In a few years I think we'll recognize that self-driving vans (in a few different sizes) are the best trains: cheaper than trains (and therefore lower environmental impact), completely flexible routing, and you can even let them use dedicated right of way if you want to increase capacity.
Until you actually do the basic middle-school math of calculating capacity. Both of vans, and of the roads
seems to be the worst of all worlds but never quite dies
How does that work? For the same amount of capacity, vans are not and probably never will be cheaper. Steel wheels on rails, with massive capacity, is just drastically more efficient, even with 0 driver costs. You'll still have much more maintenance (the tires, breaks, road) to do with a much higher number of vehicles.
Trains are unbeatable for inland freight between limited destinations, but don't make much sense for current day commuting or traffic patterns.
There is a notable exception that might distort techie perception on this issue: BART. It implements many of its own standards, even down to track gauge. But it is absolutely an outlier (standardised track gauge, ironically, being the USA’s main contribution to the development of the railways, which it was otherwise late to).
Almost everywhere else has rather interchangeable infrastructure and a lot of trans-national businesses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_gauge_in_the_United_Stat...
It was a pretty staggering achievement to switch over with so little disruption, and had such rapid, obvious benefits that it kind of ended the notion that keeping entrenched separate gauges could have any merits that outweighed their disadvantages -- it's really the event that made standard gauge the de facto standard.
Things would have taken a generation longer without it, because this was just a plainly capitalistic decision that proved itself essentially instantly.
(Nearest modern equivalent: iMac having no floppy drive and USB)
Nah, this is a UK absurdity because they UK decided to privatise their railways in the worst possible way - every single part (rail infrastructure, operations, rolling stock) was privatised in a local monopoly manner. The rolling stock owners could lease to multiple different operators, so there was some limited competition on that front (probably eviscerated by the need for the ROSCOs to have a profit margin, on top of the fact that there were 10 of them, which meant reduced economies of scale both at acquiring but also maintaining those trains).
They're currently trying to nationalise some parts, after already nationalising the infrastructure (because people died due to bad maintenance due to misaligned incentives - maintenance doesn't bring profits).
But other than that, rolling stock leasing mostly exists in freight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_stock_company
> trains are actually not only mass produced (e.g. by Bombardier)
But yes, trains of all types are mass produced by companies such as Alstom (which were already massive and also bought Bomboardier's train arm), Siemens, Stadler, etc. They can be customised (size, features, etc.), but e.g. the Alstom Metropolis line of metro trains can be found all over the world.
But admittedly that comment was mostly my brain blipping while creating that sentence by settling on the old, broader definition of "Europe" where we used to be significant and that I sometimes use when talking to Americans, hence the subclause clarification about the UK within it.
The point I was getting to is that outside the USA (which definitely has nationally-specific rail vehicles like Amtrak and BART) things are broadly commoditised and relatively off-the-shelf, both in the rail-specific hardware sense and in the wider construction sense.
I don't think there is anything particularly different between building a road and building a railway line in terms of construction skills, and indeed where major roads and rail in the UK are concerned there's at least half a dozen or so major construction firms doing both, right? Clancy, Balfour Beatty, Octavius, Eurovia, Babcock etc. (and those are mostly just names I remember seeing out of train windows)
Trains can certainly HOLD more people than a bus, and I hate buses with a passion normally reserved for religious arguments, and trains are Choo-choo, but they are expensive as all hell.
If they weren't why would BRT exist at all? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q-UHd9tFNk
The only way out IMO is that we have to stop ripping off the public by giving away unlimited road space for free.
Trains are a bigger upfront investment, but are cheaper in the long run, especially once capacity is factored in. You need a lot of busses to equal moderate sized trains.
Busses have their place, but not as the backbone for rapid transit in even moderate sized urban areas.
BRT trades CAPX for OPEX. In Latin America where BRT is hugely successful capital is expensive and labour is cheap, so hiring a ton of drivers is easy. In high labour costs markets like the US, Canada, and Europe BRT falls apart. It's often all transit agencies think they can get funding and support for so it's pushed, but it's way too easy to cut back BRT attributes like signal priority, dedicated lanes, and all door boarding to end up with just a bus with a fancy livery.
For a given capacity requirement, in a dense city, they're cheaper. The biggest costs of an urban train line are 1) building stations on expensive land 2) driver salaries, and buses are worse on both aspects; you need much more station space to load/unload the same number of people from buses than from trains, and buses carry far fewer passengers per driver.
> If they weren't why would BRT exist at all?
As far as I can tell BRT is a spook, a way for the road lobby to stop cities building rail. Has it ever actually worked out well for passengers?
Most suburbs are dense enough to have demand for full sized buses if service is good. The cost of a bus means that cities don't give them good service, but automated bus drivers would reduce the costs enough that they could run good service and this in turn will get so many people to use the bus instead of driving that the van could not work.
For rural areas a van might make sense, though you quickly get to a frequent van is less efficient than just owning your own van.
This sounds wrong, or at least your local transport company is being ripped off. Dublin Bus bought 600 plug-in hybrid double-deckers a few years back at a unit cost of 450,000 eur; they take about 90 people. More recently it bought a couple hundred electric buses of the same size for 500k apiece (though of course these are cheaper to run).
Also, define 'rarely full'. At rush hour, most buses will be full for at least part of their route.
Taken as an example, Dublin Bus has 1,100 buses, almost all ~90 person double deckers (homeopathic numbers of smaller single-deckers and giant three-axle double-deckers can be ignored). Let's say 90% are operating at peak time. That's a capacity of 89,000 people on the road; implementing your plan with 6 person vans would require about 15,000 vans. This is obviously completely absurd.
(The original claim that they were good _train_ substitutes is even more absurd; replacing a 1,000 person rapid transit train would require 166 vans. Which is multiple kilometres of vans. On a decent metro line such as train might arrive every 3 minutes. There is just no way you can do that with vans.
This structure allows for greater QoS through the system. Almost any sufficiently dense place without regulation limiting it approaches a mix of larger buses on fixed routes with smaller vehicles on slightly less fixed routes.
SF Muni has a 13% absence rate. Without the driver we can have more vehicles, more often, and on-time every time. Once we can do that, we can vary the size of the vehicles to cover different routes and to allow for QoS.
Definitely. I've found rideshare type service to be much more predictable because it is isn't subject to bus bunching and can route around traffic.