Eyyyy time for another one of these i'm bored

This is katy freeway in Houston, TX; one of the biggest freeways in the world with 26 lanes. It cost $2.2 billion to build.

It's not that much bigger than the world's busiest train station.

For perspective, Tokyo Station is in Downtown Tokyo and is used to seamlessly transfer passengers between the northern and southern parts of Japan, while also being Tokyo's main intermodal transit hub. Tokyo is much bigger than Houston, obviously, so let's compare Houston's freeway with another city's train station with a similar 2 million population size.

This is Gare du Nord Paris: a transit hub north of Downtown Paris, France, that connects passengers to London, Brussels, and Amsterdam. and... oh dear. that's really small.

What am I saying here? The Katy Freeway in Houston was built in an attempt to do what trains and rail transit already did two centuries ago: create capacity. Of course, all it did was add some 10-20 cars into the gridlock, and further induce the induced demand.

This concludes Pt. 1

https://www.wcax.com/2021/07/20/why-some-travelers-prefer-ride-trains-even-if-it-takes-longer/

Pt. 2
How...?
There are some factors that urban planners, civil engineers, and even ordinary commuters and/or travelers should consider when comparing Rail to Road and Air; the two modes of transit that rail has to compete with. On a superficial standpoint, rail shouldn't need to exist. Road provides the ordinary individual with freedom of travel on a point-to-point model. Air requires little infrastructure for the highest speeds. Rail, on the other hand, needs infrastructure to be built for limitations in where the vehicles go. However, the most successful cities in the world, such as Paris and Tokyo, use rail, and continue to invest in it. Why?

[image] The currently under construction Chuo Shinkansen line uses maglev technology: a type of rail technology being banked heavily on by JR Central, in (as the name suggests) central Japan.

The factors that Rail mostly outpaces all other modes of transit are:

Speed
Safety
Convenience
Cost & Maintenance
Profitability
Comfort
Capacity

There are other situations to consider as well, but these are typically the main issues that developers will focus on. Whatever cars and airlines do well in places where rail fits, they suffer in everything else. Because the versatility of rail transit, even failing on one thing out of the seven is still enough for Rail transit to become more feasible.

Even on slower routes, rail is really a great option because like a car, you can really see just what this country has to offer. Amtrak's California Zephyr is a great example. The segment between Denver and Salt Lake City has some of the most picturesque views you'll ever see on a train. If you took a plane, you'll have gotten there faster, but you'll have missed out on everything in between. I hope Amtrak expands even further than their current 2035 plan to include National Parks. Imagine that vacation, seeing this country's natural beauty without ever needing to step in a car.

"I hope Amtrak expands even further than their current 2035 plan to include National Parks"

^^ That would be a good plan, especially considering Amtrak's already vacation-targeted advertising.

Pt. 3: Rail vs the Automobile and the Road

A lot of road defenders will often point out that:
1. The train doesn't go where people want to go
2. People without automobiles can always take the bus. Greyhound exists.
3. Trains take up more energy than cars
4. Rail infrastructure is much more expensive to build than a freeway

The factors I pointed out earlier address all of these complaints. But for the sake of simplicity with this diatribe, I will mainly go over how cars and buses fare against trains in the factors I specified earlier.

Speed:

Automobile maximum speeds depend on:
1. What the car is capable of doing. A Lamborghini Aventador is going to outpace a Yugo on any day.
2. The environment around it. Is the driver on a city street, or a freeway in the middle of nowhere? Is it a curvy freeway? Is there rain/snow?
3. How sensible and safety-conscious is the person in the car?

Either way, the average maximum speed is going to be 60 MPH (100 km/h), with some drivers topping 110-120 MPH at best if they're really willing to risk getting caught by the police, and if the conditions are perfect. Anyone who wants to drive even faster than that will need a specifically-tuned car and the skills of a Formula One racer.

What about buses?
Typically, buses share the speeds of a car on urban streets. As a result, it's fair to say that they don't go much faster. There is such thing as BRT and Busways that act like rail infrastructure, but seriously aren't given the other limitations buses have.

