Way back in 1992, my team was doing a proposal for image processing to enable cars that could follow each other on a freeway.  One of my colleagues pointed out:  “we already have this.  It’s called a train.”

I suspect this really started to take off in the 50s, but Americans want isolation. We have internalized the idea that our worth as human beings is tied in with how little time we have to spend in the great mix—the masses of strangers that we don’t know and might not have anything in common with. We demand increasingly outrageous lawns to further distance ourselves from our neighbors, and we’ll complain that we “don’t like living my a timetable” as an excuse for driving to work everyday, but it really comes down to this: Americans have stopped being a cohesive nation of fellow-travelers. We hate one another, we hate being around one another, and the less time we have to spend in each other’s company, the better.  You might need more control over the exact times of your daily commute once a week, but generally it just means “oh, I missed that bus, It’s going to be another 20 minute wait” which means another 20 minutes with your kindle, or listening to your ipod, or surfing on your blackberry. But having to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with some random guy… who might be… ethnic? We will bend over fucking backwards to avoid that.

reminds me of the pattern of releasing toxic chemicals into the environment. 1. Create product using toxic chemical (BPA, insecticide, fungicide, PFC, etc.) 2. Health problems occur (Cancer, high cholesterol, etc.) 3. Create entirely new products to treat the effect rather than the cause 4. Sell these products 5. Profit

Feeling cynical today.

I would desperately like to see high speed rail connecting all major American cities. However, republican legislatures full of the people Mighty Ponygirl #2 described will continue to block all efforts at building it.

And I hope that high speed rail (if it ever expands past the DC-NYC corridor) is never as miserable as flying is. Airlines treat their customers like crap but at the moment we are left with few alternatives. You either drive and run the risk of getting stuck in awful traffic or you take the trains as they currently are and slowly meander to your destination. On T. Coates’ blog he decided to forgo airlines for a trip from NYC to Pittsburgh and instead took a train. It took him nine hours to get there. I wish I had that kind of patience to take nine hours to go a driving distance that takes six and a flying time of one hour. High speed rail could conceivably cut a trip like that down to two hours or so, also opening up the possibility that people who work in New York could live in Pittsburgh where the cost of living is so much cheaper.

Automobiles are a huge expense for average people. Here in New Mexico, not having a reliable vehicle is economic and social suicide. Urban sprawl and wide open rural spaces make mass transit expensive, and real estate developers and car dealers own local gov’t. And yeah, a lot of people don’t want to travel with the unwashed peasants on the bus.
Young people are increasingly resentful of this “vehicle slavery”, as another form of debt servitude, necessary for any kind of social/economic life in many cities, particularly out west.

Comment #2

Let’s assume that you are correct in every statement you made. Is there some set of actions that should be taken to correct this situation? This description comes up a lot in “urban” blogs which in general agree that many ills of society are the result of the automobile and policies after WW2 which provided financial incentive for suburban sprawl. The solutions generally tend to call for making personal use of automobiles as difficult as possible, and a desire for government action that will result in the plowing up of the suburbs and the mass migration of populations back to cities. It is amusing that one of the great fears of many urbanists is a breakthrough in battery technology that would give a car a 300 mile range and a 15 minnute recharge time. This creates the nightmare scenario where individual “automobility” could be maintained, and the gauzy dream of a carless future indefinitely postponed.

Amen to the headline.  I was recently in Finland and Russia for a bit and, as always in Europe, I was very envious of the public transportation.  Inter-city trains that are fast and efficient (with electrical outlets at the seats and wifi onboard), and with convenient schedules.  Not cheap, but not outrageous, either.  Excellent public transportation in the three cities I visited, with online maps and travel planners (in English!).  And people were always willing to help out when I needed directions, couldn’t figure out how to validate my ticket, etc.

“Americans have stopped being a cohesive nation of fellow-travelers. We hate one another, we hate being around one another, and the less time we have to spend in each other’s company, the better.”

I think there’s a lot of truth to this. 

But think about it:  How can any decent, moral, thinking, compassionate, non-sociopathic person happily live in this country, loving your neighbors and co-workers and feeling patriotic (rah rah America!), while knowing that something like 1/3 of them think Newton Leroy Gingrich is qualified for, and would make a great choice for, President of These United States, some roughly equal numbers think the same of Willard Romney, and something approximating 1/2 of them elected (sort of) George Bush Jr. to POTUS.  Twice.  That’s beyond the bounds of tolerance…

I live in North Dakota, where more local or regional train service is unavailable and likely unfeasible without massive government investment.  You can catch a train to either coast, but it’s expensive, takes much longer than flying or driving, and frequently the trains are delayed by hours.

I’m fortunate to live in one of the few cities with public transportation, and even more fortunate to live and work in places where taking the bus is possible, though not very convenient.

My folks live four hours south of me, on what has to be one of the most boring drives—pretty much flat, rural, and usually windy.  There is no train service running north-south through the middle portion of the country, so it has to be driven whenever I visit them or they come up here.  Frankly, I’d love a self-driving car for those trips.  My boss does a lot of work out-of-town, he usually drives to and from those work sites.  I know he’d like a car where he could actually work those hours, instead of driving.

That all being said, why *isn’t* there passenger train service running from Winnipeg to Dallas?  Why can’t there be a high-speed train loop running, say, Minneapolis-Fargo-Dickinson-Rapid City-Sioux Falls-Rochester-Minneapolis, or other regional routes?  Why can’t railway right-of-ways be made public property, to ensure that Amtrak trains don’t have to wait for hours?  (Since the major problem with getting the passenger trains running on time in this part of the country is that they’re frequently sidelined in favor of freight trains owned by the railroad companies that own the railroad tracks.)

TL;DR version:  Self-driving cars would be helpful in certain areas of the country, but that’s no excuse for not developing railroad infrastructure.

Trains are like #2 or #3 on the list of things that conservatives hate ONLY because liberals like them.  Seriously, who doesn’t like trains?  Every little kid loves trains.  Riding on a well-maintained train can be so pleasurable, especially through pretty country like the east coast of Australia, which is where I first learned to love the rails.  (Then I took the Sydney-to-Perth train and discovered it was possible to have too much of a good thing.)

I mean, really.  Maybe there are some people who actually hate trains, but it’s got to be a small minority.

I suspect this really started to take off in the 50s, but Americans want isolation. We have internalized the idea that our worth as human beings is tied in with how little time we have to spend in the great mix—the masses of strangers that we don’t know and might not have anything in common with. We demand increasingly outrageous lawns to further distance ourselves from our neighbors, and we’ll complain that we “don’t like living my a timetable” as an excuse for driving to work everyday, but it really comes down to this: Americans have stopped being a cohesive nation of fellow-travelers. We hate one another, we hate being around one another, and the less time we have to spend in each other’s company, the better.  You might need more control over the exact times of your daily commute once a week, but generally it just means “oh, I missed that bus, It’s going to be another 20 minute wait” which means another 20 minutes with your kindle, or listening to your ipod, or surfing on your blackberry. But having to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with some random guy… who might be… ethnic? We will bend over fucking backwards to avoid that.

Seems like there’s a huge amount of chicken and egg here. Are we that way so we demand that environment or is our environment that way so we act that way?

I tend toward the later explanation, given how popular the sort of urban living with good public transit is. Any place with good public transit and safe, walkable streets with low crime is a place with high property values because we’ve got more demand for such places in this country than supply. Not that I believe no one is just a natural suburbanite, but we spend a lot of money on infastructure and advertising, and a lot of sort of ideological energy, to convince people that car-dominated, big yard, no sidewalk suburbs and exurbs are what they should want.

And because I’m an optimist, I guess.

Trains are like #2 or #3 on the list of things that conservatives hate ONLY because liberals like them.  Seriously, who doesn’t like trains?  Every little kid loves trains.  Riding on a well-maintained train can be so pleasurable, especially through pretty country like the east coast of Australia, which is where I first learned to love the rails.  (Then I took the Sydney-to-Perth train and discovered it was possible to have too much of a good thing.)

I didn’t discuss politics with the elderly farm couple our train from Chicago to Dallas picked up in central Illinois, but statistically they’d be pretty likely to be conservative. He kept telling stories about how awesome the trains were in France. It probably helps to be old enough to remember a functioning passenger railroad system in this country.

@9: Certainly self-driving cars would be safer (assuming they drive as well as an attentive, awake human) because it’d eliminate the issue of falling asleep at the wheel, driving drunk, etc. (Not having to have a designated driver is no doubt appealing, but note that this is also a problem solved by public transportation.)

So yeah, I’m not opposed to self-driving cars in principle. I agree with your reasoning. I also agree with Amanda that we’re putting way too much emphasis on that because, socially, many Americans just can’t bear the thought of riding a train or a bus.

Those “many Americans” are largely, of course, middle- and upper-class ones. The car is a status symbol. I don’t say that to denigrate individual car owners (of which I am one). Our country’s car-addicted infrastructure necessitates it for most Americans. It’s hard to escape it on your own. But it’s the “car as status symbol” that made our infrastructure so car-centric in the first place. That infrastructure was built to be maximally convenient to middle- and upper-class people, and minimally convenient to lower-class people.

Trains are like #2 or #3 on the list of things that conservatives hate ONLY because liberals like them.

What’s number one? Mutually enjoyable sex?

witless—I don’t think it’s that.

Urban Living is popular with a particular socio-economic group: Childless yuppies and hipsters. Once you start factoring kids (especially multiple children in), most people decide that suburban living is preferable and safety is a big concern, but so is having a dedicated playroom and a backyard with a swingset, unless they have masses of money or can organize in such a way that they can fundamentally shift an entire neighborhood’s makeup to be family friendly (hello Park Slope). People have to be actively dedicated to raising their child with the cultural bonuses of the city (as in, it’s not enough to have a museum, you actually have to take your kid there) in order to feel that the cheaper property values and reduced population density (which they equate with safety) is not the better configuration for their family. And when you start adding multiple kids to the mix, it factors up substantially.

I grew up in northern New Jersey and now live in the San Francisco Bay Area—San Mateo County.  I recently changed from a job in Sunnyvale to one in San Francisco.  Driving to and from Sunnyvale took 50 minutes each day—50 tense minutes of heavy traffic, that took at least 30 minutes to “wind down” after arrival.  And that was timed to avoid the worst of it.  I tended to try to relax with music, and making a game of “stop-light average” (Divide the number of times you arrive at a green light by the sum of green lights and red lights:  .500 was a good day.)

I now drive 3.4 miles to Caltrain, then walk 15 minutes to the office.  Caltrain is 25 minutes on the Baby Bullet.  It takes 15 minutes to drive 3.4 miles:  (The stoplight average is usually .000-0.142:  of the 15 minutes, 10 are spent stopped at the lights waiting for them to turn green while there is little to no cross traffic.)  I have to drive that distance because taking Sam Trans busses would have an even longer wait for the Baby Bullet.

The one thing I recall about NY City transit is how well the different systems integrated with each other.  If I took a bus to the train, they were reasonably well coordinated.  (At least within the city of San Francisco, there’s some effort at coordination.)  You also had traffic lights that were timed so that traffic going straight didn’t have to stop at every fucking light.  (Stupid trivia:  Internal cumbustion engines get their lowest MPG when they are sitting at traffic lights:  0, as you are not moving.) 

We have systems designed to discourage public transportation, not encourage it.

Oh, and to add to that, this wonderful Congress we have decided to let the pre-tax savings for commuter public transit expenses drop from $230/month to $125/month.  Parking your car went from $230 to $240.  More proof that the Tea Party are idiots:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/10/your-money/why-drivers-get-more-commuter-tax-benefits-than-bus-riders.html?ref=opinion

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/opinion/second-class-commuters.html

Karinna A.—while I agree that we need better long-distance train options, I would prefer that there be light-speed rail for joining local municipalities together. A person might make 1-3 long journeys a year (unless their job requires traveling), but the day-to-day pollution and cost comes from having to maintain a car for an hour’s commute to and from work.

@Triplanetary, no, mutually enjoyable sex isn’t something they hate ONLY because liberals love it.  They also hate it because Jesus.  I’m not sure what #1 is; I just didn’t want to be so aggressively definitive as to state #1, because I am a squishy liberal.

Comment #15

To support this comment, there is an interesting article, “The Shifting Landscape of Diversity in Metro America” , which can found through a link in urbanophile. There is a map which shows growth and decline in the population of children based on 2010 census data. Complicated story.

I love driving (any driving, even in traffic, b/c I’m bizarre that way) and a car that drives itself sounds like a personal hell.  It’s just the logical continuation of the strategy explained in Taken for A Ride.

Trains sound like fun.  But I’ve lost any optimism we’ll ever have them in the configurations you’re all talking about here.

These companies are spending a lot of money on researching self-driving cars to address the desire of people to be able to commute without having to drive. But there’s already a superior solution to that problem, one that addresses both the desire to not drive and it’s better for the environment: public transportation.

Well their working on the EV too. I think we are just one leapfrog battery technology away and then thats it.

If Google really is interested in not being evil, they should redirect their brain trust away from self-driving cars and more towards better and more extensive public transportation.

No $$$ in public transportation. They want to be not-evil and rich. So self-driving EVs are perfect.

No $$$ in public transportation.

