And people often use that, the NYC subway is a great example. But it's not so effective in lower density, or less established rail systems. You'll often see east/west travel relatively accessible, but north/south hard, for example. Rail only really serves those along the line. I'm sure phoenix could build a ring and spoke system to connect up all of those low density developments.
The thing that sucks though, it's a big upfront cost. super cruise control is an incremental cost that takes advantage of existing infrastructure.
Rail isn't so great at getting food to grocery stores. (cities, sure, but not actual transportation endpoints.) Such a system could be built, but trucks are so obviously effective, and they work with the existing infrastructure.
Rail is cool but a big upfront cost for something that's not obviously superior to the current system seems wasteful.
Maybe fill train stations with self driving taxis to cover those last few miles to home, or work, or wherever.
Yes, the thing is just that the interstate system was in the end more expensive than similar rail infrastructure would have been (especially in maintenance).
And, well, yes, cars and trucks will still be necessary, but not nearly in the same amount.
I'd love to believe this quote, but light rail per mile is an order of magnitude more expensive than highway per mile. Do you have any citations I can look into?
$35million/mile for rail, $25million/mile for a single lane. Rail maintenance is cheaper, and ongoing costs are generally lower - you don't need police patrolling railroads.
Railroads are cool, and they have a lot of advantages, but we've got this huge investment in our existing system. And unfortunately, unlike self driving cars, there isn't a smooth transition. It's like switching from pc to mac, but all of your software is home made, and must be rewritten. You have a huge upfront investment to just get started, and you have to maintain the other system as well.
- much shorter stopping distances. This lets roads be "general access" in a way that rails have never been, even if you were to have a railway running past your house.
The issues are essentially based on (a) how many lanes your highway has, (b) how many complex interchanges you build (interchanges with many bridges tend to lead to a cost explosion), and (c) rail tracks are usually able to be used for decades without major maintenance, while highways usually need to get filled and fixed multiple times a year.
I only have a specific study for my city, where they were comparing the costs from fixing the streets in the cities from the busses running over them vs. building light rail instead, and in that study it turned out the light rail would be, if you also consider stuff like maintenance and accidents, cheaper.
Safer, perhaps. Cheaper? Not so much. Rail infrastructure is expensive, both to build and to maintain. Rail is also much less tolerant to slopes and tight corners than even the most unwieldy of road vehicles (which contributes substantially to the expense; lots of terrain engineering involved in order to build a railroad that's actually safe to travel on).
That said, rail does have superior cargo and passenger capacity, so these costs can be offset by the increase in potential revenue.
Rail is, compared to the huge amount of highways and interstates built, quite cheap. Especially if one wants to expand capacity of highways to counter population increase.
The sheer capacity of rail makes it even on small scale sustainable, on state scale it’s even more effective. (especially on the east coast).
And with cars having such low efficiency (transporting 2 tons of metal for a single passenger using gasoline at 90km/h seems a waste when you can have a single train transporting 400 people at 320km/h using electricity instead) it’s just not really effective on large scale.
New York City is a good example in the US, but cities in Europe and Japan show how even small cities and whole countries can benefit from rail infrastructure.
By "Japan" you mean major cities in Japan. An hour or two outside Tokyo, public transportation is 1 bus every 30 minutes. A friend and I were in Yamanashi-ken last year, and we were complaining to a random shop owner about the bus schedule. She said, "twice an hour is amazing! this isn't Tokyo, you know!"
Most people out there drive if they have to go somewhere.
Twice an hour is actually not that bad – I live in a suburb of a German city with the bus to my uni only coming every 30 minutes, and it’s not a problem – almost everyone uses the bus or bike. You just have to get used to the thought that not everything happens when you need it, but instead you have to adapt to when things happen.
It doesn’t have to. In a properly built city, the rail will end up less than 500m from your destination, and you can walk the rest.
Example cities with okay or good rail infrastructure: New York, London, Paris, Vienna.
