Cars fulfill a very self-indulgent narrative. 'I get to decide where and when I travel', makes people feel "free" snd "important" even when millions of them are silently coming to the same decisions-- like going downtown at 09:00 on weekdsys-- that allow huge efficiency plays.
Notice how many ads feature fantasies of open roads and trips to faraway attractions, not the real world of "I need to sit in rush hour traffic from 6:30 on to get to the Work Factory"
Maybe public transit needs to focus its message on the freedom from drudgery it offers-- you don't have to be staring at the driver in front of you, scanning the traffic reports
Exactly! This is why I love micromobility and quality public transit so much. With micromobility like electric scooters or bikes, I can zip past traffic in the protected cycle lanes in my city. With the frequent metro service in my city, I know I can show up to the metro station at basically any time and know it'll be a max 5-minute wait for the next train. And when I'm on the train, I can just chill and scroll on my phone or read a book instead of stressing about traffic. The freedom to think about something that isn't traffic.
Unfortunately as it stands in some places the infrastructure is awful. Take England for example; catching a train to London takes about 20 minutes for me, however there are often 10-15 minute delays that you now have to start accounting for, you also have to sit in a cabin with someone blaring their music that isn't to your taste. Hopefully you're not in a cabin with a toilet, because it's going to stink of shit.
Now the return journey, fingers crossed it's not cancelled otherwise you have another 40 minute wait for the next train! Last train home is a real anxiety inducing experience, will you be getting that train home or has it been cancelled? This is unfortunately all too common here. Sadly because public transport is for profit rather than a necessary service we have someone trying to do the bare minimum to make that money, and then pay the bare minimum to their staff who don't give a shit. It all begins to unravel and people just have a better experience sat in that morning traffic which is a more consistent and pleasant experience to the public transport.
The problem is once they started to turn public transport into for profit, there is little way to turn back. They invite private companies to build the network, do the operation, now how can they go back to be non profit to be a public service to the people ? Unless they do subsidise fares which will look like they are siphoning money from government to private companies. It’s a no winner situation. If the government wants to nationalise the public transport they will have to spend a significant amount of money to buy them off , which may or may not be affordable to them.
I'd say it is more about convince convenience. You decide when you leave and you leave from your door. You don't risk being late to work because you missed the train by 1 minute (baring queues, but you get the point).
Every five minutes is not enough, every minute is definitely needed for rush hour. Thankfully, I live in London where tube trains come every minute, yey!
Really depends where you live. In my town I also decide when I leave, and I don't risk being late because I missed the train by one minute. I'll just take the next one. More risk of being late because of car traffic.
The problem when people compare cars to public transport is that they compare the current state of public transport in their area. We need to compare what would happen if we were spending as much billions as we do on cars.
If I'm doing a short trip locally in the city, I get that convenience out of my bike. There are times I would have taken a taxi somewhere, but when the app told me how long it would take for my driver to arrive, I just end up cycling there (often rolling past some long lanes of traffic in the process). That process can be even better if a city is built with safe biking paths.
Bikes don't have to be seasonal. Some Nordic countries have well maintained and plowed biking networks and they see significant use throughout the winter.
I get heat warnings every other day lately, and unless it's the rare cloudy day my UV index is at the top of the scale. I don't worry about snow here, I worry about heat and sun. I don't see a good solution for that unless you want to build covered bike routes with ventilation fans all through the metroplex?
That's an unfortunate aspect of global warming I don't see talked about a lot, as more places approach wet bulb, any kind of physical activity outdoor will become deadly.
For me it's moreso the cold. But the act of biking should warm you up anyway. I think it really depends. The pathways are definitely clear, the question is if the weather would make someone drive vs bike.
I would've expected winter time to invalidate options of bike transport, but in city areas where the snow doesn't stay down, it doesn't end up happening as much. You'd of course want to bundle up for the weather, but then it's not so bad. NJB has even talked about how there are some areas of the world that have permafrost under them, and they still prefer bikes. Rain, in my experience, is just miserable either way, so I'd usually prefer the flexibility to go when a downpour has halted rather than keeping a dedicated roof-mobile around to force my way through. That said, buses have been great for rain too, so again, flexibility.
The sweaty mess remark matches with my experience when I was unused to cycling, and when going uphill. The former becomes less true after even just a week or two of experience on the pedals; I didn't even need a ton of acclimation after recovering from a leg injury. The latter may be a symptom of poorer city planning - which prefers bikes treading flatlands for long distances. It shouldn't end up being tiring when you're basically moving your legs in a walking motion at a low pace (traveling for chores is naturally going to be very different from the Tour de France).
At my old job we had showers there, so in the morning I'd just grab a quick bite and pedal off with my change of clothes in my backpack, and shower when I got there.
Hang on, the sweating goes down with more experience? I was under the assumption it'd just stay that way.
What it really comes down to for biking in the winter is how cold it is vs how much biking itself warms you up. I think most of the time it's probably fine, but there are definitely conditions where it'd be unsafe but a car wouldn't be.
What bothers me is that climate change is making those conditions more frequent, but biking is a good solution to combat emissions too.
I still would love to see a YouTube channel that takes the audio of car ads, and re-edits it with shots of the car in question just sitting in traffic.
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.
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.
Because as much as trains and buses are great for everyday commuter movement (and having amenities within walking distance is key as well), there's two issues:
Changing the infrastructure and zoning of an existing city is much easier said than done. Ripping up concrete, tearing down existing business and homes to increase densification, that's a huge undertaking.
Trains never replaced the horse drawn carriage. You can never fully eliminate the need for cars because sometimes you need to move something big like a couch. Even if there's less cars on the road, it'll never be 0, as this also includes things like ambulances, and fire trucks that can't rely on schedules.
It in that case the people with power wanted the change. They could profit from it, so it came easily.
Once those same people can make money by densifying urban areas into rental hellscapes and monopolizing public transit, you’ll have that. And it will suck.
That’s what rentals are for. Yeah, there’s always going to be a need for low volume cargo transport and emergency response, but ultimately building cities so 90% of trips can be easily and comfortably accomplished via mass transit should be the goal. Nobody is suggesting transit can replace all cars.
The image in the post is of a yogi of some sort stating that electric cars are here to save the car industry first, and my impression of it is that it's suggesting that exploring the idea of electric cars is unwise.
And hell yeah, efficient transit and walkable cities are the goal. But while we're working on that goal, we should also focus on electrifying cars! Tackle the crisis in multiple ways. Because there's no way we're gonna stop using cars overnight, and if we can make cars more environmentally friendly while we taper off of them, that's a win.
If a solution involves lining a billionaire's pockets, he's unlikely to offer you an alternative.
Electric cars are palatable for most of us because it just involves a straight swap. No lifestyle changes needed. It's a much easier sell than lugging all your shopping home on the bus.
Yes. If we had infinite money, infinite time, and the ability to put people into stasis while we tear up entire cities to retrofit them for a train system… that still wouldn’t solve the problem.
Cars haven't existed forever and we managed to build places around them. There's no reason we can't start building everything new around other modes of transport.
If you live in a city, you are done. If you live on the outskirts of a city?...
I live in Switzerland, and none of the problems you mention in the next few paragraphs exist here. I mean frequency of public transport isn't as good out of the cities, but I can get a bus or train to pretty much anywhere a car can get to, and some places they can't. The buses are nice and work well, they have priority in the city so they don't get stuck in traffic. I can get train, tram, bus, or bike to the airport no problem and if I need something bigger than I can carry I'll just get it delivered. Yes Switzerland is rich but there's a lot of money to be saved if it wasn't being spent on cars, car infrastructure, and all of the externalities of driving. It's also small, but our trains don't go particularly quickly.
Even then, the vast majority of people in developed countries (and the majority worldwide) live in urban areas. If the people living in podunk towns need to drive, power to them. Focusing on urban areas will have a bigger impact.
But unless you are rich enough to live in the city center, you are still going to deal with a lot of headaches.
And the alternative is being rich enough to afford a house in the suburbs AND a car for every member of the family? Walkable doesn't have to mean the city centre, and it's much easier to achieve if you don't have to kowtow to a bunch of suburbanites who want to drive their SUVs through your neighbourhood.
First: Your baseline is Switzerland? The 6th highest GDP per Capita (how the hell is Ireland 5th?!?!?!) which ranks 132nd for area.
Please read my entire comment, I addressed this already.
Again, if you live in Tokyo or even freaking New York City (arguably all of New York+New Jersey but upstate NY is REAL republican), you are more or less good. You might be a bit inconvenienced if you don’t live near a rail station, but you’ll probably be looking at a 20-30 minute pre-commute.