This is Google we’re talking about. They provide free email, word processing, file sharing, and a shitton of other services for free and still manage to make an enormous profit. Google excels at extracting profits through means other than charging the immediate end user.

This comes at a cost, of course, since essentially we end users, and all our personal data, are the product, and Google reaps huge profits by selling it to advertisers and other companies like that. It’s not exactly impossible to imagine how this could be adapted to public transportation.

Comment #21

True.

And other technology breakthroughs could threaten the anticipated death of the suburbs and car culture.
The hope of peak-oil is that gasoline will become too expensive to operate individual cars. But all it will take is a x10 increase in battery technology. Or for one of the many algae to biofuel projects to achieve even small to mid scale acceptable results, such that a small community could afford to produce its own fuel.
Hundreds of rural communities have taken on the responsibility of building their own fiber or wireless broadband networks to enable up to now impossible business opportunites. Cooperative solar and alternative energy projects are being put in place to give a degree of energy independence to these non-urban geographies.

I think we’re also stymied by the perceived cost of creating new systems of public transit.

We have spent a fuckton of money over the last 70 years to develop and maintain roadways built for cars. The cost of our system of roadways is, for the most part, incremental at this point. It’s easy to get funding, because local property taxes pay for local roads, federal gas tax pays for highways, consumers pay for their own fuel $50 at a time, everyone buys their own car, developers put in their own roads in new housing developments, shopping malls include the cost of parking in the rental price for their retail space, etc—the total cost of car transportation is hidden in a kerjillion different places which add up to a fuckton, but rarely are collected together and recognized as the fuckton that they are.

As opposed to building a new system of public transportation, which takes a fuckton of money right out the gate. Voters don’t like that. Billions of dollars. Nope, can’t have it. Boondoggle.

If people really need to be separated from other people, maybe what we need is the kind of train car one see in foreign movies sometimes, where each set of seats is in a separate compartment that opens to the outside.  It would take more space to transport the same number of people, but not as much space (or as much fuel) as separate automobiles.

Actually, what I have noticed is that where there is good enough bus service that people ride the buses, they get to know the other people who ride at the same time and become friendly with them.  And we could always have the compartmented train cars, or hey, even compartmented buses, for people who are just too sensitive to sit next to other people.

Resources devoted by whom?  Google is a private company, why would they burn R&D money to build a public transportation system?  Do you expect them to build a subway?

I really wish liberals (NB: I am a liberal) would think harder about public transportation:

- High-speed rail is a bad idea pretty much universally in the United States.  The reason people “hate” passenger trains, despite their lovely aesthetics, is their cost:benefit is so bad.
- Subways can be good (see: the NYC system) but they’re expensive and hard to build.
- For most intraurban transportation purposes, buses > subways or light rail.  Bus systems are cheaper, they’re easier to scale out, and routes can be recalculated/reset rapidly and as needed.
- (Self-driving) cars can be used in many different ways, e.g. fractional ownership of (self-driving) cars, (self-driving) Zipcars, (self-driving) taxicabs, peer-to-peer sharing of (self-driving) cars a la Getaround.  Implicit in your (environmental) critique of cars is the model of one (wo)man, one car.  The above-listed options/experiments suggest that this model doesn’t have to hold universally and so isn’t a good critique of cars, self-driving or otherwise, per se.  Note also that none is a “public” option.

@22 - they’re not free, you just “pay” in terms of being advertised to. It’s exactly like the old television model, where the programs are free but you have to watch the ads…. oh that’s what you’re saying. dodedodedo.

Anyway, my useless comment: I AM ON A HIGH-SPEED TRAIN RIGHT NOW.

NYC corridor. Way better than flying. I don’t feel like my ears are going to bleed, I can peer into people’s backyards, I didn’t get legally groped by someone at the airport, I have beer for friends in my luggage, I can be slightly smug that it might be better for the environment…..

But I’m flying on the return trip because of timetables.

I also find public transportation frequently dirty, smelly, and slow. (yes, even in europe.) Also it can be a huge pain if you miss a bus (because of delays on other public transportation) and then have to wait for an hour. And also harassment. But because I’m weirdly attached to decisions I made many years ago, I’m trying to see how long it is before I break down and buy a car. Probably this will coincide with whenever I move out of an urban environment due to the misanthropy Mighty Ponygirl describes.

It is amusing that one of the great fears of many urbanists is a breakthrough in battery technology that would give a car a 300 mile range and a 15 minnute recharge time.

And the benefit here would be what? That I could be stuck in traffic without so much engine noise as there is now?

Metro areas depend on growth to continue to be viable and competitive. The sprawl model of growth has a very limited lifespan because ultimately it grinds to a (literal) halt.

Setting everything else aside, as a lawyer I wonder how Google and other companies trying to develop these self-driving cars will avoid being sued into oblivion.

I don’t understand how they’re going to survive the legitimate lawsuits (software is inadequate or malfunctions causing death), much less the endless attempts people will make to sabotage the software or exploit weaknesses in the programing to instigate their own suits.

But the main point of Amanda’s piece is dead on (I’ve seen Atrios making similar points): why develop a super-complicated, high risk solution to a problem we’ve already solved?  The only advantage of this system over trains seems to be the ability to nap while your car drives you to a rural location.

NYC corridor. Way better than flying.

Eh. I disagree. Between DC and Boston, takes too long, compared to flying. Between either of those two cities and NYC, it is not that much faster than taking the bus, and it’s MUCH more expensive.

I’m enthused about self-driving cars because it’s a possible solution to the public transit last-mile problem.  Let’s say you live three miles from the train station that takes you to work; right now, if you do take the train, then you probably drive to the train station and park in a big lot.  Yeah, you could walk to the station, or ride a bike, or even skateboard, but you probably don’t; you’re thinking ahead to the end of the day when you’re tired and you don’t want to face the long trek home.  Or maybe it’s raining and you don’t want to get to work soaked, whatever.  The point is you need to own your own vehicle to be able to use the train, and if you’re in your car anyway, you’re a lot more likely to decide to ditch the parking fees and train fares and put up with an extra 30 minutes of driving.

Now, if you didn’t own a car, one possible solution would be ride-sharing with friends or neighbors to and from the station, but that’s not always an option and anyway it requires social skills.  Another would be to get a cab, but cabs are expensive… and therein lies the “aha”.

Cabs are expensive because you have to pay a driver.  When we have fully autonomous cars, someone like Zipcar would be able to have a cab deliver itself exactly where you need it, exactly when you need it, drop you off, and then go pick up the next person.  In a typical size city, you could easily field a fleet of cabs big enough that no one would ever have to wait more than 3-5 minutes from the time they pushed the “call a cab” button on their smartphone—which could show them where their cab was and give them an accurate ETA.  This sort of thing could make transit a lot more attractive.

Karinna A asked:

That all being said, why *isn’t* there passenger train service running from Winnipeg to Dallas?

The answer is simple: there was.  We had coast-to-coast passenger rail service for decades .  .  . and then ridership declined, to the point where it ceased being profitable, and the rail companies got out of the passenger rail business.  Amtrak was created, but even after a few decades of service, it still operates at a loss, with the only lines which are self-supporting being some (not all) of the densely-populated northeast corridor.  People freely chose to travel by other means.

The kind of transit system being envisioned here is one which would come at a huge cost in government subsidies, and virtually every level of government is either running at a deficit or scrambling to avoid a deficit.  What do you think public transportation would actually cost riders if it operated without government subsidies?

Comment #26: jiminythicket

“High-speed rail is a bad idea pretty much universally in the United States.  The reason people “hate” passenger trains, despite their lovely aesthetics, is their cost:benefit is so bad.”

There are a number of things deeply flawed about this argument.

First, do people “hate” passenger trains, or do they hate crappy, slow, dirty passenger trains that don’t really take them where they want to go and cost about as much as a plane ticket?  Build better trains, that hate disappears.  I have never met someone who traveled through Europe or Japan (and now China) who bitches about their trains. 

Second, people HATE air travel.  It’s a miserable experience from the moment you approach the airport.  Because it’s the only legitimate form of hasty travel, however, people put up with all the bullshit.  If trains were fast and efficient, they would quickly replace plane travel within a certain radius.

People hate speed limits, too, but they’re enforced because of safety concerns.  Replacing some percentage of car travel (whether car share or otherwise) with rail travel saves lots and lots of lives.  On top of that, there are the environmental concerns.  We’re much closer to fueling trains with clean sources of energy, replacing a massive amount of internal-combustion travel, than we are to creating a fleet of affordable electric cars.

Urban Living is popular with a particular socio-economic group: Childless yuppies and hipsters. Once you start factoring kids (especially multiple children in), most people decide that suburban living is preferable and safety is a big concern, but so is having a dedicated playroom and a backyard with a swingset, unless they have masses of money or can organize in such a way that they can fundamentally shift an entire neighborhood’s makeup to be family friendly (hello Park Slope). People have to be actively dedicated to raising their child with the cultural bonuses of the city (as in, it’s not enough to have a museum, you actually have to take your kid there) in order to feel that the cheaper property values and reduced population density (which they equate with safety) is not the better configuration for their family. And when you start adding multiple kids to the mix, it factors up substantially.

That’s who urban living is popular with now. If we had more urban living, we’d likely also have more Park Slopes (which I’m assuming you’re describing accurately, I know fuck all about NYC). Or maybe not. I neither have kids not live in a walkable urban neighborhood. That’s mostly because my city really doesn’t have many. In hindsight, I wish we’d bought a house closer to downtown, but at the time we were angling for shortest commute to jobs that are both outside the city. 

But you can have suburban neighborhoods with good public transit options, so it’s not an either/or situation. My neighborhood actually isn’t terrible for that. A bus stop is decently close to my house, 3-4 blocks, so if I worked downtown I could take the bus to work. Any kind of business is a long, inconsistently sidewalked hike away, but I do walk to the ice cream shop in a strip mall in the summer.

My point in bringing up the popularity of urban living was to argue that there’s probably a good-sized subset of people who’d like to live that kind of lifestyle for some portion of their lives, but are priced out of it because of high demand. Which I think cuts against what you were saying about Americans loving isolation and that driving dislike of public transit and love of cars.

The “carless future” nonsense is a strawman. I’m from rural West Texas. I know that car-free living for *everyone* isn’t going to happen. But we can substantially reduce the number of cars on the road while catering to people’s desires to use their traveling time to read or play games and their desire to be safe. (Car accidents kill SO many Americans.) Putting our nation’s best technological minds on that instead of self-driving cars is what we should be doing.

Some of the economics can be seen when you look at freight rail service.  The railroads used to be the primary carriers of freight in the United States, but that was taken over by trucking because rail service was both more expensive and less convenient.  Unless you have a rail siding and loading/unloading facilities at both ends, you wind up with twice or thrice the amount of material handling involved; a truck needed at both ends.  And dealing with the railroad can be enormously frustrating, because they know they’ve got you, and really don’t care about you.

The same is true of passenger rail: unless your departure and arrival points are very close to your destinations, you would have to have another means of transportation involved: a car or bus to take you to and from the railroad station.  Passenger rail for most people wouldn’t mean that they wouldn’t have to have a car.

Comment #32: Dana

The answer is simple: there was.  We had coast-to-coast passenger rail service for decades .  .  . and then ridership declined, to the point where it ceased being profitable, and the rail companies got out of the passenger rail business.  Amtrak was created, but even after a few decades of service, it still operates at a loss, with the only lines which are self-supporting being some (not all) of the densely-populated northeast corridor.  People freely chose to travel by other means.

That explanation conveniently skims over the complicated issues that led to a deterioration of rail travel.  It wasn’t just that people decided they didn’t like train travel, there was a concerted lobbying effort by car manufacturers, oil companies, and related industries (steel…etc.) to promote car travel and then plane travel.  If you look at the MASSIVE subsidies those industries received throughout the twentieth century (especially after WWII—the interstate highway system, for example) and compare it to the consistent attacks on the rail industry, if the rail industry had even received a fraction of that support, we would have a more functional system.

Our country made a conscious decision to support the automotive industry, the result is an infrastructure dedicated to cars.  This isn’t true of necessity nor is it the just result of free consumer choice.  If, for example, oil company subsidies were shifted into HSR construction, within a decade it would be a thriving industry.

Every conservative loves “Amtrak operates at a loss”.

Not as much of a loss as the highway system. Tolls help a little, but the % of spending recouped by highways is teeny compared to how Amtrak does.

The kind of transit system being envisioned here is one which would come at a huge cost in government subsidies, and virtually every level of government is either running at a deficit or scrambling to avoid a deficit.  What do you think public transportation would actually cost riders if it operated without government subsidies?

Dana, c’mon. What would car-based transportation actually cost drivers if it operated without subsidies?

That passenger rail system went away because the alternatives of air travel and interstate highways were both heavily subsidized by the U.S. taxpayer, as the rail system had been at its creation. This was done in large part because extremely cheap oil made the fuel efficiency of moving one person (or one pound of freight) by train versus car or plane much less of a big deal. There’s a lot of other factors to be sure, but that’s the main thing.

Whether other propulsion technologies can replace that in a similar economic model is very much an open question. And better technology to extract oil only pushes that problem down the road. Basically, oil is really awesome stuff and we need to stop burning it to drive back and forth to work.

