The heavier the vehicle, the more damage done to the road on an exponential scale. The average truck does over 400 times the damage to the road as the average car. 99% of road wear is caused by...
The heavier the vehicle, the more damage done to the road on an exponential scale. The average truck does over 400 times the damage to the road as the average car. 99% of road wear is caused by large trucks, but they only pay for 35% for tolls, causing the average US taxpayer to be subsiding private trucking companies.
The author author offers train shipping as a much better alternative, solving most of the physical problems trucks have, as well as having a fourth of the greenhouse emissions. To truly combat climate change, I think we need to challenge rampant overconsumption and the need to have anything your heart desires in two days or less. But we will always need some sort of shipping infrastructure, and trains are vastly superior to trucks in almost every way.
Love trains, but they scale very poorly and trucks have a much easier time switching routes. I don't see them taking over smaller shipping until they solve industrial truck transportation. I would...
trains are vastly superior to trucks in almost every way
Love trains, but they scale very poorly and trucks have a much easier time switching routes. I don't see them taking over smaller shipping until they solve industrial truck transportation.
I would guess it is also much easier to externalize infrastructure costs using up common roads than dedicated railways.
"Thing we spend virtually no money on doesn't work compared to thing we spend billions on" -Everyone criticizing non-car transport in America. Maybe Americans wouldn't hate public transport so...
"Thing we spend virtually no money on doesn't work compared to thing we spend billions on" -Everyone criticizing non-car transport in America.
Maybe Americans wouldn't hate public transport so much if we funded it properly. I'd certainly take the bus more if it ran more than once an hour and was free at point of use.
Everyone talks up high-speed transport between localish cities. How about some high-speed cross-continent rail? Would be a lot greener than fleets of jets.
There is certainly that problematic cultural perception. I know Americans who insist that taking a car is the best way to get between Heathrow and central London, which makes very little sense...
Part of the issue is that Americans basically see public transit as being for the poor. You'd have to get people while they're young. Teach high schoolers and the like, especially in the high-income areas
There is certainly that problematic cultural perception. I know Americans who insist that taking a car is the best way to get between Heathrow and central London, which makes very little sense except in very unusual circumstances. It is less comfortable than the more expensive trains, is slower, and is much less reliable, in addition to being more expensive.
But unfortunately, outside of perhaps a few cities on the East Coast, I think this perception has also influenced system design and implementation, such that public transport in many parts of the US is for the poor, or, more specifically, is primarily for people who are too poor to be able to afford a car.
This can change the priorities of a system considerably, especially from certain political perspectives that one might describe as paternalistic conservative progressivism. You're not competing with driving. You're providing transport to people who likely have no other option, in some cases so that they can pull themselves by their bootstraps out of their unfortunate circumstances, through suffering and hard work, and buy a car. Reliability and speed are not are not particularly important. Consistent dedicated bus lanes, for example, become rather pointless: they're expensive and hinder car traffic, and all they do is help make buses faster and more consistent than an alternative, driving, that your target customers don't have; similarly train speed and reliability isn't very important. Accurate real-time information is not a priority, just having transport eventually get there. High frequency on the most potentially needed routes is less important than having a broad network of low frequency routes; your target customers have no choice but to work around your schedules, but have nothing if you don't serve an area. People who can afford not to are not going to use public transport, so it's best to put stops and stations in areas you see as impoverished: besides, affluent communities probably don't want you there (except for planning regulation scams), or if they're really urbanites, can be given bikes instead (I can recall situation where activists pointed out that a specific city's history of racism and segregation could be surprisingly precisely seen in the locations of its fixed-station rental bikes). Payment options that are convenient for people with high levels of access to technology and conventional banking systems (eg, credit card and device contactless, etc) are less important than ensuring that people without access to conventional banking (a separate problem in the US...) are always able to pay, and that cut-rate or free options are available. Transport doesn't need to be pleasant, it just needs to have a basic level of safety: keeping people from sleeping on benches is more important than having seating and shelter, and hiring a collection of brutish gangs like the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department (I mean this literally) to police the system is fine.