The vast majority of people in developed countries live in urban areas, so for the vast majority of people that drive, this isn't an issue. It is the rich suburbanites who are driving into cities.
Yes. If we had infinite money, infinite time, and the ability to put people into stasis while we tear up entire cities to retrofit them for a train system… that still wouldn’t solve the problem.
Fun how we had zero fucking problem doing it to every city in the country for cars. 🤷
EDIT: lol so the !fuckcars on lemmy.world is just pro car drama addicts, got it.
My brother in Christ we haven't BEEN HERE for multiple centuries. Fun watching people give zero fucks that their defense of the status quo doesn't make a damn lick of sense or even adhere to basic knowledge of reality.
Actually most cities had rail laid out and working commuter trains. The car manufacturers bought them up and purposely ran them into the ground to increase car sales. (Think Twitter) they were run like that.
Some cities, yes. LA is an example, right? And how they wrecked the street cars.
But not my city. Calgary was built as a stop on the Trans Canadian Railway, and that still exists, and there's an (okayish) light rail train system here that's slowly been built over the years and not torn down. Fully wind powered, too! Edit: our public transit kinda sucks though, I'm not saying we're great. My commute to the office would be over an hour by transit and twenty minutes by car, I'm lucky I work remote.
A majority of North American cities that have grown within the last hundred years (coinciding with cars) were built from the ground up with cars in mind as the primary form of commute.
Yeah, all of those things weren't problems at the dawn of the steam engine. Those are all problems brought on by the automobile and oil companies designing cities in the 40s.
I would just settle for sidewalks, where I live in the USA it's just streets with no sidewalks everywhere. I used to live one mile from where I worked and I could barely even bike there because of crazy car drivers and nowhere to go if someone wasn't paying attention. Rural America is going to be car dependent for a long, long time.
My daughter can't walk the 1/4 mile to school because it's on a major road with no sidewalk. So we drive her, every day. It's bad for the environment and bad for her health.
Uh, appparently only 61% of German train lines are electrified. I know of at least 2 heavily used lines that aren't (so far). One is the connection Basel towards Bodensee, the Hochrheinbahn. Another is Ringzug.
That is as local as it gets around here. We don’t have subways or street cars, it’s either busses (diesel) or train (motor coach actually) for even single digit km distances.
But yeah, it is real rail, not some separate local network.
But that's a certain level of naivete. I've lived in Europe and in the Western US, and for people who have lived in urban or suburban situations their whole lives, they simply can't comprehend the vast tracts of land that exist in most of the US. Public transport isn't viable when your nearest neighbor is at least five acres away.
Well yes, if you live in the middle of nowhere with literally no one else nearby, then public transport obviously doesn't make sense. But that's not where most people live.
A large part of the population in the US doesn't have access to public transport not because it wouldn't be viable, but because car-centric infrastructure was built instead. And often better designed cities were bulldozed to make room for it.
I was also going to recommend the Not Just Bikes video @[email protected] linked, definitely check it out!
True, but a lot of US real estate, even in big cities, started out agricultural. Those underpinnings are still affecting them today, given that they are less than 300 years old. They just don't have the history of being piled on top of each other that Europe has. The original American inhabitants didn't have the infrastructure Europe has had since the Romans, even if their population HAD been so concentrated.
The U.S population density is less than half that of Europe, even today.
Please. I have gone to Italy and seen far vaster landscapes in the mountainous areas than I've ever been cognizant of in the United States. And yes, I saw these locations from the window of a bus taking the highway system. The key thing is, people are not going to those far-out locations frequently. Actual transit problem-solving relates to the broad majority of the use cases people have, not about abstractly going to a pin thrown on a map.
I have metro+train and it already wears me out so much that alI arrive at the office tired. I can’t imagine how I would survive through 3 different transit options twice a day
I don’t know, I could not even imagine the transit switch to be not overwhelming, it’s just way too many changes for me in a short span of time, like too many tasks. go down, wait for metro, try to not miss the stop, get up on escalator, go to platform, wait there, it’s just sucking out energy out of me, if I spent all that time just sitting on the train yes I unwind and I love it but dragging my laptop around and standing and waiting and having to concentrate instead of getting into the flow is disruptive for me. Plus I feel like underground is super dark and dirty and on the bus I get nauseous from so many braking and stopping and all the vibrating from the road
I'm sure you're aware part of that anxiety can come from the unfamiliarity. I'm surprised it doesn't end up being compared to the stress of merging from an on-ramp in a car, or watching crosswalks for pedestrians, or even just backing out of a driveway in some people's cases.
100% anxiety from unfamiliarity. My last job had me flying over the US (terrible but it was for a renewable energy company and I was part of the Ops team). The first trip, I missed my flight, on which was my overnight bag.
But from that first flight, I knew exactly what to do, where to go, and when to do it.
If people take time to learn these systems over time, then these fears go away. Just takes courage to learn something new
hmmm, do I want to sit in a train, flip my laptop open and do some work, then walk through a park to the office for today... Or do I want to sit in traffic and do nothing...
Work time starts when I open the laptop. I'm not volunteering that time, since i'm not completely insane. It makes a huge difference whether my workday starts in the office, or in the train.
You're right. It's been raining all day today with a forecast of thunderstorms, I absolutely want to sit in a warm, dry box and not walk through the park :p
Are you seriously trying to tell OP that he's lying about not living near a train? Or are you trying to say that the part about them running on a fixed track isn't true? Either way, this is a really dumb take.
Also, you clearly haven't been to rural areas, where dirt and gravel roads are common. Cars handle those just fine.
But those roads are far more numerous and further reaching than train tracks. Trains go from a to b. Cars can go which ever route you want. And you don't build train tracks around a house.
Thats not true also. Rails have junctions that alow switching tracks and work like a normal road. The reason theres more roads is irelevante as it depends on investment. Some places invested more into roads and others did in rail. Check out old rail maps on the US
I have an electric car because I refuse to pay any more money to fossil fuel companies but still need to drive. I use public transport where possible, but many trips just aren't viable.
It takes me 30 minutes to walk to the nearest shopping centre, but 2 hours to get there by public transport, or 5 minutes by car.
As an average citizen, I don't have the means to build or fund new railway lines. I am, however, lucky enough to be able to refuse to drive fossil fueled vehicles and still survive.
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.
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).
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 motor
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
This isn't a binary. We need both robust public transportation and electric cars (with an electric grid supplied by renewable energy). Public transportation can't take you anywhere at anytime -- it's all a game of statistics and demand. If 12000 people want to go downtown at 7 pm, and 3 people want to go the opposite direction to get to work to start their night shift, you're going to see buses and trains headed downtown but not the opposite side of town.
Public transportation is best served for commutes and travelling to popular areas, and that's where the majority of emissions are coming from. Cars can supplement with everything else
They are, but only in specified routes. The issue is the areas they don't hit because there isn't a ton of demand. That said, someone else mentioned a taxi type public transit service, and that would solve this perfectly.
I'm all in favour of trains. I only take the train to work, and it's so convenient I even take my kids to the city via train, to entertainment or shopping. However, even though I live inside the capital city in a Western European country, the train we take is powered by diesel. The government has been talking about electrifying the track for years, and the current estimate is that it will take another decade or more to get it done. There's a single electrified rail line in the entire country, and based on the electrification progress it will take several decades to electrify the rest (if ever). Based on this experience, I'd venture to say that electric cars are far easier to deploy than electrify train lines.
Even on diesel trains they are far far far more energy efficient than cars. Current estimate is that it takes 3.7 liters of fuel to transport 1 tonne of cargo for 100km. That's incredibly more efficient than any car can get. Not to mention cars carry around on average 1.3 persons inside.
Train infrastructure is also significantly more scalable. You can add another train car for passengers at the price of one passenger car and you have increased capacity of that train immediately. Same goes to downsizing. Rails can be easily adapted to have overhead wires. Train wheels are metal as are tracks which means significantly cheaper maintenance and slower wear than asphalt and rubber.
It's nothing to do with ease of deployment. It's all about selfishness of people and their inability to or lack of willpower to change. Even if people switched to motorcycles, which are still ICEs it would still be a lot cleaner for the environment since it would effectively eliminate traffic jams and reduce road maintenance significantly. Not to mention not needing to move 1 tonne of metal for no more than 1 passenger.
Running errands on public transport is an absolute nightmare. Imagine having appointments, hauling bags of groceries and maybe even having a child or pet on a leash, all while trying to catch busses and trains. Public transport is great to get a lot of people to a common place, but that's about it.
