Public transportation in America is typically a magnet for crime.
I’ll take a hard pass on being trapped in a tube with my assailants.
Because they give people a lot more freedom than trains — if you own a car. If you don’t own a car but live in a society where everybody else has one you are kinda screwed.
Because I like driving. It’s really not that hard to figure out why the hive effort over EVs.
Because people want a means to travel independently, as in they are in control and not riding with strangers.
/s
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🤷 I don’t actually agree with the sentiment. I am describing how other people feel about it. I don’t even own a car. I actually want high speed rails. All I am telling you is that that is how opponents feel about it, and to get what you want, you have to address those feelings, probably in some form of marketing campaign.
That is a luxury that should be severely limited. I hate screaming children on flights, but I don’t want us to all start chartering private jets, even if somehow becomes affordable.
The U.S. needs to grow up and get off of its post-9/11 authoritarian kick. Then plane and airport design and system setup can go back to being about the convenience of the flyer and not the obscene hellhole it is now that is driving people away from supporting public transit.
Please keep your garbage ideas away from America. Freedom is more important than anything, and cars are a great enhancer of personal freedom. So I will be keeping my cars and my independent luxuries.
I think it’s more of a result of the time countries developed and the needs of the time. Old European cities were developed before cars. They’re dense with narrow roads. Retrofitting mass transit/trains makes sense, as the alternative would be destroying all the buildings and building a new city to support the space needed for cars.
The US on the other hand was really being developed and built up along side the automobile. There were vast areas of land being settled with no preexisting infrastructure. The only option was horse, wagon, and later… the car and truck. Because land was so plentiful it didn’t make a lot of sense to create dense cities, especially as transportation became easier. As a result, the US is the way that it is now. Just like it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to rip down a European city just to change the transit system, it’s hard to justify ripping down entire US cities to better support rail, to the point where people can get rid of their cars.
I don’t like owning a car and I wish I could just walk a block, hop on a train, and get to wherever I need to go… but that’s not reality. And changing that would take decades of frustration and cost trillions of dollars. Even then, it would only cover major metro areas and connecting them. The idea that rural America is going to get on rails is not possible, just like rural areas in Europe aren’t accessible by rail either. Even if the city I lived in had protected bike lanes, mixed use spaces, and rails to get to other nearby hubs where people gather, I’d still need a car, because I have family members in a rural area that doesn’t even have a highway within 10 miles. I think there are a lot of people in this situation.
Large swaths of the US were populated around the railroads. The cities had old style walkable centres before they were demolished to make way for cars. Even LA was built up around a streetcar network which was at the time the largest in the world.
Boston is one of the few places I’ve been in the US that has that small feel still. I think the water, preventing sprawl, and the age and importance of a lot of the areas are the reason for that. But it’s a good case study for what it takes to keep that. The Big Dig took 25 years and $22B dollars. For cities that weren’t that old and didn’t have land constraints, why would they go through that?
I do have to wonder how much of the removal of things like streetcars were a result of urban sprawl. Once the area grows and cars service that new area, how do they handle the original city? Do they have large parking lots around the edge and force people to switch over to a street car? Generally if someone is driving to a city from an area not served by mass transit, they are going to want to take their car all the way to the finial destination, rather than switching to something else and paying money (for parking and the transit). The younger a city, the easier it is to make that change.
Regardless of why it happened, it’s where we’re at. So we need to accept we’re here and figure out the best way forward. Is that electric cars? Is that spending decades and billions and trillions of dollars to build new cities and hope the people of 2150 don’t think we made the wrong call, because now they have some crazy new way to get around and different problems? Is it something else? I don’t think anyone in the past was trying to screw over people in the future. They were making the best decisions they could based on the information they had, the needs of the people at the time, and technology available. We’ll make similar choices and people of the future will have their opinions about it.
The big dig was replacing an urban highway that already demolished much of the city and shouldn’t have been there in the first place, and it shouldn’t have been replaced. When you have land constraints the answer is easy: don’t build for the car.