Comment #36: Dana

“...that was taken over by trucking because rail service was both more expensive and less convenient.”

Again, you’re narrowing the scope of your gaze to eliminate background issues.  Truck shipping is cheap because we spend INSANE amounts of money building highways and subsidizing gasoline prices.  One train can obviously haul the equivalent of 1000 semi trucks, but because that industry doesn’t receive the governmental support that the industries necessary to automotive travel do, it’s comparatively expensive.

unless your departure and arrival points are very close to your destinations, you would have to have another means of transportation involved: a car or bus to take you to and from the railroad station. 

This is how it works for airports. Similarly, train station has several car rental outlets and an army of cabs available, as well.

Driving and flying the DC-Boston corridor regularly, I have direct experience with capacity limits in the air and on the roads, and I am frequently frustrated by our disinterest in investing in improving the already existing infrastructure, to say nothing of building high speed rail to relief a lot of congestion on this corridor.

If our current transit and transport infrastructure is so great, then why is it so unpleasant? And given its unpleasantness, why is it the model that is most ardently defended by conservatives?

If the cars are self driving then why would any of us need to own one?

We have the ability now to use smart phones to get real time locations of public transit buses and trains.

The next useful step is to have the transit system know where I am and where I am going, and then provide just-in-time circulator and mass transit transportation to get me there.

The neighborhood circulator can pick up me and several of my neighbors and take us to the train just before it arrives. Then the system can point me to the nearest bike share, unlock the bike and I can take that the last mile to my destination.

If the cars can drive themselves, then the system can be smart enough to eliminate most of our current motor vehicle traffic by having the system actively think about moving people to their specific destinations instead of just providing space for everyone’s single occupancy self-driving itself all at once.

I’ve never seen anyone write about this. Except for the self driving car part, we could right now do the software part of making the transit system know the location of its users.  I doubt that’s what Google has in mind though.

Tyro asked:

If our current transit and transport infrastructure is so great, then why is it so unpleasant? And given its unpleasantness, why is it the model that is most ardently defended by conservatives?

But it isn’t unpleasant.  Sitting in traffic on a boring commute might be, but for much of our automobile usage, it really isn’t bad.  The transportation is virtually door-to-door, and if you need to stop at the grocery store on the way home, you can do it, and you have the vehicle to carry home the groceries.  The automobile is so popular because, overall, it is the most convenient method of transportation.

We have high-speed rail service in only a limited area of the country because it is practical in only a limited area of the country.  The public demand for the service you desire simply does not exist at levels which would justify the investment; if it did, the investment would already have been made.

Second, people HATE air travel.  It’s a miserable experience from the moment you approach the airport.  Because it’s the only legitimate form of hasty travel, however, people put up with all the bullshit.  If trains were fast and efficient, they would quickly replace plane travel within a certain radius.

Amen. I could do with a decent passenger rail service right about now—we’re going on vacation next month and with all the rigamarole of airport security these days we’re opting to drive. It isn’t going to be pleasant, but neither is air travel and at least this way we can stop to see one of his friends along the way.

But it isn’t unpleasant.  Sitting in traffic on a boring commute might be, but for much of our automobile usage, it really isn’t bad. 

That is a stunningly ignorant thing to say, to the point where I can only assume you do not drive in a congested metro area or ever drive down a highly traffic corridor between major metro areas. It is operating far beyond its capacity, and it is a mess, and a 4 hour trip can easily turn into 6 hours.

We have high-speed rail service in only a limited area of the country

No, we do not have any high speed rail service at all.

But it isn’t unpleasant.  Sitting in traffic on a boring commute might be, but for much of our automobile usage, it really isn’t bad.

Where do you live that this is not “much” of automobile usage? Next door to the Autobahn?

@#46:

i live in a rust belt city where highway capacity exceeds demand. i rarely sit in traffic. i have lived in a place where traffic is typically a problem if you live in the suburbs. but i typically didn’t because i lived relatively close to where i needed to be.

** note: i’m not saying that i wouldn’t enjoy the convenience of better public transportation where i live. but driving is definitely not awful where i am.

No, we do not have any high speed rail service at all.

Acela begs to differ.

Commuting by bike is wonderful and most people in working age can and should be able to do it safely. It’s cheap, healthy, comfortable, clean, wakes your body up, no parking problems.

I’ve worked in Cologne and Aalborg and both are great for bikes. If anybody has a chance to visit them don’t hesitate. Haven’t seen it myself, but I’m told Amsterdam is nice for bikes too. Londoners are famous for their bikes, but that city isn’t as bike friendly as the other three. I’m convinced this can help make the car problem in dense urban areas get a lot better.

1. We need high-speed rail on routes that can support it (Chicago-Milwaukee, Los Angeles to Las Vegas, San Diego, and San Francisco, etc.).

2. We need a heck of a lot more mass transit including buses and trains in cities.

BUT:

3. This does not reduce the utility of creating better cars. I think Amanda should take a look at a map of Los Angeles and Vicinity, from Palmdale down to San Clemente and from Agoura over to Riverside sometime. Look at the distances involved, the sheer number of population and work centers, and the amount of sprawl. And then figure out a mass transit system that would serve all the places people want to go and in the time they want to take to travel there.

I know Amanda grew up in Texas, but the idea that trains and cars are a zero-sum game is a very New York way of looking at the situation. There’s just no way you can build train networks that would do what they do in New York here in America’s second-largest metropolitan area. And even if you came up with some sort of plan, you’re talking about 35 years and trillions of dollars (and have fun with our environmentalists and historic preservationists, who are not bad people but who are capable of blocking just about any project).

4. One thing we DO NOT need is more long distance rail. Those lines are huge money pits and basically serve the population who fears flying. And there’s no way it’s going to serve the vast majority of small towns and cities in rural America. Subsidized inter-city bus service, on the other hand, would be a very good idea.

That explanation conveniently skims over the complicated issues that led to a deterioration of rail travel.  It wasn’t just that people decided they didn’t like train travel, there was a concerted lobbying effort by car manufacturers, oil companies, and related industries (steel…etc.) to promote car travel and then plane travel.

Railroads got massive subsidies too you know. And they lobbied too.

There’s two basic things here:

1. Cars and planes became popular in every country in the world. Even in Europe, where there are quite a lot of trains, lots of upper class people love to drive or fly. Planes are faster and cars give you more autonomy, while trains don’t go everywhere you want to go. That’s a reality.

2. What Europe did, and we didn’t do, was actually engage in some good old-fashioned socialism when it came to rail travel. Central planning. They decided where trains would make sense, and put a boatload of money into those trains and made them faster and more efficient. And they also let other train lines die out where they didn’t make sense.

In contrast, Amtrak is a mess. Not enough money to pour the type of investment into its showcase lines that it should (Acela would be a lot faster if Amtrak had a bigger budget), and too much political intervention—it keeps a lot of money-losing long distance milk runs going because it’s existence is dependent on running a train through as many congressional districts as possible.

But the conspiracy theories are wrong. Don’t have any illusions about how popular cars and planes were going to be once the technologies matured.

An automobile is more convenient than a bus or train if you can assume large quantities of parking exist right next to your destination. If parking spaces are limited, then looking for a place to leave your car while you do your business can take a lot of time and frustration. Then it becomes more convenient to take public transit, because you don’t have to park the bus—you just have to get on/off it.

Dana, c’mon. What would car-based transportation actually cost drivers if it operated without subsidies?

In Europe, car based transportation basically works that way, with road tolls and huge gasoline taxes. And yet—plenty of people still drive. Less than drive here, but still a ton of people drive.

(Similarly, Japan subsidizes high speed rail far more than it does domestic air transportation, and yet its major airlines fill up Haneda airport with all-coach 747’s (500 passengers a plane) flying the Tokyo-Osaka route and other short hops. People love to fly.)

@47 I admit to finding pretty much all driving tremendously unpleasant (traffic or no), so to my mind basically, if I am in a car and on a road and other people are there, I’m grumpy. I also live in a notoriously physically ugly part of the country; so I suppose that made it difficult to imagine that most Americans enjoy a visually pleasing, traffic-free and unstressful commute. Mea culpa.

But mostly I was questioning Dana’s assertion that somehow commuting (with its attendant traffic that is, as you note, not the same everywhere) does not constitute “much” of peoples’ driving experience.

Acela doesn’t count as high-speed rail. Technically, yes, it exceeds 125 mph, which the USDOT defines as high speed, but it averages 80 mph on its course, and only hits its max speed of 150 mph on two stretches of track.

I live in central NC. I decided to take the train to Boston last summer. It took 2 days each way because of schedule issues. (I could catch a train out of DC at like 10 pm and get to Boston at 8 am, or I could sleep on my sister’s couch.) My train from Durham to DC was delayed over an hour because there was a freight train on the track that we had to yield to, and because there was a signal problem at a station and we couldn’t pull in. The DC-Boston leg was pretty well on time. The way back was similar. The DC-Durham leg was limited to 60 mph because it was hot outside and there was concern about the tracks.

It wasn’t just my bad luck, either. The Carolinian/Piedmont routes’ on-time performance over the last year was only 74%. The Acela does better, at 85%

In Europe, car based transportation basically works that way, with road tolls and huge gasoline taxes. And yet—plenty of people still drive

Of course people drive, but driving is just one mode among many. That said, a distorting element is that for a lot of jobs in Europe, everyone in middle management and above gets a car and gas paid for by their employer, so they’re insulated from the gas costs.

@54: well i certainly understand someone not liking driving at all. my fiance is the same way. she and i lived with one car for 3 or 4 months this past year. But the first 20 degree week with lots of commitments for both of us all over town and we broke down and got a second car again. i actually prefer to ride my bike to work. and i do so a couple times a week when the weather is cooperative. but winter makes the prospect of biking to work pretty untenable around here (both because it is darker and the cold/ice make it a pretty unpleasant experience).

Of course people drive, but driving is just one mode among many. That said, a distorting element is that for a lot of jobs in Europe, everyone in middle management and above gets a car and gas paid for by their employer, so they’re insulated from the gas costs.

And that might very well happen here if we raised the price of driving as well.

(That said, I don’t buy your argument that this is a big factor in the choice to drive cars. Most Europeans are not “in middle management and above”, and plenty of those who are not nonetheless drive and pay the gas taxes and tolls.

The point is, other than in the very densest, largest, wealthiest cities, like New York and Hong Kong, you are always going to have plenty of people who want to drive even when you set the cost closer to its true impact. The story that some on the left tell that the only reason people “chose” driving is because of an imbalance of subsidies is quite wrong.)

sarijoul, if you’re really committed to bike commuting and have money to burn, fatbikes are gaining popularity for winter riding.

http://fatbikes.com/

I’m a professional driver. I see it all.  Aside from flying cars, self-driving cars are one of the worst ideas I know of.

The primary reason these are a Very Bad Idea is basic human unpredictability. You’re tooling along in your self-driving car, checking your email while the car drives. What happens when Jackass Driver makes an unexpected lane change, right into you? Does the car have the sensors and reaction time to take evasive?

Even when my truck has a VORAD Collision Reduction system, it couldn’t brake fast enough when someone cut me off, I had to do it.

I’ve seen drivers put their ICC bumpers into cars’ engine compartments. I’ve seen cars go under trailers. I’ve been hit (in a minivan) by someone making a right hand turn from the left hand lane. I do not see self-driving as helping any of this, but rather increasing it.

I’d like to see a lot more light rail. I’d love high-speed rail between major midwestern cities. If I could get to St. Louis in 3 hours and Kansas City in 2 more—and read or crochet or visit with my kids—I would love it, rather than spending 8-10 hours in the car and arriving exhausted and aching.
I’d like my city to run more than one bus in the morning and one in the evening out to my community and back into town.
I’d like to be able to ride a bicycle to work, since I only work 2 miles from my house.  Commuting by bike, at 2 AM, on unlit 45 mph roads is asking to die.

The same is true of passenger rail: unless your departure and arrival points are very close to your destinations, you would have to have another means of transportation involved: a car or bus to take you to and from the railroad station.  Passenger rail for most people wouldn’t mean that they wouldn’t have to have a car.

Gee, I wonder what it would look like to live in a country that had functional rail, say in a country which had long distance rail between major cities, and in a city which had suburban rail within a 70 mile catchment area funnelling to a major transport hub with bus services running thrughout the urban area? A city where many people walk to a station or park at a station, take the train into work, and then catch it back out each day for roughly the same cost of petrol?

Oh, wait - I live in such a bloody city.  But how can that be when Dana says it’s impossible?

BTW, Dana - good going on preemptively blocking me from your new site because you couldn’t stand me bringing up inconvenient facts, and then lying about it.  I notice that you blamed me for your previous site degenerating into a slanging match - but your new site is just as bad with your usual crowd of ignorant fatheads busy screaming backwards and forwards.

I used to stand up for you at Pandagon for at least having the courage to not resort to censorship.  But no more, you goddamned weasel.  Scratch a wingnut, find someone who can’t stand people telling the truth - and is willing to use whatever power he has to block them, and then lie about it.

Tyro wrote:

<blockquote>But it isn’t unpleasant.  Sitting in traffic on a boring commute might be, but for much of our automobile usage, it really isn’t bad.

