I dunno what country you are from, but here in the US of A, the monopolies that own all the train infrastructure make sure to keep trains as public transportation as cost prohibitive as possible.
This always reminds me of the movie, Roger Rabbit. I was a kid and the movie taught me a much deeper/darker lesson than it was meant to teach me at that age. It still irks me.
Because places like America are so spread out (by design) that rail networks, especially in the Great Plains and Southwest, are viewed as impractical unless all of their population moved to cities or towns in close proximity to rail lines, and Americans tend to take up a large chunk of the bandwidth.
From the end of the video:
Though, I admit, actually fixing American and Canadian cities after they were destroyed by car infrastructure and rebuilt to be car-dependent is a very daunting task, and I’m personally not even convinced it can be done in the foreseeable future, which is a big part of the reason why we left North America for a better city in the Netherlands in the first place.
In case it’s not clear, I’m not against trains, buses, trolleys, trams, and bikeable, walkable cities. Far from it. But regardless of whether cities used to be connected by rail and were bikeable, as stated in the video, they aren’t anymore, and haven’t been for generations in many cases. So what’s the solution in the meantime, while we wait for the slow churning bureaucracy to get its head out of its butt?
A start could be a similar method to the Netherlands. It took them a few decades to get their cities car free again. Whenever a city road was due for resurfacing/redevelopment, instead of just slapping down the same road and calling it a day, other options are considered like adding bus lanes, trams, or bike lanes while reducing the total number of car lanes.
The best part here is it can be done locally. The municipality can decide they want change and commit to a redesign.
I live in the Boston area, and while it doesn’t seem like it would compare to a place like the Netherlands, it’s slowly going in that direction by acknowledging a shift in focus. Places like here and New York are slowly respecting bicycles as a more viable city transport, and expanding the rail/bus systems. If that mindset can continue to occur each time the city planning office receives a complaint about lane congestion, or a city block that’s fallen into disuse, it can make some slow changes that make walking/biking/training a little bit better. They won’t replace the backbone of the city, but often they don’t need to.
I think the link below compliments the video above. It it from the same channel. This seem to be a compounded issue. https://youtu.be/7IsMeKl-Sv0
And even within those cities, they are vast stretches of suburbia, without the density that makes rail and mass transit systems practical. Rail as mass commuter transit works better the more dense a city is (conversely cars work worse). So if you wanted to try to massively reduce cars as an answer to the climate crisis, you’d first need to rebuild all of these cities that were largely built after cars were a thing. Which is even more impractical than electric cars.
Would be AWESOME if we had more dense cities and rail connections like Europe, though! We need the next generation of city planners to encourage more density in our (non Northeastern) American cities.
Europe has a lot of suburbia too and rural areas too though. I live in the SF Bay Area. It’s population density is similar to many regions in Europe (barring ultra urban cities like capitals). Yet with this density (and loads of money) we sadly still don’t have decent public transportation here…
There once was a time we built rail first and the cities appeared along it. The early rail capitalists knew that transit seeds development and that’s what built MOST of the major cities in the Americas. Somehow we forgot that and have instead come to believe that transit only makes sense if it connects dense, fully-developed places that already exist. It’s insipid, but unfortunately makes it past peoples’ bullshit filters routinely. It’s just part of the trend of cities in North America to give no shits about their future development.
It’s total bullshit, though. Most city downtowns can justify small transit easily. Play with the Tom Forth tool and see for yourself. I recommend looking at bus stops per capita for any place you click; that tells a hell of a story about how over or underinvested a community is in car infrastructure. In most of the world, it’s something like 200-400 people per bus stop in a city. In the US, you’re lucky to see 1200 outside of a few edge cases.
The fact is, most trips are within a few miles of home. There’s a lot of space in the world for cars. They’re needed to fill in the edge cases. The truly rural areas. The niche needs of a profession. An unusual living situation, or to provide accessibility, or for so many other reasons. But the default should be transit and bike-ped, as it was for virtually all of human history and as it still is for most people in most cities in most of the world.
When we entertain this “The US is too big for transit” stuff, we’re reversing the victim and offender and substituting the solution with the problem. To start with, intercity transit isn’t even that important a kind of transit. It’s useful and nice, but the kind of trips that happen within a few miles of home are the fundamental ones.
In most of the world, it’s something like 200-400 people per bus stop in a city. In the US, you’re lucky to see 1200 outside of a few edge cases.