I can't say with certainty the extent to which these choices are explicitly made by US systems, but I have certainly heard them implied by officials and politicians. I can recall a mayoral debate, for example, where the candidates were asked how often they had taken public transport in the city, and essentially all of them answered that of course, they had taken it, and supported it, but that in their jobs, with their need to go to so many places reliably and quickly, they really had no option but to drive; taking public transport would be an unreasonable burden on their time. Public transport in European cities, on the other hand, is quite often directly competing with driving. High-speed trains in Europe are often competing with flying, and in that competition, they aren't competing on price. Both are perfectly possible, if you have a serious system that makes the choices needed to compete. With reliable, sufficient-frequency service, good real-time information, and dedicated, clear routes, you can offer something that's consistently the more efficient choice than driving: if for example you have trains coming exactly every 5 minutes, for a trip will take exactly 45 minutes, and driving will take somewhere between 40 and 90 minutes, then driving seems enormously risky or inefficient by comparison. If you have a well-maintained and reliable high-speed train, then you can cut pre/post-trip times so much by comparison to planes, and offer so much smoother and more comfortable a ride than a plane or car, that you can sell yourself as both the most comfortable and most efficient option.
But public transport in the US usually doesn't do any of this. It just doesn't feel serious. It doesn't try to get you somewhere efficiently, comfortably, and reliably. It either just tries to get you there, half-heartedly and eventually, assuming you have no alternative, or, in the case of Amtrak, at least outside of Acela, perhaps tries to market it to you as the novel experience of taking a train (I was once on a focus group for Amtrak where I think they tried to get a wide cross-section of casual occasional users and instead got pretty much only serious regulars; the gap in perspective was almost comical). This isn't something that just educating high school students on how to use public transport will help over the short term, because even when you know how to use it, it's worse than driving in almost every way but cost, so, unless you were taking it for stubborn and privileged ideological or personal reasons, like me, why would you? If you need to get places reliably, you'll need a car anyway, or be willing and able to afford to call an Uber/Lyft/taxi whenever your train or bus doesn't show up, in addition to having enough experience or knowledge of information sources to know whether it's actually going to show up in a reasonable amount of time or at all, which can sometimes be quite hard (Amtrak station staff, for example, in marked contrast to their excellent conductors, seem to be either oblivious or shamelessly dishonest). And if they're in high-income areas, it's quite likely that they have worse, or no, public transport options, because it isn't meant for them.
I don't really know what the solution is, unfortunately: to be honest, I gave up caring much about public transport in the US, or local politics in the US in general, a few years ago, after finding it enormously disheartening.
Part of the problem is that public transit is for the poor. At least in California, I've never had a positive public transit experience. Public transit vehicles are always utilitarian, ugly and...
Part of the problem is that public transit is for the poor. At least in California, I've never had a positive public transit experience. Public transit vehicles are always utilitarian, ugly and uncomfortable at best. Scheduling is never convenient. Unless I'm going somewhere like San Francisco, where I don't actually feel safe parking my car for extended periods, driving is 100% better in every way except for the environment.
Bingo. I've commented about this on Tildes twice before, about how even fantastic well-funded public transport still kinda sucks and how in those same situations, despite higher costs, people...
the idea that spending more money on it will make for more converts is not wholly correct.
Bingo.
I've commented about this on Tildes twice before, about how even fantastic well-funded public transport still kinda sucks and how in those same situations, despite higher costs, people still choose cars if they can.
Safety standards and working conditions have improved dramatically since then, which slows things down and dramatically increases costs. Safety and working conditions weren't much of a concern in...
The transcontinental railroad was built inside of 5 years in the 1860s. How is it considered so impossible to do again with 160 years of technological progress?
Safety standards and working conditions have improved dramatically since then, which slows things down and dramatically increases costs. Safety and working conditions weren't much of a concern in the 1800s though, especially when it came to immigrant workers. See: Building the Transcontinental Railroad: How 20,000 Chinese Immigrants Made It Happen
Yea, but I'm fairly certain that 100 workers, safely operating machinery, can work a lot faster and safer than 1,000 near-slaves. It is a lack of will, not a lack of ability.
Yea, but I'm fairly certain that 100 workers, safely operating machinery, can work a lot faster and safer than 1,000 near-slaves.
Physically, that's likely true. But it's not necessarily true overall, since as @skybrian mentioned above about eminent domain, delays these days are unfortunately caused by more than just the...
Physically, that's likely true. But it's not necessarily true overall, since as @skybrian mentioned above about eminent domain, delays these days are unfortunately caused by more than just the labor aspects that I brought up. I suppose those potential issues could also be solved with enough "will" but that might require rather authoritarian behavior (ignoring/modifying current law and legal precedent) to accomplish.
I would be surprised if we even got freight going by rail to large retail stores. It doesn't seem to be a consideration in the US at all? You don't see new big box stores built on rail sidings,...
