American public transports

[ray245]

Well...I am obivously not american...but I am rather concerned with america's need for fuel for their cars.

How hard is it for the US to developed a high speed train system? A nice bus transports system to reduce the needs for cars.

After all...trains, subways and etc are more cost efficient right?

[Alferd Packer]

It's not difficult in the Northeast, or any cities built before, say, 1870. Most of America's older cities have well-developed mass transit schemes, from bus to light rail to interurban commuter rail.

As a general rule, once you get west of the Mississippi River, the idea of mass transit gets more problematic. Most cities in the western half of the country are fairly young, and designed with automobile usage in mind. As such, they are extremely spread out, making mass transit a difficult prospect, at best.

As for a national rail system, it's a fucking gigantic undertaking. If you're not from or have never visited Russia, Canada, or the western United States, you simply have no idea how fucking huge this country is, and how daunting any nationwide infrastructure project is. It took the U.S. 35 years to "complete" the Interstate System (it's never really done, but they say 1956-1991 is the general timeframe for construction given). So, what to do for national, high-speed rail?

Well, for how underfunded and underequipped Amtrak is, it nonetheless provides a national rail service. High speed rail isn't generally possible, because a tiny fraction of Amtrak trackage is electrified, and further, that which is electrified isn't necessarily equipped to handle 150+ mph trains. National high speed rail would be at least as daunting an undertaking as the Interstate System, made even more difficult by NIMBYs and a general lack of public support.

[Coyote]

The problem with the American rail system runs deep.

Part of the problem comes from back in the mid-to-late-1800's, when robber baron types like Cornelius Vanderbilt and James Pierpoint Morgan owned & operated their railroad empires. They engaged in unfettered capitalism that a Libertarian could only dream of. Their price fixing & market gouging of people that depended utterly on their transport network was one of the reasons the Grange society formed, basically a union of agricultural workers into political organizations to challenge the railroads.

For a long time, many different railroads also insisted on using their own, different gauges of track. The width of space between rails was different for southern railroads (5 feet) most northern railroads (4 ft, 8.5 inches) and so on. This meant that in order to get good from New Orleans to Chicago, you had to stop and unload from one train onto another, local carrier train, and maybe again to reach your destination. Bear in mind the whole idea of trains was to have an efficient transport network.

The railroads were so badly run that when World War 1 came, and the US military depended on them to get supplies to port, the whole system pretty much broke down. Locomotives didn't get to loaded cars; timetables were mixed up, there was no coordination... even though most of the gauge problems were solved, the railroads were still competing with one another and work was done to manipulate stock prices more than get the goods to customers.

The US ended up nationalizing the Railroads to sort out the mess, and by the time they handed the railroads back to private companies they'd shackled the Railroads to the Interstate Commerce Commission so that decsions about the RR's had to go through government approval. This cut back on the capitalist abuse, but it also made the railroads slow to react to market fluctuations and, as far as passenger service was concerned, non-competitive.

By the time World War 2 came along, the trains were almost entirely concerbed with carrying freight: it made more profit than passengers and it didn't bitch and whine about the odd hours the trains needed to pull out of stations in order to make their destination. Cars were also becoming reliable and cheap, and once WQorld War 2 was over the last real demand for passenger service on trains was the return of soldiers.

By the 1950's you had cars for almost every family and cheap, dependable air travel as well. Passenger service was re-nationalised in the form of Amtrak, but many in the government feel that if "competition" had rendered passenger service obsolete, then the government should not subsidize what was clearly a "failing industry".

One of the reason national passenger service fails epically is because of the distances being dealt with in the western US. The east and far-west coast have high population density, like Europe and parts of Asia. That means for every hundred miles of track, there could be ten or more towns providing demand and tax money to support a passenger rail service.

In the western part of the United States, you might need two hundred miles of track or more just to connect two tiny villages, where the demand for passenger trains is minimal at best. But you do have hundreds of miles of farmland that needs to ship crops to market, so the trains do away with passenger services entirely and just run freight trains to meet the needs of agriculture & industry.