Its not exactly cheap either. Where I live, a single one direction train ticket costs roughly as much as 2 liters (~½ Gallon) of gas. 2 liters can get me in and out of the downtown area about 3-5 times, depending on traffic. Or once with an hour of parking.
If an electric vehicle would fall out of the sky into my lap and the only thing I had to care about is fuel (electricity) I'd definetly would save money and time compared to public transport.
Public transport is absolutely necessary, but not the solution for everything.
Doesn't mean it's not a nightmare, and that doing it with a car wouldn't be easier. Try doing this with two toddlers one day, lol, I promise you it's not as easy as watching someone else do it.
Depending on how rowdy kids are, it's not even easy in the car. You're strapped in, focused on roads, and any "incidents" they incur may require you to pull over.
The other thing about public transit heavy cities is, in order for people to use them, they have to be much more walkable - in other words, not wasting their wide open space with eight-land roads, or ocean-sized parking lots. That also means, if all you're going out for is groceries, it would be a waste of time to get in a car, or a train; just walk to a grocery store and back. Plus, if the trip genuinely does work out conveniently, you would not need to buy huge quantities in bulk each trip - just take multiple short trips through the week.
I happen to have a somewhat lucky city living situation, and this is pretty much how it works out for me. Sometimes when someone visits me, they offer to drive me to the grocery store, and it's basically just as much hassle as walking, thanks to the pedestrian underpass I normally take home.
I can fully understand your position. People in big and densely packed cities profit a lot from proper public transport and vice versa. Plus the city itself is layed out to function with public commute in mind, I've experienced it personally in New York.
I'm from a rural area. Our public transport system can't fully replace cars. The main transit traffic is concentrated around rush hour in the morning and evening. To provide most people with public commute would require an immense increase in busses and train lines, only for 80% to be idle during low traffic hours.
There's often a visual comparison between how many people a full car and bus can carry. Obviously the bus wins. But you rarely see the comparision between the space needed for a single empty car or bus to be parked. Cars can park on the side of the road or have a parking lot on location (even underground). Busses need ports and infrastructure. Trains are an even bigger problem to store. Their ports can easily take up a good chunk of the entire city. That's why there's always a financial incentive to have too little busses or trains than too many. People can tolerate waiting, but can't tolerate higher prices to sustain a surplus on transport.
Also, public transport is often confined to local bubbles. Go outside your bubble and things start to get messy. When I was in High School, we had about ¼ of our class commute every day from one city over. They were either way to early or always late, because one cities train and bus plan wasn't tuned to the others, resulting in people either having to get up about 2 hours before school starts at 7 am to catch a train or run the risk of missing their bus connection to the school. It's even worse if you are crossing train districts and have to buy multiple tickets. When I was in college, some people came from another major city about 40km away. Their district covered half the state therefore their price was ~300€ per month and additionaly they had to pay 90€ per month for our smaller district. And both of those were the reduced prices for students. I could leave my car running idle for 20 days straight for that price.
EWs are important because cars are never going to be replaced by even the best public transport systems. But at least with could reduce the amount of cancer we get from sitting in traffic and breathing commute air. If I could choose, I'd rather have a power plant spit out steam and gas through state of the art filters somewhere in the outskirts, than to be surrounded by combusted gasoline resedue all day.
Part of the problem with American public tranist is cities assume the transit to be directly profitable. Tramsit functions best when heavily subsidized (just like car infrastructure is). The value brought by transit it terms of property value and connectivity will outweigh the cost of subsidizing it.
I doubt the US even has a say in these dissussions. Their intercity train system is mostly commercial to transport goods from coast to coast or border to border. Sparse availability of public trains means spending roughly the same on 48 hours train ride or a 1 hour plane flight. Building a single highway trough dessert heat of the Midwest is already a toll, but building a countrywide train system would, even if subsidized with the full military budget still be a nearly impossible task. Furthermore you have 50% of the population screaming to stop this socialist nonsense. There are enough examples of unfinished train sections that show what happens if money runs out.
And one might ask them self, how did the US get from cowboys and farms to the beacon of technical advancement? The answer is oil and slaves. They played dirty for 200 years and got ahead. So how does the entirity of Europe have a extensive network of rails spanning millions of kilometers? Was it because they where built before unions and labor rights were a thing? Turns out multi continental projects were mostly achieved through human suffering and disregard for safety. None of which goes nowadays to the same extend as back then. If a project isn't finished within one legislative period, why even start? Policaly you won't reap the fruits of your labor.
I know I'm exagarting, but the principle is simple. The early bird gets the worm. Europe has their trains and the US has their cars. Better to let each one figure out their own thing and then share the knowledge.
The system does not need to just suddenly be country wide. There are many major population centers within the same state or neighboring states that could greatly benefit from high speed rail connection. In this meme's argument trams serve a similar purpose and could be implemented much more locally. Many rail lines have a troubling past but we should not use that as an excuse to not build new ones with modern labor and safety standards.
I can only speak from the experience I have, which is New York and Flint, Michigan. Both are obvious contrasts between one of the richest and poorest cities in the US. New York has maybe one of the best Subway systems in the world. Having a car in NYC is insane. Everything that isn't covered by bus or train, is bridged by rentable bikes on each corner of a block.
Flint could desperately use a couple of busses and a tram, but they can barely afford to keep their river and parks clean of (hopefully) dog poop. I remember seeing tram rails on the road but they where in an inoperable state. The north and west coast has a decent railroad system already but its basically inaccesible without having a car taking you to and from the station.
It really felt like each city in the north was fending for their own. A bus system is quite the investment for a city. You can't just start with a couple of busses and then expand. Otherwise you are running the risk of it being the first thing people point fingers at, once city funds run dry.
A lot governments in the world push for increased public transport spending on the federal level. But it seems everybody is to busy trying to put out political fires to properly appropriate state funds. And if they are approved its often half assed and the cities have to make due with what the have anyway. It's the same in my country, I bet its the same in the US. Just because the urgency increased, doesn't mean the capability did es well.
As an examlme of intercity travel, the average annual milage for cars in Michigan is ~12,370 miles . Let's say that's mostly work commute (which from my experience, it is) so that's roughly 50 miles a day during week days. A US class I railroad trains average speed is ~25 mph, a cars about 50 mph (source: readout from my car back during my stay). You'll spend roughly twice the amount of time on your commute. Thats excluding the fact that a car goes door to door and not station to station.
In rural areas of the US a local bus and tram system would surely improve the life of some people. But its not enough of a reason for Americans to change their car culture or for cities to put some money on the table.
First lets start with the obligatory mention that thanks to zoning laws in the US you are even in this predicament. My grocery store is like just a few hundred metres from my apartment and on my way from work. Instead of weekly shopping I just do it daily / every other day with just the few things I need for those few days. No for hauling grocery bags. And like you wouldn't go shopping before appointments either...
Also you completely forget to factor in the cost of owning an maintaining a car. A yearly ticket for public transport for me is around 500€. I don't own a car so my expense on public transport is just that 500€ with a bit more for holiday trips etc compared to the cost of buying a car every X years, paying for maintenance, and for fuel.
I'm in Europe, not in the US. You are very fortunate to be living in a way that doesn't require a car. That's not the case for most people. Here, we have a lot of smaller towns and ignoring backeries, they have zero places that sell food. I see a lot of elderly people commute by bus for daily grocery shopping. But in this heat, they are in serious danger spending that much time in barely climate controlled busses and trains. Mostly, somebody from their families swings by once a week to fill up their fridge.
The most common scenario is a family, both adults working 9-5, 1-2 children school aged. With children and jobs most people don't have the time to do daily grocery trips. That's why shops are usually overfilled on Friday evenings and Satruday mornings (I worked those shifts in retail). From my experience growing up, a full week of groceries for a mid sized family is impossible to carry by hand.
Also from my experience, public transport is a godsend if you live alone and are tight on money. It takes the burden of maintanig a vehicle of your back. But in a family or a close circle of friends, a car is usually a communal workhorse, used by everyone for everything to avoid the hassle of public transport.
i agree with everything you said, but i do have to say that the problem with Europe isn't proving that public transport isn't that good(i know that's not what you're saying but I can't think of any other way of wording it rn), but rather than the city planning is... unfortunate
Yes, that's what I'm trying to say. In r/fuckcars and also here the term "car centric" and "pedestrian centric" cities is thrown around a lot. Europe is often praised for being build before cars were invented and is therefore naturally friendlier towards pedestrians. But it's not like busses are hovering above the buildings, they are as much car as an SUV, even bigger and bulkier. They have to squish themselves around tight corners. Whole roads get turned into one way streets because a new bus line was opened and now a bus and a car wouldn't be able to pass each other in this medival inner city alley. Public transport requires infrastructure, which means property has to be acquired. One douche not wanting to sell his shed to the city, can grind a whole project into halt. Even if the government took extensive action to invest into public transport, there's only so much they can do. And theres a long line of burrocracy between cause and effect.
