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[3]Since we're not making more surface area, yet population is still growing, the obvious conclusion is that we better be using our finite resources to the best advantage.
To move the most cargo / passengers for the least amount of fuel, surface area, and resources, the solution is electric traction steel wheel on steel rail (rail way).
BUT - it also requires a parallel initiative in building cities and towns to best utilize rail. See pre-1910 cities for reference.
The unwise development of automobile centric designs has not ceased.
gument, imagine what would happen if a transition to 90% rail based transportation cut travel budgets by 90% or more. Would people give up spending 1/4 to 1/2 of their working life to 'support' their automobiles, for more freedom?)
Leave it to government to foul up the most efficient form of land transportation!
But a big part of the problem is that our rail network, now geared primarily to freight, bears very little resemblance to what was there before the ascendency of the auto-centric society,
Find a picture of New York harbor before 1965, and you'll see large numbers of freight cars on "car floats" maneuvered by tugboats. Every major railroad that served New York had piers and small yards on Manhattan, and usually, Brooklyn, sometimes even the Bronx as well.
In smaller communities, the local feed and grain mill, the lumber dealer, and the fuel dealer also had rail spurs. And every community had a "team track' -- the term evolved from "team of horses", as did "teamster".
And in the days before truck competiton developed, freight rates were overseen by the ICC; these depended upon a fair valuation of the huge investment in property involved, so in the early Tenties the ICC emarked on a huge program to catalog and value that property -- leaving railroad buffs and modelers with a delightful inventory of photographs.
All this expensive overhead disappeared with the dominance of trucking; railroads began to heavily "unsell" infrequent, single-car shipments after 1960, They now mostly haul bulk commodities in larger volumes, or high value freight in containers, with trucks making local deliveries -- a technology sometimes referred to as "boxes and rocks". Livestock hasn't moved by rail since the early 1980's, and most perishable traffic is in highway trailers on flatcars, if it goes by rail at all.
So it would require almost as much time and effort to redirect much of our freight traffic back onto the rails as it did for supply and demand to reorient it aroud a highway-centric system.
Maybe the notion of HSR isn't the problem here, I see a terrible kind of love affair we all have with our cars. This coupled with the fact of a fear of sharing our space with strangers makes any talk of having an improved method of transportation something undesirable. One thing is certain, when driving in America today we see the failure in utilizing a car- centric model of transportation, the humongous cost of building and maintaining roads is becoming a nightmare, especially in a society that has consistently failed to understand the tax construct as the purveyor of all infrastructure.
Just the mention of rising taxes in my area causes a near epidemic of fear and loathing of the elected officials who are charged with the responsibility to keep up with maintaining this failing infrastructure. Many American's came of age driving on roads payed for by their grandparents, and maintained by the taxes paid by their parents. But today the newly arrived adults seldom if ever see the need to be taxed for the plethora of public infrastructure they assume just happened to be there, and their grandparents no longer have the rising income that allowed them to participate in the initial construction of an expanding public system. High volume traffic coupled with high speed is a serious problem in the US.
I'm like most who believe we have come to a crossroads point in our ability to get around. I'd love to ditch my car and travel without the hassle of flying to Minneapolis to see grandchildren, or a trip to San Diego for some winter sun. Tens of thousands of retirees are headed to Arizona and Florida each year, they fly or drive at a huge cost to them and the environment, this is just one type of mass migration of human kind that could/should be addressed by rail transit. City wide commutes from the burbs is another problem for those who share the roads with the much needed freight hauling activity that utilizes large trucks with trailers.
The way things are going politically and economically in America I don't see a lot of effort going into the big question of us having a crumbling infrastructure, America is showing it's age, we've been utilizing an old paradigm of individual transportation, one that is showing us the innate fallacies regarding the fundamentals of transporting large groups of people in an efficient manner. With an aging populace this is a subject that will continue to crop up as a safety problem as well as an environmental concern.
But you are missing a key point here. You can build a high speed line between portland and San diego. You can build great transit systems in San diego. But people would just go around them, and avoid areas that have dense transit. I see this all the time. Transit isn't necessrily changing the mode of transportation. It is satisfying those who already want to use transit but not necessrily those who prefer cars. In fact, exurbs are the second fastest growing areas of major metropolitans. People can't afford urban centers and its property tax. People want large space, spacious homes, and a safe environment to raise their kids. As a many times visitor to portland, I do enjoy many things Portland offers. But I would never live in Portland proper. And it isn't just because I can't afford it. Even if I have the money to live in a big house near reed college, I am still not interested.