So the end result is a legacy of abuse that forced government regulation; this regulation didn't allow the trains to comete quickly to changing demands; new technology came along that further challenged trains in ways they couldn't meet (cars & planes); and a lack of tax base in the central regions of the country that make train service impractical. That, and a pro-business government attitude that feels that passenger rail service is "obsolete" and resents having to give up a single nickel for Amtrak, and you have a recipe for fail.

If oil keeps its high prices, and if the airline industry keeps up with its asinine customer-service practices, we'll see some return of trains in some areas.

[Uraniun235]

How hard is it for the US to developed a high speed train system? A nice bus transports system to reduce the needs for cars.

High speed rail transit between just the major cities would be a massive public works project, as it would entail massive replacement of or addition to the existing rails, and totally new electric infrastructure, for thousands of miles worth of track.


As for metropolitan mass transit, these systems have varying levels of success depending on certain factors. Where I live, light rail construction has been going on for over a decade, and has been facilitated in part by the ability to re-use some of the old right-of-ways from back when the Portland area had a hell of a lot of electric interurban trains. Other areas aren't so lucky and have to resort to much more expensive means to get the trains built.

[Redleader34]

One area that has some success, is theTri-State Area, but then again, the pouplation density is so absurd that subways, medium speed inter-suburban rail have been somewhat of a success. For busses, the common carriers are fairly good here, but they tend to be for regional transport. NY and NJ both offer adquite services for bus transport in the state.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

The problem with the American rail system runs deep.

Part of the problem comes from back in the mid-to-late-1800's, when robber baron types like Cornelius Vanderbilt and James Pierpoint Morgan owned & operated their railroad empires. They engaged in unfettered capitalism that a Libertarian could only dream of. Their price fixing & market gouging of people that depended utterly on their transport network was one of the reasons the Grange society formed, basically a union of agricultural workers into political organizations to challenge the railroads.

For a long time, many different railroads also insisted on using their own, different gauges of track. The width of space between rails was different for southern railroads (5 feet) most northern railroads (4 ft, 8.5 inches) and so on. This meant that in order to get good from New Orleans to Chicago, you had to stop and unload from one train onto another, local carrier train, and maybe again to reach your destination. Bear in mind the whole idea of trains was to have an efficient transport network.

The railroads were so badly run that when World War 1 came, and the US military depended on them to get supplies to port, the whole system pretty much broke down. Locomotives didn't get to loaded cars; timetables were mixed up, there was no coordination... even though most of the gauge problems were solved, the railroads were still competing with one another and work was done to manipulate stock prices more than get the goods to customers.

The US ended up nationalizing the Railroads to sort out the mess, and by the time they handed the railroads back to private companies they'd shackled the Railroads to the Interstate Commerce Commission so that decsions about the RR's had to go through government approval. This cut back on the capitalist abuse, but it also made the railroads slow to react to market fluctuations and, as far as passenger service was concerned, non-competitive.

By the time World War 2 came along, the trains were almost entirely concerbed with carrying freight: it made more profit than passengers and it didn't bitch and whine about the odd hours the trains needed to pull out of stations in order to make their destination. Cars were also becoming reliable and cheap, and once WQorld War 2 was over the last real demand for passenger service on trains was the return of soldiers.

By the 1950's you had cars for almost every family and cheap, dependable air travel as well. Passenger service was re-nationalised in the form of Amtrak, but many in the government feel that if "competition" had rendered passenger service obsolete, then the government should not subsidize what was clearly a "failing industry".

One of the reason national passenger service fails epically is because of the distances being dealt with in the western US. The east and far-west coast have high population density, like Europe and parts of Asia. That means for every hundred miles of track, there could be ten or more towns providing demand and tax money to support a passenger rail service.