Rail speeds also differ:
1. What type of train are we on? A 35 MPH subway train, or a 200 MPH bullet train?
2. Are there grade crossings? Does it share tracks with freight trains?

Those are about the only real factors that affect passenger trains, and they don't vary the same way car speeds do. However, in most situations, trains will be faster than a car in urban landscapes, excluding streetcars, which are essentially buses on rails and have the same speed limitations, but more on streetcars later because they are still better than buses.

Between cities, however, a bullet train that reaches 100 MPH still outpaces automobiles, let alone 200 MPH which is a regular speed in Japan and France for bullet trains. This is enough to make people consider not taking the freeway to Nagoya or Lyon.

There is also factor of whether it's quicker overall to take the train instead of drive. This stems into the convenience factor because cars need to be parked, while passengers on trains don't need to stress over placing a car anywhere, and parking takes too long. However, train passengers need to transfer in order to get to places due to the hub-and-spokes nature of rail. Hub-and-spokes may not be the fastest or most convenient, but it is still the most efficient method to move a lot of people at once. Some longer-distance rail services don't need transfers, but still face competition from air travel. More on that later. I will also discuss convenience, after I discuss the horrifying elephant in the room when it comes to cars...

Safety:

Let's face it: a system of travel that completely require every participant's use of synchronous judgement is not safe. More than 40,000 deaths per year in the United States occur from car accidents, and that's just on the freeway. For perspective, over 400,000 Americans died during the Second World War. It only takes a decade for freeways to match that number, and the first Interstate Highways appeared in the 1950's; 70 years ago. During the COVID-19 pandemic, cars were even more dangerous to use than trains and planes, despite the lack of COVID spread, due to the open roads prompting even more dangerous driving.

Each car driver on the road essentially represents a point of failure. One point of failure in the system is enough to cause pileups and traffic jams, be it breakdown or crash. Trains, on the other hand, reduce the points of failure in a transit system per 100+ passengers. As a result, train crashes are few and far in between, and trains are loads more safer than most other forms of transit.

Convenience:

Convenience on a car depends on being able to parking it efficiently. As a result, car-dependent cities have more parking spots than local businesses, which makes the city unprofitable. Not to mention that parking a car is still loads more inconvenient than parking a bicycle or simply walking off of a train, no matter how many opportunities there are to cheat park. It's also worth mentioning that walking around a huge parking lot takes a hell of a lot more time than walking down a compact city street with simple streetcar or subway train access. There is a video showcasing a test that the Triangle Region in North Carolina did on two sample methods of commuting between Downtown Durham and Downtown Raleigh. Typically, either way takes 20-30 minutes. However, the train passenger got to Raleigh faster than the car driver because this was a Rush Hour test. It shouldn't be hard to see why considering that the driver had to drive on Southbound NC 147 and park her car in central Raleigh.

Trains are seen as inconvenient for a few main reasons:
1. They aren't at one's doorstep in most cases.
2. Some trips require transfers, especially urban trips.
3. Amtrak (or VIA Rail in Canada) warped this perception by not being in places like Nashville, TN, or Las Vegas, NV.

Typically, when a trip requires a lot of transfers, another train service can be added easily to remove the necessary transfer, making for a simpler trip. The doorstep perception exists due to many Americans living in glamorous houses in expensive Suburbia. Compact and well-built cities have neighborhoods where the houses aren't detached don't have parking spaces. The consequences of this? The houses are cheaper and the neighborhood remains transit-oriented and the roads aren't hard to maintain... hang on, those sound like benefits. Younger Americans are feeling discontent with high-cost suburb houses with inconvenient lawns, and are also burdened by cars due to...

Cost & Maintenance:

Freeways aren't expensive. There we go, let's build one! However, they are a nightmare to maintain and have nowhere near the same benefits of building a slightly more expensive light rail line.