Hmm I couldn’t reproduce this, which places did you check? I’ve checked most of the larger cities in Europe and the US. They all seem to have similar numbers, around 800-1000 people per bus stop.
I’ve also noticed that larger population densities usually have less bus stops per population. Which makes sense, as rural areas tend to rely more on buses because they don’t have access to trams or subways. Plus, for higher population densities you need less stops per population, because doubling the amount of bus stops only reduces walk times to the nearest stop by 30%, assuming an equal spread (Circle Area = Pi * Radius²).
You’d think. But the truth is throughout the West and Midwest, almost every town has or has had a rail line.
So what’s gone wrong? Pretty much the same thing that’s gone wrong with America in general, big corporations realized shipping to big cities is way more profitable than carrying passengers from small towns. Particularly because most people prefer a car over the train.
We have a ton of dead rail lines just waiting to be revitalized.
So what’s the solution to revamp and restore them? I’ve seen tons of abandoned rail lines, usually rusted to uselessness and even paved over for “walking trails”. California has a hard enough time just extending BART a single mile.
The same solution to our current one with frequent potholes and congestion issues on our highway system; constant maintenance and attention.
I’m not going to delude myself into saying we gather 5 plucky volunteers to knock weeds off the rails and they’re set for a decade. But the costs are ultimately being compared to what the whole country needs to spend for its cars to continue being useful.
I can’t even totally complain about towns making rail trails instead - having some kind of viable walking path is also a good change.
Electric cars don’t solve a lot of the root problems of cars. They still require massive amounts of energy to move thousands of pounds of steel. They also still rely on sprawling roads and parking lots.
Electric motors are between 95 and 98% efficient, while ICEs are in the 80’s on a good day.
You are aware that electric trains also use electric motors, just like electric cars do, right? And you are aware that electric cars rely on an electric battery while electric trains rely primarily on overhead electric power lines, are you?
That means cars require one extra component and an extra conversation of energy which trains don’t need. Every conversation of energy reduces efficiency of the final outcome. The more conversations, the less efficiency.
Trains use: power lines -> electric motor
Cars use: power lines -> electric battery -> electric motor
Furthermore, bigger machines can be built to be more efficient than smaller ones. So bigger motors can use (electric) fuel more efficiently than smaller motors.
Not to say trains are not more efficient than cars, because they are for a myriad of reasons. But electric motors scale relatively linear to my extent of knowledge, so usually it just ends up being that trains use many motors instead of one big motor.
That means cars require one extra component and an extra conversation of energy which trains don’t need.
Well, tbf, both trains and cars require converters (i.e. inverters like variable frequency drives or VFDs; or rectifiers) to match power between the local electric supply and traction motors, in the case of trains, or between the battery and traction motors, in the case of cars.
You need to be able to ramp up or down voltage or current (or both) depending on the drawing load that the motor sees at each and every moment of a trip (cars and trains). Then there is the possibility of your train jumping between different electric systems along its route, and so you need to have a way to accommodate those difference if you want to serve the most amount of passengers.
There are Battery Electric Multiple Units (BEMUs), too, out in the wild today that incorporate batteries in addition to electric service on trains (or just batteries alone), mostly in Japan and some in Europe. These are in the minority though compared to electric-supplied units.
Interestingly, there are some projects, most notably in Germany, where overhead lines are being introduced to trucks, fuzzying the differences in transportation modes even more.
I still get your point about the conversions, though. Batteries don’t have 100% Coulombic/Faraday efficiencies, meaning that they don’t charge up from 0-100% every charge cycle: you might start at 0-100%, but the next charge cycle might be 0-99.9999%, then 0-99.99%, then 0-99%, etc. This efficiency loss isn’t as great as the other losses you might find in the converters previously mentioned, or other resistive losses such as via Eddy currents in the motors/axles, demagnetization of the motors, etc.
Trains use: power lines -> electric motor Cars use: power lines -> electric battery -> electric motor
A better description of these processes would be:
Non-BEMU Trains: power lines -> converter -> electric motor (acceleration)
Non-BEMU Trains: electric motor -> converter -> power lines (deceleration)
Cars/BEMUs: power lines -> converter -> [battery -> converter -> electric motor] (charging [acceleration])
Cars/BEMUs: [electric motor -> converter -> battery] -> converter -> power lines ([deceleration] discharging)
Furthermore, bigger machines can be built to be more efficient than smaller ones. So bigger motors can use (electric) fuel more efficiently than smaller motors.