That is a stunningly ignorant thing to say, to the point where I can only assume you do not drive in a congested metro area or ever drive down a highly traffic corridor between major metro areas. It is operating far beyond its capacity, and it is a mess, and a 4 hour trip can easily turn into 6 hours. </blockquote>

I live in a small town now, and the largest cities in which I have lived are Lexington, KY and Hampton, VA.  However, what you call “stunningly ignorant” is actually quite true for most of the country.  Some of the older, large cities in the Northeast aren’t particularly automobile-friendly, having grown up with roadways which were fit for horses-and buggies, but most places really aren’t like that.  The suburbs are specifically automobile-friendly, because they were built to attract people with automobiles.  Many cities like Lexington weren’t really geographically-restricted, and could devote more space to roads even before automobiles, and did; when the population didn’t have to be crammed into a restricted space, people just naturally took advantage of having more space.

You get into these areas, and there’s plenty of parking: businesses build with the automobile in mind.  Some downtown areas have suffered greatly because they were the one area which was really built before the automobile became ubiquitous, and people started shopping where it was more convenient, where they could park their cars.

Dammit Dana, if you bothered to read my comments, I’m not even talking about driving in the cities. I’m talking about driving down the highways between cities. Hell, even between suburbs.

As I said, if our way of doing things is so great, why is it so unpleasant? If the breadth of your experience with driving and commuting is in empty small towns, then sure, I can see how you’d think that, but for those doing commutes from exurbs of metro areas over congested highways and doing family trips on over-capacity highway corridors, nothing can really describe that experience as particularly pleasant or efficient. Yet that’s what the conservatives consider the best of all possible worlds.

As I said, if our way of doing things is so great, why is it so unpleasant?

And, of course, how sustainable a model is a transport and urban planning system built on the assumption of perpetual and unlimited cheap petrol?

And, of course, how sustainable a model is a transport and urban planning system built on the assumption of perpetual and unlimited cheap petrol?

it’s not really. we’re starting to see more and more of what the car mode would look like post-cheap-petrol now with electric and hybrid vehicles. there are also fuel cell vehicles that are likely on the horizon as well. the main barrier to a lot of these new technologies is the infrastructure to service and charge them as necessary along routes. these problems will be solved when the viability of these methods of transport cross a threshold that i think is coming pretty soon.

for those doing commutes from exurbs of metro areas over congested highways and doing family trips on over-capacity highway corridors, nothing can really describe that experience as particularly pleasant or efficient. Yet that’s what the conservatives consider the best of all possible worlds.

Well, conservatives in general often consider the suffering of the less-worthy to be the ideal, so…

it’s not really. we’re starting to see more and more of what the car mode would look like post-cheap-petrol now with electric and hybrid vehicles. there are also fuel cell vehicles that are likely on the horizon as well. the main barrier to a lot of these new technologies is the infrastructure to service and charge them as necessary along routes. these problems will be solved when the viability of these methods of transport cross a threshold that i think is coming pretty soon.

I might add as well that it’s no accident that we are also seeing a lot of urban rail and bus rapid transit being built as well. How many cities have light rail lines now compared to 25 years ago? Those are far from complete transit systems, but they are being built for much the same reasons that hybrid and electric cars are coming online.

I might also note that not only do Dana’s qualifiers (horse-and-buggy streets, etc.) Not apply to Los Angeles, a city both built for the car-lover AND home of the most appalling traffic I have ever witnessed, but they also don’t explain why the traffic in the suburb where I grew up was (and remains) orders of magnitude worse than the traffic in the urban area where I now live. It’s not as simple as suburb = no traffic, city = traffic.

@doubtthat #33

First, do people “hate” passenger trains, or do they hate crappy, slow, dirty passenger trains that don’t really take them where they want to go and cost about as much as a plane ticket? Build better trains, that hate disappears.  I have never met someone who traveled through Europe or Japan (and now China) who bitches about their trains.

If crappy, slow, dirty trains are too expensive, why would shiny, fast, clean trains cost less?  Also, trains, regardless of whether they’re fast or slow, don’t take you to exactly where you want to go; you still need a rental car, cab, bus ride, etc. at the terminus of the train portion of your trip.  (The same is true for plane travel.) Also, pretty much all the European train systems bleed money.  SOME of the Japanese system (Tokaido) runs in the black, the rest doesn’t, and that’s AFTER hundreds of billions of dollars of debt writeoffs on the initial outlays.

Second, people HATE air travel.  It’s a miserable experience from the moment you approach the airport.  Because it’s the only legitimate form of hasty travel, however, people put up with all the bullshit.  If trains were fast and efficient, they would quickly replace plane travel within a certain radius.

... or plane travel would become less miserable.  And if plane travel is so miserable, why not fix that instead of spend hundreds of billions of dollars on trains?  (Why is plane travel so miserable?  Is it because of lack of competition from another mode of transportation?  If so, why doesn’t intraindustry competition have the desired disciplining effect?  Or is plane travel miserable because of the TSA and national security hysteria?  I can see an argument for trains along the lines of: airlines do the best they can in competing with each other to deliver convenience, low cost, etc., but their service is intermediated by the airport-TSA-national-security-hysteria monolith and only another mode of transportation could discipline that.)

Also, what is the radius?  Which population centers do you wish to connect?  I can kind of see HSR being good for the NE Corridor, but after that the case is much, much more tenuous.

People hate speed limits, too, but they’re enforced because of safety concerns.  Replacing some percentage of car travel (whether car share or otherwise) with rail travel saves lots and lots of lives.

Only if the drivers are human.  Computer-driven cars are much safer than human-driven cars and comparable in safety to HSR and planes.

On top of that, there are the environmental concerns.  We’re much closer to fueling trains with clean sources of energy, replacing a massive amount of internal-combustion travel, than we are to creating a fleet of affordable electric cars.

Only if people actually ride the trains.  Even efficient trains are relatively inefficient if they run with no passengers.  Also, self-driving cars are much more efficient than their human-driven counterparts.

I might add as well that it’s no accident that we are also seeing a lot of urban rail and bus rapid transit being built as well. How many cities have light rail lines now compared to 25 years ago? Those are far from complete transit systems, but they are being built for much the same reasons that hybrid and electric cars are coming online.

Actually, I think it is more due to growth management than gas prices. Cities and metro areas can’t afford to waste space devoted to parking and can no longer handle the increased amount of traffic. No one wants to bulldoze city blocks to make a highway. But you have a lot more people, and you have to deal with their transportation needs.

We don’t actually spend that much money on self-driving cars.  The requirements for them keep going up and up, too; now they have to navigate on unmarked dirt roads and in horrible weather conditions before they’ll be allowed.

It something we create because it’s cool and the technology has other potentials.  There’s little functionally different between a robot navigating an unmarked hallway or collapsed mine shaft system as navigating city streets; they all have lack of special markings and outside information as to where you are and lots of things entering or changing the landscape you’re moving in.

Lastly, I often do drive through winding mountains - I specifically live in the mountains.  ‘d love transit, and there are tons of commuters so transit should be profitable.  It just isn’t, as long as we’re paying billions of dollars for roads.

Roads do have the advantage of being random-use; your vehicle can carry special-purpose gear just for you, it can carry your luggage, it can choose an arbitrary route.  Computerized cars could skip congestion (customized route information, unique routes), gang for efficiency (like trains), and carry more personal equipment or be ready for unique conditions at the end of the travel.  So computerized cars have their place.

But they’re no replacement for decent mass transit.

we’re starting to see more and more of what the car mode would look like post-cheap-petrol now with electric and hybrid vehicles. there are also fuel cell vehicles that are likely on the horizon as well. the main barrier to a lot of these new technologies is the infrastructure to service and charge them as necessary along routes.

People keep saying that. What I don’t think most people get is that those are all methods of energy storage, not energy production. You’re still assuming that energy will be cheap, plentiful, and readily available for use in private vehicles—which isn’t guaranteed by any means.

I should probably point out that there are millions of people like me who watch Top Gear, read Hot Rod magazine and spend hours tuning virtual cars in Forza Motorsport 4.

Can we gearheads please have a seat at the table here? We’re being ignored and treated like pests.

<blcokquote>Does the car have the sensors and reaction time to take evasive?
Even when my truck has a VORAD Collision Reduction system, it couldn’t brake fast enough when someone cut me off, I had to do it.
Comment #60: Angelia Sparrow on 01/26 at 04:10 PM</blockquote>As much as I prefer my driving to others… I know that computer reflexes can and will be faster than mine.  We have anti-lock brakes because a computer can use reflexes hundreds of times faster than mine to blindly change the braking strength.  We have traction control because the reflexes of a computer are so fast, it can blindly speed up or slow down wheels based upon their relative speed, with no other input.

Sure, when it first arrive it’s only better than the average driver.  Now those are all better than the best driver.  Are you really going to take the position that your braking reflex is faster than a computer, and always will be?

Anyhow, when complaining about the cost of trains, Amanda has it right:  No one ever compares them to the annual cost of roads.  Roads don’t just not make a profit while Amtrak - a system that sells off any route that makes a profit, that is required to not lay or own or manage any track - almost does.  Roads cost billions of dollars and all our trains instead are trying to come out even.  It’s not even a fair comparison.  And the amount we spend on airports is mighty as well.  No one would fly if flying actually cost what it did, and there’d be an armed revolt if roads cost directly in user fees.

We’re being ignored and treated like pests.

That’s because 12 year olds who use handles like “ferrariman” ARE pests. You almost prove the point here: if cars are recreational, then nothing is less recreational than that repetitive, stop-and-go, traffic-congested 45 minute drive between your house and your office (I am told, however, that this is the “freedom” that makes America unique).

You want federal funding for development of scenic coastal roads and salt-flats highways? Go to it, but it would help a whole damn lot of I could hope on a train in DC and be in Boston in 4 hours rather than having to deal with the mess that is our buckling airport and highway infrastructure.

It’s comments like #75 that pretty much prove the point I was trying to make. Thanks.

People keep saying that. What I don’t think most people get is that those are all methods of energy storage, not energy production. You’re still assuming that energy will be cheap, plentiful, and readily available for use in private vehicles—which isn’t guaranteed by any means.

power stations of all stripes are more efficient than internal combustion motors that are on cars.

petroleum is a method of energy storage as well effectively. it’s just lucky that nature already stored the energy for us. the only cost to us is getting to it. that is getting more expsensive though.

and i really don’t see where it is that i assumed that energy will be cheap and plentiful. but i’ll say it now: i think it will be. in some form or another. there are enough different tracks that could be taken for energy production that i think energy will at the very least be plentiful for the forseeable future. cheap is in the eye of the beholder i suppose.

Gearheads enjoy awesome drives that are fun. They do not fantasize that their stop-and-go trip to the grocery store is some kind of extreme driving experience for freedom.

My car is awesome and very fast. But I bike to the grocery store because there’s nothing “Gearhead” about barely making it to second gear between traffic lights.

But I bike to the grocery store

that’s probably the last place i’d want to bike.

sarijoul, replace “grocery store” with the weekend errand destination of your choice if it makes you feel better.

I’ve had a car ever since I graduated college, and I only started using it for commuting to work in my early 30s. It’s possible to enjoy driving while also realizing that it’s not the solution to all transportation problems and in fact is pretty darn boring and unpleasant in many cases.

i totally agree actually. just grocery shopping is a big pain with a bike. at least in my experience.

sarijoul, replace “grocery store” with the weekend errand destination of your choice if it makes you feel better.

and nice attitude, buddy.

petroleum is a method of energy storage as well effectively. it’s just lucky that nature already stored the energy for us.

Yes, that’s the point: petroleum is millions of years of solar power, conveniently available in liquid form. Charging a battery removes energy from the power grid—i.e. the energy it consumes has to be produced through some other source. Burning gasoline consumes oil—energy that doesn’t need to be produced through some other method, because it’s already available. Battery technology doesn’t compensate for increasing petroleum prices, unless you compensate with increasing energy production through other methods.

And I’d love to know your suggested means of power production, because I’ve yet to hear of a sustainable method that can be scaled up fast enough to compensate for decreasing quantities of fossil fuels, petroleum or otherwise.

And I’d love to know your suggested means of power production, because I’ve yet to hear of a sustainable method that can be scaled up fast enough to compensate for decreasing quantities of fossil fuels, petroleum or otherwise.

solar, wind, nuclear, (preferrably non-ethanol) bio-fuels, hydro, geothermal, natural gas

can any single one of those make up for decreasing coal and oil supplies? no probably not. but i don’t see a future where we are left without an adequate power supply with all those different options to choose from.

If Google really is interested in not being evil, they should redirect their brain trust away from self-driving cars and more towards better and more extensive public transportation.

Their brain trust is, I assume, largely made up of software engineers.  How does that brain trust, then, know fuck-all about civil engineering?  Google can actually make money from the software/computer system of self-driving cars by patenting that technology.  There’s very little profit in public transportation, which is why functional public transportation systems are provided by the government, not private business.

As I see it, the best possible development in making public transportation more feasible is by making it more affordable and making it easier/faster to build.  As one example, Seattle is currently building a several-mile-long light rail line underground, which is slated to open in five years.  Construction started about two years ago.  This is a multibillion-dollar project that’s ultimately taking decades to construct.  See the problem there?  What is a bunch of software developers supposed to do about that?

