Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Trains are more efficient and less polluting than other transportation modes

citylab.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 334 posts

Re: Trains are more efficient and less polluting than other transportation modes

#81

Post by pmyteh »

shereadsthenews wrote: post #41
philwelch wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious how long Europe's famous rail infrastructure will continue to be cost-effective in the era of Ryanair.

Very. Spain’s high-speed service killed the Barcelona-Madrid air route, which had been the world’s busiest.

And taken the lion's share of London to Paris, which was also huge. But a combination of high-speed day trains and low-cost air has killed off many of the very long distance trains and most of Europe's sleeper services. So it's a bit of a mixed bag.

Re: Trains are more efficient and less polluting than other transportation modes

#82

Post by TheCoelacanth »

8bitsrule wrote: post #71

Sounds good, but it's hard to see into the details. In the US,cars & light trucks constitute about 18% of energy use. But what percentage of that use is for travel that could move over to rail? (I'd wager that driving around town is the biggest chunk.) Further: should all US cars go renewable electric, that seems preferable to diesel-electric rail emissions. The railroads got hit hard back when autos came along a cen…

There's not going to be any one magic bullet that solves all environmental problems forever. 18% of energy use is a colossally huge amount of energy.

Re: Trains are more efficient and less polluting than other transportation modes

#83

Post by [deleted] »

gruez wrote: post #28
melling wrote: post #11

No mention of China. They built 16,000 miles of high-speed rail in 15 years. They’ll be at 24,000 miles by 2025. The low/medium speed maglevs also seem interesting: https://gbtimes.com/china-tests-new-generation-of-maglev-tra... A 70-100 mph maglev would be useful in a few large cities.

I think it's relevant to mention [1] and [2]. A lot of things can get done if you aren't constrained by economic and political considerations. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19549466 [2] https://www.ft.com/content/ca28f58a-955d-11e8-b747-fb1e803ee...

[deleted]

Re: Trains are more efficient and less polluting than other transportation modes

#84

Post by kortilla »

luckydata wrote: post #22
gamblor956 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has the best rail system in the world...and uses it to transport cargo. The US also has the biggest single-country economy in the world.

Coming from Europe and stealing a large swath of largely unexploited land has done great things for the American economy. Unfortunately the majority of my fellow americans insist in believing it's all due to hard work and superior moral fiber, because everywhere else people are just lazy and corrupt :)

Land has been completely irrelevant to the success of the entire information economy and the US still dominates that. It has nothing to do with a “superior moral fiber”, it’s about having an environment that promotes innovation and businesses based on new innovations.

Re: Trains are more efficient and less polluting than other transportation modes

#85

Post by reidacdc »

jackcosgrove wrote: post #66

Rail requires significant investment to overcome the last mile problem, meaning the problem that often you need to walk the last mile from the station to your destination. Some may scoff at this but it is a major deterrent. Combine this with ride sharing apps and rail transit use has actually declined in the US in the past several years.

The last-mile problem is also a significant issue for freight rail. US rail companies have been abandoning low-traffic and branch lines for years, because the revenue from the sparse traffic doesn't cover the infrastructure maintenance costs.

Being an efficient user of energy is not the same thing as being an efficient end-to-end mover of goods.

The best freight rail money is in "unit trains", long trains with a single type of cargo with a single destination -- the canonical example is coal trains from Wyoming heading for power stations in the midwest, which makes good use of continent-spanning "trunk" infrastructure and avoids the "first mile" collection expense and the "last mile" disbursement expense. Trains are very good at that sort of thing.

Re: Trains are more efficient and less polluting than other transportation modes

#86

Post by kikoreis »

bronco21016 wrote: post #62

I’ve visited Europe many times and I do like how the region is so easily accessible without a car, largely because of trains, but there are many more factors outside of just having trains. European cities are far more walkable and accessible without a car. For decades the US has just not been built up in this way so just dropping trains in doesn’t suddenly make them preferred and thus viable. The reason people drive…

Interestingly, the cities are in part broke due to the infrastructure cost of maintaining sprawl — which only cars make possible.