I would be surprised if we even got freight going by rail to large retail stores. It doesn't seem to be a consideration in the US at all? You don't see new big box stores built on rail sidings, that I've noticed
Does it happen in Europe? Anywhere?
I think maybe someone who knew logistics could tell us when it's worth doing or why it's not a thing.
If I recall correctly, Europe has much less freight travel by train than the US, and a much higher petcentage of truck-based freight, in part because most of its rail networks are focused on...
If I recall correctly, Europe has much less freight travel by train than the US, and a much higher petcentage of truck-based freight, in part because most of its rail networks are focused on prioritizing passenger services, in many cases with rails exclusively for passenger use.
By contrast, in the US, freight usually has priority and passenger trains share the same tracks as distinctly less important users; this is why regardless of Amtrak's timetables, their trains are often at the whim of whatever freight trains decide to do, even when this means a huge inconvenience for the passengers for what seems like an insignificant gain for the freight trains.
FWIW the US has a world-class freight-train network and is one of the only countries in the world that relies heavily on freight to move goods and natural resources intranationally. Building...
FWIW the US has a world-class freight-train network and is one of the only countries in the world that relies heavily on freight to move goods and natural resources intranationally. Building distribution centers and retail businesses along train tracks would be a massive undertaking as there's little prior art. Train cars optimized for these routes do not accelerate and decelerate in the safer ways that passenger rail does, though with PTC that might not be as much of an issue anymore. Because loading and unloading these trains is a bespoke process, there's no guarantee that freight cars would be at grade with folks loading and unloading freight, and indeed any modifications needed to load/unload at grade would probably require expensive infrastructure improvements that would both be borne by retail businesses (which means they won't be able to/want to pay for it) and have to be approved by code in what is mostly a commercial area (and given zoning restrictions in the US, I doubt a commercial zone would easily approve of the modifications necessary.) Not to mention the costs/uproar with acquiring the RoW, laying down the trackage, etc.
Much more impactful, IMO, would be to mandate that freight trains in the US are electrified. Right now mots of them run diesel locomotives and have little intention to electrify because of the costs associated.
Think about how many packages a truck can carry vs. a drone. I feel like the sun would be blotted out by drones delivering packages (though I accept this feeling can be quelled by some cold hard...
Think about how many packages a truck can carry vs. a drone. I feel like the sun would be blotted out by drones delivering packages (though I accept this feeling can be quelled by some cold hard compelling facts on air drone shipping).
They might actually synergize with trains reasonably here: Parsley above makes a good point that rail infrastructure isn't abundant enough to make train shipping reasonable. Sure, companies could...
They might actually synergize with trains reasonably here: Parsley above makes a good point that rail infrastructure isn't abundant enough to make train shipping reasonable. Sure, companies could rely more on rail, but until we get some serious innovation there, that's just not feasible.
Compare though a rail-based warehouse that dispatches trains of goods to towns: Every town gets a car full of boxes, which are then distributed within the town using drones. Drones might become a viable last-mile delivery option, imo. Certainly better than 3-ton trucks stopping at every home.
Also worth adding that last mile drones can look like this, which is inherently more energy efficient than the quadcopter most of us probably initially imagined.
Also worth adding that last mile drones can look like this, which is inherently more energy efficient than the quadcopter most of us probably initially imagined.
The heavier the vehicle, the more damage done to the road on an exponential scale. The average truck does over 400 times the damage to the road as the average car. 99% of road wear is caused by large trucks, but they only pay for 35% for tolls, causing the average US taxpayer to be subsiding private trucking companies.
The author author offers train shipping as a much better alternative, solving most of the physical problems trucks have, as well as having a fourth of the greenhouse emissions. To truly combat climate change, I think we need to challenge rampant overconsumption and the need to have anything your heart desires in two days or less. But we will always need some sort of shipping infrastructure, and trains are vastly superior to trucks in almost every way.
Love trains, but they scale very poorly and trucks have a much easier time switching routes. I don't see them taking over smaller shipping until they solve industrial truck transportation.
I would guess it is also much easier to externalize infrastructure costs using up common roads than dedicated railways.
"Thing we spend virtually no money on doesn't work compared to thing we spend billions on" -Everyone criticizing non-car transport in America.
Maybe Americans wouldn't hate public transport so much if we funded it properly. I'd certainly take the bus more if it ran more than once an hour and was free at point of use.