In my city at least, I've never experienced the government trying to cull the public transport, there's been a steady improvement over the past 15 years. New lines, Better busses (also electric ones) have been added. Busses have their own traffic lights to give them time to de- and accelerate. But the city is literary at its capacity. It has reached the point of diminishing returns for public transport.
I personally consider the price of the car as the privilege of ownership. Its not like you can change the color of the train if you don't like it or throw you trash in the corner. If the train is to slow, you can't put a turbo in it. Plus, you can always sell you car, but you can't sell your used train tickets.
I've owned my car current car for roughly 4 years now. I got it used and it lost about -1,000€ in value. Maintance is incredibly low, roughly -300€ in total. Insurance was the big money drainer with about -2000€ in total, but I got in a couple of minor fender benders that weren't my fault and only resulted in scratched plastic so I got a payout of about +1300€. So in total, if I were to sell it right now, my car my car cost me 500€ annually over the course of 4 years (fuel exluded). Thats a fair price for the freedom a car gives you.
But there are certain situation that essentialy prohibit using a car. Getting to the airport is far easier by bus (my city has a direct line) and you don't have to pay for weeks of parking.
Late night bus lines make going out to parties and clubs actually enjoyable, because you don't have to leave your car in a shady part of town over night.
Parking is another problem. The US feels like 80% parking space but Europe doesn't have that. The biggest parking area in my city is basically right at the central bus hub. So it wouldn't make any difference time wise to go by car. But thanks to 20 traffic lights, riding a bicycle doesn't either.
Bicyles are like the best extension to public transit. And its highly undervalued. I'd rather have them reduce prices for train tickets that include a bike, than build more train lines. Currently they are nearly twice as expensive as normal tickets (because a bike takes up more space I guess).
I didn't say it cost gas only. Quite the opposite, I ignored the gas cost and shown only my rough cost of ownership. It's just the fact that the huge entry price of buying a car is put in parallel to low ticket prices, when really, it shouldn't. Otherwise you could also add the cost of shoes and clothes to the train ticket, because well you can't exactly ride a train barefoot and in your undies. And all the food for the energy spend walking from station to station, can't forget that.
Yes a decent car can cost between 5 - 10K used, but if you take care of it you will get most of that money back. And I'm not talking about SUVs or Pickup Trucks, but compact hatchbacks with 30mpg or 6-7L per 100km. The engines easily last 10+ years with regular but minor maintanace. 2000s Honda Civics and Toyota Corollas can easily outlast multiple generations of trains and busses.
My city has gone through 4 generations of bus fleets while my buddies dad still rocks a VW T4 camper probably on his 2nd milage gauge loop. We figured out how to make the perfect car in 1993 when McLaren build the F1. Nothing beats low weight and a reliable engine. The big mistake was letting heavy SUVs become the go to car for everybody. Historicaly speaking, it's an overcorrection from the US being invaded by small cheap and reliable Japanese hatchbacks in the 90s. An that I itself was an overcorrection form gigantic 20 feet long cars from the 70s and 80s. SUVs and Pickup Trucks are like a fashion trend, they are not here to stay. Slick E-vehicles seem to be the newest trend, they just haven't fully found the shape they want to be in yet.
From the point of physics, a train weighs hundreds of tons and is pulling another hundreds of tons of weight. A hatchback weight 1-2 tons. They work on the same principles. They need energy to accelerate their mass. Trains need to carry a lot of people to break even otherwise they are just pulling themselves for nothing. You should be uncomfortable having a whole cart to yourself. Sure a car might be 100 times lighter but the train can carry 200 times more people at max capacity. Max capacity being an important factor. Most trains travel way below that. Remove all the traffic lights and hills from a cars path and it will be just as efficient as a train. Trains are just really good mass haulers.
One of the major advantages that trains have over cars is their electric engine. Electric engines have an efficiency of roughly 80 - 90% for transferring energy into motion. Car engines only 20 - 40%. And combustion engine are at their economical limit. Putting electric engines in cars is putting them directly on par with trains.
Thats why we shift towards EVs, because we already have everything but the batteries and charging figured out anyway. Public transport is a political issue, EVs are an engineering and marketing issue.
Jeez I'm not reading all that. You have now twice tried to discount the cost of the vehicle. First you wanted to account only for gas. Second you wanted to call it "privilege", yes you then broke it down for some reason but you want to call it a "privilege" and not account for its cost in the actual transportation.
Fair enough. I realize that I mixed up owning a car, and being able to afford one. I double checked, and, one can own a car in my country while having low or no income and live in subsidized housing. But the value of the car is limited to a certain amount. So I stand corrected, technically "No" owning a car is not a privilege but is considered a basic necessary by our government. But thats only the case if you start collecting financial aid and already have a car. You won't be able to afford to buy one with the aid alone.
I was fortunate enough to have my parents pay upfront for my first car that I couldn't afford while I was in college. I paid them back in full over 2 years and didn't have to pay intrest to a bank. I call that privilege.
Groceries are solved by having smaller but more frequent supermarkets, I can walk to 3 different ones from my house including one that's literally 2/3min walk away (and I live in the countryside), we go daily so we can just carry it back because it's smaller groceries. If bigger, personal carts exist and are gaining popularity around here.
I love good public transport. It's great to not have to worry about parking or having to drive. Good cities, like many in Europe and New York in the US, a car isn't really required.
But out in the countryside, a car is a must. Electric cars are massively better for the environment and way cheaper to run (like tenth the cost with a night rate).
Because North Americans were tricked by the oil and car companies in the 50s to think that car ownership was part of being human, and now we're addicted to sitting in traffic, breathing fumes, and killing pedestrians in the name of muh freedom.
Trains are great to connect cities. But a train trip for me will tipically take me will typically take 3 times longer than it would with a car. Last time I had to take the train/bus it took me 6 hours and had to change between 3 busses and 1 train. I could have done the whole trup in 2 hours, no changes and actually same price as I spent on fuel for my car.
And this is in Scandinavia where things run pretty smoothly!
I agree that within cities public transportation is great. But there are people who need cars no matter how many trains you set up or electrify. For us, EV is a good option (when they become more affordable)
This falls apart as soon as high-speed rail comes into play. I've done multiple train trips that outpace car trips primarily cause the train goes faster than the car.
Honestly no matter how fast the trains go, I won't get home faster than when I use my car. You may, and many others may. The train I have to use connects two major cities. That connection is fair I need to change to several busses though to get from door A to B and that messes things up.
Trains are great if you live in the cities they go through but you can't gave trains go through all cities let alone villages
the thing with trains is they get more inefficient the more tracks there are. Trains are great for connecting a few high spots with high traffic between them, not for everyone's daily transportation needs.
No.. I trains are great to comment A and B. But If you don't live in A or B, the they are not great.. The train network is fair where I live and covers a lot of the country. But still not everyone can use them. The majority of people living in cities can though. It will never cover the needs of all
In my country, 30 years ago, there was a train station every two villages.
French government built a crazy train network in the first half of the 20th century because it was the backbone of war logistics, and it allowed people to move. Cars and Europe made both these needs obsolete, so the rail network was abandoned.
You don't need to go more than 2km to find a train station in my country, it's just that most are abandoned now.
Yes it does. Even a dirt road is still a road. Debris free and compacted. You want to prove me wrong, try driving your car on farmland or through forest and see how far you get.
Oh, I did just that for many years while living in a countryside of a small country in Eastern Europe. Does that look like bloody road to you? Debree free and compacted?
Trust me, you don't need roads for cars, any wide trail suitable for walking or horse riding will do. And there are more trails like that in the world than all the paved roads and railroads combined.
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 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.
Because in our current state with everything built around cars, creating a train system to accommodate it all is nearly impossible. Trains work great in a downtown, or centralized area. They are very difficult to build to accommodate our 1x1 grid system that cars use. Or at least that's my perception of it. Even if the system could be built, it'd have to be manned, it'd have to travel to certain areas at certain times to account for jobs. And it becomes increasingly unwieldy the more requirements you add to it. I wish things had built up along a sustainable train systems instead of cars, but placing a train system in to replace the decentralized nature that cars introduce is a monumental and perhaps untenable task.