The ticket price of a light rail ride doesn't go any higher than $10 in many situations. The cost of a light rail or subway isn't cheap, especially with subways since they need to be tunneled. However, the alternative to putting trains in one's city is having cars in one's city, which destroys all productivity and quality of life. Cars require lots of parking spaces, and as a result, car-dependent cities produce more parking spaces than urban business growth.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0intLFzLaudFG-xAvUEO-A
This YouTube Channel called "Not Just Bikes" talks in great detail about urban design and car-dependent cities.

Freeways are harder to maintain than rail lines due to the interruptions freeway work causes to traffic flow. An interruption to traffic flow means an interruption to productivity. Meanwhile, rail transit typically doesn't operate between the hours of 1AM-5AM, leaving a giant window of opportunity for maintenance along the rail lines.

Rail vehicles are also cheaper to maintain. Streetcars in downtown Philadelphia and San Francisco have survived for over a century. Internal combustion engine vehicles such as buses have shorter lifespans, and as a result, get replaced much more frequently.

What happens if freeways aren't maintained? Obviously, potholes are formed, which leads to uncomfortable rides, and eventually damaged vehicles. Essentially, your car could cost you money to repair due to your government's negligence of infrastructure. Steel rail has much better durability and doesn't have the same amount of vehicles going over it the same way freeway blacktop does. As a result, maintenance periods are fewer and further in between for railroads.

Not Just Bikes is a great channel; we really can learn a lot from the Dutch when it comes to city planning, transportation, and overall city living. I especially enjoy his videos about building better bicycle infrastructure; US and Canadian cities are just awful to live in unless you have a car or happen to live in one of the few cities with decent public transit. Amsterdam and other Dutch cities on the other hand, are so pedestrian and bicycle friendly, you can actually get around faster on a bike than with a car.

Many American cities are too bankrupt to even afford sidewalks or streetlights as a result of car-dependent Suburbia being the reason behind rising taxes. Glad you like that channel as well.

Profitability:

Transportation is not easy to make money from in all aspects. Sure, selling cars make car companies money, but the sale of gas and construction of roads still requires public money instead of private funds. Talking of roads, freeways don't make money. Toll roads might, but even then not many people use them. Making a road into a toll road is a way to quickly stop people from driving along the big roads, but also risks being unproductive if it is anything like Houston, TX. Also, with such big freeways comes lots of parking spaces, as I've said before. That space could've been used for skyscrapers and local businesses.

Trains are a much better bet for investment in the private sector, especially high-speed trains due to the concentrated demand. As a result, Japanese rail companies such as JR Central and European companies like Thalys make profits off of passenger rail and providing the occasional luxurious restaurant on wheels. Running trains that don't require fossil fuels or batteries cheapens the overall cost as well due to not having to refuel or recharge the train.

Comfort:

One of two things that trains will always have the upper hand on, no matter what, is comfort. The other thing is capacity.

Comfort in automobiles, like with most other things in regards to cars, is varied based on the car. Some cars come with Wi-fi, a GPS, the ability to play music, and it's hard to imagine a car without AC. Some cars are huge because they have huge seats and legroom.

However, a lot of these things are either guaranteed or arbitrary when it comes to trains. Modern trains such as the ones operated by Brightline or Deutsche Bahn will offer Wi-fi and AC. GPS is unnecessary on both trains and cars since the passenger needn't navigate, and the car driver can always use Google Maps to navigate; which, is infinitely better than most automobile GPS systems, and comes free with anyone's phone, while the GPS in a car usually adds to the cost.

As well as that, the individual using the car to *travel* is going to have to drive: a tedious, typically non-productive task that is dependent on the existence of rest stops for long-distance travelers. I say /typically/ nonproductive because the driver of a pickup truck with a trailer is at least getting something out of driving that the single driver of an SUV doesn't.

And that's without mentioning congestion. Anyone who has ever been in a car knows about congestion and what it's like to be in traffic. No one is comfortable when stuck in soul-destroying traffic, no matter how leathery the seats are in their Lexuses or Cadillacs. This feeling simply doesn't happen on a train. Even when the train stops and becomes late, there's nothing holding back the comfort.

Capacity:

The biggie. No transportation innovator has ever defeated trains in capacity. Many have tried, and subsequently failed.