I think the transit question you have is a matter of lifestyle choices and culture. If this generation drives less, it would perhaps be that many of them can't afford a car centric lifestyle. A lot of young people are in that situation. They are, however, stuck in crowded apartments that are quite expensive in transit enabled neighborhoods. They are also exploring the small home options, as that's all that they can afford.
Americans love affair with cars aren't unqiuely American. Chinese middle class have a tremendous love for cars and SUVs now. It's what a lot of people want when they have the option. Europe and other places are smaller, dense, and have a tradition of using public transit. The US doesn't have that tradition.
All systems, regardless of their function tend to have a technical evolutionary aspect to them. That realization should be the driving force in developing the necessary passenger train structures sooner rather than later. As a more viable HSR based transportation system becomes the rational choice for commuting logistics we will be needing a much more efficient system than the one that utilizes the present rail infrastructure as a cost cutting measure.
The one constant in the argument against a better transportation system is that of cost. I've looked at the costs associated with the building of large scale systems in our recent history and found that many were thought of as an astronomical burden forced upon the public. Dams, highways, space program infrastructure, huge public institutions, and a host of other costs that were absorbed by the collective of government allowed the US to have the framework to become the huge economy that it is.
That framework was the result of visionary types who advanced the notion that economies needed structure in order to expand. Now we'll need people who can look forward to the reality of energy alternatives being needed to maintain the current scale of economic activity, the cost will be staggering for a society that balks at the kind of taxes needed to scale up for that reality.
My guess is that we won't be realizing those big dreams. America was a rising power at the time. The economics was very different. The social structure was also different. Today's Americans are very much less interested in paying tax to an increasingly diverse society full of people you don't know, don't care, don't understand, or don't welcome. The Balkanization of America isn't just social, cultural, racial, but economic, gender, orientation, political beliefs. And that's what diversity realistically does.
We are looking at stagnant wages and long term unemployment high rate for many years to come. We are also looking at many retirees not being able to survive on their own. The projects you mentioned cannot trump the need to provide basic welfare to an ever larger population in poverty, to pay off the national debt before it goes out of control, and to help young people obtain higher education. These tasks will be daunting already.
And because of our Balkanization, I predict that our businesses will continue to want more immigration, which will increase the need for social welfare and competition for the best jobs. To be honest, I'm not in the mood to support huge dams, Mars adventure, and whatever fantasies at this point. We need to solve economic problems first. We need to help young people get the right skills to compete in the global economy. We need to make education more affordable, efficient, and skilled based. We need less entitlement of the young and more strategic planning. And we need to do it without giving too much tax burden on the public. Your space program's cost too much.
I think high speed rail will only happen when it makes economic sense to the masses. Even cheaper rail passenger has to be highly subsidized. Other public transportation systems already existing are facing cuts much less new ones being organized. States want to do it can; but they are not going to see anywhere close to matching funds. Many bus systems are facing massive cuts as is.
Here's another look at why we seldom arrive at any agreement on creating infrastructure such as HSR networks. Oil has been the spoiler in most of our transportation equations, with regard to a future view, when the cheap oil is gone rail will be the only viable ton per mile transportation method. The other often overlooked facet of resistance to any thing of a "public" nature is our collective abhorrence of sharing space with "them", them being whatever group of people an individual may find to be undesirable. As a side note: The American populace can now exist completely divided from one another socially due to our cars and other devices that insure our disconnectedness.
When public transportation is discussed in the US it has always been acknowledged as a threat to big oil's grip on the American motoring mindset. But, the death of individual transport methods will surely be in the future transportation mix just for the fact of our lacking of public funding for such huge auto-centric infrastructure. We should have been expanding our cities with a mass transit form in mind, local rail and bus service connected to a large scale of train systems with long distance capability. But, we didn't and now any attempt to change this auto-centric paradigm will be necessarily harder.