Comment #69: jiminythicke

If crappy, slow, dirty trains are too expensive, why would shiny, fast, clean trains cost less?  Also, trains, regardless of whether they’re fast or slow, don’t take you to exactly where you want to go; you still need a rental car, cab, bus ride, etc. at the terminus of the train portion of your trip.  (The same is true for plane travel.) Also, pretty much all the European train systems bleed money.  SOME of the Japanese system (Tokaido) runs in the black, the rest doesn’t, and that’s AFTER hundreds of billions of dollars of debt writeoffs on the initial outlays.

Around and around we go.  Those systems “bleed” money because the subsidies aren’t hidden.  Look up any study that estimates the true price of gasoline.  When subsidies from all industries are considered (oil extraction, refining, steel, roads, auto manufacturers…), gas usually ends up costing around $20 a gallon.  That cost is hidden from consumers; it is not for train travelers. 

Subsidizing the rail industry would generate cheaper, better trains, which would be a good idea because it is cleaner, infinitely safer, and a more comfortable way to travel.

... or plane travel would become less miserable.  And if plane travel is so miserable, why not fix that instead of spend hundreds of billions of dollars on trains?  (Why is plane travel so miserable?

Have you flown lately?  Cramped spaces, security lines, endless waiting…it’s horrific.  And if you can figure out a way to make a plane that doesn’t run on fossil fuels, I’m all ears.  Within a certain radius, plane travel is incredibly inefficient.  As the distance increases, it becomes a better option.

Only if the drivers are human.  Computer-driven cars are much safer than human-driven cars and comparable in safety to HSR and planes.

Perhaps in some science fiction universe.  At best, that claim has yet to be proven.

Only if people actually ride the trains.  Even efficient trains are relatively inefficient if they run with no passengers.  Also, self-driving cars are much more efficient than their human-driven counterparts.

The first part is just sort of pointless theorizing.  People use the infrastructure that exists.  Because there is no train infrastructure, people have built their lives around automobiles.  Investment in the system has to precede usage.  Read some of the debates about how useless and wasteful the interstate highway system would be.  Recall that it passed for national security reasons (ease of moving soldiers and equipment across the country).  Once that infrastructure was in place, society built around it.

The second half of the statement is a totally unsubstantiated claim.  3 hours of internal combustion driving generates the same pollutants regardless of what is controlling the car.  Perhaps if every car on the road was run by a computer, you’d somehow eliminate a certain amount of driving time, but as long as roads are crammed with cars, light rail will always be more efficient.

3 hours of internal combustion driving

solar, wind, nuclear, (preferrably non-ethanol) bio-fuels, hydro, geothermal, natural gas

can any single one of those make up for decreasing coal and oil supplies? no probably not. but i don’t see a future where we are left without an adequate power supply with all those different options to choose from.

Fuel cells are important precisely because even though they are just a storage mechanism, their effect is to shift from a generation source (in the car) that allows for only limited use of alternative fuels to one (the power grid) where the full panoply of alternative fuels are available to use (and where even if we are going to use fossil fuels, we can burn them more efficiently in a power plant than we can in an automobile engine).

So fuel cells are probably a necessary, but not sufficient, step in the evolution of greener cars.

I love to use a car about once a week.

I would hate to use it daily. 

That’s pretty much it.

Why on Earth don’t passenger trains get priority / right-of-way over freight?

I mean, passenger trains?  Like, you know, people?

Why on Earth don’t passenger trains get priority / right-of-way over freight?

I mean, passenger trains?  Like, you know, people?

Well, which passenger trains do you mean?

The Tehachapi Loop north of Los Angeles is the busiest single track freight line in the country, and maybe the world. It was built by Southern Pacific, and for years it ran a Los Angeles-San Francisco train, the San Joaquin Daylight, over those tracks. As they got busier and busier, the trip (which was already up and down a mountain pass and took a long time) got slower and slower. It took over 4 hours to get from Los Angeles to Bakersfield by train, a 90 minute drive.

So when Amtrak took it over, they junked that train and let Southern Pacific (now part of Union Pacific) run its freight trains over those tracks. If you want to take Amtrak, you take a bus to Bakersfield which is the southern terminus of the San Joaquin.

Now, I don’t know the exact value of all the freight that travels over the Tehachapi Loop each day, but given it’s the main trackage that connects Los Angeles and the Bay Area as well as the only trackage that connects Los Angeles with the Central Valley of California where almost all of our agriculture is located, my guess is that we’re talking about a shitload of money there.

Now what, exactly, is the case for prioritizing passengers who want to take a 4 hour 100 mile train ride over those freight trains?

On other tracks, the issue isn’t this stark. But the basic outline of the issue is that just like passengers have buses and autos and planes to choose from if they don’t have a train, freight that doesn’t ride the rails ends up on trucks. Polluting, greenhouse gas consuming trucks. Might this nonetheless be the right choice in particular circumstances? Sure, if enough passengers ride the train. Amtrak owns the Northeast Corridor tracks (no freight trains allowed) for exactly this reason. And there are places where Amtrak gets priority over freight trains even on private railroad-owned tracks for good reason—the BNSF tracks between Los Angeles and San Diego, over which Amtrak runs 16 or so trains a day, is a good example of this. The passenger trains run by day and the freight trains by night.

But as a general matter, if you don’t have enough passengers riding the train, you’re costing the economy a lot of money for the convenience of a small number of people if you prioritize the passenger trains.

One thing I have wondered is how pet owners deal with being car-free.  I used to live in the middle of a city and I would have loved to be completely car-free, but I needed to have one around to take my cat to the vet or to bring him along when I visited my family for more than a few days.  Surely people manage this, but I haven’t really figured out a good way other than maybe getting a taxi.  The worst part about having a car in the city was the parking, so I basically never moved my car except in an emergency or on a Sunday afternoon when I knew I could find parking when I got back.

#73

I should probably point out that there are millions of people like me who watch Top Gear, read Hot Rod magazine and spend hours tuning virtual cars in Forza Motorsport 4.

Can we gearheads please have a seat at the table here? We’re being ignored and treated like pests.

Okay, I’ll bite: you’re arguing that motorists and automotive interests are under-represented in transportation politics? Seriously? I’m going to go right ahead and say that ALL of the seats at the table are filled by gearheads, or at least by parties more sympathetic to their interests than of those who would like to see better public transportation or transportation infrastructure designed to accommodate users other than motorists, such as cyclists and pedestrians. Okay, 99 percent of the seats at the table.

As for Top Gear, don’t make the mistake of confusing people who watch Top Gear with people who think that the car should be given preference in transportation planning, or who are enthusiastic about driving everywhere. I watch it, because it’s fantastic, entertaining television. But the three man-children who present it have no political credibility whatsoever. That’s the direction they’ve taken their work. That’s WHY it’s so popular - a liberal, automotive society skeptic like me (though, being a gear freak, I admit I do like cars, as objects of engineering and design in particular) can watch it regularly and be fabulously entertained, in spite of Clarkson and co. being infuriatingly wrong so regularly. But that formula, as they present it, precludes them from having a serious, credible position on these issues. If that hurts your feelings, too bad. I don’t have any sympathy.

In Canada we have ViaRail, which is somewhat skeletal outside of the Windsor-Toronto-Montreal-Ottawa corridor, but is efficient, clean, and heavenly compared to Amtrak. Seriously, I once took the train from Toronto to NYC because.short-haul flights are the worst in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. The Amtrak staff were miserable and didn’t even tell us that the train was over 2 hours delayed. On Via, a delay of more than an hour = 50% off your next fare. On Amtrak it didn’t even warrant a mention.

Of course it won’t help you if you’re going from, say, Kapuskasing to Sudbury, but it’s great if you’re going from Toronto to Kingston or something. And if you spring for a 1st class ticket you get free drinks!

Bananacat, I can actually answer that. I’m car-free an have two dogs. Animals are allowed on public transit except Syria g rush hour, so mostly if I have to take the dogs somewhere they go on the subway. Our vet is very local - literally just up the street - so that’s not an issue. For trips outside the city we rent cars, because unfortunately for me (but fortunately for everyone else) pets aren’t allowed on Via or Greyhound. It’s not a problem at all.

I don’t like to drive.

I don’t like the fact that I’m in control of a machine that, if I’m off my game at precisely the wrong second, I could very easily take someone’s life. And there are times, when I’m on a road I know, on a route I’ve traveled a hundred times or more, and I’ve got some music I like on when it becomes pleasurable. But the fact remains, if I’m paying attention to the dog on one side of the road, for example, and I don’t see the kid about to dart out from behind a hedgerow. Or someone driving a grey sedan decides to hang out in my blindspot or gets impatient and passes me on the right (or, what nearly killed us in December, we were passing on the left on a three-lane freeway and some maniac decided to pass on the right and we nearly merged into the same lane—it didn’t help he was probably going close to 100MPH). That shadow is always there. I don’t like that as careful as I am, how I actually follow all of the safety stuff from my driver’s ed courses—shit like “when you’re pulling out in the left hand turn lane in an intersection, don’t turn your wheel because if you’re rear-ended it’s going to push you into oncoming traffic” and “keep 2 seconds’ distance between you and the car in front of you, and more if the weather is bad” and of course, “don’t pass on the right” are just fucking ignored by too many drivers today. So even if I’m careful, and even if I’m driving defensively, it isn’t going to stop some idiot in an SUV who’s checking their email in between bites of their breakfast from blowing a stop sign and either killing me outright or causing me to live the rest of my life needing a nurse to feed me.

It is way too easy in this country to get a driver’s license, and it’s far too hard to lose it.

Um, “Syria g” should be “during”. F you autocorrect!

grolby—particularly when Top Gear actually answered this question.

3 hours of internal combustion driving generates the same pollutants regardless of what is controlling the car.

Well, no, that’s not right. You don’t have to be a “hypermiler” to know that a substantial portion of your vehicle’s fuel efficiency comes from your own driving style - whether you jackrabbit start, whether you’re controlling the shifting or letting the transmission do it, whether you use cruise control, that sort of thing. It’s reasonable to assume that computer control of a car is not only going to save a lot of lives (since the vast majority of car-related deaths are caused in accidents that are the result of human error) but be more efficient, as well.

It helps if you’ve driven one of those hybrids that shows you when your driving is efficient vs. when it is wasteful. Even over the exact same journey in the exact same car, there can be a substantial difference in fuel consumed simply as a result of better driving habits. Combine that with the end of traffic jams, and autonomous cars stand to reap enormous fuel savings.

If parking spaces are limited, then looking for a place to leave your car while you do your business can take a lot of time and frustration.

Right, but an autonomous car would drop you off and then drive directly to a vacant parking space.

Look, as Amanda accurately points out, American cities are overwhelmingly car-centric. That’s not something you can address without tearing the cities down and building new ones centered around public transit. So roads and cars are going to have to be a part of our transportation solution, and autonomous cars are a better way to exploit the infrastructure that we already have. The only reason we’re not out in the streets demanding them is that, as a society, we’ve all decided that the deaths of about a hundred American men, women, and children every day isn’t something we’re going to talk about.

But we can substantially reduce the number of cars on the road while catering to people’s desires to use their traveling time to read or play games and their desire to be safe. (Car accidents kill SO many Americans.) Putting our nation’s best technological minds on that instead of self-driving cars is what we should be doing.

Building trains isn’t a technological problem, though. Train technology is mature and robust. It’s a sunk cost problem - in order to make urban central Texas, for instance, a place where most people’s needs could be served by public transit we’d have to bulldoze four major cities and completely rebuild them around a public transit paradigm. Then we’d have to raise the capital for an incredibly expensive public transit network.

Self-driving cars is exactly how to meet the needs of Americans to safely move in car-centric cities. Serving car-centric cities with trains doesn’t make a whole lot of sense; if it did, they’d already have trains.

Gee, I wonder what it would look like to live in a country that had functional rail, say in a country which had long distance rail between major cities, and in a city which had suburban rail within a 70 mile catchment area funnelling to a major transport hub with bus services running thrughout the urban area? A city where many people walk to a station or park at a station, take the train into work, and then catch it back out each day for roughly the same cost of petrol?

Well, right. When you live in a city that grew up around functional rail, it looks a lot different and is structured differently than a city that grew up around interstate highways and widespread car ownership.

And you can’t just rewind that clock. There’s an enormous number of low-density American cities that didn’t grow up around functional rail and widespread mass transit, which means that they can’t now be served by rail mass transit. A city that grew up being served by cars and roads is one that has to continue being served by cars and roads, and the way we make that work better is with a widespread fleet of autonomous, networked cars.

I live outside of Boston.  I have researched, more than once, ways to use the transit system here to get to work. 
The possibility when I worked out of my company’s Woburn office was the best and was aweful.  It started with 6 miles to the train station which I could accomplish by: a 1 mile walk to the bus, a 5 mile bus ride, a half mile walk followed by 45 minutes to an hour wait on an open platform ( provided I went in during peak hours, otherwise, longer wait); direct drive and park, with parking fee of about $5; a cab drive of $25 (last check 3 years ago).  That would be followed by a 45 min to hour cummuter rail ride into Boston, a half hour wait during which I would transfer to the commuter line that goes to Lowell/Fitchburg, followed by another 30 minutes to an hour ride.  At the end I would then need to walk an additional mile or so. 
If I used the walk-public transit entirely model, my commute was 3 hours and 15 minutes, each way, if nothing went wrong with my connections.  That’s a minumum of 6.5 hours just in travel taken out of my day.  On a good commute, it’s less than 40 minutes by car.  The worst one from that location was about 2 hours.  The total direct travel about 30 miles.
The big problems hindering use of public transport are first mile-last mile (usually more than literally a mile); internodal connections; unreliability in older, neglected systems (like Boston’s commuter rail); shifts in major work destinations (no longer just city center, where the trains hub from).  To solve them requires coordinated planning and funding, both things that seems to be in short supply.