I am all for more public transportation in this country, but it wouldn't help me personally. I live outside of city limits- the closest bus line is two miles away. My work is even further outside city limits, a 10-minute drive south of me down a four-lane highway, past farm fields and into an industrial park.
There's just no way public transportation is going to help me there. And even if I didn't have to do it down a highway, there's no way I'm riding a bike there in the middle of winter.
So do please make public transport more available and expansive. Just know that it still won't be a universal solution. Individual transport is needed by some of us.
I plan to get an electric (not a Tesla) for my next car. I currently drive a hybrid.
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?
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.
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.
People here are saying a lot that cars are convenient because there's more roads... like... let public transport run on those roads? People seem to literally be unable to realize that things are the way they are now solely because you refuse to believe they can be in any other way and don't solve problems because "it's not practical". Short termed thinking runs too much
never said it's private car only, but i did use wrong wording, sorry. what i meant was, those are the same roads public transport runs on, so the "cars can go anywhere" point kinda falls unless we're talking offroading. mildly inconveniencing, but that's just a tradeoff, it's the entire point of fuckcars
The problem with public transport is that it only goes on pre-planned routes. If you want to go elsewhere, you can't without a car. And replacing all nature with rails and asphalt is a very bad idea.
you don't need to replace anything, the roads are already there. and if you wanna go somewhere super specific, just walk, keep in mind that if transport is more invested into, it will barely be different from car travel. the mild convenience created by cars isn't worth the clutter that 10 times the volume of automobiles will create. also parking is already a problem now.
The problem isn't the roads, but needing to create a route that touches every single road. Public transportation can't really do customization, it's a one size fits all deal.
My city has a door-2-door system of minibuses that are a bit like the missing link between taxis and buses. They pick you up from wherever you are and take you to wherever you're going, they just pick up other people on the way too. It's generally marketed towards the disabled/elderly, but I don't see why it couldn't be scaled up and be marketed as either a bus+ or a taxi lite.
This is actually the first I've heard of this, and it's actually the perfect solution. If 1/3 of the fleet is dedicated to first come, first serve transportation, it helps a ton with what's otherwise the use case for cars.
A quick search suggests that here in the UK the average driver is spending up to £200 per month on their car (excluding any financing to pay for it in the first place). That much money would easily cover a monthly travel pass in most cities I've lived in, with plenty left over to pay for taxi rides when you need the convenience of door-to-door travel at a time that suits you.
I live in London zone 5, travelling to Zone 1 will cost me £267.30 monthly. One of my colleagues lives in Petersfield. His monthly ticket would be £613.70. You don't know much about train fares in the UK, do you? If you live in Scotland and need to travel to London, it is always cheaper to bloody fly! Sometimes it's cheaper to buy a car for one trip and then just dump it, or, even better, sell it and recoup your costs!
Which, by the way, would not be there like without a government making it so. And if those governments went "nah" to the idea of a stroad and any highway expansion beyond 6 lanes, and threw it all into railways in the '70s, the USA may have had a bullet train network today that'd make Germany jealous.
It's the path of least resistance. If public transport was more effiencent and faster, people would opt for that.
But then you're also dealing with the weather, or some people like the privacy or they enjoy driving their own car. Or not having to worry about time tables and waiting.
All these factor in, and that's why many prefer cars.
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 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Public transit good, but in america public transit is not well funded and only really available in big cities. I think sadly it will be years before americans can give up the independence of being able to have transportation direct from point a to point b. Consider that in rural areas it could be a 30 minute drive to get groceries with no transit options. As long as americans are going to drive cars, we can at least try to make them electric vs ICE.
I will continue to vote for public transit initiatives and if we had a bus or train system in my town I would use it. I have a fuel efficient ICE car but trying to buy electric as soon as I can afford to buy something that isn't a telsa pile of crap.
Yeah, but no train takes me from my front door to my job/the movies/my vacation place. And my car works even if the state decides to shut down the trains/buses.
People associated "freedom to go anywhere" with cars but it's a disguised argument. For the most part it's about not traveling with others. To a degree it's also about status symbol but for the most part they want to be alone and dictate their own schedule. If they really cared about freedom to move wherever they would get offroad motorcycles and never need to pay for parking again.
There are plenty if trains and buses where I'm from, and they still don't cover enough land area, let alone come along often enough and go largely in the direction I need to go to be useful.
Cars are about freedom and convenience. Being anti social is a secondary choice, and a perk.
No they are not. Public transport always needs improving, but getting to close where you need to be is always possible. Cycling after that or using some other sort of transport is possible. Even if you do want to ride your own vehicle to desired location, motorcycles are always better than cars. Even more convenient since you can filter through traffic jams, don't need parking spaces and spend less fuel.
Public Transport takes twice as long to get anywhere for me (and I live fairly close to both trains and buses), and motorcycles are way more dangerous, and can't really carry anything except yourself. Cars are a happy medium between the two, which is why people use them.
Motorcycles are "way more dangerous" if you drive them that way. Falling off of bicycle, motorcycle or a scooter at 30km/h is the same, with added benefit of wearing a helmet. If you ride it at 200km/h, then there's little to increase survivability. There's a reason why speed limits are in place. Sure they are still riskier than armored boxes in which you sit, but they don't have to be. Also if you really care about safety you'd switch to trains and busses which are significantly more safe than cars.
Depends where you live. If you live in the countryside in ireland, the public transport is severely lacking. A 20 minute drive requires you to take probably 2 hours of public transport.
Edit: After cycling for about... an hour to the train station, so probably 3 hours total
There are always going to be edge cases where personal vehicles make sense, but no serious proponent of better public transport is ever going to propose an outright ban on private vehicular use.
The fact is the majority of people in the world live in urban areas, where there shouldn't be the excuse of "oh I live hours away from the nearest station and too few people to justify adding a bus route."
No, I literally just want to be able to go somewhere when the trains aren't running. You can try and put words in detractors' mouths all you want but it's clear you'll only jam them full of lies.
It’s not remotely easier. Trains carriages are easy to build, but the infrastructure is not. You have to move and extend roads, demolish buildings, lay the rails, build bridges, if you go underground there will be lots of digging and engineering work to protect nearby buildings, and don’t forget about maintenance. It is only profitable when the population is high enough and people have the need to travel to set places en mass. Otherwise it is just fantasy. If you live your whole live around any city Center, I can understand that you are not going to drive . But plenty of people lived in a tiny town of population under 10000people .
cars don't need to be driverless to be electric. i'm in favor of public transport but as long as we're in the long process of building it out it's still a lot better to have electric cars than gas guzzlers, with drivers still included.
there is a doctrine here where you fuck up a less optimal but easier solution just to force the world to adopt the better one but it's a shitty thing to do. public transport and electric vehicles aren't exclusive. in fact, for lower density stuff we will need buses and those should be electrified too.
Been seeing a big push for trains in Florida and California lately, hopefully things with Amtrak go well and we see more lines implemented in the future
Because trains aren’t economically viable for the vast majority of the US, and where they are economically they are the topic of conversation.
As far as why the conversation would center around the US, that’s just the regular American-centric tilt english conversations generally lean towards. Most of Europe has their shit together in some topics like this (public transportation, for instance) and the US is a huge consumer of automobiles and no one if building mass transit between the middle of nowhere to the other middle of nowhere where we could ‘efficiently’ move individually insignificant numbers of people at a time.
Why is it that trains are always proposed as the alternative to cars? I, for one, really want PRT to succeed. It seems to be the best middle ground between efficiency and convinience.
The worrying thing here is the assumption that we can choose...
The world has 2 billions individual cars. Lithium extraction rate may not be sufficient to make 2 billions cars by 2030... and that's assuming we don't need lithium for computers, smartphones, but also not for batteries for the grid (because no solar cell works at night and wind farms are not on demand erther), and... not for electric trucks!
Then comes the question of the other metals: copper, nickel, cobalt, ...
Trains will not work everywhere for everyone, but not deploying them now and fast will be a severe issue for North America when resources will get scarce.
We need a smart mix of trains, buses, subways, tramways, shared vehicles, bikes, everything but one individual car per person. That era will come to an end because we're closer to the bottom of our planet's natural resources stock than the beginning.
There's not even a real option of keeping gas cars a little while more, as cheap oil is also coming to an end.
The difference between accepting this and "choosing" individual cars is how ready countries will be when resources will get scarce. It may get ugly...
because in lots of countries there is effectively no public transport culture existing, and car companies take advantage of that. it's really just about car culture and taking advantage of people in my opinion
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.