The picture here shows a freeway in Chicago with two rail lines running down it. The freeway consists of four lanes per direction. Judging from how many cars there in one lane (I counted 15 on the left-most lane from this angle), and assuming they are all single-driver since most Americans drive alone and excluding all massive trucks that take up even more space, and what we're seeing here is a quarter of a mile...

...at best this 4-lane freeway can move 60 people (cars) per quarter of a mile.

This silver box on wheels that is also in Chicago carries over 35 seated passengers per rail car. Essentially, in order to make that 4-lane freeway, all it needed was 2 rail cars on steel. It's not even a quarter of a mile long.

I made a miscount on the freeway lane length. Turns out it has 2 extra lanes; 6 in total. Assuming the same conditions, that brings it up to at best 90 vehicles in a quarter of a mile. It still has nothing on a silver box on wheels. And this rail vehicle can run down the rail lines placed in the middle of a freeway; a showcase how this thing uses a fraction of the space needed for lone drivers, as well as the very occasional Uber passenger.

Why is capacity so important?

The main challenge with transportation is moving lots of people to destinations as efficiently and as conveniently as possible. This is just not compatible with car dependent cities.

Don't get me wrong; I like cars. I fantasize about having a Honda Civic (ok, that does sound weird). I also fantasize about having a Rimac Nevera (ok, a little obscure but it checks out).

When considering the efficient usage of trains and the ability we have to walk places, and comparing that to the space used up by automobiles, any sane urban planner and/or city official will invest in rail to fix their city's transit problems; be it trams, commuter rail, metros, high-speed rail; even buses do a better job than cars in where trains don't fit.

Of course, in the United States, it's near-impossible not to have a criminal in charge of cities, states, and the federal government. And with criminals comes corruption. And one source of said corruption is the oil industry, which depends on car-dependent cities. It's worth noting that rail does cost taxes. While that is the case, they also provide urban profitability, and are nothing like the tax hogs such as the Katy Freeway. For a state such as Texas that doesn't like taxes, it's astonishing that the Katy Freeway is allowed to plow through businesses and homes with no one batting an eye... but when Texas Central Railway (a private company that won't even cost half a penny on taxpayers) /might/ go through a few farms, everyone loses their minds; especially those who receive funding form the Airline Industry... hang on, I'm getting ahead of myself there.

Added on to cost and maintenance:

Energy Usage

It's no argument that trains use a massive amount of energy. However, the amounts of energy used by trains is much more efficient when the capacity is considered as opposed to road vehicles. I will elaborate on this further when it comes to capacity, but I will say for now that the energy used by one N700 Series Shinkansen train carrying 1000 passengers uses fewer kilowatts per passenger than 200 5-passenger capacity Teslas. With that, the N700 train can be turned on and off easily, while the Teslas will need to be recharged.

Pt. 4: Rail vs the Airlines

Airplanes are fun. Much like cars, most of us don't know how they work, yet we take them for granted. It's mesmerizing to see the biggest airplanes take off from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta, or O-hare International in Chicago.

Their constraints are still what allows rail to outpace them, however, that many aren't aware of. On the surface, it seems like having trains operate where planes could work seems like a bad idea. Many say that:
1. Trains are an ancient technology compared to planes
2. Trains need infrastructure. Planes don't need it to the same extent that trains do.
And of course...
3. Planes are faster.

Again, I will be going through the factors that I mentioned earlier, and comparing how air travel and train travel fare against each other.

Speed:

By technicality, airplanes are faster than trains as a result of encountering low pressure air in the layer of the atmosphere they fly at.

However, the speed of the plane doesn't always directly help the traveller. Let's say there is a 300 mile trip between two cities with both airports and high speed rail connections. The train tops out at 200 MPH (320 km/h) which is typical for a high speed train. The plane tops out at around 400-500 MPH. The airplane flight itself is around an hour, while traveling by the train would take an hour and half. At first glance, it looks like the plane far better. However, there are multiple other things to consider.

