900 |
In other words waterborne freight is generally around 25% cheaper energy wise and far easier/cheaper to scale capacity relative to rail.
It's also worth looking at some of the other numbers on that page. German numbers work out ocean freight to be over 3x cheaper energywise per tkm relative to rail.
Notice that we managed to build an interstate system and lot of other infrastructure.
The yellow book (designed by the federal govt) maps extremely closely to what became the final interstate system.
The states did the actual building and own the actual land but the federal govt told them where to build, gave them the money, and otherwise forced their hand into the construction.
I'm not necessarily saying federal control over all infrastructure is a good thing but it really was in large part due to the federal government that the interstate system actually happened.
You’re right though that it’s not exactly about it being centralized.
Slaves?
Exploitation and cheating sure, but the railroads are recent.
The slaves were also recent.
>Southern railroad companies began buying slaves as early as the 1840s and used enslaved labor almost exclusively to construction their lines. Thousands of African Americans worked on the southern railroads in the 1850s
There is a temporal overlap between "slave america" and "railroad america".
This type of subtle historical revisionism is used to distance ourselves from the horrors of slavery. I don't think it was a conscious effort on your part, though. Don't take this as an attack, please. It's just a gentle reminder that slavery isn't actually all that ancient of a practice.
https://www.google.com/maps/@43.7155994,-122.829874,73748m/d...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_and_California_Railroad...
That's a pretty huge difference in terms of modal share.
And even with the sprawling size of the US network (and differences in things like labor costs), US freight rail is still more efficient at moving cargo in terms of costs.
Now do comparison of transporting people and that’s impact on the economy
China:
Total length: 155,000 km (100,000 km electrified)
Total passenger/km: (1,470.66 billion passenger-kilometres, 2019)
Total freight: 3,018 billion cargo tonne-kilometres (2019)
US:
Total length: 257,722 km (160,141 mi) (I can't find figures on electrified length, seems at most 2000km?)
Total passenger/km: (10.3 billion, 2014)
Total freight: 1.71 trillion short ton-mile, approx 963 billion tonne-kilometres (I used wolfram alpha for that conversion)
So if my calculations are correct - which they may not be - on fewer rails China transports an order of magnitude more passenger and freight traffic.
But the premise is meaningless. It's easy for a government to affect the usage of something by subsidizing it or constraining alternatives to it, which has little to do with whether it would be more efficient or well-managed as a public agency.
Are those actually the only options for public goods focus though?
I generally lean softly toward anarchic solutions, so of course my mind goes toward some kind of non-profit NGO or DAO rather than the same government structures that lead to war for oil, etc.
> or the fed.
Is there another example of a central bank owning a railroad? I don't doubt that it has happened historically, but this is the first time I've even thought of it as a possibility.
Oh, an entity like the original DAO that led to Ethereum selling out?
"The Contract is the Law" until its not.
Very anarchic.
JR Shikoku, JR Hokkaido, and JR Freight are basket cases.
We can’t believe it but some of us enthusiasts are actually wanting privatisation back
Public can be good. Private can be good. Public can be bad. Private can be bad…
Because we want them to work well? Look at how the government handles the infrastructure it owns.
That's assuming, of course, you mean the US government--which does not own things like highways, for those unclear; it does have a controlling stake in Amtrak, but aside from the NEC (which is great IMO) Amtrak does not own the railways that actually serve as rail infrastructure. Because, of course, country governments elsewhere regularly own or have majority stakes in both railroads and railways, to pretty good success.
Or, on the other other hand, maybe you mean non-transporation infrastructure? 'Cause frankly, the US Postal Service was pretty great 'til "the government doesn't work and we're going to prove it by ripping out big chunks of it" politicians got their hands on it.
I don't see how it applies to infrastructure management. I understand how it can apply to energy producers (overall disagree on that, i work for a big energy producer who have multiple plant of a lot of different types, and in the end the electricity market the EU copied from the US made us less efficient, i have math to prove it), to service providers, or even to train companies and railroad building companies. And i think that for non-critical infra construction it's even good.
But managing infrastructure is hard, and put a company at the right place (between consummer and producers) to both put a toll on a service, and to be increasingly susceptible to corruption.
I was responding to a comment which said "states or the fed," so of course I was referring to those both. The states own the highways.
I hope you're not putting forth the Department of Defense as a positive exemplar of government efficiency.
> That's assuming, of course, you mean the US government--which does not own things like highways
The federal government funds 90% of the interstate highway system. The job it does at this is kind of medium and has all of the usual problems that happen when you're spending somebody else's money, e.g. the roads are always under construction because the construction companies get paid if they're "working" (even if that means standing around) so finishing projects quickly is disfavored because they want the work to expand to fill the available budget rather than the other way around.
The general problem with government projects in the US is that they put too much emphasis on false economies of scale and try to allocate contracts that are too large. For example, instead of contracting with one company for rolling stock and it maintenance, they should buy rolling stock as-needed from anyone who makes it broadly matching a required spec (e.g. the correct width of the track) and then contract with separate companies for maintenance.
The most important thing, which they fail at utterly, is to make contracts small and simple and make it easy for companies that don't specialize in government contracting to bid on them. Because otherwise they only get companies that do specialize in government contracting, even when the contract is for some fungible commodity, and end up paying unreasonable rates for everything.
> the US Postal Service was pretty great 'til "the government doesn't work and we're going to prove it by ripping out big chunks of it" politicians got their hands on it.
The US Postal Service had a monopoly on first class mail at a time when lots of things were delivered via first class mail. It wasn't particularly cost efficient but it delivered the mail and it couldn't be outcompeted by someone else because competing with it was prohibited by law.
Then first class mail got replaced by email while online purchasing increased enough to give UPS and FedEx enough economies of scale to outcompete USPS for package delivery even with the USPS having existing trucks delivering the mail. Then it actually had to compete on efficiency, which it failed to do and ran into problems. Then people started trying to reform it.
Which never really worked because a government agency is constrained by political forces, e.g. public sector unions that capture legislators ("management") who are supposed to represent the general public against the unions representing the public's employees. If you then put it into competition with private companies, it will generally operate less efficiently and go bankrupt. Which is fine as long as the private companies continue to operate in a competitive market themselves, until someone decrees that we need to save the publicly operated business that failed in the market.
[1] https://archive.is/2023.09.19-135838/https://www.nytimes.com...
Brightline is an accomplishment, but this significantly oversells it: the Orlando-Miami route tops out at 125mph, which is barely HSR by any normal standard. A good chunk of the route is on pre-existing lines that top out at 79mph. For comparison, trains on the LGV Nord (31 years old) operate at 190mph[1].
I hope they continue to invest in HSR, but I don't think we should settle for marketing here.
The terminus in Las Vegas is south of the airport and the Strip. The terminus in “LA” is in Rancho Cucamonga, 37 miles east of LA and in a whole different county.
CAHSR was partially sold as a downtown revitalization project, and so has expensive full speed approaches into Fresno, Bakersfield, Merced, etc.