Totally. And trains that add batteries onboard can reduce the advantage that non-battery EMUs have, moreso resembling locomotives with big diesel engines and fuel tanks. I still find BEMUs better though because you can run the trains as married units, just like EMUs (and I suppose DMUs), but batteries can also be distributed along the rolling stock to allow for greater weight balancing. Idk if the major manufacturers like Siemens or General Electric have plans to design systems this way, but greater adoption may lead to more varied designs.
Hope this helps the discussion!
I was responding to your assertion about EVs not being much better than ICEs.
Absolutely. And the benefit trains have over cars is that you can reduce the amount of other stuff per person needed to get people moving.
For a local train of mine that seats 93 people with empty weight of 54 metric tons, that comes out to ~0.58 tons/person.
My sedan weighs in at about 1.5 metric tons empty, and since I’m the only one that uses it, my weight footprint is ~1.5 tons/person.
Forget about fuel economy too. Trains don’t have traffic (most of the time) to deal with, meaning they can accelerate to coasting speeds and spend most of the ride at best-efficiency. Cars are subject to traffic conditions, meaning efficiency can be as-designed by the manufacturer, or it can be much, much worse on a per trip basis if you contribute to the daily rush hours on freeways.
In Germany electric trains are standard for local public transportation.
Not everywhere. There are still enough lines that aren’t electrified so diesel locomotives have to be used.
Uh, appparently only 61% of German train lines are electrified. I know of at least 2 heavily used lines that aren’t (so far). One is the connection Basel towards Bodensee, the Hochrheinbahn. Another is Ringzug.
That’s regional public transport, not local. I dare you to show me a city with diesel subway trains.
Trains only run on a specified track and there isn’t one near me. A car isn’t bound by a track and can go anywhere.
Trains could have intercity connections. Walk/bus to the train, ride the train, walk/bus to your destination.
I have metro+train and it already wears me out so much that alI arrive at the office tired. I can’t imagine how I would survive through 3 different transit options twice a day
I do the same and if anything, it just helps me wake up or wind down after a long day. Out of pure curiosity, how does it wear you out?
Sure buddy, spend a few hours hopping public transport each day is so much fun.
Cars are superior in every single way, it’s paupers that cry out of jealousy we’re seeing here.
They know cars aren’t the problem, there are industries out there that spew out the equivalent of millions of cars but they don’t bitch about that.
it’s paupers that cry out of jealousy we’re seeing here.
Found Andrew Tate’s account
hmmm, do I want to sit in a train, flip my laptop open and do some work, then walk through a park to the office for today… Or do I want to sit in traffic and do nothing…
Tough choice there
Thats not really true and you know it. Cars are like trains, limited mostly to paved roads that need to by built.
Are you seriously trying to tell OP that he’s lying about not living near a train? Or are you trying to say that the part about them running on a fixed track isn’t true? Either way, this is a really dumb take.
Also, you clearly haven’t been to rural areas, where dirt and gravel roads are common. Cars handle those just fine.
But those roads are far more numerous and further reaching than train tracks. Trains go from a to b. Cars can go which ever route you want. And you don’t build train tracks around a house.
can go anywhere
As long as there’s road, no serious traffic, and fuel stations along with rest stops.
and there isn’t one near me.
That’s exactly the problem that this community wants to fix.
But that’s a certain level of naivete. I’ve lived in Europe and in the Western US, and for people who have lived in urban or suburban situations their whole lives, they simply can’t comprehend the vast tracts of land that exist in most of the US. Public transport isn’t viable when your nearest neighbor is at least five acres away.
Please. I have gone to Italy and seen far vaster landscapes in the mountainous areas than I’ve ever been cognizant of in the United States. And yes, I saw these locations from the window of a bus taking the highway system. The key thing is, people are not going to those far-out locations frequently. Actual transit problem-solving relates to the broad majority of the use cases people have, not about abstractly going to a pin thrown on a map.
Well yes, if you live in the middle of nowhere with literally no one else nearby, then public transport obviously doesn’t make sense. But that’s not where most people live.
A large part of the population in the US doesn’t have access to public transport not because it wouldn’t be viable, but because car-centric infrastructure was built instead. And often better designed cities were bulldozed to make room for it.
I was also going to recommend the Not Just Bikes video @Katana314@lemmy.world linked, definitely check it out!
![[meme] Trains are 100000x easier to electrify and automate than cars, so why does everyone keep talking about electric and driverless cars?(lemmy.world)](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/11c37658-7c32-4cc2-b12c-6ced348bd09d.png){kind=link}