The way forward isn’t that complicated. Electric cars don’t fix most of the problems with ICE cars, and they’ll need vast amounts of lithium and other materials to produce. We’ll spend just as long replacing every car with an electric one as it would take to build out a decent amount of non car dependant infrastructure. And the way to do that isn’t difficult either, just stop building new car dependant places, remove euclidean zoning codes, and start adding some transit and bike lanes. The dutch didn’t get their bike infrastructure overnight, it was done by redesigning roads whenever they needed to be rebuilt anyway. The same can be applied elsewhere.
How do we handle rural areas where the population is too low to justify a rail and the distances are too large for bikes to be practical? For the US, I think that is the big question for those not in a population center, or who knows people not in a population center.
In terms of replacing stuff when it’s due to be replaced. I think that’s great, if everyone is onboard. I see that starting to happen. A city I used to live in just put in their first protected bike lane a few years ago. Where I live now there is 1 semi-decent bike lane, but it’s still not protected. I think it’s really a “build it and they will come” situation, which it needs to hit a certain critical mass before it becomes useful. For that, we have to. hope politicians stay the course long enough for that to happen.
A big city near me has started putting in a 27 mile greenway to connect 20+ neighborhoods around the city. I’m hoping they do something to connect some of the surrounding cities, because as it stands I’d have to drive to the greenway. If I could get to a protected bike lane that would take me to the greenway and let me get around the city, I would go down there significantly more than I do now. It’s only about 10 miles, but with traffic, construction, and parking, it’s just not worth it for me to take my car. They put in a light rail but it doesn’t really go anywhere. They’re doing things to help people move around the city, but not doing anything to keep people from needing to bring their car into the city in the first place.
Another thing I’ve seen (in that city that got their first protected bike lane) was during the COVID lockdowns they put up construction barrels all over the places. I think everyone thought construction was starting. I didn’t find out until months later that the idea was they were using those to make bike lanes. All they ended up doing was constricting car traffic and turning the whole city into grid lock. A few signs would have gone a long way. Attempts are being made, but a lot of mistakes are being made along the way as well.
Small towns can be super walkable, since you can easily walk anywhere in town. But yeah at some point cars do make more sense, and at that point it isn’t much of a problem since most people live in urban areas anyway.
Because many of us live in places where you must use a car, there are no alternatives
In such places electric public transport is nothing but a pipe dream
I would love to have trains and not need a car. Unfortunately that’s still a decade away here in California.
And who knows how long in the Midwest. I can’t even take a train from Des Moines to St Louis - I have to go to Chicago by bus first!
I’m 100% less likely to get stabbed by a tweaker in my car than on public transit in my city.
Trains, busses subways and trams with room for bikes. Bike and walking infrastructure along roads and in cities. Secure bike parking both publicly and at home. Frequent and flexible busses. And a wide variety of easily avaliable rental cars.
I dunno what country you are from, but here in the US of A, the monopolies that own all the train infrastructure make sure to keep trains as public transportation as cost prohibitive as possible.
This always reminds me of the movie, Roger Rabbit. I was a kid and the movie taught me a much deeper/darker lesson than it was meant to teach me at that age. It still irks me.
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Spoiler alert- the villain buys the transit system and shuts it down, basically steals a town it served, and plans to demolish the town so he can build a freeway over it and profit.
In case you need a hint, it was Doom’s plan.
I used to watch roger rabbit as a kid for other reasons
I think I know exactly what you mean and I was in 3rd grade.
Because places like America are so spread out (by design) that rail networks, especially in the Great Plains and Southwest, are viewed as impractical unless all of their population moved to cities or towns in close proximity to rail lines, and Americans tend to take up a large chunk of the bandwidth.
From the end of the video:
Though, I admit, actually fixing American and Canadian cities after they were destroyed by car infrastructure and rebuilt to be car-dependent is a very daunting task, and I’m personally not even convinced it can be done in the foreseeable future, which is a big part of the reason why we left North America for a better city in the Netherlands in the first place.
In case it’s not clear, I’m not against trains, buses, trolleys, trams, and bikeable, walkable cities. Far from it. But regardless of whether cities used to be connected by rail and were bikeable, as stated in the video, they aren’t anymore, and haven’t been for generations in many cases. So what’s the solution in the meantime, while we wait for the slow churning bureaucracy to get its head out of its butt?
