Rail lives in that weird category like rural mail or power service (or, for that matter, highways) – you need to provide it if you want your country to be a civilized place, but it’s real real hard to make it available at a reasonable price and still turn a profit.
Turns out the answer was government, all along…
Railway doesn’t have to be profitable under government funding. The railway is a way to establish profitable businesses surrounding the railway. The profit comes from taxes paid by everyone getting work because of the railway.
Not everything has to turn a profit directly. Some stuff, like public transport services will most probably work at a loss, bit will generate profit indirectly. e.g making people take the car less frequently, generating less traffic accidents which at the same time, reduce the load of the healthcare system… Oh right, I forgot we’re talking about the US, where healthcare also needs to turn a profit…
We already spend billions on “public transport services”. We just spend it in one of the least efficient ways possible. Roads and highways. It costs so much to maintain the infrastructure is crumbling and people are too car-brained to admit how awful the situation is.
people are too car-brained to admit how awful the situation is.
I challange you to find one American who doesn’t constantly complain about their local roads. I’ve driven everywhere across the US excluding the pacific north west and everywhere I’ve been ppl complain about lack of up keep. Rightfully so
But how many are actually willing to give up cars and use public transport instead if given the choice? In my experience, most people want to be able to continue using their cars but with glowing roads and little traffic hahahaha. That’s what we mean when we say people are car-brained, most people want magic solutions to be able to continue to use their stupid, contaminating, inneficient cars. EVs will fix the contamination hahaha. And another lane will fix traffic for sure hahaha. These people are just too dumb to realize that it’s literally impossible to do what they want once you have areas with “high” population density. Instead, as you just mentioned, most people just complain like dumbasses like that’s good for anything.
Part of the discussion with US rail is that American rail carries some freight service and it would be better environmentally to maintain that service than go all passenger.
For profit companies have shown themselves as being bad at running freight rail, but the solution to public rail needs to include freight.
If anything, we need to double down on freight. Get all the long haul trucks off the highways that we can.
Porque no los dos?
Rabbit hole incoming: If you have to pick one, I suppose it depends on what metric you are trying to maximize. One doublestacked intermodal train car takes two long haul trucks off the road. One Siemens Venture passenger train car takes 74 people, or about 50 cars at 1.5 people per car, off the road. You can generally run longer freight trains than passenger trains, but 25x to normalize for VMT (which could be used as an approximate measure of direct health impacts from driving: crash risk, elevated blood pressure, obesity. It could also be used to approximate societal impacts of car culture: real estate dedicated to surface parking, voting bloc size that supports car-centric planning and development regulations) is probably excessive. On the other hand, if we normalize for emissions (hard to find data here, but as far as I can tell trucks are on the order of 10x as emissive), that gets us down to 5x train length, which is about on par (northeast corridor trains are typically in the 1/6 of a mile range, and median freight train length is somewhere in the 1-1.5 mile range from what I could find), and if we use infrastructure damage/maintenance cost (trucks are about two orders of magnitude worse than even today’s SUV saturated passenger car market, I’m assuming without reason or evidence that damage to steel rail infrastructure between a freight and a passenger car scales significantly less harshly for the sake of simplicity), things look downright strongly in favor of freight traffic. At the end of the day, it probably just depends on which use case has more unmet demand on a case by case basis. Of course, both pale when compared to the opportunity that high speed rail gives to take short haul flights out of the sky, but that is another set of analysis and does partially correlate to the elevated infrastructure cost of high speed rail vs conventional rail.
Germany has the same problems. After the reunification they merged the east and west state railway companies into a private enterprise, the Deutsche Bahn AG. Since then, the service progressively became worse and the prices unaffordable.
They engaged in a downward spiral of cutting infrastructure investments and reducing coverage/offer and having less private travellers. Now the infrastructure is such a bad state, that the bad quality of the service is a running gag in Germany. Voyagers now expect their train being late and hope that it will not be cancelled last minute.
In the last couple of years, there has been a push to invested in the infrastructure, but it’s too little too late and it’s going to take decades to make the train an attractive option again.
One of the reason why they are still getting by financially, is because the have very good marketing.
Here’s a good video about it. It’s in German, but you can get the English auto-translation.
As an American living in NRW, German trains are a well oiled machine compared to their US counterparts. Our trains constantly derail, catch fire, break down etc. I love having S-bahn, U-bahn, and RE compared to the underfunded death traps that are Amtrack, and major city subway systems. It sucks occasionally but I don’t fear for my life on a German train
Ayn Rand wrote a very silly book about how the government was interfering with railroads and how that was a terrible, terrible thing.
It’s always a good day when something Ayn Rand suggested is once again shown to be utter nonsense.
And one has to merely mention the Vandertunts to find another example of why the railroads should be public.
It’s certainly a far more entertaining watch than Atlas Shrugged is to read. It’s just awful. I couldn’t even get all the way through it, I ended up reading a summary.
But two things in it really made me laugh-
- That railroads would work better if the government had no involvement (good luck laying track without eminent domain).
- The solution to the world’s problems involves violating the laws of physics.
And people take it seriously.
Government is better at X… because it can steal stuff. Yay for the government, I guess… :D
New report argues for obviously needed change that probably isn’t going to happen.