In the western part of the United States, you might need two hundred miles of track or more just to connect two tiny villages, where the demand for passenger trains is minimal at best. But you do have hundreds of miles of farmland that needs to ship crops to market, so the trains do away with passenger services entirely and just run freight trains to meet the needs of agriculture & industry.

So the end result is a legacy of abuse that forced government regulation; this regulation didn't allow the trains to comete quickly to changing demands; new technology came along that further challenged trains in ways they couldn't meet (cars & planes); and a lack of tax base in the central regions of the country that make train service impractical. That, and a pro-business government attitude that feels that passenger rail service is "obsolete" and resents having to give up a single nickel for Amtrak, and you have a recipe for fail.

If oil keeps its high prices, and if the airline industry keeps up with its asinine customer-service practices, we'll see some return of trains in some areas.

That's the stereotypical line about Amtrak, but it isn't true. Systematic economic analysis actually shows that the long distance trains have the highest profitability margins, not the lowest. I've discussed this before in SLAM exhaustively and even provided initial stage plans (I really need to provide second-stage, too) for improving the passenger rail network, so this thread really duplicates discussions from last May and June.

At any rate, in absolute terms the USA still has the largest railroad network in the world, and plenty of torn-up areas of roadbed that are still intact and could be used again. It's not a really bad situation.

[K. A. Pital]

Well, come on. Russia, a far poorer country, managed to build a transnational railway system in the Tsarist times, and massively expand it into a pan-regional one in the XX century!

I find it hard to believe the US could lack funds for such a project when it easily wastes billions on military adventurism. More like a lack of political will.

Which can't be compensated by all the money in the world, really.

[Havok]

Well...I am obivously not american...but I am rather concerned with america's need for fuel for their cars.

How hard is it for the US to developed a high speed train system? A nice bus transports system to reduce the needs for cars.

After all...trains, subways and etc are more cost efficient right?

I think it is a far simpler answer than everyone has given. Americans love their cars. To us, there is something, almost like a calling, to get a car (motorcycle) and drive it. Cars are more a part of our "culture" than just a means to get around. It is absolutely silly and we need to knock it off, but that, I think is the reason and the answer you are looking for.
If we REALLY wanted to, building mass transit railroads wouldn't be hard or really even an issue as The Duchess has touched on.

[Coyote]

Well, come on. Russia, a far poorer country, managed to build a transnational railway system in the Tsarist times, and massively expand it into a pan-regional one in the XX century!

I find it hard to believe the US could lack funds for such a project when it easily wastes billions on military adventurism. More like a lack of political will.

Russia and Canada both had low population bases in their hinterlands-- there was no profit motive for companies to expand; so if rails were going to be built, they were going to be government projects from the start. There are advantages to government control of the rail network, and the ability to say "build it, don't worry about the cost" is one of them.

The only thing really comperable was the 1st US transcontinenetal railroad link, which was still carried out by companies seeking profit as much as it was egged on by government.

But early US rail history was one where the government kepts its hands largely off the construction and management of the system, leaving entirely up to companies to follow money instead of general practicality. It is partially a lack of politcial will, but also a completely different philosophy of what government is for-- and the rights of states or companies to refuse to cooperate in what they might think is a "wasteful" project that will only "increase big government control" over their lives. They would rather suffer with a half-ass transporation system than let "big government" tell them what to do.

Oddly enough, the same instincts did not kick in when the Federal government did the same thing with the interstate highway system. But individual people drove cars themselves, and complained about the crappy state highways-- it was no long sitting passively in a railcar while an engineer had to worry about the transportation network, now that everyone had to be the "engineer" themselves in their cars, they started to realize what a mess it was and welcomed Federal "intrustion" to build nice, smooth massive highways-- leaving the railroads to fester.

[Lonestar]

Well...I am obivously not american...but I am rather concerned with america's need for fuel for their cars.

How hard is it for the US to developed a high speed train system? A nice bus transports system to reduce the needs for cars.

After all...trains, subways and etc are more cost efficient right?