Everyone talks up high-speed transport between localish cities. How about some high-speed cross-continent rail? Would be a lot greener than fleets of jets.
The transcontinental railroad was built inside of 5 years in the 1860s. How is it considered so impossible to do again with 160 years of technological progress?
There is certainly that problematic cultural perception. I know Americans who insist that taking a car is the best way to get between Heathrow and central London, which makes very little sense except in very unusual circumstances. It is less comfortable than the more expensive trains, is slower, and is much less reliable, in addition to being more expensive.
But unfortunately, outside of perhaps a few cities on the East Coast, I think this perception has also influenced system design and implementation, such that public transport in many parts of the US is for the poor, or, more specifically, is primarily for people who are too poor to be able to afford a car.
This can change the priorities of a system considerably, especially from certain political perspectives that one might describe as paternalistic conservative progressivism. You're not competing with driving. You're providing transport to people who likely have no other option, in some cases so that they can pull themselves by their bootstraps out of their unfortunate circumstances, through suffering and hard work, and buy a car. Reliability and speed are not are not particularly important. Consistent dedicated bus lanes, for example, become rather pointless: they're expensive and hinder car traffic, and all they do is help make buses faster and more consistent than an alternative, driving, that your target customers don't have; similarly train speed and reliability isn't very important. Accurate real-time information is not a priority, just having transport eventually get there. High frequency on the most potentially needed routes is less important than having a broad network of low frequency routes; your target customers have no choice but to work around your schedules, but have nothing if you don't serve an area. People who can afford not to are not going to use public transport, so it's best to put stops and stations in areas you see as impoverished: besides, affluent communities probably don't want you there (except for planning regulation scams), or if they're really urbanites, can be given bikes instead (I can recall situation where activists pointed out that a specific city's history of racism and segregation could be surprisingly precisely seen in the locations of its fixed-station rental bikes). Payment options that are convenient for people with high levels of access to technology and conventional banking systems (eg, credit card and device contactless, etc) are less important than ensuring that people without access to conventional banking (a separate problem in the US...) are always able to pay, and that cut-rate or free options are available. Transport doesn't need to be pleasant, it just needs to have a basic level of safety: keeping people from sleeping on benches is more important than having seating and shelter, and hiring a collection of brutish gangs like the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department (I mean this literally) to police the system is fine.
I can't say with certainty the extent to which these choices are explicitly made by US systems, but I have certainly heard them implied by officials and politicians. I can recall a mayoral debate, for example, where the candidates were asked how often they had taken public transport in the city, and essentially all of them answered that of course, they had taken it, and supported it, but that in their jobs, with their need to go to so many places reliably and quickly, they really had no option but to drive; taking public transport would be an unreasonable burden on their time. Public transport in European cities, on the other hand, is quite often directly competing with driving. High-speed trains in Europe are often competing with flying, and in that competition, they aren't competing on price. Both are perfectly possible, if you have a serious system that makes the choices needed to compete. With reliable, sufficient-frequency service, good real-time information, and dedicated, clear routes, you can offer something that's consistently the more efficient choice than driving: if for example you have trains coming exactly every 5 minutes, for a trip will take exactly 45 minutes, and driving will take somewhere between 40 and 90 minutes, then driving seems enormously risky or inefficient by comparison. If you have a well-maintained and reliable high-speed train, then you can cut pre/post-trip times so much by comparison to planes, and offer so much smoother and more comfortable a ride than a plane or car, that you can sell yourself as both the most comfortable and most efficient option.
But public transport in the US usually doesn't do any of this. It just doesn't feel serious. It doesn't try to get you somewhere efficiently, comfortably, and reliably. It either just tries to get you there, half-heartedly and eventually, assuming you have no alternative, or, in the case of Amtrak, at least outside of Acela, perhaps tries to market it to you as the novel experience of taking a train (I was once on a focus group for Amtrak where I think they tried to get a wide cross-section of casual occasional users and instead got pretty much only serious regulars; the gap in perspective was almost comical). This isn't something that just educating high school students on how to use public transport will help over the short term, because even when you know how to use it, it's worse than driving in almost every way but cost, so, unless you were taking it for stubborn and privileged ideological or personal reasons, like me, why would you? If you need to get places reliably, you'll need a car anyway, or be willing and able to afford to call an Uber/Lyft/taxi whenever your train or bus doesn't show up, in addition to having enough experience or knowledge of information sources to know whether it's actually going to show up in a reasonable amount of time or at all, which can sometimes be quite hard (Amtrak station staff, for example, in marked contrast to their excellent conductors, seem to be either oblivious or shamelessly dishonest). And if they're in high-income areas, it's quite likely that they have worse, or no, public transport options, because it isn't meant for them.