On terrorism: It's not on my radar at this point, and it shouldn't be a factor to be considered in future transportation needs. It will be a sure bet that the resistance to any large scale change in American transportation will come from those who now have a large benefit in the form of individual transportation. Those in the metro areas and the outliers of the plains states will be the "natural allies" of a rail plan that includes a fast and comfortable alternative to the one hundred mile and more travel needs not now being met by the airlines or bus services.
I live in a large metro area spanning two state borders, one state has an expanding light rail plan while the other, a politically conservative area with a rural (car-centric) population opposes any rail plan even though that area is experiencing terrible gridlock on their freeways. Mass transit, whether it be local light rail-bus or long distance HSR-bus has become another political quagmire surrounded by all the usual tirades regarding government expenditures. But when oil has had it's day in the sun and it's cost has risen to prohibitive heights, some figure that would be the best time to have the discussion on mass transit...
Toyota is launching a hydrogen vehicle that may be one of future individual transportation. Googles driverless cars will likely integrate hybrid and hydrogen or whatever technology in the future to make individual transportation more desirable and convenient. I don't think most Americans would give up their personal vehicles. More likely these vehicles will evolve through high technology. The quaint transit transportation will be limited to dense areas and metro areas.
I'd agree, we need to change the way fuel taxes are applied. A tax based on the weight of the vehicle and miles driven would be ideal, this would increase the tax for large trucks who really aen't paying enough. That will help drive some of the long haul freight off the road onto rail where it belongs. You'll end paying more for goods in the store short term, perhaps carve out a niche in the tax for local deliveries to help alleviate that. Long term costs will decrease as more freight moves to rail, with less trucks you reduce costly maintenance on roads and can lower the fuel tax(I won't hold my breath).
No need for another tax. Intermodal rail business has been booming since 2006 and keeps growing every year and is expected to stay on this path well into the next decade at the minimum. Every year there is getting to be less over the road trucking do to the trucking industry not being able to get younger people interested in the job (who wants to only be home 4 days a month?). That and the cost of shipping freight via rail is just vastly cheaper then shipping it over the road.
Quote:
Originally Posted by 2nd trick op
And in the days before truck competiton developed, freight rates were overseen by the ICC; these depended upon a fair valuation of the huge investment in property involved, so in the early Tenties the ICC emarked on a huge program to catalog and value that property -- leaving railroad buffs and modelers with a delightful inventory of photographs.
All this expensive overhead disappeared with the dominance of trucking; railroads began to heavily "unsell" infrequent, single-car shipments after 1960, They now mostly haul bulk commodities in larger volumes, or high value freight in containers, with trucks making local deliveries -- a technology sometimes referred to as "boxes and rocks". Livestock hasn't moved by rail since the early 1980's, and most perishable traffic is in highway trailers on flatcars, if it goes by rail at all.
So it would require almost as much time and effort to redirect much of our freight traffic back onto the rails as it did for supply and demand to reorient it aroud a highway-centric system.
Since double stack well cars came out shipping freight via rail has grown tremendously. Intermodal freight use to make up single digit revenue for Norfolk Southern and now it's 20% of there business and the percentage is going to get higher over the years. Also a ton of freight shipped in domestic 53ft containers is actually grocery which is not high value. The reason why things like grocery and other freight not high value (not necessarily cheap though) is shipped via rail is because it's vastly cheaper then running it over the road. If you buy a lot of food product from Quaker for example the vast majority of the time that food got loaded on a container and shipped by rail...Quaker is very big into using rail. So as far as moving freight back to the rails goes that's been going on over the last few years and at rather fast pace.
But you are missing a key point here. You can build a high speed line between portland and San diego. You can build great transit systems in San diego. But people would just go around them, and avoid areas that have dense transit. I see this all the time. Transit isn't necessrily changing the mode of transportation. It is satisfying those who already want to use transit but not necessrily those who prefer cars. In fact, exurbs are the second fastest growing areas of major metropolitans. People can't afford urban centers and its property tax. People want large space, spacious homes, and a safe environment to raise their kids. As a many times visitor to portland, I do enjoy many things Portland offers. But I would never live in Portland proper. And it isn't just because I can't afford it. Even if I have the money to live in a big house near reed college, I am still not interested.