That said, the commuter rail is packed, nearly every weekday train.  The parking lots at the stations are full, every day.  I like trains and often wish I worked closer to the city center where I could use the rail and subway system rather than driving, as for that it would be both time and cost effective.  I like to drive, provided traffic is moving at all, but still wish it were reasonable to use the train.

@doubtthat #86

Around and around we go.  Those systems “bleed” money because the subsidies aren’t hidden.  Look up any study that estimates the true price of gasoline.  When subsidies from all industries are considered (oil extraction, refining, steel, roads, auto manufacturers…), gas usually ends up costing around $20 a gallon.  That cost is hidden from consumers; it is not for train travelers.

Umm, the cost is hidden from train travelers.  If it weren’t, the systems wouldn’t operate in the red.  The point is that BOTH HSR and car travel are subsidized.  In the former the subsidy is aggregated in the budget of the operating authority (assuming we don’t factor in subsidies to construction, steel/cement producers, etc.) and in the latter the subsidy is scattered across the global budget.  If car travel is unduly subsidized (it is), then get rid of those undue subsidies, don’t insist on undue subsidies for HSR, too.

Subsidizing the rail industry would generate cheaper, better trains, which would be a good idea because it is cleaner, infinitely safer, and a more comfortable way to travel.

We should be careful, is the relevant comparison to planes or to cars?  If the former, it’s possible that flying will be miserable forever.  If so, I would support HSR in some cases.  (There are lots of flights to lots of places though.  Which flight-redundant HSR connections would you build and which would you leave off the list?)  If the comparison is to cars, trains would only be safer and more comfortable than human-driven cars, not computer-driven cars.  Cleaner would depend on ridership.

Have you flown lately?  Cramped spaces, security lines, endless waiting…it’s horrific.

I asked why plane travel is so miserable.  You’ve just restated what you said before.  Moreover, the mere fact that plane travel is bad doesn’t make HSR good. 

And if you can figure out a way to make a plane that doesn’t run on fossil fuels, I’m all ears.  Within a certain radius, plane travel is incredibly inefficient.  As the distance increases, it becomes a better option.

What is that radius?  A number in miles or kilometers will suffice.  Obviously you don’t want to fly to for a 50-mile trip, but how many population centers are close enough together so that HSR between them is cleaner, faster, and cheaper than flying but far enough away with enough commuter volume between them to justify HSR over cars?

Perhaps in some science fiction universe.  At best, that claim has yet to be proven.

Do you really think you can drive better than a network of computers + Google/IBM?

The first part is just sort of pointless theorizing.  People use the infrastructure that exists.  Because there is no train infrastructure, people have built their lives around automobiles.  Investment in the system has to precede usage.  Read some of the debates about how useless and wasteful the interstate highway system would be.  Recall that it passed for national security reasons (ease of moving soldiers and equipment across the country).  Once that infrastructure was in place, society built around it.

No, people do not use infrastructure just because it exists.  No one uses San Jose’s light rail system.  Total public transportation use in Portland has declined even with increased light rail use (from a starting point of 0) because the light rail can’t cover its costs and the money is deducted from bus services (resulting in less bus service and higher bus fares).  You really do need to be judicious about what you build.  So I’ll ask again: which HSR connections would you build?

[continued next comment]

What happens when Jackass Driver makes an unexpected lane change, right into you? Does the car have the sensors and reaction time to take evasive?

The claim in the Wired article is that Google’s car actually beats human drivers right now in reaction time. Whether it’s true or not is up in the air (I mean, let’s just admit that Google’s guy is the least trustworthy when it comes to evaluating how good their auto-driving car is) but it’s really not that far fetched. If it’s not true now it certainly will be within 10 to 20 years, which is when I expect this technology will actually become mass market.

As far as Google focusing on self-driving cars instead of public transit, may I remind everyone of the fact that one of Google’s big applications is Google Streets, which means right now they’re already paying a bunch of people to drive around their camera cars in large cities to take pictures. I expect their research in that area were motivated by something more than just ‘gee whiz, self-driving cars would be awesome technology’ altruism.

[continued]

The second half of the statement is a totally unsubstantiated claim.  3 hours of internal combustion driving generates the same pollutants regardless of what is controlling the car.  Perhaps if every car on the road was run by a computer, you’d somehow eliminate a certain amount of driving time, but as long as roads are crammed with cars, light rail will always be more efficient.

The point, as you’ve reluctantly conceded, is that the trip wouldn’t take 3 hours.  The average speed and efficiency for a given distance would be much higher because there wouldn’t be traffic jams, stop-and-go driving, idling at red lights and then accelerating out of them over and over again, etc.  Cars would move in formation to reduce aerodynamic drag.  Traffic jams are complex phenomena but they can be mathematically modeled and prevented, so the roads would not be crammed with cars.  If you’re talking [people moved x distance]/unit energy, then light rail will be more efficient sometimes but not always.  Build-out precedes usage, as you said, but physical environment precedes built-out.  Light rail may work in some cities, it absolutely does not work in San Jose and is not “more efficient” by any metric than cars in that city.

I’ll repeat what I said before: if you value transportation dollars (and if you recognize that there is such a thing as a budget constraint), then you will spend those dollars on intracity bus, not HSR or light rail (generally).  The liberal (NB again: I am a liberal) obsession with HSR and light rail amounts to an aesthetic preference, not one that can be justified in terms of human welfare enhancement.

LMM -  sarijoul’s list is good, but by no means exhaustive.  Add tidal, reclaimed methane and other compressed gasses.  Don’t be so limited in your idea for sources.  Part of the beauty of fuel cells and batteries is that nearly any energy source can be used to create electricity and they make electricity portable.  Energy isn’t a huge issue; portable energy is. 
I’m sure it would be news to everyone who works the petroleum industry to know

Burning gasoline consumes oil—energy that doesn’t need to be produced through some other method, because it’s already available.

Do you know anything about the losses in retrieval, transport and refining?  I hope not, because you are sounding like an ignorant ass, and I’d hate to add lying to the adjectives.

I see the self-driving car as a bridge between public and private transportation. How it would work would be me driving out of my driveway to get somewhere, say to work 15 miles away. Before I leave the driveway, I’d put in my destination and the preferred route, and then have the car calculate the best way to get there using that information, the traffic flow, and so forth. Then I could choose to control it myself or let the car do the driving. What I’d find is that the traffic would bundle up by destinations. Cars turning left at, for instance Broadway, would be in a train. I’d be in the larger group heading South. Another group would break off for a West turn at Golf Links to go to the airport and other jobs to the West and South of town, while I’d stay on the road and head toward my work and the other large group going to the tech park. The grid would allow for my group of cars to be as one large group (maybe split up into five or six car-length bundles) and the traffic lights would accommodate things for maximum efficiency. It sounds like a lot of calculations and a lot of things going on. It also sounds like a major clusterfuck if a light goes out, too. But I think it could work pretty well, provided most drivers be able to put down their book, ereader, phone, makeup kit, shaver, breakfast burrito, or whatever it is they were doing in the instance their driving skills are needed. A default “pull over to the side of the road” function wouldn’t be hard to put in for those who don’t take control.

And other cars going their own way or choosing not to join in wouldn’t have to. Motorcycles and older cars would be on their own, too. I’d love it on the freeway, since it’s so damn boring to drive so much of that. And it would be voluntary. It would eventually be stupid not to go along, as it would lead to greater efficiency, since so much fuel is wasted on idling, starting, and stopping cars (read about hypermilers for easy and crazy tips.)

There are still those who can get along without a car, and there are those who can’t. The advantages of self-driving cars outweigh the potential downsides, at least for me. I see them as a bridge to public transportation, as I’ve always hated the drive from Tucson to Phoenix and wondered how much it would cost to put my car on a train. For most of my visits, I’d need a car when I got there. In the future, my car would be part of that train. Doesn’t seem like a bad idea, actually.

I heard an “On Point” about fantasy autos two weeks ago.

If I ever wanted to know what the 1939 Futurama exhibit at the NY World’s Fair would sound like as an hour of radio, that show answered that question.

Train/transit folks (even transportation experts, non-judgmental term for people who don’t have an axe to grind) have to be the “adult in the room” who tell kids they can’t live on cotton candy forever, whereas car people get to sell them fantasies. It’s a stacked deck.

Oh, and Green Metropolis is recommended on the subject of “making driving ‘cheaper’ to the detriment of all”.

Energy isn’t a huge issue; portable energy is. I’m sure it would be news to everyone who works the petroleum industry to know

Yes, and also news to anyone who does research into energy production. Do you have any idea how long it would take to create all the power plants required to produce the energy that’s currently supplied by fossil fuels? Or the *basic* research going on into many renewable energy sources? Or the flaws involved current calculations of the available supply of most of the resources we depend upon? (There was an excellent editorial in Nature in late 2010 which pointed out that our coal supply, for example, has probably been massively overestimated.)

And that’s your accusation? That I work for the petroleum industry, and that’s why I’m attacking the assumption that we can all just switch to electric cars? (For the record, I’m a chemist in academia, and my research has nothing to do with the petroleum industry.)

Do you know anything about the losses in retrieval, transport and refining?

Yes, I do. But the energy return on investment for oil is way above one. Batteries require the energy to be generated somewhere else, which is why saying “we’ll switch to battery technology once gasoline becomes expensive” completely misses the point.

I hope not, because you are sounding like an ignorant ass, and I’d hate to add lying to the adjectives.

You know, I was going to create a list of problems associated with the laundry list of energy sources that people rattle off (I have seen far more academic presentations on *basic* research into solar power than virtually any layperson—if *widespread* reliance on solar power was anywhere near a solved problem, people in top-tier universities wouldn’t be getting funding for research into it), but, with that sort of response to me pointing out even the most basic problems with another person’s logic, I’m not even going to bother.

Simply put: developing renewable energy sources demands massive energy inputs, which our society isn’t willing to invest, and probably won’t be willing to invest until it’s far too late. There are also serious problems associated with many of them (due, for example, to the limited availability of some of the elements required using current methods (it’s not just *oil* we’re running out of), problems with the power grid, severe environmental damage, etc.).

But, given your response, I’m not even going to bother.

Comment #103: jiminythicket

Umm, the cost is hidden from train travelers.

No, it really isn’t.  The subsidization of all the industries involved our system of cars is many orders of magnitude greater than rail receives.  Even if you just calculate direct subsidies and leave out the cost of our various military ventures aimed at protecting our access to oil, we pay a fraction at the pump what it actually costs our nation to generate gasoline.  When you buy a train ticket, that cost reflects what a rail company requires to keep functioning.

This gives consumers the false impression that cars are an inexpensive form of travel.  There are two ways to approach this: eliminate the subsidies for the automotive industry (which includes the building and maintenance of roads) or subsidize rail travel.  Obviously the oil extraction and gasoline refining industries need to have their subsidies cut, but it’s a good idea for a society to provide its citizens with relatively cheap travel.  Tax dollars that build infrastructure and keep access cheap are necessary for a functioning economy.  I would advocate the elimination of a great deal of the automotive industry combined with an increase in subsidies for light rail, high speed rail, and other forms of public transit.

We should be careful, is the relevant comparison to planes or to cars?  If the former, it’s possible that flying will be miserable forever.  If so, I would support HSR in some cases.  (There are lots of flights to lots of places though.  Which flight-redundant HSR connections would you build and which would you leave off the list?)  If the comparison is to cars, trains would only be safer and more comfortable than human-driven cars, not computer-driven cars.  Cleaner would depend on ridership.

Rail replaces some amount of car travel and some amount of plane travel.  There isn’t a 1:1 relationship between the modes of transportation.

Cleaner depends on the source of energy fueling the trains.  We’re far closer to providing energy for rail that has non-fossil fuel sources than we are to building reliable batteries for cars beyond 100mi.

I asked why plane travel is so miserable.  You’ve just restated what you said before.  Moreover, the mere fact that plane travel is bad doesn’t make HSR good.

Plane travel became shitty when the industry was privatized.  It’s been a slow deterioration since then.  Add the security bullshit and it’s a nightmare.  Perhaps in some perfect world we could correct a lot of that, but if plane companies are going to be profitable, they need to cram tons of people into tight spaces and charge us for everything.

As for HSR, go to France or Japan, ride those trains, compare them to plane travel.  I have never met someone that preferred SW airlines over an HSR trip.

More later if I have time.

One thing I have wondered is how pet owners deal with being car-free.  I used to live in the middle of a city and I would have loved to be completely car-free, but I needed to have one around to take my cat to the vet

I think this thread is dying but just in case you’re checking in: I keep cats in the city with no car. Honestly, since I just know I’m going to always have cats, I work very hard to find apartments within walking distance of the vet. Kittehs get a sturdy carrier (wish I could get one of those wheely kinds you see in SkyMall, but they’re a bit pricey for me) and we hoof it.