I take the DC Metro everyday to work, and I know folks who ride the Amtrak in from Philly to New Carrolton and/or Union Station.

Lots of folks use it, alas, rail hasn't been devolved that well outside of the Mid-Atlantic/Northeast.

[Commander 598]

I think one of the problems may be where the lines run. I think to travel any significant distance across the country over rail REQUIRES that you go all the way down to New Orleans and/or Chicago, while also bypassing half the major cities on that route, which I think is kind of absurd. There's a shitload of rail lines through here in North Louisiana but NOTHING travels over them but freight. I'd basically have to travel a couple hundred miles south to use this mythical form of transportation despite having several major cities within a MUCH shorter reach.

[Vain]

I take the Metro when I go into DC. It's really amazingly convenient.

However, I drive in Baltimore city, because the public transit isn't nearly as well developed here.

[Dark Hellion]

Just to reinforce what Alfred Packer said, remember that many U.S. states are literally larger than many European countries. To get a perspective on this, I consider the trip to Chicago, which is 175 miles, to be a short undertaking. If I were driving across say Belgium, I could have gone a good distance across the whole country, but I covered around 1/3 of my state.

The U.S. if really fucking big, I mean we are fucking huge man!

[Knife]

Take it for what it's worth, but wiki has 80% of the three hundred million population living in the big cities. Granted, a lot of those cities are rather new so transport is a bit tricky with them being all spread out. However, a lot of the older cities are there too, with good public or decent public transport.

[Alferd Packer]

Well, come on. Russia, a far poorer country, managed to build a transnational railway system in the Tsarist times, and massively expand it into a pan-regional one in the XX century!

I find it hard to believe the US could lack funds for such a project when it easily wastes billions on military adventurism. More like a lack of political will.

Which can't be compensated by all the money in the world, really.

Certainly. But what we had funds and will for was a national limited-access road network that is, all things considered, the best in the world. Perhaps if the political will had been different, our national passenger rail network would be the best in the world, instead.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no nation-spanning road network in Russia, yes?

[K. A. Pital]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no nation-spanning road network in Russia, yes?

How so, of course there is, it just got properly built far later than the Trans-Siberian railway magistral and it's offshoots. However, highway roads aren't that wide and don't have a large capacity. Besides, they face tremendous competition for cargo traffic from the railways, which are cheaper and carry more bulk for the buck.

The primacy of railways in inter-city traffic has been a longstanding feature of Russia - you could get (or get your cargo) almost to any city by train, and it would be cheaper than doing the same by car.

That doesn't mean we don't have roads. They're just not the massive highways people usually imagine, not some kind of six-track autobahns, but generally 2- or 4-line highway roads.

[CmdrWilkens]

Could it be done? Sure. I can point you to at least three major plans/studies which are moving forward in the Balt/Wash region alone which would massively increase the amount of Commuter Rail, Heavy Rail, Light Rail and BRT mass transit options:

Commuter Rail Plan (in pdf)

As an aside while that plan stretches out to 2035 it would do more than add commuter rail capacity. The move to quad tracks from Newark to DC and additional triple tracking from Baltimore to DC would also greatly increase Amtrak, NS, and CSX carrying capacity into Virginia.

Baltimroe Regional Rail plan (also in pdf)

While I seriously doubt this will actually make it through in totality (or at least the purple and orange line bits) I have some faith that Maryland can ram through the Red & Green lines. As to the extension to Columbia I'm less certain but as central Maryland continues to grow with plans to run DC Metro as far north as Laurel its hard not to imagine sometime before 2030 seeing Baltimore and Washington completely connected by non-commuter rail.

The Purple Line

Despite some folks I know having no faith in this ever being built MD is putting another 100mil or so into all the neccessarry preliminary work over the next 6 years. Not sure if it will end up Light Rail (which I favor) but I would expect by 2020 or so ground will at least be broken.