I think the transit question you have is a matter of lifestyle choices and culture. If this generation drives less, it would perhaps be that many of them can't afford a car centric lifestyle. A lot of young people are in that situation. They are, however, stuck in crowded apartments that are quite expensive in transit enabled neighborhoods. They are also exploring the small home options, as that's all that they can afford.
Americans love affair with cars aren't unqiuely American. Chinese middle class have a tremendous love for cars and SUVs now. It's what a lot of people want when they have the option. Europe and other places are smaller, dense, and have a tradition of using public transit. The US doesn't have that tradition.
Let's face it suburban sprawl is absolutely inconsistent with anything that could be easily addressed by mass transit. Transit in my area is sorely lacking in it's ability to substitute for personal vehicle commuting. One poster calls attention to the fact of a local transit system being the focus of budget cuts as though those cuts may be the result of the prevailing winds and not a voter resistance to being taxed. This is a direct result of the thinking that states, "cars are good transit is bad". Americans are not a sharing kind. Their fear is a large part of transit resistance, the riffraff and all. These are people who have become satisfied with their separation of eight feet between houses and calling that privacy.
My contention regarding the need for better passenger rail transportation (not necessarily high speed) is simply based on daily observation of our failing car centric model. Daily auto commuting to work is the prime factor in the gridlock experienced in every US city, weekends are a time of less volume at usual peak times but traffic is still nightmarish. Forty minutes yesterday to move six miles through the city. Yet with all of this suffering over traffic we still have a unique love of cars, custom car shows, antique car shows, and hot rods, all worshiped by an older crowd, but the younger car freaks are just as over the top with their foreign four cylinder rods as their grandfathers were. Cars are still not seen as simple transportation machines,
Do I expect anything to happen as a positive with regard to our transportation dilemma, no, I don't. I'm thinking that this crop of upcoming adults are too far into their own notions about the ability of Google and Facebook to be their savior in all things needing solutions, technology is their driver and they are along for the ride. It's becoming common among our youth to think of solutions as being a thing best left to the techno wizards who make the wonderful phones and cars with parking sensors, and, the dream of texting while driving will be accommodated by the fact of the car driving itself. I'll be driving to the sun and back east with my car with two people inside, after all it's the American way..
The particular type of car we drive won't have a big impact on the volume problem, we can have all the efficiency we want with regard to fuel economy, or simply the use of alt fuels to increase cost efficiency, but, and this is the core of our dilemma, what can we do to increase the efficiency of our time spent and the efficiency's we seek with regard to the environmental impact of heavy traffic? Those who have a vested interest in keeping things as they are will be harping on fuel efficiency and the result will be a million electric cars sitting on the freeways and their drivers left to wonder what desirable efficiency's were garnered by this technology.
Traffic volume is a way bigger problem in American than the supposed culprit of fuel cost. When driving a midst the huge pickup trucks and SUV's being utilized as commuter cars occupied with one person one can easily see the American penchant for cars as bling and little care about fuel economy. I also think that American's will eventually have the nation they deserve with regard to transportation, whatever they decide one thing is certain, and that is the fact of changing realities being hard to predict. We should keep in mind that a mere one hundred years ago most American's wanted land, lots of land if possible, then came the reality of city living, then the rise of suburbia with it's tract housing, and now apartments are making a huge comeback, is it really about choice as much as it is about economic realities?
This country is just too large to be able to get away from the automobile. There is always somewhere someone needs to go where there is no other way to get there.
My vision of a possible improvement to the transportation would be automobiles designed that one could drive in and also sleep in that would still be small enough such that they could be easily driven onto or into some type of rail car yet to be designed as well. All the autos on a given rail car would be going to the same general area. Once at that destination, it would be easy to drive off again and be on your way. The portion of the rail trip would be a combination of faster travel where the cost is equal to driving or maybe slightly higher than actually driving there, or in cases where the travel time is longer than actually driving there, then the cost would be lower. In this way the pluses and minuses would offset and make the use of the rail more appealing.
All that would need to be done is to develop the technology to quickly load and off load the rail cars and to quickly and automatically switch rail cars to different trains, depending on the destinations. I think we have the technical ability to do this. All we need is the will and a consensus to do it.
The existing auto train method is much too slow in loading and unloading and is much too expensive for the amount of time it takes to get from Lorton, VA to Sanford, FL. You have to pay for a seat for each person making the trip as well, whereas if you stayed in the car, like in my proposal, with the ability to get out and explore the train, you could purchase a vehicle that meets all your travel needs, and save you money and/or time on long trips.
