How many times will techbros reinvent the train/tram until North America finally starts laying down rails?
Don’t even need to lay down rails. The rails are already there. Built by Chinese slave labor 150 years ago. We need merely to seize them.
Or just cut a check to the freight companies.
Many cities paved over their tram lines. Sometimes they poke through during road work. We had trams in nearly every city 100 years ago yet today people tell me we can’t afford it or our population is too small to support it. If we could do it 100 years ago we could certainly do it now.
Even the rural college town my grandma grew up in had tram lines running down the main streets in the 30’s and to both colleges. If a city had more than 20,000 residents 100 years ago, they probably had a tram system that was pulled up at GM’s behest.
We’ve still got the major line going through our town, but the spurs, what connected to the mines and factories, are all paved over. I moved across town a decade ago, and the train went by a mile away at 1am at the old place. I now wake up at 1am every night because there’s no damn train. I should probably set a short, quiet, train honk alarm or something and see if that helps.
I’d be very concerned about the state and safety of those rails.
Amtrak currently runs trains on the freight tracks, but as Amtrak essentially leases the privilege of using the tracks at all from CSX and BNSF and Union Pacific and the like, their traffic gets heavily deprioritized to freight trains. You can totally catch a train from Fort Worth to Los Angeles, but it will take a few days longer than driving, will be almost as expensive as flying, and the train will be delayed many times for freight traffic.
If the federal government nationalized the rails, put them under the care of the FRA, properly funded Amtrak, and gave it a healthy advertising budget to let people know rail is the clear choice for medium length trips (like Chicago to St. Louis), there’s no reason we couldn’t send passengers on the same rails and with the same priority as freight trains. They’re perfectly safe, and the reason we’ve been hearing about so many train wrecks lately is the degradation of work conditions for rail workers. Longer trains and longer hours make for more dangerous operating conditions and more frequent wrecks.
And while the trains wouldn’t run 190 miles an hour, many long, straight stretches do exist, and it’s not unheard of for a train to be running 80-100 miles an hour on those stretches. That kind of speed is very doable for passenger rail. Hell, some Amtrak trains are capable of 150 miles an hour.
My point wasn’t to use 150 year old rails. It’s that the rails already exist so it doesn’t need to be a decades-long multi-trillion dollar project. It’s highly unlikely that any of the rails in use today are from the 19th century.
Gotta be honest, it doesn’t make sense to cross the Rockies on rail as is right now. We’ve either gotta get japan speed from Washington state to LA then over to Dallas with north south lines up to Utah, Idaho and Montana or drill straight fucking through the damn mountains. It takes 24 hours to take a train direct from Sacramento to SLC. I can drive that in 12 (breaks included) or fly that in 3 (including airport time), all for around the same cost (if I get cheap tickets). I haven’t even looked at the train from SLC to Denver or anywhere on the other side of the Rockies, but I’m sure it’s just as ridiculous.
Don’t get me wrong, the train through the Sierras can be gorgeous, but I don’t want to spend 24 hours traveling when I could be spending 3. We only get so much time off.
I love this Adam Something classic where they keep optimizing the tech bro idea until it turns into Thomas the Engine
The US has so much tarmac they don’t even need rails just turn some of that tarmac into dedicated bus lanes. And put one of these long boys on them
Bus lanes are too easy for the next politician to remove bus priority and allow cars back into the lane. At least with rails it’s a lot more costly to remove the route. Busses also still contribute to microplastics and tire waste compared to railed trams. Trams are also easier to automate which can make employing drivers and adding trams to lines less difficult compared to buses. The rails are also more effecient as there is less friction.
I’d defintely take BRT over no transit but many cities are dense enough to justify electrified trams.
Just lay rails in the lane. Turn it into, I dunno, a fuck you I’m a train lane
The danger with trains is that they have low traction.
What if they added tractors
Well if tractors are involved it is good
On account of the election, you can basically be sure that passenger rail will not happen to any extent any time soon. Expect bigger cars and more highways instead, as this is what is outlined in Project 2025.
Incredibly bleak.
Going backwards while the rest of the world builds more functional and fair cities. We feel just as bad up here in Canada where our provincial premier is overstepping cities to force them to remove bike lanes that just got installed. The lanes are along a subway corridor and there are several apartment buildings planned on those roads that have extensive bicycle parking plans with much less car parking. And we’ve got big plans for new highways while we refuse to build rail along the densest part of our nation.