How many trains run from my garage to the convenience store at anytime I want? Or from my garage to work at anytime between 8 and 9 am and then home at whatever time I want to leave? What about the trains that run to my mother's house or my sister's house in different cities? What about the one that goes to the snowboarding resort I like it in the boonies, or for that matter, the one in the middle of the mountains? I will never live in an apartment with other people for many different reasons, and it gets both miserably hot and dangerously cold where I live. There are plenty of other things to fix before going after vehicles, especially electric vehicles. Making me operate on some strict schedule with trains and buses it other public transportation takes away my freedom to do what I want, and I will fight tooth and nail to make sure that's not taken from me, especially when both can coexist.
My city has metro lines that run every 3 to 5 minutes all day every day, and riding the metro affords me the freedom to do something, anything besides keeping my eyes on the road. I agree that adhering to the schedule of a train that comes every hour (or half-hour) sucks, but it doesn't have to be that way. My city is also building an automated light metro that will run every 2.5 minutes.
If we talked more about building quality trains places, and building good bike infrastructure for micromobility like bikes and e-scooters, train + micromobility would feel far more free than being caged in traffic. In my city, that's how it currently is for me. Metro + my electric scooter makes me feel crazy free within the city. Only thing I wish is they would build even more trains, including to the nearby mountains so I could easily go hiking and camping, too.
Scooters and bikes are not viable when it's literally freezing outside, especially with bad weather conditions. Unless there is transportation literally right out of my door, I would sooner keep my eyes on the road and drive myself. Trains and buses don't stop at the gas station on my way into work to grab my drink for the day, and if they do, they aren't waiting for me. If I need to run some errands, like go to the doctor or run to the hardware store, that is significantly less convenient with public transportation. I just got 4 bags of softener salt the other day that totaled 160 lbs. Not a chance I would try to lug that on a bike or carry it on and off a bus or train. I'm not saying I wouldn't use it sometimes, and have in cities like Minneapolis and New York, but I was visiting and either didn't have a car or wasn't in condition to drive so worked around it. Again, they can coexist , but fighting electric vehicles of all things is a dumb fight.
I’m not biking in the rain. Period. That is miserable and I’m not subjecting myself to it. I’ve done it, it sucked. I turned up to work soaking wet and very unhappy. Snow is a complete non-starter since my city is famous for poor snow management.
And if any of the distances between your errands or home are too much for you to walk, a frequent public transport network makes it easy to just hop on and off as needed, and not have to worry about parking. And for carrying a lot, cargo bike rentals are really cool, but just paying for delivery works well too.
I live in Canada. I rode my scooter to work all winter (including in -14 celsius weather) without issue thanks to good bike infrastructure that gets plowed promptly. Quite a few cyclists in my city do the same, as it's actually not nearly as bad as you might imagine it, provided your city actually cares about bike infrastructure. It was actually pretty fun.
For more, there are cargo ebikes or even just renting a car for the occasions that you do need to carry heavy stuff. And for most average people, we don't lug around 160 lbs on a daily basis.
My point in all of this is not that we should make a car-free society. It's that our focus on "oh, let's just switch to EVs and change absolutely nothing else in society!" is misguided. Sure, there are certain things cars can do that won't be replaced, at least not any time soon, but plenty of places in the world already thrive with much fewer cars and much more micomobility and public transit.
Nobody is forcing you to only use the transit. We just want the option to be available and be effecient because for some of us it is cheaper or more convenient.
Just remember that resources are limited and if you want to use your part of the pie for stuff like that, you’ll have to save in other places. Possibly eating less/no meat, not/rarely going on vacation, living in a small home and using less energy for heating/cooling or whatever works.
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.
I don't know why you're being downvoted. Safety is my number 1 concern. The amount of times I've had to avoid dodgy / unsafe situations on public transport is crazy.
Finally getting a car was the best decision ever. Until they make public transport safe, I'm not on it.
Because I value my autonomy and don't want to have to wait for a train to show up when I want to go somewhere. Also, paved roads are significantly cheaper to maintain than rail lines, which makes a substantial difference when you take into account the size of the US.
A frequent transport networks gives you much more autonomy than a car, since you don't have to worry about maintenance, parking, or traffic. It can be frequent enough to just turn up and go.
Cars come along with many external costs that are often not accounted for, such as the costs associated with pollution and the increased healthcare costs associated with that as well as injuries and deaths caused by cars. Plus there's all the parking and extra space needed between all of the places people want to go to needed for that parking and road space.
A train network isn't going to run 24/7 in a town of 300 people no matter how many subsidies it gets from the government. It doesn't make any sense to spend the resources and incur the pollution cost of running a train with nobody on it.
And before someone brings it up, I absolutely refuse to accept the idea of forcing people to live in cities, or anywhere else for that matter.
Most people live in cities. If those people don't drive, the problems are pretty much solved.
Small towns can be very walkable, since you can easily get from one edge of town to the other. And they can have a connection to the outside. But again rural populations driving isn't too much of an issue, as long as they aren't driving into the city every day.
Instead I have to worry about switching trains and schedules and the weird guy in the corner who might have a gun and the homeless person yelling at the voices in their head.
I honestly will never use public transit as long as a private option is available. Fuck being packed in like sardines with no personal space. It gives me panic attacks.
False. More cars = more traffic = longer travel time at a lower capacity than what public transport could achieve. Also, if you enjoy driving so much, you'd very much want everyone else not being on your road, right?
I'm not sharing a cart with retards that bring food onto the train, obnoxious breeders and their offspring. Not to mention shitty infrastructure, lack of airconditioning and having to adhere to whatever schedule they pull out of their ass.
Cars fulfill a very self-indulgent narrative. 'I get to decide where and when I travel', makes people feel "free" snd "important" even when millions of them are silently coming to the same decisions-- like going downtown at 09:00 on weekdsys-- that allow huge efficiency plays.
Notice how many ads feature fantasies of open roads and trips to faraway attractions, not the real world of "I need to sit in rush hour traffic from 6:30 on to get to the Work Factory"
Maybe public transit needs to focus its message on the freedom from drudgery it offers-- you don't have to be staring at the driver in front of you, scanning the traffic reports
Exactly! This is why I love micromobility and quality public transit so much. With micromobility like electric scooters or bikes, I can zip past traffic in the protected cycle lanes in my city. With the frequent metro service in my city, I know I can show up to the metro station at basically any time and know it'll be a max 5-minute wait for the next train. And when I'm on the train, I can just chill and scroll on my phone or read a book instead of stressing about traffic. The freedom to think about something that isn't traffic.
Unfortunately as it stands in some places the infrastructure is awful. Take England for example; catching a train to London takes about 20 minutes for me, however there are often 10-15 minute delays that you now have to start accounting for, you also have to sit in a cabin with someone blaring their music that isn't to your taste. Hopefully you're not in a cabin with a toilet, because it's going to stink of shit.
Now the return journey, fingers crossed it's not cancelled otherwise you have another 40 minute wait for the next train! Last train home is a real anxiety inducing experience, will you be getting that train home or has it been cancelled? This is unfortunately all too common here. Sadly because public transport is for profit rather than a necessary service we have someone trying to do the bare minimum to make that money, and then pay the bare minimum to their staff who don't give a shit. It all begins to unravel and people just have a better experience sat in that morning traffic which is a more consistent and pleasant experience to the public transport.
The problem is once they started to turn public transport into for profit, there is little way to turn back. They invite private companies to build the network, do the operation, now how can they go back to be non profit to be a public service to the people ? Unless they do subsidise fares which will look like they are siphoning money from government to private companies. It’s a no winner situation. If the government wants to nationalise the public transport they will have to spend a significant amount of money to buy them off , which may or may not be affordable to them.
I'd say it is more about
convinceconvenience. You decide when you leave and you leave from your door. You don't risk being late to work because you missed the train by 1 minute (baring queues, but you get the point).This can also be achieved by high frequency transit.
Yeah, if the train comes every five minutes, that's going to be way more consistent than traffic over time.
Every five minutes is not enough, every minute is definitely needed for rush hour. Thankfully, I live in London where tube trains come every minute, yey!
Really depends where you live. In my town I also decide when I leave, and I don't risk being late because I missed the train by one minute. I'll just take the next one. More risk of being late because of car traffic.
The problem when people compare cars to public transport is that they compare the current state of public transport in their area. We need to compare what would happen if we were spending as much billions as we do on cars.
If I'm doing a short trip locally in the city, I get that convenience out of my bike. There are times I would have taken a taxi somewhere, but when the app told me how long it would take for my driver to arrive, I just end up cycling there (often rolling past some long lanes of traffic in the process). That process can be even better if a city is built with safe biking paths.
Unfortunately that's super weather dependent and seasonal. Plus, some of us would be a sweaty mess by the time we biked to where we needed to go.