Let's face it suburban sprawl is absolutely inconsistent with anything that could be easily addressed by mass transit. Transit in my area is sorely lacking in it's ability to substitute for personal vehicle commuting. One poster calls attention to the fact of a local transit system being the focus of budget cuts as though those cuts may be the result of the prevailing winds and not a voter resistance to being taxed. This is a direct result of the thinking that states, "cars are good transit is bad". Americans are not a sharing kind. Their fear is a large part of transit resistance, the riffraff and all. These are people who have become satisfied with their separation of eight feet between houses and calling that privacy.
My contention regarding the need for better passenger rail transportation (not necessarily high speed) is simply based on daily observation of our failing car centric model. Daily auto commuting to work is the prime factor in the gridlock experienced in every US city, weekends are a time of less volume at usual peak times but traffic is still nightmarish. Forty minutes yesterday to move six miles through the city. Yet with all of this suffering over traffic we still have a unique love of cars, custom car shows, antique car shows, and hot rods, all worshiped by an older crowd, but the younger car freaks are just as over the top with their foreign four cylinder rods as their grandfathers were. Cars are still not seen as simple transportation machines,
Do I expect anything to happen as a positive with regard to our transportation dilemma, no, I don't. I'm thinking that this crop of upcoming adults are too far into their own notions about the ability of Google and Facebook to be their savior in all things needing solutions, technology is their driver and they are along for the ride. It's becoming common among our youth to think of solutions as being a thing best left to the techno wizards who make the wonderful phones and cars with parking sensors, and, the dream of texting while driving will be accommodated by the fact of the car driving itself. I'll be driving to the sun and back east with my car with two people inside, after all it's the American way..
The particular type of car we drive won't have a big impact on the volume problem, we can have all the efficiency we want with regard to fuel economy, or simply the use of alt fuels to increase cost efficiency, but, and this is the core of our dilemma, what can we do to increase the efficiency of our time spent and the efficiency's we seek with regard to the environmental impact of heavy traffic? Those who have a vested interest in keeping things as they are will be harping on fuel efficiency and the result will be a million electric cars sitting on the freeways and their drivers left to wonder what desirable efficiency's were garnered by this technology.
Traffic volume is a way bigger problem in American than the supposed culprit of fuel cost. When driving a midst the huge pickup trucks and SUV's being utilized as commuter cars occupied with one person one can easily see the American penchant for cars as bling and little care about fuel economy. I also think that American's will eventually have the nation they deserve with regard to transportation, whatever they decide one thing is certain, and that is the fact of changing realities being hard to predict. We should keep in mind that a mere one hundred years ago most American's wanted land, lots of land if possible, then came the reality of city living, then the rise of suburbia with it's tract housing, and now apartments are making a huge comeback, is it really about choice as much as it is about economic realities?
It is certainly about economic realities. But like you said, you don't expect anything to change dramatically until it makes no economic sense. The whole hybrid fuel efficiency and even apartment living come from declining prosperity. If millenials are buying homes and starting families with stable employment in large numbers, you would see more young people buying homes than renting fancy condos on bike trails. It's not much a cultural change than it is an economic necessity. And even then, most young people live in apartments in suburbs where you get more for your money. Don't forget that economics is also pushing people out of urban growth boundaries, visualized socioeconomic class lines if you will.
Technology is what the young believe in. They use technology. They study technology. Some of the best jobs are in technology. Technology makes personal vehicle ownership more pleasant, not more difficult. When cars can drive itself, we won't see the big return of trains. Driverless cars will change our world.
High speed trains require a highly dense population, such as many parts of China and Europe, and northeast USA. In the vast majority of America, it simply doesn't make sense to have these trains. They are expensive. They don't serve that many people. They don't make much profit (the more expensive, the fewer customers). For that system to function well, american cities would have to be planned and built very differently. Without a dense urban structure, regional rail doesn't work well when passengers get to a city. If you get into Kansas city Union station, where do you go from there? Are there even car rentals nearby?
Light rail is being built all across american cities. But they are far from being sufficient and pleasant transit options. They are slow, and they cover only certain areas of the city. The transit in Portland crawls. Look at Hong Kong and shanghai transit. They are underground or elevated, and they are extremely dense. But even in Shanghai, much like nyc, affluent people take cabs.