That aside, though, since obviously it’s not always possible to live within 10 or so blocks of a vet you like, I’ve cabbed it too. And Peapod is essential for the 60lbs of cat litter + small person + 4 flights of stairs…

- For most intraurban transportation purposes, buses > subways or light rail.  Bus systems are cheaper, they’re easier to scale out, and routes can be recalculated/reset rapidly and as needed.
Comment #26: jiminythicket on 01/26 at 01:19 PM

Word.

It is surprising how many people talk about trains and totally ignore buses.  Buses are so much faster to deploy and change than trains and you already have roads to run them on.

I mean, sure, buses are more lumbering and have to deal with whatever road problems you already have while rail is, well, smooth as rail.  But the cost of putting down rails and then discovering there’s suddenly no there there at one end of the route can be ruinous.

pretty much all the European train systems bleed money.

Viewed in isolation, yes. But take them away and you bleed away the economic activity of the cities they connect.

Buses are so much faster to deploy and change than trains and you already have roads to run them on.

But buses are equally fast to undeploy. One of the big differences with rail is that when done right, you can build up development around it.

When I was back in Europe last year, I didn’t drive at all, partly because the weather was bad and it didn’t make sense to sort out insurance. Being able to do things on a three-hour train journey—or do nothing but relax—is a very nice feeling.

And you can’t just rewind that clock. There’s an enormous number of low-density American cities that didn’t grow up around functional rail and widespread mass transit, which means that they can’t now be served by rail mass transit.

I think this overstates things.

What IS true is that you can’t simply play off cars vs. trains as a zero sum game, as the OP did. As I noted above, if you take one look at a map of the Greater Los Angeles Metropolitan Area, it’s pretty apparent why we have to build safer, greener cars.

But on the other hand, that doesn’t mean that there are no places in America other than already train-centric cities (Chicago and in the Northeast) where investments in trains wouldn’t make sense. First of all, for instance, parts of Los Angeles are already so dense and feature so much inter-borough commutes and transit that there’s a sufficient market for new subway and rail lines, even though you’re never going to make Los Angeles completely livable without private cars. We’ve already built one subway (Downtown-Hollywood-Valley) plus a bunch of light rail lines and bus rapid transit, some of which are very successful (others of which are not—politics plays a role in route selection and that can really kill efforts at progress).

And second, a lot of cities are still expanding (or at least were until the housing bubble pierced and will again once housing gets going again), and there’s no reason why you can’t tie NEW development to transit.

And third, there are some natural places for high-speed intercity rail in this country. Airports and airplanes have capacity issues just like roads do (especially since our unregulated airlines aren’t going to deploy 747’s on short-haul routes the way they do in Japan, preferring instead to swallow up all the slots on the schedule with small planes to prevent competitors from coming in).

So there’s plenty of spots for more trains. The problem with the OP is the assumption that there is not also a need for better cars.

Busses don’t encourage development.  The sunk cost of rail and cheap to operate (per passenger mile) means that development can count on it being around for a long development cycle.

Busses don’t reduce congestion.  They still take up space on road, and if counted per time on the road and the speed they travel, they’re occupying alot of it.

Busses aren’t actually cheaper.  While saying ‘bus lane’ is true it’s cheaper to deploy, it’s not actually cheaper to operate and often not cheaper to build, if you have to actually build the roads they’re operating upon; rails are actually cheap to build per mile.  Busses also employ more drivers per passenger and no less maintenance per mile - unless it’s really severely low-density.

3 hours of internal combustion driving generates the same pollutants regardless of what is controlling the car.

Untrue.  A steadier speed, and therefore cooler driver, saves fuel.  A driver that can select gear and acceleration based on route prediction can save fuel.  A driver that is tuned to the power output of the engine will save fuel.  This is why manual cars usually outperform automatics on fuel efficiency, and why a frustrated or unfamiliar or inexperienced driver will consumer more fuel.  The driver does make a difference.

So when Amtrak took it over, they junked that train and let Southern Pacific (now part of Union Pacific) run its freight trains over those tracks. If you want to take Amtrak, you take a bus to Bakersfield which is the southern terminus of the San Joaquin.

Also not really true.

Amtrak doesn’t own the lines.  They don’t ‘give’ anything.  They don’t have right of way anywhere west of New Jersey.

Passenger lines are scheduled.  They take a certain amount of time to go from A to B, and they do it on a certain schedule.  They don’t vary in weight.

Freight trains are not scheduled.  They leave the station when ‘full’ and then proceed to the next point.  They vary widely in weight and motive power, hence taking different amounts of time to proceed over passes.

The freight line that uses that pass has no reason to lower their profit just so some passengers make it through.  And why should they, when the cost for a new pass is estimated to be at minimum twice their total annual gross for 2011 - their most profitable year in 150, apparently.

Amtrak doesn’t ‘let’ them - Amtrak can’t afford it.  At the same time we’ve spend hundreds of millions - probably billions - on the freeway over the same mountains.  $350 million in 1994, $130 million in 1970, plus whatever operating cost and the cost for all the interchanges and upgrades in the meanwhile.  It would cost tens of billions to build it today.

Re:  Comment #92: grolby on 01/26 at 11:06 PM

I like when Top Gear proved driving to London Heathrow was the worst possible solution vs bicycle, boat, tube, etc.  Hehe.

Re: Comment #103: jiminythicket on 01/27 at 11:51 AM

Notice jimminy blames MAX for less busses in Portland.  Guess what?  He didn’t bother to notice the increase in development around the transportation hubs.  In fact, they have so many MAX runs that they need a new bridge or lane on a bridge for MAX to cross the river.
http://www.google.com/search?rls=en&q=MAX+ridership
http://trimet.org/pdfs/publications/trimetridership.pdf
At 99 million rides in 2011, are you saying that ridership for MAX is too low?  Or what?  Busses sure seemed as frequent as when I lived there twelve years ago - and MAX now runs what used to be two of the most congested bus runs.

San Jose’s light rail suffers from the fact that they never built it to the airport (they miss it by a mile, I don’t know entirely why, the airport is just built a dozen kinds of stupid) and that San Jose’s economy dips horrendously quickly from a recession.  We lost 10% of our population in 2002, for instance.  A very mobile population and a very overbuilt urban sprawl; we have a huge proportion of empty office space.

Your argument seems to be that light rail destroys bus routes because there was a recession.  Which is sorta true:  Less people are going to use busses in a recession, and less busses are going to be fielded because local governments can’t run deficit spending - and rail maintains a high capacity while busses, well, don’t.  Seems like a benefit of rail over busses, if you ask me.

Amtrak doesn’t own the lines.  They don’t ‘give’ anything.  They don’t have right of way anywhere west of New Jersey.

You’re mostly right, but they do own the Chicago-Detroit Line.

Freight railroads are legally required to give Amtrak trains priority.  In practice, most don’t.  The few that do (BNSF is the only reliable one, AFAIK) get incentive payments from Amtrak—effectively, payments for not breaking the law.  (It’s unclear what priority means when the freight railroads have “rationalized” their track networks to the point where they have trouble dispatching their own trains properly, never mind an annoying interloper with strange demands about “schedules”.)

As for you, 3letterjohn, you’re ignoring the stunning inefficiency of moving giant metal boxes around, each with (usually) one passenger, instead of putting dozens (buses) or hundreds (rail) of people in each.  (As well as the huge wasted space of parking.)  “Bundling it up by destination” could reduce crashes, but energy efficiency would still be wedged as deep in the toilet as it is now.

Dana argues:

We have high-speed rail service in only a limited area of the country because it is practical in only a limited area of the country.  The public demand for the service you desire simply does not exist at levels which would justify the investment; if it did, the investment would already have been made.

This argument is nonsensical, because it assumes that the US government is more or less competent, more or less rational, and more or less reflects popular opinion.  Every one of those assumptions is false.  By Dana’s logic (I use that word loosely), no infrastructure investment should ever be made, because if it were justified, it would already have been made.

Any reasonable analysis shows that high-speed rail (at least medium-speed rail, along the lines of Acela Express) would be entirely justified in many corridors: Vancouver-Seattle-Portland, SF-LA-San Diego, Chicago-Milwaukee-Cleveland-Cincinnati-Pittsburgh, etc.  Would any of these “make a profit” (even considering only operating costs)?  Probably not.  So what?  No one demands that Interstate highways, state highways, rural roads, or streets turn a profit.  Instead, we build the infrastructure with no direct user fees (or, in the case of tolls, for a very poor direct return on investment: occasionally tolls pay for a bridge, but never for all the roads leading to the bridge)...and then allow private bus companies to make a profit from the infrastructure they don’t pay for.

Crissa: Portland’s MAX has serious problems, like being extremely slow; the Westside line (now the western half of the “Blue Line”) actually did lead to slower commutes for some people, because TriMet eliminated express routes and added feeder buses.

That said, people just like rail better, and it’s not irrational: it’s more comfortable (I can usually read on rail without getting nauseated; I can’t on buses), it tends to be faster (not necessarily because rail is intrinsically faster—rail is intrinsically more energy-efficient, but not magically faster—but because rail is taken more seriously and is more likely to get dedicated right-of-way, fast boarding, etc.), it’s more permanent (as pseudonymous in NYC already mentioned).

Chet wrote:

Look, as Amanda accurately points out, American cities are overwhelmingly car-centric. That’s not something you can address without tearing the cities down and building new ones centered around public transit. So roads and cars are going to have to be a part of our transportation solution, and autonomous cars are a better way to exploit the infrastructure that we already have. The only reason we’re not out in the streets demanding them is that, as a society, we’ve all decided that the deaths of about a hundred American men, women, and children every day isn’t something we’re going to talk about.

Actually, some of the bigger east coast cities really aren’t .  .  . and pubic transportation still suffers.  Philadelphia has broad enough thoroughfares, but many of the side streets are very narrow and automobile unfriendly; parking is a nightmare and there have literally been people killed due to fights over who “owns” an on-street parking spot.  The whole metropolitan area has a pretty good public transportation system, SEPTA, and fares are kept artificially low through heavy state subsidies.  But even with all of that, a whole lot more people don’t use SEPTA than do.

Trackless wrote:

Any reasonable analysis shows that high-speed rail (at least medium-speed rail, along the lines of Acela Express) would be entirely justified in many corridors: Vancouver-Seattle-Portland, SF-LA-San Diego, Chicago-Milwaukee-Cleveland-Cincinnati-Pittsburgh, etc.  Would any of these “make a profit” (even considering only operating costs)?  Probably not.

The federal budget is over a trillion dollars in deficit every year, and most states are struggling to make ends meet; Illinois just had a credit downgrade by Moody’s after a significant tax increase failed to close the budget deficit, and started driving some businesses out of the state.  Proposing a massive infrastructure project which will benefit a relatively small number of people, and still run at a loss, is not going to win much support from Congress or the state legislatures.

Further, how does “Any reasonable analysis shows that high-speed rail (at least medium-speed rail, along the lines of Acela Express) would be entirely justified in many corridors” reach such a conclusion when you concomitantly admit that such would probably operate at a loss, even if only operating expenses are considered?  A reasonable analysis would have to include sufficient anticipated passenger demand to enable such a system to at least break even.

One thing I have wondered is how pet owners deal with being car-free.  I used to live in the middle of a city and I would have loved to be completely car-free, but I needed to have one around to take my cat to the vet

What?

WHAT?!

Are you fucking kidding me?

The price of owning a car in the city: car payments, gas, insurance, parking, INSURANCE… is -less- of a monthly operating expense than calling the occasional cab?

How often do you have to take your fucking cat to the vet?

The federal budget is over a trillion dollars in deficit every year, and most states are struggling to make ends meet; Illinois just had a credit downgrade by Moody’s after a significant tax increase failed to close the budget deficit, and started driving some businesses out of the state.  Proposing a massive infrastructure project which will benefit a relatively small number of people, and still run at a loss, is not going to win much support from Congress or the state legislatures.

Gee, Dana, you fucking weasel, you seem to have missed Trackless’s main point.  If you’re really so worried about deficits, why not propose that the US government stop subsidising road transport, sell off all the streets, highways, and interstates, and let private operators maintain them and run them at a profit - extracted from direct user fees?

Possibly because it would be a nightmare to use roading WITHOUT the deep indirect subsidies from the government - the same subsidies you feel are illegitimate when applied to rail.

But you’re not really interested in the deficit, any more than you’re interested in democracy or free speech.  When push comes to shove, you’re nothing but a liar and a weasel.

Yeah, good point, MPG. Though it can be difficult to find a cabbie that’ll take pets, as a lot of them won’t for whatever reason. You usually have to call ahead and ask for a driver who accepts dogs. And some cities don’t allow any pets on public transit, so without a vehicle you’re looking at a lot more frequent cab rides or never taking your animals anywhere out of walking distance.

But fuck, owning a car is very expensive. I don’t know how people afford it at all, frankly. Either everyone else makes a lot more money than I do or they’re a lot better at managing it, because I sure as hell can’t come up with a monthly car payment, gas money, insurance, parking, let alone maintenance and repairs. I might as well say “I’ve had it with public transit and biking. I’m switching to a magic carpet!”