A start could be a similar method to the Netherlands. It took them a few decades to get their cities car free again. Whenever a city road was due for resurfacing/redevelopment, instead of just slapping down the same road and calling it a day, other options are considered like adding bus lanes, trams, or bike lanes while reducing the total number of car lanes.
The best part here is it can be done locally. The municipality can decide they want change and commit to a redesign.
That actually sounds reasonable. Are these options and methods being considered in America already? I want to see something like this happening in places like the LA metropolitan area and the Bay Area, the most notoriously gridlocked areas in California, which seems like the most car-centric state in the US.
To find more info about the push for this kind of redevelopment in America I would look to the movement Strong Towns.
I live in the Boston area, and while it doesn’t seem like it would compare to a place like the Netherlands, it’s slowly going in that direction by acknowledging a shift in focus. Places like here and New York are slowly respecting bicycles as a more viable city transport, and expanding the rail/bus systems. If that mindset can continue to occur each time the city planning office receives a complaint about lane congestion, or a city block that’s fallen into disuse, it can make some slow changes that make walking/biking/training a little bit better. They won’t replace the backbone of the city, but often they don’t need to.
I think the link below compliments the video above. It it from the same channel. This seem to be a compounded issue. https://youtu.be/7IsMeKl-Sv0
Yup. And the worst part is, most people do not realize that this is even in issue, let alone how many other problems or creates. Especially ecological ones.
There once was a time we built rail first and the cities appeared along it. The early rail capitalists knew that transit seeds development and that’s what built MOST of the major cities in the Americas. Somehow we forgot that and have instead come to believe that transit only makes sense if it connects dense, fully-developed places that already exist. It’s insipid, but unfortunately makes it past peoples’ bullshit filters routinely. It’s just part of the trend of cities in North America to give no shits about their future development.
It’s total bullshit, though. Most city downtowns can justify small transit easily. Play with the Tom Forth tool and see for yourself. I recommend looking at bus stops per capita for any place you click; that tells a hell of a story about how over or underinvested a community is in car infrastructure. In most of the world, it’s something like 200-400 people per bus stop in a city. In the US, you’re lucky to see 1200 outside of a few edge cases.
The fact is, most trips are within a few miles of home. There’s a lot of space in the world for cars. They’re needed to fill in the edge cases. The truly rural areas. The niche needs of a profession. An unusual living situation, or to provide accessibility, or for so many other reasons. But the default should be transit and bike-ped, as it was for virtually all of human history and as it still is for most people in most cities in most of the world.
When we entertain this “The US is too big for transit” stuff, we’re reversing the victim and offender and substituting the solution with the problem. To start with, intercity transit isn’t even that important a kind of transit. It’s useful and nice, but the kind of trips that happen within a few miles of home are the fundamental ones.
In most of the world, it’s something like 200-400 people per bus stop in a city. In the US, you’re lucky to see 1200 outside of a few edge cases.
Hmm I couldn’t reproduce this, which places did you check? I’ve checked most of the larger cities in Europe and the US. They all seem to have similar numbers, around 800-1000 people per bus stop.
I’ve also noticed that larger population densities usually have less bus stops per population. Which makes sense, as rural areas tend to rely more on buses because they don’t have access to trams or subways. Plus, for higher population densities you need less stops per population, because doubling the amount of bus stops only reduces walk times to the nearest stop by 30%, assuming an equal spread (Circle Area = Pi * Radius²).
I was looking at French cities to get that number. I admit, it was not a comprehensive survey.
You’d think. But the truth is throughout the West and Midwest, almost every town has or has had a rail line.
So what’s gone wrong? Pretty much the same thing that’s gone wrong with America in general, big corporations realized shipping to big cities is way more profitable than carrying passengers from small towns. Particularly because most people prefer a car over the train.
We have a ton of dead rail lines just waiting to be revitalized.
So what’s the solution to revamp and restore them? I’ve seen tons of abandoned rail lines, usually rusted to uselessness and even paved over for “walking trails”. California has a hard enough time just extending BART a single mile.