You hear young people saying they would love to ditch the car. But most of these people don't have kids. Of course, it is easy for them to say. They also rent studio apartments, they also eat cold pizzas, they don't take care of themselves. Is that the sort of generational shift?
The biggest generational shift I see in young people is their fascination and involvement with technology, especially communication technology. Such technology creates a more antisocial and divided society, even though it's all about sharing and social. These days, when people wait for their food to come in the restaurant, even a group of people at the table would be each on their phone reading something. They talk and then look up something. There is an infinite amount of content and entertainment on your digital device. At that restaurant, you can download declassified files once available to only top official. You can be the first to know an aircraft crash. You may witness an incident in progress through Twitter.
I wouldn't call it privacy. It is personal space. It is a buffer. I have traveled to many great big transit-based cities. But I tell myself that visiting these places is wonderful, but after a week, I am ready for my house, the greenery, the solitude, the stars at night, and the convenience of running errands. If I want to work out, I can go swim at my gym. there are large parks where I live, with miles of trails and serene lakes. Pick an autum day the leaves are gorgeous.
No need for another tax. Intermodal rail business has been booming since 2006 and keeps growing every year and is expected to stay on this path well into the next decade at the minimum. Every year there is getting to be less over the road trucking do to the trucking industry not being able to get younger people interested in the job (who wants to only be home 4 days a month?). That and the cost of shipping freight via rail is just vastly cheaper then shipping it over the road.
Since double stack well cars came out shipping freight via rail has grown tremendously. Intermodal freight use to make up single digit revenue for Norfolk Southern and now it's 20% of there business and the percentage is going to get higher over the years. Also a ton of freight shipped in domestic 53-ft containers is actually grocery which is not high value. The reason why things like grocery and other freight not high value (not necessarily cheap though) is shipped via rail is because it's vastly cheaper then running it over the road. If you buy a lot of food product from Quaker for example the vast majority of the time that food got loaded on a container and shipped by rail...Quaker is very big into using rail. So as far as moving freight back to the rails goes that's been going on over the last few years and at rather fast pace.
The public doesn't realize just how much of a struggle it was for intermodal transportation (by any mode) to evolve.
Moving highway trailers on flatcars first appeared in some markets as early as 1940, but it wasn't until 1955 that the major rail carriers became intrigued with the idea ... usually referred to as "piggyback" in those days. The first solid intermodal train, operated by the Pennsylvania, began service in the spring of 1955. It was hoped that the major truckers would make use of it, but only limited success was seen in that particular market.
By 1968 the railroads were moving about 2 million trailers and containers annually, but the bankruptcy of Penn Central and several other Eastern carriers hurt both maintenance and reliability, so growth stagnated here for about a decade.
One of the biggest problems was the huge variety of equipment, some of it not completely compatible with other carriers. Highway trailers could vary from 23 to 40 feet in length, and not long after TrailerTrain (an intermodal consortium) tried to standardize things with an 88-foot flatcar (perfect fit for 2 40-foot trailers), the highway carriers went to 45-foot trailers -- and after that, to 48 and 53, That car also allowed for several inches of vertical play when on the rough track which was common in the Seventies. I can recall working in the Central Dispatch of the old Jones Motor Co, in suburban Philadelphia. and hearing the Line Haul Director fume about a load of plate glass put on the railroad and turned into slivers by rough handling.
Finally in the early Eighties, the few remaining major rail carriers agreed to standardize equipment around cars designed for 53-foot trailers (or two small containers) double-stacked on a rigid frame that didn't "bounce". Tunnel clearances had to be significantly improved on several main lines, but the science of anchoring continuous welded rail on curves had been refined to a point where vibration and substandard track were no longer much of a factor on a slimmed-down network of main lines.
Around 1985, everything fell into place, aided by deregulation and serious reductions in crew sizes (from five people per train to two) that retired the caboose. Entire motor carrier fleets -- Schneider and J B Hunt being the most prominent -- redirected their marketing strategy around relatively short-haul pickup and delivery. "Ultra-long-distance" truck hauls are still the rule for some high-value freight, but are becoming increasigly uncommon.
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