Bikes don't have to be seasonal. Some Nordic countries have well maintained and plowed biking networks and they see significant use throughout the winter.
I get heat warnings every other day lately, and unless it's the rare cloudy day my UV index is at the top of the scale. I don't worry about snow here, I worry about heat and sun. I don't see a good solution for that unless you want to build covered bike routes with ventilation fans all through the metroplex?
That's an unfortunate aspect of global warming I don't see talked about a lot, as more places approach wet bulb, any kind of physical activity outdoor will become deadly.
For me it's moreso the cold. But the act of biking should warm you up anyway. I think it really depends. The pathways are definitely clear, the question is if the weather would make someone drive vs bike.
I would've expected winter time to invalidate options of bike transport, but in city areas where the snow doesn't stay down, it doesn't end up happening as much. You'd of course want to bundle up for the weather, but then it's not so bad. NJB has even talked about how there are some areas of the world that have permafrost under them, and they still prefer bikes. Rain, in my experience, is just miserable either way, so I'd usually prefer the flexibility to go when a downpour has halted rather than keeping a dedicated roof-mobile around to force my way through. That said, buses have been great for rain too, so again, flexibility.
The sweaty mess remark matches with my experience when I was unused to cycling, and when going uphill. The former becomes less true after even just a week or two of experience on the pedals; I didn't even need a ton of acclimation after recovering from a leg injury. The latter may be a symptom of poorer city planning - which prefers bikes treading flatlands for long distances. It shouldn't end up being tiring when you're basically moving your legs in a walking motion at a low pace (traveling for chores is naturally going to be very different from the Tour de France).
At my old job we had showers there, so in the morning I'd just grab a quick bite and pedal off with my change of clothes in my backpack, and shower when I got there.
Hang on, the sweating goes down with more experience? I was under the assumption it'd just stay that way.
What it really comes down to for biking in the winter is how cold it is vs how much biking itself warms you up. I think most of the time it's probably fine, but there are definitely conditions where it'd be unsafe but a car wouldn't be.
What bothers me is that climate change is making those conditions more frequent, but biking is a good solution to combat emissions too.
I still would love to see a YouTube channel that takes the audio of car ads, and re-edits it with shots of the car in question just sitting in traffic.
Not to mention that well built mass transit achieves the same level of freedom. You'll wait 5 minutes for the train and away you go.
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.
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.
In case you need a hint, it was Doom’s plan.
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.
Big Auto has been destroying any idea of high speed rails for decades. Our trains are complete trash because of car lobbyists.
Muskrat is one of the biggest ones to blame.
And they expand the roads and freeways to have rails literally no place to go
Denver has decent rail, but I have to walk/bike across this insane hellscape of cars trying to kill me for 1 1/2 miles to get to the station
Because as much as trains and buses are great for everyday commuter movement (and having amenities within walking distance is key as well), there's two issues:
Fun how we had zero fucking problem doing it to every city in the country for cars. 🤷
Including destroying neighborhood-after-neighborhood with highway overpasses.
Literally destroying buildings to build surface level parking.
It in that case the people with power wanted the change. They could profit from it, so it came easily.
Once those same people can make money by densifying urban areas into rental hellscapes and monopolizing public transit, you’ll have that. And it will suck.
That’s what rentals are for. Yeah, there’s always going to be a need for low volume cargo transport and emergency response, but ultimately building cities so 90% of trips can be easily and comfortably accomplished via mass transit should be the goal. Nobody is suggesting transit can replace all cars.
The image in the post is of a yogi of some sort stating that electric cars are here to save the car industry first, and my impression of it is that it's suggesting that exploring the idea of electric cars is unwise.
And hell yeah, efficient transit and walkable cities are the goal. But while we're working on that goal, we should also focus on electrifying cars! Tackle the crisis in multiple ways. Because there's no way we're gonna stop using cars overnight, and if we can make cars more environmentally friendly while we taper off of them, that's a win.
If a solution involves lining a billionaire's pockets, he's unlikely to offer you an alternative.
Electric cars are palatable for most of us because it just involves a straight swap. No lifestyle changes needed. It's a much easier sell than lugging all your shopping home on the bus.
Cars haven't existed forever and we managed to build places around them. There's no reason we can't start building everything new around other modes of transport.
I live in Switzerland, and none of the problems you mention in the next few paragraphs exist here. I mean frequency of public transport isn't as good out of the cities, but I can get a bus or train to pretty much anywhere a car can get to, and some places they can't. The buses are nice and work well, they have priority in the city so they don't get stuck in traffic. I can get train, tram, bus, or bike to the airport no problem and if I need something bigger than I can carry I'll just get it delivered. Yes Switzerland is rich but there's a lot of money to be saved if it wasn't being spent on cars, car infrastructure, and all of the externalities of driving. It's also small, but our trains don't go particularly quickly.
Even then, the vast majority of people in developed countries (and the majority worldwide) live in urban areas. If the people living in podunk towns need to drive, power to them. Focusing on urban areas will have a bigger impact.
And the alternative is being rich enough to afford a house in the suburbs AND a car for every member of the family? Walkable doesn't have to mean the city centre, and it's much easier to achieve if you don't have to kowtow to a bunch of suburbanites who want to drive their SUVs through your neighbourhood.
Please read my entire comment, I addressed this already.
The vast majority of people in developed countries live in urban areas, so for the vast majority of people that drive, this isn't an issue. It is the rich suburbanites who are driving into cities.
Actual poor people are the ones who benefit the most from better infrastructure. Public transport is a lifeline for the homeless, and access to it is the biggest factor in whether they will be able to escape homelessness. Owning a car is really expensive, and The burdens of vehicle dependency fall disproportionately on marginalized people, especially those who are low-income and those who are Black.
More headaches than wet bulb temperature?
Yes, bc no headache when you're dead.
I was thinking as your brain fries it might hurt, but you're right! It won't hurt for long.
Fun how we had zero fucking problem doing it to every city in the country for cars. 🤷
EDIT: lol so the !fuckcars on lemmy.world is just pro car drama addicts, got it.
My brother in Christ we haven't BEEN HERE for multiple centuries. Fun watching people give zero fucks that their defense of the status quo doesn't make a damn lick of sense or even adhere to basic knowledge of reality.
OOOOHHHHHHHHH You're comparing apples to turnpikes and claiming it a win. Gotcha. Have fun mate.
Well said.
Actually most cities had rail laid out and working commuter trains. The car manufacturers bought them up and purposely ran them into the ground to increase car sales. (Think Twitter) they were run like that.
Some cities, yes. LA is an example, right? And how they wrecked the street cars.
But not my city. Calgary was built as a stop on the Trans Canadian Railway, and that still exists, and there's an (okayish) light rail train system here that's slowly been built over the years and not torn down. Fully wind powered, too! Edit: our public transit kinda sucks though, I'm not saying we're great. My commute to the office would be over an hour by transit and twenty minutes by car, I'm lucky I work remote.
A majority of North American cities that have grown within the last hundred years (coinciding with cars) were built from the ground up with cars in mind as the primary form of commute.
Calgary had a pretty extensive Streetcar network around downtown once upon a time.
https://saadiqm.com/2019/04/13/calgary-historic-streetcar-map.html
Hey neat!
Just goes to show how history gets erased. Hopefully the green line gets built and we'll have even some of this coverage back.
Yeah, all of those things weren't problems at the dawn of the steam engine. Those are all problems brought on by the automobile and oil companies designing cities in the 40s.
Lots of places can't support trains either. Kelowna area would not work well because of altitude changes and lakes.
I would just settle for sidewalks, where I live in the USA it's just streets with no sidewalks everywhere. I used to live one mile from where I worked and I could barely even bike there because of crazy car drivers and nowhere to go if someone wasn't paying attention. Rural America is going to be car dependent for a long, long time.
Cities in America too. I'm currently in Charlotte, NC and the amount of times that the sidewalk just ends is a little bit insane.
My daughter can't walk the 1/4 mile to school because it's on a major road with no sidewalk. So we drive her, every day. It's bad for the environment and bad for her health.
I love trains
Man, I went to England and we took trains (or a bus) everywhere and it was super convenient (and comfortable!).
https://youtu.be/hHkKJfcBXcw
Thank you for your service.
In Germany electric trains are standard for local public transportation.
Not everywhere. There are still enough lines that aren’t electrified so diesel locomotives have to be used.
But they are usually low frequency lines or in remote ish areas.
Uh, appparently only 61% of German train lines are electrified. I know of at least 2 heavily used lines that aren't (so far). One is the connection Basel towards Bodensee, the Hochrheinbahn. Another is Ringzug.