“Just one more highway bro, the 413 will fix it this time”
I can’t even afford to use the last one they made.
Soon, many of us won’t be able to afford to drive at all, it would be nice if we had other options
We don’t even need big trail routes. Just put in a small trolley that stops throughout a city. It doesn’t need to go everywhere but it could do business areas and tourist destinations
Take any tech bro take on transit, and if you try to perfect it, you’ll almost always end up with a train.
What about those giant quadcopter type things they keep wanting to build to fly from building rooftops in cities for some reason?
Within cities?
Look, aircraft are Hella noisy and if stuff goes bad, they’ll smash into buildings. Using them for intra-urban transit is not safe. Besides, I don’t know if multicopters can autorotate[1], which only adds to the safety concerns.
So why not bring it slightly closer to the ground. Maybe put the transportation device on a bridge or viaduct. And while you could put some stairs up from the streets, you may even choose to link buildings into them directly. Most tall buildings have lifts, after all.
Next, giving each building its own link into the system would be excessive. You can achieve 90 percent of the utility if you have larger entry hubs for multiple buildings, and expect people to walk the last mile.
Anyway, back to the vehicle, since a vehicle for a handful of people is rather inefficient, why not build the vehicles for many dozens of people? Why not build it to connect multiple vehicles? If you run, like, four of these, every five minutes, most people will be able to walk up any time and just go.
And to make that movement more efficient, let’s have our vehicles roll along a specifically designed path, optimised for minimal friction by using hard wheels on a hard surface.
There, I replaced the quadcopters with a train.
EDIT:
[1]: According to one answered question on a StackExchange page, the answer to this question is probably no. Autorotation requires some magnitude of control of the pitch of your rotors, something that most multicopters do not have.It does make me intrigued to see what’d happen if you could or did fit a multicopter with swashplates and pitch-adjustable rotors.
If they really want rooftop travel, a gondola system could probably work.
Works assuming the rooftops are roughly in line of sight. That is something I assumed not to be definitively true in the other comment…
Oh I mean you can replace them, but when nothing of the original system remains you’re not so much optimizing the idea as throwing it out to use trains instead
Everyone thinks the sky is big, without considering just how unscalable flying cars are
- no building is designed for large scale entry/exit at roof top. Most don’t support any
- the low altitude airspace over a densely populated area is very limited. Given current separation, minimum altitude, speed limitations, a city can support only a small number of flying cars. And no, “smart” vehicles don’t change the laws of physics, even if they help us get closer to them
- a flying car will always be more expensive than a not flying car, which will always be more expensive than transit
Let’s stop worrying about new ways for the ultra-rich to avoid the frustrations the rest of us have to deal with, we’ll all be better off if they also have an incentive to design more effective cities and transportation for everyone
I wasn’t, to be clear, advocating for them, just pointing out that they were one of those things tech bros keep suggesting over and over again. I don’t suspect they’re something to really worry about, because I don’t really expect the economics of them to work out.
I wouldn’t expect the economics of private jets to work out either, and yet…
What about the moon? Surely not…
Well, ultimately space elevators are the most energy efficient way to escape Earth’s gravity well. And once we have one of those, mind as well build a mass driver at the top so rockets don’t have to carry so much of their own mass. Then we can build a laser-based photonic sail on the other end to decelerate the cars and make them even lighter/faster, and then build track at the bottom…
Train.
What about interstellar travel?
Well, ultimately wormholes are way more efficient than any subluminal travel once the infrastructure to build them is in place: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/48545a0f6352a
So we control traffic on each side carefully. In fact, we could just suspend a really strong wire on either end…
Yep. Train.
And once we have one of those, mind as well build a mass driver at the top so rockets don’t have to carry so much of their own mass.
You wouldn’t even need a mass driver. You have to build your space elevator so that it’s center of mass is where you want it to orbit. Logically, this needs to be at geostationary orbit so that the end point on the ground stays in the same spot. That means you can extend the other end of the elevator to twice geostationary orbit. Lift a mass from the ground to the far end of the elevator and just let it go. It will be flung away out of earth orbit because it’ll already be moving faster that orbital velocity at that height. You’re limited in the direction you can fling it because it will be flung off by the Earth’s rotation, but you don’t necessarily need a mass driver.
I mean, currently both space elevators and wormholes (as transportation) seem physically impossible.