So anyway that's the perfect world scenario for just Baltimore Washington region which already hosts the second busiest rail transit system in the US (DC Metro) and you can just look at some of the "bllions" which get appended throughout the various reports to get an idea of the cost involved in trying to actually tie together a truly metropolitan transit network even in a region with tons of old railroad right of ways still lying around (the Purple Line plans to use a good chunk of one if it does use Light Rail).

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

I guess the problem is population density. For places like Michigan and some of the other midwestern states, and possibly others, the relatively sparse population density gave little, if any, incentive for a intra-state rail network connecting cities, beyond Amtrak. The idea for a rail for Michigan has been floated around, but no momentum because of the fears of lack of usage.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

No, population density is not a problem at all. Economically, the huge number of large destinations actually makes long-distance trains through lightly populated areas more efficient, because ridership is not linear to population size, but rather larger cities contribute fewer riders proportionately. It's simple mismanagement and an obsession with speed and "independence" which have crippled long-distance trains.

[K. A. Pital]

It's clear that a long-range train going through a lightly populated area from megapolis 1 to megapolis 2 could also pass through small commuter stations - which, when built, could support a number of short-range comm trains virtually in any direction depending on the needs for traffic. It's pretty simple really how passenger railways evolve, and population density isn't much of a barrier here.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

No, population density is not a problem at all. Economically, the huge number of large destinations actually makes long-distance trains through lightly populated areas more efficient, because ridership is not linear to population size, but rather larger cities contribute fewer riders proportionately. It's simple mismanagement and an obsession with speed and "independence" which have crippled long-distance trains.

That is true. Among the main reasons for not having a rail in Michigan was because of the deeply entrenched car usage which led to fears of lack of usage of rail.

That said, so long as there is little incentive to switch, there won't be long distance trains. It doesn't quite help that Michigan as a state doesn't quite a lot of funds given how closely tied it is to the car manufacturers.

[K. A. Pital]

Of course the car lobby would throw anything to stop any progress in railway construction - railways are their main competitors. They could ruin their business, make highways deserted with cheaper cargo and passenger traffic. No shit they'd fight against that until they dropped dead.

I heard in Brazil the car trading lobby was so powerful that it virtually stopped all progress in railway construction and had the existing railway network become deserted in favour of mystic superhighways which never got built - but of course, the downfall of rail contributed to a massive rise for automobile demand.

Quo prodest I guess.

[Erik von Nein]

Seeing as how the auto industry did as much as it could to lobby for cheap roads and highways to virtually everywhere to kill off rail in the first place they'll fight tooth and nail if there's any push to restart the rail system en masse. Replacing roads and cars will see the (even greater) death of the auto industry. It's going to happen, at least with ICE engine cars one way or the other, and the more desperate they get the harder they'll probably fight. Provided they don't switch over to electric vehicles.

[Molyneux]

Well...I am obivously not american...but I am rather concerned with america's need for fuel for their cars.

How hard is it for the US to developed a high speed train system? A nice bus transports system to reduce the needs for cars.

After all...trains, subways and etc are more cost efficient right?

I think it is a far simpler answer than everyone has given. Americans love their cars. To us, there is something, almost like a calling, to get a car (motorcycle) and drive it. Cars are more a part of our "culture" than just a means to get around. It is absolutely silly and we need to knock it off, but that, I think is the reason and the answer you are looking for.
If we REALLY wanted to, building mass transit railroads wouldn't be hard or really even an issue as The Duchess has touched on.

Speaking for myself: fuck that.
I'm getting a driver's license solely because it is the only option for getting around in any kind of reasonable time-frame in the suburbs.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Speaking for myself: fuck that.
I'm getting a driver's license solely because it is the only option for getting around in any kind of reasonable time-frame in the suburbs.

We will build more mass transit, interlocking the suburbs which can be saved because of the cheapness of such systems and because they're fairly compact; the rest will, of course, die. As for your hilarious car ownership goals, in ten years you'll be paying $10 a gallon for gas.