To be a little contrarian: what would New York City look like today if they had dismissed the Subway as a "gadgetbahn" back in 1894?
Less room for cars on the roads and a lot more surface trains.
What’s a Gadgetbahn? (2017)
21–30 of 58 posts
Re: What’s a Gadgetbahn? (2017)
#22nearly all passenger trains are gadgetbahns, automobiles are much easier to scale and likely more environmentally friendly when occupancies on the train are low
Automobiles are easier to scale until you hit a brick wall. Subways and trains can transport a lot more people than roads. A subway line with modern signalling can have a train every 45 seconds or so. It's impossible to match that with normal roads. Dense cities can't function without trains. Imagine London, Tokyo, or New York without the subway.
Re: What’s a Gadgetbahn? (2017)
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a source on that? I would expect an electrically propelled train to be extremely efficient from an emissions standpoint and to have far far lower emissions when occupied, enough to offset running a few empty ones.
If you look at the operational emissions, this is true. Infrastructure does however play a role. Planes have high operational emissions but require little infrastructure. Trains have little emissions but require enormous infrastructure. It's however completely unclear to me which CO2-calculators account the infrastructure, and which do not.
The cost of infrastructure is extremely hard to quantify. Roads aren't free either, and parking in cities makes them less dense and hence increases the distances people need to travel.
Re: What’s a Gadgetbahn? (2017)
#24A key aspect of Gadgetbahns is they are always Not Trains ™ and the reason for that is because trains are old tech that is hard to hype, but moreso because hard data already exists for how expensive trains are to build and Gadgetbahn advocates would rather have the luxury of pulling numbers out of their ass.
Another thing they share is they have almost all the same requirements as trains, and thus, inevitably, similar costs.
Yeah.
A lot of times, you will see things like “this new technology can be built elevated/underground really cheaply so you don’t have to buy the land underneath!” Except that’s not how property rights work in Western countries at all, and at a practical level things like emergency walkways or fire ventilation or maintenance passageways end up eating whatever the miniscule difference in right-of-way width is.
Re: What’s a Gadgetbahn? (2017)
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
The German newspaper article names construction and operation of railway stations, and the construction of the infrastructure itself. My main point is: there seems to be a non-neligible impact, and CO2 calculators don't help me grasp that.
Is the German newspaper also considering the infrastructural costs of road construction, expansion and maintenance (particularly maintenance costs incurred by shipping freight on those roads instead of rails)?
Forget newspapers. Here's an IRU study about combined rail/road freight transport accounting for costs and emissions.
"There is no such thing as a truly environment friendly means of transport. Combined transport is not inherently superior to pure road transport in terms of environmental impact, as measured by energy consumptionand CO2 emissions."
https://www.iru.org/apps/cms-filesystem-action?file=PPP/en_C...
Re: What’s a Gadgetbahn? (2017)
#26Yeah, hyperloops. Going to be insanely cheap. Right. The one route that might have made sense, Dubai to Abu Dhabi, seems to not be happening. That was over empty flat desert, and had government support, so it might have been built. Monorails are a working technology, but still niche. China has 140Km or so. Japan has about 80Km. They're useful when you have to cram a transit system into a built-up city. The switch pro…
The problem with billionaires guessing what lowly commuters want is that they focus on speed and comfort instead of the more mundane issues as "bum with distinct urine smell", "person who ate several garlic cloves the evening before" and "menacing group of youths".
Re: What’s a Gadgetbahn? (2017)
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another thing they share is they have almost all the same requirements as trains, and thus, inevitably, similar costs.
Yeah. A lot of times, you will see things like “this new technology can be built elevated/underground really cheaply so you don’t have to buy the land underneath!” Except that’s not how property rights work in Western countries at all, and at a practical level things like emergency walkways or fire ventilation or maintenance passageways end up eating whatever the miniscule difference in right-of-way width is.
You also have the matter of the Gadgetbahn advocate convienently neglecting to mention that most of the cost of a typical subway system goes into the cavernous stations. They pretend the costs of a modern subway station is purely the cost per mile of tunnel, and that's the number they compare their pure cost per mile number to.
So the subway cost per mile includes stations, while the Gadgetbahn cost per mile doesn't include anything other than tunnel boring. Certainly not the costs of each ludicrous car elevator.
Re: What’s a Gadgetbahn? (2017)
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is the German newspaper also considering the infrastructural costs of road construction, expansion and maintenance (particularly maintenance costs incurred by shipping freight on those roads instead of rails)?
Forget newspapers. Here's an IRU study about combined rail/road freight transport accounting for costs and emissions. "There is no such thing as a truly environment friendly means of transport. Combined transport is not inherently superior to pure road transport in terms of environmental impact, as measured by energy consumptionand CO2 emissions." https://www.iru.org/apps/cms-filesystem-action?file=PPP/en_C...
This “study” is literally from an organisation dedicated to keeping freight transport on roads, it’s hardly unbiased, and is actually of very poor quality - I’d expect to see, for example, an explanation of how the routes involved were chosen for the study. Additionally, if the study said anything other than “road freight is good”, it just wouldn’t have been published by this organisation!
Re: What’s a Gadgetbahn? (2017)
#29I don't care what gets built, but the province really needs more trains. "The market is too small", people tell me. But then I see all the cars on the highway between Montreal and Sherbrooke and I'm pretty sure there is enough people there to fill a train every 1-2 hour. What the current prime minister really wants is just more room for cars (see "3e lien") . The "much more modern things" (than trains) are probably j…
Next to a train line you'll need a lot of more fine-grained transport though - like buses - to get people from train stations to their final destination. In addition it needs to be as expensive (or cheap) as driving, and not take any more time.
I used to live somewhere / have a commute where the time difference between public transit and driving was negligible. Nowadays I live somewhere much nicer, but I drive to work; the drive is 15-20 minutes, public transit would take me an hour. There is some traffic issues from time to time, but even with traffic it's faster than public transit.
Re: What’s a Gadgetbahn? (2017)
#30To be a little contrarian: what would New York City look like today if they had dismissed the Subway as a "gadgetbahn" back in 1894?
It isn't though; it's a conventional rail system, nothing too fancy there. And it solved an actual problem, unlike e.g. the monorail vs conventional high speed rails.