By that point, no one demands airports or air traffic control make a profit, either.  Airlines do, but they aren’t footing the price of the terminals and the attached transportation - huge bridges and overpasses and big streets and freeways.

By that point, no one demands airports or air traffic control make a profit, either.  Airlines do

And even then, there are just a couple of airlines that are consistently profitable, and the rest seem to go through a cycle of bankruptcies, bailouts, and consolidations.

Like many urban legends, the stories about aborted babies/feti dying in utility closets come from one source:

Christ Hospital controversy

Stanek gained initial prominence in 1999 when she testified that, while she worked as a nurse at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois, infants that survived induced labor abortions were abandoned to die in a utility room.[5] These allegations led to a formal investigation by the Illinois Department of Public Health, which stated that the hospital violated no state laws. Shortly thereafter, Advocate Health Care changed its policy on induced labor abortions, barring its use against fetuses with non-lethal developmental issues.[6]

A Christ Hospital spokesman admitted “that between 10 percent and 20 percent of fetuses with genetic defects that are aborted survive for short periods outside the womb.”[7]

At the signing ceremony for the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, President George W. Bush named Stanek in his speech, publicly thanking her for being in attendance.[8]

Oops, wrong thread.

Sorry about that, chief.

By that point, no one demands airports or air traffic control make a profit, either

ATC: N5336D, turn right to 130, cleared for the ILS 16R
N5336D: Turn right to 130, cleared for the ILS 16R
ATC: N5336D, contact tower on 120.5. In case of missed approach, come back to this frequency with your credit card number, maintain runway heading, climb and maintain 2000.
N5336D:  Ahh approach, do you accept Discover
ATC: Negative 36D, Radar services terminated, squak VFR, good day!
N5336D: WTF

Busses don’t reduce congestion.  They still take up space on road, and if counted per time on the road and the speed they travel, they’re occupying alot of it.

If buses are full, and the riders include a lot of people who would otherwise drive, they do reduce congestion, for rather obvious reasons. Further, there are bus rapid transit lines that are basically more like trains and can reduce it substantially.

Also not really true.

Amtrak doesn’t own the lines.  They don’t ‘give’ anything.  They don’t have right of way anywhere west of New Jersey.

Passenger lines are scheduled.  They take a certain amount of time to go from A to B, and they do it on a certain schedule.  They don’t vary in weight.

Freight trains are not scheduled.  They leave the station when ‘full’ and then proceed to the next point.  They vary widely in weight and motive power, hence taking different amounts of time to proceed over passes.

The freight line that uses that pass has no reason to lower their profit just so some passengers make it through.  And why should they, when the cost for a new pass is estimated to be at minimum twice their total annual gross for 2011 - their most profitable year in 150, apparently.

Amtrak doesn’t ‘let’ them - Amtrak can’t afford it.  At the same time we’ve spend hundreds of millions - probably billions - on the freeway over the same mountains.  $350 million in 1994, $130 million in 1970, plus whatever operating cost and the cost for all the interchanges and upgrades in the meanwhile.  It would cost tens of billions to build it today.

You really don’t know what you are talking about. You’ve managed to get everything except one minor point wrong.

Amtrak does not own most of the tracks, you are correct about that. But Amtrak has statutory priority on any freight line that it wants to run its trains over—that’s part of the deal the railroads agreed to in exchange for being able to drop their unprofitable passenger lines. The only time that Amtrak has to spend money on trackage is if a freight railroad DOES NOT want to continue running trains over the tracks. Then Amtrak has to take over maintenance costs. That has recently happened on its Southwest Chief line, where the host railroad wanted to abandon a stretch of track and Amtrak had to take it over.

So now we come to the Tehachapi Loop. First of all, it might help you to know what it is and why it is important. There is only ONE railroad track running continuously from the Central Valley in California, where almost all our agriculture is, to Los Angeles. It runs over a mountain pass that took some very difficult 19th Century engineering, including a tunnel where the train runs under itself, to cross. Further, while there is another way to get from Los Angeles to San Francisco, on the coast, that terrain is mountainous and winding and takes a lot longer to traverse than the flat Central Valley.

Freight trains run—and guess what, they run on a schedule, because there is a train on that pass at ALL TIMES—24/7 over the Tehachapi Loop. If Amtrak were to assert its priority and put a train on that pass, it would displace a freight train. Further, because of the geography of Tehachapi, it takes 4 hours to go what would be 100 miles on the Interstate. Finally, while if we spent a shitload of money, we could build more tracks over Tehachapi (or build some sort of bypass to it), we’re probably talking about A LOT more money than it cost to build I-5 over the Tejon Pass. (One advantage roads have over rails is that cars and trucks can go up much steeper grades than trains can. So I-5 takes a shorter route.)

Amtrak made the obvious decision given those facts. They didn’t displace important freight trains over Tehachapi Loop to put an empty passenger train running a 4 hour milk run. And that shows you that yes, freight trains can be more important than passenger trains.

Okay, you just want to be right, whatever asshole thing makes you happy. I get to know that in practice you’re wrong and that it’s not that impprtant to argue you down.

There are no passes that Amtrak gets priority on, in practice.  Busses don’t displace so many cars in practice, either.

There are no passes that Amtrak gets priority on, in practice.  Busses don’t displace so many cars in practice, either.

In practice, there are pieces of track where Amtrak has fought with the freight railroads to get their statutory priority. For instance, the Coast Starlight was for many years called the Coast Star-Late because it was always late because Union Pacific (and its predecessor, Southern Pacific) always illegally prioritized freight trains. (I once took an 18 hour trip from LA to Sacramento on the Starlight due to freight delays, which is ridiculous.) Eventually, and after a lot of negotiations and some questionable payments, UP gave the Starlight more priority, and it’s schedule has gotten somewhat more reliable.

Now, is that a tale of statutory priority working the way it should? Not really. But it shows you that if Amtrak really wants to assert its priority, there are mechanisms available for Amtrak to do so.

But Amtrak has NEVER fought to run trains over Tehachapi Loop. They didn’t want to, from the very beginning. They inherited a train, the San Joaquin Daylight, that ran over it, when Amtrak was formed, and AMTRAK decided to cancel it.

You seem to not care about facts and would rather call me names. That’s fine, but the fact remains, there’s really no case at all for the claim, which I was responding to, that passengers should always take precedence over freight. There’s no reason to run as much as one passenger car over the Tehachapi Loop. It accomplishes nothing. And there’s a number of similar places in our rail system where running freight is clearly a greater priority than running passenger trains.

As for buses, honestly, I don’t think most intracity rail projects displace THAT many cars. Only a few of them are hugely successful at getting cars off the road. But here in Los Angeles, we have had the El Monte Busway bus rapid transitway since 1974, and the studies that have been done do show that the frequent service buses have succeeded in getting some cars off the road. There’s good bus systems and bad bus systems, and there’s no reason to paint this as a black-and-white “buses bad, trains good” issue.

Busses don’t displace so many cars in practice, either.
Comment #133: Crissa on 01/28 at 11:05 PM

Really?  Because a bus full of passengers (24 or 30 or more) means that many fewer cars.  Each trip.  If the bus has three or more passengers it’s taking up no more space than those three cars would take up.

In terms of volume, the bus system in the metropolitan area I live in (of about 1.6 million) provides almost 70 million rides a year.

Intercity buses aren’t that bad, and they’re a great low cost transportation option for trips around 300 miles or less, but they suffer from the limiting factors of the speed limit and the fact that they can still get stuck in traffic on the highway. Until you give buses their own lanes and allow them to cruise at 90 mph, they’re just a large scale version of carpooling for intercity trips.

One thing I’ve noticed while traveling to different countries is that in general, the lower the overall quality of life and public infrastructure, the more likely it is that intercity transportation is more preferable by bus than by train. Thus, the greater region around France and Germany is this paradise of sleek trains that take you anyplace you want to go at high speeds. In England, the rail infrastructure is still good, but there might be a preference for buses for some destinations. In the Balkans, you’ll be adding hours to your trip by choosing their slow-moving trains over the buses. And in Turkey, there is at best one usable train line which is really really slow and only worth it for the unique experience of going all the way from Tehran to Istanbul. But turkey has a massive and impressive bus system.

What may be useful is for the US to have a high-speed, lower security process for boarding short-haul flights.

We have high-speed rail service in only a limited area of the country because it is practical in only a limited area of the country.  The public demand for the service you desire simply does not exist at levels which would justify the investment; if it did, the investment would already have been made.

Also, it’s impossible to find a dollar on the sidwalk, because if one were there, someone else would already have picked it up.

The kind of transit system being envisioned here is one which would come at a huge cost in government subsidies

As opposed to the automobile-based transit system, which also comes at a huge cost in government subsidies, while also requiring massive expenditures of individual money as well.

It always amazes me how determinedly conservatives fail to grasp the self-evident stupidty of the notion that a pair of steel rails is somehow vastly more expensive than five lanes of asphalt you have to replace every other year.

My favorite thing about the massive amounts of money we shit into our terrible waste of a car-based transit system is that we did all this without realizing that putting every working-age american in the position of being essentially an unskilled amateur operator of heavy-duty machinery was a great way to slaughter tens of thousands of people every year.

My favorite favorite thing is how we have to treat any instance of someone dying on a train system like a massive public outrage while systemically ignoring the vastly greater numbers of people who die in our shitty car transit system because if we treated the latter in any way remotely comparable to the former we’d have to admit that car-centric transit is one of the stupidest fucking ideas in the history of civilization.

Once you start factoring kids

Once you start factoring kids older than age six you realize that suburbs are the other stupidest fucking idea in the history of civilization and a skullfuckingly terrible way to raise anyone aside from sedentary sociopaths.

Of course nobody bothered to notice that either during the multiple decades we spent having pro-business conservatarians straightjacket society into suburban automobile hell via the subsidy of massively preferential legal treatment for the development of car-centric suburbia.

People don’t need self-driving cars! They need better trains and buses, and more accessible trains and buses.

That’s pretty much what I felt reading about the driverless cars, except I thought of the driverless car as less a thing no one needs as a thing that would be good, but more and better trains and buses would be so much better! And cheaper, besides.

I thought driverless cars would have some marginal utility over trains and buses in that they would enable people like me, who cannot drive, to use a car. But if we had a good enough public transit system, people like me (and just about everyone else) would never need to use a car in the first place.

So I’m with you; screw futuristic supercars, I want some freakin’ trains.

I’d love better public transportation systems, but self driving cars would be an improvement on what we’ve already got without all new infrastructure. Currently if I plot my commute to work on Google Maps, it’s 20 minutes by car, but if I switch to public transportation it’s 1 hour 36 minutes taking two buses at best. Adjust the time I leave a little bit and all of the sudden it’s well over 2 hours. If I want to stop off at the supermarket on my way, well then that schedule is all shot to hell, but still doable assuming that there is a good supermarket on the bus route and not one of those overpriced white people supermarkets.
  I’d rather be riding a bus and playing on my phone, but with everyone going different places in a low density area like Orange County, I don’t know if an efficient bus system is even feasible. You can make them as fast as you want, but the loading and unloading time is what slows them down. You’d need a lot of them on the road and a lot more routes in order to make them feasible. I don’t know if we have the density to make that pay for itself even if people were excited about using them.

LLM - I was suggesting the opposite - that you know litterally nothing about the actual petroleum industry.

Charging a battery removes energy from the power grid—i.e. the energy it consumes has to be produced through some other source. Burning gasoline consumes oil—energy that doesn’t need to be produced through some other method, because it’s already available. Battery technology doesn’t compensate for increasing petroleum prices, unless you compensate with increasing energy production through other methods.

Your quote suggests that you just burn the oil, completely ignoring any costs or losses associated with retrieval or production.  It also rediculously suggests that burning fossil fuels does not remove energy that could be used for power production for other purposes.  So, since you aren’t uninformed, you are minimizing, drastically to make your point.  Got it.  Arrogant ass rather than ignorant one.
This

Simply put: developing renewable energy sources demands massive energy inputs, which our society isn’t willing to invest, and probably won’t be willing to invest until it’s far too late. There are also serious problems associated with many of them (due, for example, to the limited availability of some of the elements required using current methods (it’s not just *oil* we’re running out of), problems with the power grid, severe environmental damage, etc.).

I absolutely agree with and doesn’t treat the rest of us like we are complete idiots with no idea what we are talking about nor completely erasing the idea of costs.

It always amazes me how determinedly conservatives fail to grasp the self-evident stupidty of the notion that a pair of steel rails is somehow vastly more expensive than five lanes of asphalt you have to replace every other year.
Comment #139: Dan on 01/29 at 07:47 PM

You don’t have to replace asphalt every other year.  Unless you lay it down only four inches thick so you as the contractor have a perpetual job.  It costs more to lay down a thicker asphalt pavement but then again it will not turn into a potholey shit trail in two years.

Actually, that depends very much on where you are.  In places with really bad ground underneath, it takes a great deal more subbase, base and asphalt. (Like almost all of coastal MA, RI and CT on down through NJ and on.)  Places like that that also go through hundreds of freeze thaw cycles in a year.  Now, CA and AZ and NV?  Damn right.