The same solution to our current one with frequent potholes and congestion issues on our highway system; constant maintenance and attention.
I’m not going to delude myself into saying we gather 5 plucky volunteers to knock weeds off the rails and they’re set for a decade. But the costs are ultimately being compared to what the whole country needs to spend for its cars to continue being useful.
I can’t even totally complain about towns making rail trails instead - having some kind of viable walking path is also a good change.
Yeah there is zero chance the poster is from the US or anything that isn’t a major city. Electric cars aren’t perfect but they are a hell of a lot better than an ICE.
And even within those cities, they are vast stretches of suburbia, without the density that makes rail and mass transit systems practical. Rail as mass commuter transit works better the more dense a city is (conversely cars work worse). So if you wanted to try to massively reduce cars as an answer to the climate crisis, you’d first need to rebuild all of these cities that were largely built after cars were a thing. Which is even more impractical than electric cars.
Would be AWESOME if we had more dense cities and rail connections like Europe, though! We need the next generation of city planners to encourage more density in our (non Northeastern) American cities.
Europe has a lot of suburbia too and rural areas too though. I live in the SF Bay Area. It’s population density is similar to many regions in Europe (barring ultra urban cities like capitals). Yet with this density (and loads of money) we sadly still don’t have decent public transportation here…
You ever try taking your new mattress and bed frame on a train?
I don’t know if you’re making this argument for outside the US, but renting a U-haul is pretty cheap if you stay within city limits. It really only gets expensive if you’re actually moving. Occasional needs should have occasional solutions!
That’s not a valid response to “spend more on trains (public trans, whatever)”. No one is suggesting that any one thing be all things – except car folk. Walk, bike, bus, subway, light rain, taxis, rentals cars, personal cars, personal trucks, commercial trucking, limousines, trains… all of it. Varied and specific to need. Diversity and choice.
No but I’ve never owned a vehicle that could handle a mattress and frame. I assume there’d still be delivery options. If it’s not new then there are U-Haul rentals and movers still. It’s not like most people need a vehicle that size. Yes I know some do and there are always edge cases but having a vehicle that size for moving something large once every X years shouldn’t be a deterrent to mass transit.
No, I would just have it delivered like a normal person would
Electric cars don’t solve a lot of the root problems of cars. They still require massive amounts of energy to move thousands of pounds of steel. They also still rely on sprawling roads and parking lots.
Electric motors are between 95 and 98% efficient, while ICEs are in the 80’s on a good day.
You are aware that electric trains also use electric motors, just like electric cars do, right? And you are aware that electric cars rely on an electric battery while electric trains rely primarily on overhead electric power lines, are you?
That means cars require one extra component and an extra conversation of energy which trains don’t need. Every conversation of energy reduces efficiency of the final outcome. The more conversations, the less efficiency.
Trains use: power lines -> electric motor
Cars use: power lines -> electric battery -> electric motorFurthermore, bigger machines can be built to be more efficient than smaller ones. So bigger motors can use (electric) fuel more efficiently than smaller motors.
Not to say trains are not more efficient than cars, because they are for a myriad of reasons. But electric motors scale relatively linear to my extent of knowledge, so usually it just ends up being that trains use many motors instead of one big motor.
Thanks for the info, I didn’t know how exactly this works, but I was aware that this factor is different for each device.
Thinking about it I guess that explains why small electric motor powered devices exist often while small combustion powered devices are rare? The only items I can come up with are forestry/gardening devices, tools for cooking and I guess lanterns. With the latter only using the heat/light and not actually moving anything.
I was responding to your assertion about EVs not being much better than ICEs.
I did not make any prior assertions. The post above was my first comment here.
To clarify, when you say ICE you are talking about trains, right? As in intercity express. And when you say EV you mean an electric car, correct?
I don’t understand why you argue that cars are more efficient than trains in this aspect. My argument is that since both machines use electric motors the motor efficiency can be nearly equal. Other factors probably favor a train more than a car if anything.