Re: Trains are more efficient and less polluting than other transportation modes

#87

Post by jcranmer »

shereadsthenews wrote: post #12
manigandham wrote: post #2

This is rather obvious and has always been a major advantage of rail. The problem is the capital costs and real estate requirements of building the rail lines, especially when locations are far apart and there's already existing infrastructure that needs attention.

When you think of an American state with a growing population you can take the existing infrastructure as a given and plan for rail for your new capacity. Unless you are willing to say we're just not going to add transportation capacity for our new citizens, you face a choice of road, rail, or air. Rail is often a good choice. As for "far apart" this seems irrelevant. Ohio has a greater population density than does S…

Where HSR excels is in being able to service several city pairs on a single line. The Northeast Corridor is a great example: you can have a single train service all pairs of {Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, NYC, Boston} at negligible extra expense in time and money. Thus you can add in stops like Providence, which don't generate all that many trips on their own, simply because it is literally on the way to where you're going.

The problem with the US Midwest is that there's a lot of these third-tier cities, but you have to go out of your way to connect them. Who wants to go between Columbus and Indianapolis--the highway between the two cities is pretty empty. Even worse, the few collinear city triples you can come up with all completely miss the primary destination of the entire region, Chicago. If you want to go from Chicago to Columbus, Indianapolis, and especially Dayton, are not on your way.

Re: Trains are more efficient and less polluting than other transportation modes

#88

Post by TOGoS »

eMSF wrote: post #40
thatfrenchguy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now, having a car is seen as impending your freedom, funnily enough.

By whom?

Anyone who doesn't get free parking, or doesn't want to spend their time and money maintaining a personal vehicle, but is coerced into doing so by society that was built around them.

Re: Trains are more efficient and less polluting than other transportation modes

#89

Post by narag »

kposehn wrote: post #80
temp-dude-87844 wrote: post #8

Most of the US freight rail system isn't electrified because the capital expenditures of doing so would be very large, and its return on investment in terms of direct monetary savings wouldn't materialize for many, many years. Since externalities aren't priced in, diesel-electric locomotives haul most trains in the US. More passenger rail isn't really being built in the US, because the capital expenditures of doing s…

Well put. Until they have a good reason, the major freight railroads (BNSF/UP/CSX/NS/CN/CP/KCS) will continue to be all-diesel. Also, as emissions requirements have gotten more stringent they've moved to rebuilding older power (which gets around the current Tier-4 requirements instead of buying as much newer motive power. In fact, a number of the most recent-gen units have been stored as they're often 15% less effici…

Excuse if this is an absurd idea, I really don't know. But...

Wouldn't it be possible to use (giant) batteries? It sounds terribly dangerous, but possible?

Re: Trains are more efficient and less polluting than other transportation modes

#90

Post by jackcosgrove »

The main reason US cities rely on automobiles is because the "job watershed" of a private automobile exceeds the job watershed of train systems everywhere in the US, even New York City. The job watershed is the number of jobs within commuting distance, whatever your tolerance for a commute is, given a transportation modality. In some cities the automobile job watershed is 100x larger than the transit job watershed. Transit systems, especially train systems, in most US cities are hub and spoke systems, centered around terminals in places like midtown Manhattan and the Chicago Loop. If you superimpose that hub and spoke model on top of an employment "contour map" that seeks a level (due to the desire to minimize rents), you'll see that there's a fundamental mismatch between what employers and residents want and the transit network. Rather than a unipolar peak at the transit hub, both employers and residents want to minimize rents which drives sprawl and transportation webs, as opposed to hub and spoke models.

Transit has a future with ride sharing and bus rapid transit since those modes use a cheap, flexible network as opposed to an expensive, rigid rail network. Unfortunately, if you wish rail to become more important, its use is actually declining and has been for decades.

Post reply on HN