I don't really know what the solution is, unfortunately: to be honest, I gave up caring much about public transport in the US, or local politics in the US in general, a few years ago, after finding it enormously disheartening.
Part of the problem is that public transit is for the poor. At least in California, I've never had a positive public transit experience. Public transit vehicles are always utilitarian, ugly and uncomfortable at best. Scheduling is never convenient. Unless I'm going somewhere like San Francisco, where I don't actually feel safe parking my car for extended periods, driving is 100% better in every way except for the environment.
Bingo.
I've commented about this on Tildes twice before, about how even fantastic well-funded public transport still kinda sucks and how in those same situations, despite higher costs, people still choose cars if they can.
Safety standards and working conditions have improved dramatically since then, which slows things down and dramatically increases costs. Safety and working conditions weren't much of a concern in the 1800s though, especially when it came to immigrant workers. See: Building the Transcontinental Railroad: How 20,000 Chinese Immigrants Made It Happen
Also it's much harder to build when people are already living there. The eminent domain process is slow, especially when people fight it.
Yea, but I'm fairly certain that 100 workers, safely operating machinery, can work a lot faster and safer than 1,000 near-slaves.
It is a lack of will, not a lack of ability.
Physically, that's likely true. But it's not necessarily true overall, since as @skybrian mentioned above about eminent domain, delays these days are unfortunately caused by more than just the labor aspects that I brought up. I suppose those potential issues could also be solved with enough "will" but that might require rather authoritarian behavior (ignoring/modifying current law and legal precedent) to accomplish.
Just like Congress! \rimshot
I would be surprised if we even got freight going by rail to large retail stores. It doesn't seem to be a consideration in the US at all? You don't see new big box stores built on rail sidings, that I've noticed
Does it happen in Europe? Anywhere?
I think maybe someone who knew logistics could tell us when it's worth doing or why it's not a thing.
If I recall correctly, Europe has much less freight travel by train than the US, and a much higher petcentage of truck-based freight, in part because most of its rail networks are focused on prioritizing passenger services, in many cases with rails exclusively for passenger use.
By contrast, in the US, freight usually has priority and passenger trains share the same tracks as distinctly less important users; this is why regardless of Amtrak's timetables, their trains are often at the whim of whatever freight trains decide to do, even when this means a huge inconvenience for the passengers for what seems like an insignificant gain for the freight trains.
FWIW the US has a world-class freight-train network and is one of the only countries in the world that relies heavily on freight to move goods and natural resources intranationally. Building distribution centers and retail businesses along train tracks would be a massive undertaking as there's little prior art. Train cars optimized for these routes do not accelerate and decelerate in the safer ways that passenger rail does, though with PTC that might not be as much of an issue anymore. Because loading and unloading these trains is a bespoke process, there's no guarantee that freight cars would be at grade with folks loading and unloading freight, and indeed any modifications needed to load/unload at grade would probably require expensive infrastructure improvements that would both be borne by retail businesses (which means they won't be able to/want to pay for it) and have to be approved by code in what is mostly a commercial area (and given zoning restrictions in the US, I doubt a commercial zone would easily approve of the modifications necessary.) Not to mention the costs/uproar with acquiring the RoW, laying down the trackage, etc.
Much more impactful, IMO, would be to mandate that freight trains in the US are electrified. Right now mots of them run diesel locomotives and have little intention to electrify because of the costs associated.
Do you think drone shipping would be a suitable replacement? I really don’t know anything about them. Was just curious.
Think about how many packages a truck can carry vs. a drone. I feel like the sun would be blotted out by drones delivering packages (though I accept this feeling can be quelled by some cold hard compelling facts on air drone shipping).
They might actually synergize with trains reasonably here: Parsley above makes a good point that rail infrastructure isn't abundant enough to make train shipping reasonable. Sure, companies could rely more on rail, but until we get some serious innovation there, that's just not feasible.
Compare though a rail-based warehouse that dispatches trains of goods to towns: Every town gets a car full of boxes, which are then distributed within the town using drones. Drones might become a viable last-mile delivery option, imo. Certainly better than 3-ton trucks stopping at every home.
Also worth adding that last mile drones can look like this, which is inherently more energy efficient than the quadcopter most of us probably initially imagined.