Going to the airport: This can take a varying amount of extra time because, unlike central train stations, airports are never in the downtown area. Public transit/car is required to get to the airport.
Being early to the airport is also mandatory. Typically the earliest time one must show up to the airport is 2 hours before the flight takes off, with 1 hour at best. This is to get heavy luggage checked out, go through security, go to the right gate, and wait for every other passenger on the flight to do the same.

Then there is boarding the plane. The only way in and out the aircraft is through the jetway that can only support a single direction of moving passengers. This makes boarding process an extra 30 minutes, totaling between 1h30m-2h30m of travel time by plane, combined with getting to the airport, and we're not even in the air yet.

Then the plane must taxi through the runway and preparing to takeoff, which can take 10-15 minutes. There is also waiting for other aircrafts depending on how busy the airport is. A trip I took from Newark Liberty to RDU in NC involved 30-45 minutes of waiting for other planes to take off. This can make the travel time between 2h10m-3h25m.

Then comes the 1 hour long flight. Total time taken between cities? An estimated 4h25m at worst, and 3h10m at best.

The train trip takes 1 hour & 30-40 minutes while going 200 MPH at tops. Getting to the station is typically easier because the station is closer to downtown, with 1-10 minutes added depending on the nearest major train station. Preferably, arriving 15 minutes prior to the train's departure works best for intercity/high speed trains in order to pay for/register tickets. 25 minutes in total of not traveling by high speed train. Then... that's it. The rest of the trip is the 1h40m train trip.

Results:

2h05 minutes from city to city by train, with around 75-80% of it actually being on a high speed train.

3-4h25m city to city by plane, with less than 25% of the trip actually being airborne.

How will you travel today?

Obviously these are rough, rounded down estimates. However, they aren't far off from reality. I will go into further detail in regard to convenience later.

Safety:

At the time of me writing this section, it is the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. However, this situation was a transportation anomaly. In reality, airlines are the safest method of transportation. There is no argument against that. We all have greater chances of being struck by lightning than dying in an aircraft.

However, wedging that fact into the heads of many Americans isn't easy. The truth is, most of you reading this don't know how airplanes fly without looking it up and remembering it after reading this sentence. As result, the fear of the plane suddenly falling out of the sky is a consistent fear. More Americans fear being in a plane than in a car, despite the latter being significantly more dangerous. Likewise, despite Amtrak having more serious incidents than American Airlines, more people would sooner be taking the train than the plane. Siderodromophobia is extremely rare compared to aerophobia.

It's worth mentioning that when run properly, trains can never have accidents. The infamous Lathen train collision, unique for involving a Maglev train, only happened due to human error. Meanwhile, no one saw the Concorde's fatal crash with its anomalous circumstances. As a result, the Japanese Shinkansen system has had no passenger/crew fatalities since its inception in the 1960s.

When trains do collide, the people in danger typically are the ones closer to the front, since most train-related issues happen at the driver's end. It's a similar phenomenon with airplanes, and the most danger happens at the front half instead of the back half. However, with some problems, like terrorists shooting land-to-air missiles or what happened on 9/11, there is no escape. I will talk about terrorism later.

If you stop to think about it, you'll discover that liberals favor mass transportation development far more than conservatives do.

that is true. usually though, transit is often a bipartisan issue. younger conservatives favor transit while older ones (such as our senators who receive money from the oil industry) tend to favor the freeway and the airline

I agree with that. I, as a younger person on the conservative side, want as many transportation options as possible. I love taking my car out on the freeway, but I'd also like to be able to go downtown and board a train and go anywhere across the US, or get on a bike and run my errands without getting hit by a car (this actually happened to me btw). However, I doubt most of the older conservatives would ever agree with me, deeming it as something like "socialism".

"However, I doubt most of the older conservatives would ever agree with me, deeming it as something like "socialism"."

True. The delicious irony of it all is that the nations that run trains well, such as France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, and Japan, are all capitalist nations that were on the wealthy side of the Iron Curtain (at least Western Germany was). The only country I know with well-ran trains that also maintains communism is China. Hell, even America's biggest (and most overrated) ally, Israel, is investing in rail now.

Ever think of joining TRB? Lots of good stuff going on there.

https://www.mytrb.org/