I don’t make a claim, but assume that even diesel locomotives might be a better choice than cars using only renewable energy, since the latter are idle most of the time, take up a lot of space, and require a lot of resources both in the car itself and in infrastructure. Surely something worht looking into.
That means cars require one extra component and an extra conversation of energy which trains don’t need.
Well, tbf, both trains and cars require converters (i.e. inverters like variable frequency drives or VFDs; or rectifiers) to match power between the local electric supply and traction motors, in the case of trains, or between the battery and traction motors, in the case of cars.
You need to be able to ramp up or down voltage or current (or both) depending on the drawing load that the motor sees at each and every moment of a trip (cars and trains). Then there is the possibility of your train jumping between different electric systems along its route, and so you need to have a way to accommodate those difference if you want to serve the most amount of passengers.
There are Battery Electric Multiple Units (BEMUs), too, out in the wild today that incorporate batteries in addition to electric service on trains (or just batteries alone), mostly in Japan and some in Europe. These are in the minority though compared to electric-supplied units.
Interestingly, there are some projects, most notably in Germany, where overhead lines are being introduced to trucks, fuzzying the differences in transportation modes even more.
I still get your point about the conversions, though. Batteries don’t have 100% Coulombic/Faraday efficiencies, meaning that they don’t charge up from 0-100% every charge cycle: you might start at 0-100%, but the next charge cycle might be 0-99.9999%, then 0-99.99%, then 0-99%, etc. This efficiency loss isn’t as great as the other losses you might find in the converters previously mentioned, or other resistive losses such as via Eddy currents in the motors/axles, demagnetization of the motors, etc.
Trains use: power lines -> electric motor Cars use: power lines -> electric battery -> electric motor
A better description of these processes would be:
Non-BEMU Trains: power lines -> converter -> electric motor (acceleration)
Non-BEMU Trains: electric motor -> converter -> power lines (deceleration)
Cars/BEMUs: power lines -> converter -> [battery -> converter -> electric motor] (charging [acceleration])
Cars/BEMUs: [electric motor -> converter -> battery] -> converter -> power lines ([deceleration] discharging)
Furthermore, bigger machines can be built to be more efficient than smaller ones. So bigger motors can use (electric) fuel more efficiently than smaller motors.
Totally. And trains that add batteries onboard can reduce the advantage that non-battery EMUs have, moreso resembling locomotives with big diesel engines and fuel tanks. I still find BEMUs better though because you can run the trains as married units, just like EMUs (and I suppose DMUs), but batteries can also be distributed along the rolling stock to allow for greater weight balancing. Idk if the major manufacturers like Siemens or General Electric have plans to design systems this way, but greater adoption may lead to more varied designs.
Hope this helps the discussion!
Well, tbf, both trains and cars require converters
Totally! My idea was that -> arrows represent the converters and to put it simply more arrows = more efficiency loss. But right, since power can also be injected back into the network, which is a good thing, there could be <-> arrows, or maybe <=> to better hightlight the bi-directionality:
power lines <=> electric motor
Since you mentioned putting power back into the grid:
I heard another potential use for car batteries would be using them to balance out local power fluctuations in the grid to make it more stable. Since cars stand still most of their life anyway, they might as well be connected to the grid whenever they’re parked. Not as a big energy reserve, since that wouldn’t be very efficient and capacity would be too low, but just to keep things more balanced which is a healthy thing for the power network. I suppose that also applies for train batteries.
Nissan has already started rolling out Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) or Vehicle-to-X (V2X) chargers for its offering of vehicles since 2022, so it’s already happening.
Chris Nelder, who runs the Energy Transition Show podcast and who is a member of the Rocky Mountain Institute, published a paper even as far back as 2016 arguing how the potential for the US consumer rolling stock of BEVs (Battery Electric Vehicles; grid + batteries only) and PHEVs (Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles; grid + batteries + gas) offering Demand Response services to utilities is enormous.
I’m not sure about the V2G compatibility of BEMUs feeding energy back to the grid to serve Demand Response is where the industry is going currently, instead favoring the implementation of overhead line islands as compared to extensive grid rollouts, but that reality is 100% feasible. The island approach I believe is also what Siemens is aiming for with the overhead-fed trucking solution I shared earlier.