You also save a LOT of time, because you are never stuck in traffic, and you can use the time in the train to check up on your emails, etc – and you never risk getting into an accident because you are tired after work.
> It doesn’t have to. In a properly built city, the rail will end up less than 500m from your destination, and you can walk the rest.
Part of the problem in 2015 is that unless there was planning for rail from the start, the cost to build out rail in established areas is enormous - typically because you need to tunnel - in addition to the cost of community consultation and other access-related issues.
I otherwise agree that well-planned rail into key areas would have benefited a lot of cities, especially those feeling the pain from road congestion now.
I commuted by tube in London for 3 years, my most recent house was 1 minute walk from the station and my office was also 1 min walk from a very busy central station. So basically door to door. Even still, commuting was not a pleasant experience.
The human congestion in the central tube stations at rush hour is appalling, as is the air quality down there, as is the lack of personal space on the train itself. It's a very stressful, undignified experience for everyone.
I'd much rather be spending a bit of extra time in traffic, sat comfortably in a self-driving taxi, than take the tube. That said, I think there's good reason to believe that as self-driving cars become more prevalent, traffic flows will actually improve due to better flow management, less need for traffic lights, and fewer cars parked.
Rail does the job, but it does not do it elegantly. It's very unpleasant to take mass transit railways in major world cities. Nobody who's done it for any length of time would reasonably contest this. Self-driving personal vehicles could be a major improvement on the commuting experience, if indeed the future involves commuting at all - a vast increase in remote work may simply sidestep the issue completely by the time self-driving cars are a mature tech.
A single person in the tube takes, technically, 0 space due to being in a tunnel, and even in overground railway a single person takes less than a square meter.
With a car, you waste far more space.
And, by the way, I’m taking public transport every day, all year round, even in situations like http://i.imgur.com/KyWkUzJ.jpg and I still find it far more pleasant to wait 20 minutes in a crowd than to be stuck for 40 minutes on the highway.
> there’s not physically enough space for self-driving taxis for everyone
Do you have any sources on this? I agree that space on the roads of major cities is an issue now, but several changes in the future could mitigate these issues significantly:
1) Self driving cars will probably end parking in city centres. Suddenly, a lot of congested roads have ~twice the surface area.
2) Self driving cars may eventually be able to drive within centimetres of one another.
3) No need for a huge bonnet (small electric engine), boot/trunk (rooftop rack storage), pedals, dashboard, etc in an electric automated taxi. A 2-4 person vehicle is now rather compact indeed.
4) Remote/part-time-remote work may mean commutes are avoided, or staggered throughout the day, for the majority of people. There's a lot less peak capacity required, compared to today.
Well, your car will still have only one person – and you won’t get it smaller than the Messerschmitt Kabinenroller I linked above. And even that is more than twice what a person in an overground train takes in space, underground trains are essentially free.
Additionally, in many cities there is already almost no downtown parking.
It’s not like you’re going to turn the laws of physics over.
I live in a european city founded around 1200 – so, while we destroyed our tram system, and our public transport is shit, I can still get everywhere with public transport equally fast as driving, often faster.
I’d like to have even better infrastructure, and 24/7 service, but I don’t have an issue. I have 3 bus stations within of 300 meters, and a train station 800m from my current home.
Clearly you've never ridden the subway in NYC during rush hour. Most of the major lines will have some delays, you'll have to wait for multiple trains to pass before you can get on, or once you're on the train will stop because "we are waiting for train traffic ahead".
The point of the parent was that for commuters, for long-distance cargo transport and for busses some "super lane guide" would be useful.
Does your going into the mountains contain "driving on the same lane with thousands of others from the same place to the same place every day"?
Because that’s what I was suggesting – nothing more, nothing less: Replacing mass-scale commuting with rail.
Yes, if you drive somewhere where no one else wants to go, cars are still useful – but if you’re going the same path that another million people are also taking, maybe rail might be better.
Rail and Road are not exclusive, they can coexist.
There’s something that does exactly that, is cheaper and safer: It’s called rail.