If we’re not sticking to the realm of our current understanding of physics, then that opens the doors for techbros too, because we’re in the realm of speculative fiction and things can be however we say they are.
They’re physically possible, just massive engineering challenges. Read Orion’s Arm’s overview, it’s largely based on current known physics.
For space elevators, to the best of my knowledge, there is no known material that can withstand the forces involved. Not even CFNTs.
For wormholes, we’re getting so deep into speculation that the conversation doesn’t even really matter.
The problem is “perfection” looks different to different people.
If you’re optimizing for efficiency, then you’re absolutely correct.
If you’re optimizing for convenience then shit like personal taxi drones is probably gonna be better.Trains are extremely convenient. You optimize them for convenience by adding more trains.
That’s how you get to cars.
Add more trains.
The trains now need to seat fewer people so make them smaller. Maybe 2-7 people per train.
Most routes aren’t needed at any given time, so you might as well only run the train when someone needs it.
Rather than keeping the unused trains in a central depot, keep them at the departure points
We can’t staff all these trains, and if the departure points are peoples’ homes, then let’s have the people themselves drive it
The network of destinations requires a TON of rail switches, and coordinating that is a complicated. Better to use a technology that doesn’t require switches, like wheels on pavement.Boom, cars.
So it really depends on what you’re optimizing for.
And walkability.
When I first moved to Boston many years ago, I had some enlightening experiences. I loved how walkable Boston is, I loved trains, but I did not expect the the feeling of freedom I got from leaving my door with only a T pass in my wallet and Having so much of the city so convenient.
It was revelatory just how much more convenient that was than using a car, when all my life I expected to use a car to go practically anywhere. The challenge is sharing this experience among others who have only known car life, making the advantages real, immediately beneficial.
And yet a coordinated approach with multiple strategies will most effectively cover every use case.
- conservatives get too attached to personal vehicles as the strategy they are most familiar with, most focussed on
- too many transit advocates recognize the limitations of personal vehicles and the advantages of rail, but tend to speak in absolutes that scare conservatives.
Yes it’s critical that we refocus much of our transportation effort to give more people better choices in more scenarios, but that will never rule out cars
The point I was trying to make was that tech bros are almost certainly trying to optimize for convenience, because they live in a bubble where thats what’s important to them (or that’s what has the highest margins).
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I mean, every once in a while you might end up with a bike instead.
Issue is, tech bros want “individual pods”, with some futuristic look.
I want to be done with car shaped cars… I want a self driving room to show up…I want to say “send me a living room/bedroom/office/whatever,” and have a room shaped vehicle show up to get me. I want that vehicle to drive me to the nearest train tracks and hop on the tracks itself and then zoom me to the nearest hyper loop and jump itself on that to zip me across the country in an hour… Join up with other “rooms” as you go to create a typical looking train
Having slept in a train bed that has a bathroom and was 3 doors down from a kitchen, it’s wild that we looked at a car and went, “That’s what I want.”
Jetsons theme starts playing
go live in a tiny house first to get a feel. you can even get one on wheels and have it towed around for the full experience. be kinda pricy though
I mean…I don’t want to live in it, I just want it to be able to handle both roads and rails and zip me around
you can do roads or rails not both
With that attitude lol
Ah hyperloop, the fictional transportation method meant to scam California voters
It would require a Manhattan Project sized effort, but I think it could be done
Can’t we just do like, lines on the road that have specific meanings? We could put it all in a book of rules and standards? Make it a nation wide system?
For an international system, the EU has taken some measures to try and make the road markings and such easier for self-driving cars to recognize and whatnot.
At the request of the European Council, the European Commission has introduced that road markings and traffic signs shall be designed and maintained in such a way that they can be properly recognized both by human drivers and by autonomous vehicles.
You could put up signs that give directions
I think what they want is trains with individual private cars that can automatically choose the tracks you want by selecting a destination. Which would be fucking awesome it’s how I thought cars worked when I was 4, I swear all the steering wheel did was change lanes (my folks were good drivers I guess).
next up in the agenda: what if we make cars larger so more people can travel in them simultaneously
Main selling point of cars is that you don’t have to share them with strangers.
I know it’s just a meme but they both solve different enough problems. A self-driving car can easily turn back into a non-self driving car, meaning you can self drive for long transit and switch to a normal one in the city or hectic areas. This basically solves the issue of self drive tech not being smart/reliable enough. Which, as you probably also agree, is still quite far from perfect.