Still exciting nonetheless!!!
energy is a non-issue
Absolutely. And the benefit trains have over cars is that you can reduce the amount of other stuff per person needed to get people moving.
For a local train of mine that seats 93 people with empty weight of 54 metric tons, that comes out to ~0.58 tons/person.
My sedan weighs in at about 1.5 metric tons empty, and since I’m the only one that uses it, my weight footprint is ~1.5 tons/person.
Forget about fuel economy too. Trains don’t have traffic (most of the time) to deal with, meaning they can accelerate to coasting speeds and spend most of the ride at best-efficiency. Cars are subject to traffic conditions, meaning efficiency can be as-designed by the manufacturer, or it can be much, much worse on a per trip basis if you contribute to the daily rush hours on freeways.
There is also much less friction on rails compared to rubber on roadways. If demand increases the length of the train can be increased or more trains added. This helps prevent the cycle of needing more lanes (rail lines in this case).
Well that’s a topic that intrigued me recently.
Here in France there was already some debates about how worth it was, mostly because it takes a few years to compensate the cost of production of the battery. But in France we think of the electricity as basically carbon-free (our energetic mix is something like 70% nuclear, 7% gas+coal, then “clean” energy)
However, in the world I think something like 70% of electricity production is fossil (with ~40% of coal), I don’t get how electric cars are even a thing, say in the US?
One power station is easier to replace than 1 million cars but takes a fair bit longer. So you swap the cars over right now. You also immediately stop local production of co2 as well as other noxious gases, stop the transportation of fuel and the fuel that THAT burns and you make people more energy conscious not just about the vehicle but their total usage.
Fossil Fuels in a power station are more efficient than a car ever will be. In addition Petrol and diesel vehicles are dirty from day one until they are scrapped. EVs pay off their debt ( in the EU I believe it’s less than 20k miles and falling) and then are as close as you can make to neutral but not ride a bike everywhere. As the grid gets cleaner you immediately benefit also.
Many people hate cars and in America you lot have been very lazy about public transport so you lot are way, way behind on a lot of the mass transit stuff sadly. This means EVs are the future. Are they the end point? Probably not. But they’re the best we can do right now and this infighting over them is stupid.
We all should be behind anything that moves us to being fully electric as quick as possible, making the transition to public transport if we can but EVs if not. Fire your ire at the coal rollers and V8 5.0 wastes of energy, not the EVs.
Economies of scale. Generating power - whether it’s fossil fuels, wind turbines, hydro, whatever - is more efficient at scale. To put it another way, a single 1MW generator will use far less diesel than a thousand 1KW generators. Also, electric cars are insanely efficient compared to combustion engine cars, so even if all your electricity is generated in diesel power stations it’s more efficient than burning it inside the car. Additionally, large centralised power stations are better maintained, not constrained by weight and can have offsetting/capture systems attached that are impossible in a car that must, above all else, be small and light enough to move.
Renewables and nuclear are still the way and a carbon-heavy grid makes it take longer for EVs to break even but even then EVs are a no-brainer.
It’s simple: people pay for cars. Companies or states pay for trains. Liberals want people to give money to companies, so cars it will be.
Uh, no. https://highways.dot.gov/public-roads/summer-1994/highway-finance-past-present-and-future
Cars ultimately need tons of cash to fulfill the high-maintenance roadways needed to maintain their paths. Car companies convinced federal and local government to provide that cash, making little of the investment themselves. But it’s not even fully paying for itself - meaning lots of walkers end up footing that bill for systems they don’t use.
Even if we end up with a corporate-run high-speed rail network (which certainly does have some of the same issue), it’s most logical to pair that with pedestrian, walkable areas in most parts of cities. THAT part is impossible to monetize except by local businesses that just want you to step inside.
Because cars aren’t stuck to tracks.
![[meme] Trains are 100000x easier to electrify and automate than cars, so why does everyone keep talking about electric and driverless cars?](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/11c37658-7c32-4cc2-b12c-6ced348bd09d.png){kind=link}