Self driving cars will allways use far more energy and space per passenger than a train or light rail. And personally owned cars will spend more than 90% of their time just standing around, being useless and wasting space. If you propose self driving taxis, you’re just another step closer to trains.
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50998469228_c41072cb16_b.jpg
Already ahead of you.
Didn’t Elmo muskrats tunnel end up causing more traffic?
If tomorrow we banned non-self-driving (NSD) cars, sure. But in most countries, grandfathering in old cars is going to happen for a while. Which means that self-driving and non-self-driving cars will have to share the road.
I could see some transitions possibly. For example, on a 4-lane highway: “In 2027, lane 1 will be separated by a barrier and only allow SD cars. Lanes 2-4 will be for NSD cars only. In 2029, lanes 1-2 for SD. By 2033, NSD cars will be banned on this highway.”
Self driving cars are terrible for privacy
It’s not a hard problem to solve. It’s not hard to see the reasoning behind a desire for self driving cars. Anyone who lives outside of a big city in the US knows this.
Roads are already present. Traffic control is already present.
Tie the goddamn roads to the goddamn traffic control and have it coordinate the cars. The cars input their destination, and have radar to stop the car to prevent accidental collision.
The problem is people don’t like that they can’t get to their destination faster, they don’t have the freedom of choosing their exact route, and they can’t just rev their engine whenever they want.
It’s not mass transit, but it solves the final distance problem.
I remember reading something (unauthoritative?) about Microsoft (maybe it was a decade ago at least) working on self driving cars and deciding the only way to get it to work safely was to put rfid tags in the road and the other cars and the postboxes and the children and the everything.
I just keep thinking about the automated robots that have existed since I was a child that just followed a painted line on the ground. Those operate around people, other robots and vehicles in ways similar to traffic on a public road, and yet they have none of the issues autonomous cars have. They’re far, far more simple.
If a line-following robot bumps into a 3 year old, it might knock them over. It’s a different situation with high speed 2 ton death machines
Let’s bring back trams and trollies
There’s trolleys in my city. I love them riding on their little tracks and I go choo choo.
Trains don’t self-drive, though.
Edit: Okay, for the pedants: most trains don’t self-drive.
But do you know how easy it is to have self driving train compared to self driving car? Because trains only need speed control. Honestly trains are already almost self driving and only needs human inputs occasionally.
You’d think so. But at least Germany struggles massively with missing personnel to staff trains (which includes roles beyond the driver). As far as I know there is no automated solution on the horizon for any form or scale of train traffic. The only self driving trains I have experienced require tight control of the rail environment (entirely underground or lifted above the surface) and special stations with airlocks.
Maybe there is just more money in self-driving cars. But I’m pretty sure they will happen before wide spread automated trains. Which sucks.
Yeah I think it’s the money issue. The companies have more money making self driving cars. Specially since the incremental advancements make them more money on every new car sell.
While trains don’t have incremental advancements with sells associated with them. They have less training and incentives. But technology wise it is definitely easier to control speed 1D, while mostly looking at the front (maybe back) compared to the degree of control/sensors cars need.
Someone has never been to most airports. Or Disney World.
That’s not most trains. Those are highly specialized and constrained applications. There are already self-driving taxis in certain defined city areas, so they’re still ahead by that standard.
I was in Barcelona last month and the metro was automated. Some trams in Switzerland too when I was there two months ago
I’m not a city person but I assumed that was just normal now.
Dunno if you’re from NA but if so just remember you might be a decade behind on public transport
Most trains aren’t public transit, either. They’re freight haulers.
Dunno if you’re from NA
Ha ha yep
Europe has freight trains too.
I don’t see why this is a point worth quibbling about. The “gag” is that rails are designed for self-driving vehicles, but most trains are not self-driving. It’s only relatively recently that any of them are.
DLR trains do, and several airport trains.
Some London Underground lines have drivers that only intervene in the automatic operation of the train in an emergency or abnormal condition.
What? The train in my country are mostly self-drive.
As long as it goes right from my house directly to where I need to go, take me and whomever I need exclusively, and also optionally be my own little space I could customize to my taste, then hell yeah, I’d take the tram.
But at this scale rails seem to be inefficient. PRT is where it’s really at.
So bike lanes but for cars. What could go wrong.