The Bodensee one is getting electrified soon!
Website in german https://www.die-bodenseeguertelbahn.de/
Huh interesting, didn't think it was that little. Thanks!
That's regional public transport, not local. I dare you to show me a city with diesel subway trains.
That is as local as it gets around here. We don’t have subways or street cars, it’s either busses (diesel) or train (motor coach actually) for even single digit km distances.
But yeah, it is real rail, not some separate local network.
That's exactly the problem that this community wants to fix.
But that's a certain level of naivete. I've lived in Europe and in the Western US, and for people who have lived in urban or suburban situations their whole lives, they simply can't comprehend the vast tracts of land that exist in most of the US. Public transport isn't viable when your nearest neighbor is at least five acres away.
Well yes, if you live in the middle of nowhere with literally no one else nearby, then public transport obviously doesn't make sense. But that's not where most people live.
A large part of the population in the US doesn't have access to public transport not because it wouldn't be viable, but because car-centric infrastructure was built instead. And often better designed cities were bulldozed to make room for it.
I was also going to recommend the Not Just Bikes video @[email protected] linked, definitely check it out!
True, but a lot of US real estate, even in big cities, started out agricultural. Those underpinnings are still affecting them today, given that they are less than 300 years old. They just don't have the history of being piled on top of each other that Europe has. The original American inhabitants didn't have the infrastructure Europe has had since the Romans, even if their population HAD been so concentrated.
The U.S population density is less than half that of Europe, even today.
Please. I have gone to Italy and seen far vaster landscapes in the mountainous areas than I've ever been cognizant of in the United States. And yes, I saw these locations from the window of a bus taking the highway system. The key thing is, people are not going to those far-out locations frequently. Actual transit problem-solving relates to the broad majority of the use cases people have, not about abstractly going to a pin thrown on a map.
NJB summarizes why this argument is dumb better than I do.
You can't put railways everywhere.
Trains could have intercity connections. Walk/bus to the train, ride the train, walk/bus to your destination.
I have metro+train and it already wears me out so much that alI arrive at the office tired. I can’t imagine how I would survive through 3 different transit options twice a day
I do the same and if anything, it just helps me wake up or wind down after a long day. Out of pure curiosity, how does it wear you out?
I don’t know, I could not even imagine the transit switch to be not overwhelming, it’s just way too many changes for me in a short span of time, like too many tasks. go down, wait for metro, try to not miss the stop, get up on escalator, go to platform, wait there, it’s just sucking out energy out of me, if I spent all that time just sitting on the train yes I unwind and I love it but dragging my laptop around and standing and waiting and having to concentrate instead of getting into the flow is disruptive for me. Plus I feel like underground is super dark and dirty and on the bus I get nauseous from so many braking and stopping and all the vibrating from the road
I'm sure you're aware part of that anxiety can come from the unfamiliarity. I'm surprised it doesn't end up being compared to the stress of merging from an on-ramp in a car, or watching crosswalks for pedestrians, or even just backing out of a driveway in some people's cases.
100% anxiety from unfamiliarity. My last job had me flying over the US (terrible but it was for a renewable energy company and I was part of the Ops team). The first trip, I missed my flight, on which was my overnight bag.
But from that first flight, I knew exactly what to do, where to go, and when to do it.
If people take time to learn these systems over time, then these fears go away. Just takes courage to learn something new
Sure buddy, spend a few hours hopping public transport each day is so much fun.
Cars are superior in every single way, it's paupers that cry out of jealousy we're seeing here.
They know cars aren't the problem, there are industries out there that spew out the equivalent of millions of cars but they don't bitch about that.
hmmm, do I want to sit in a train, flip my laptop open and do some work, then walk through a park to the office for today... Or do I want to sit in traffic and do nothing...
Tough choice there
no, I absolutely do not want to work on my way to work
Work time starts when I open the laptop. I'm not volunteering that time, since i'm not completely insane. It makes a huge difference whether my workday starts in the office, or in the train.
unfortunately, where I work, worktime starts when I scan my keycard at the front door
Yeah, that's not really an option then.
You're right. It's been raining all day today with a forecast of thunderstorms, I absolutely want to sit in a warm, dry box and not walk through the park :p
I’m gonna be real, I’d 100% rather sit in traffic. It’s somewhat relaxing to me.
I hate this trend that we need to be working all the time, even during our commute.
To each their own. I prefer 2 hours of working in the train and 6 in the office to traveling for 2 hours and working 8 hours in the office
To each their own. I prefer 2 hours of working in the train and 6 in the office to traveling for 2 hours and working 8 hours in the office
Well trains can transport alot more people at once
Those industries don't pump out their emissions in my city for me to breathe in, nor do they threaten to maim or kill me on a regular basis.
Found Andrew Tate's account
Ugh, vegans.
That's rude
As long as there's road, no serious traffic, and fuel stations along with rest stops.
which is practically everywhere
You must be new at this
You don't need a road.
This is your brain or advertisements :)
In reality:
Thats not really true and you know it. Cars are like trains, limited mostly to paved roads that need to by built.
Are you seriously trying to tell OP that he's lying about not living near a train? Or are you trying to say that the part about them running on a fixed track isn't true? Either way, this is a really dumb take.
Also, you clearly haven't been to rural areas, where dirt and gravel roads are common. Cars handle those just fine.
But those roads are far more numerous and further reaching than train tracks. Trains go from a to b. Cars can go which ever route you want. And you don't build train tracks around a house.
Thats not true also. Rails have junctions that alow switching tracks and work like a normal road. The reason theres more roads is irelevante as it depends on investment. Some places invested more into roads and others did in rail. Check out old rail maps on the US
Nope.
It is, don't be such a little bitch about it.
I have an electric car because I refuse to pay any more money to fossil fuel companies but still need to drive. I use public transport where possible, but many trips just aren't viable.
It takes me 30 minutes to walk to the nearest shopping centre, but 2 hours to get there by public transport, or 5 minutes by car.
As an average citizen, I don't have the means to build or fund new railway lines. I am, however, lucky enough to be able to refuse to drive fossil fueled vehicles and still survive.
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.
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).
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 motor
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.
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.
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)
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!
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!!!
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.
energy is a non-issue
Trains aren’t 100% the answer, but cars should be the last answer. Still we should electrify cars.
This isn't a binary. We need both robust public transportation and electric cars (with an electric grid supplied by renewable energy). Public transportation can't take you anywhere at anytime -- it's all a game of statistics and demand. If 12000 people want to go downtown at 7 pm, and 3 people want to go the opposite direction to get to work to start their night shift, you're going to see buses and trains headed downtown but not the opposite side of town.
Public transportation is best served for commutes and travelling to popular areas, and that's where the majority of emissions are coming from. Cars can supplement with everything else
Aren't buses and trains going back and forth?
They are, but only in specified routes. The issue is the areas they don't hit because there isn't a ton of demand. That said, someone else mentioned a taxi type public transit service, and that would solve this perfectly.
I would love to have trains and not need a car. Unfortunately that's still a decade away here in California.
I'm all in favour of trains. I only take the train to work, and it's so convenient I even take my kids to the city via train, to entertainment or shopping. However, even though I live inside the capital city in a Western European country, the train we take is powered by diesel. The government has been talking about electrifying the track for years, and the current estimate is that it will take another decade or more to get it done. There's a single electrified rail line in the entire country, and based on the electrification progress it will take several decades to electrify the rest (if ever). Based on this experience, I'd venture to say that electric cars are far easier to deploy than electrify train lines.
It's very hard to do something if you only talk about it and not actual doing it. But that has nothing to do with technology itself
And politicians are elected on what they say, not really on what they do.
Even on diesel trains they are far far far more energy efficient than cars. Current estimate is that it takes 3.7 liters of fuel to transport 1 tonne of cargo for 100km. That's incredibly more efficient than any car can get. Not to mention cars carry around on average 1.3 persons inside.
Train infrastructure is also significantly more scalable. You can add another train car for passengers at the price of one passenger car and you have increased capacity of that train immediately. Same goes to downsizing. Rails can be easily adapted to have overhead wires. Train wheels are metal as are tracks which means significantly cheaper maintenance and slower wear than asphalt and rubber.
It's nothing to do with ease of deployment. It's all about selfishness of people and their inability to or lack of willpower to change. Even if people switched to motorcycles, which are still ICEs it would still be a lot cleaner for the environment since it would effectively eliminate traffic jams and reduce road maintenance significantly. Not to mention not needing to move 1 tonne of metal for no more than 1 passenger.
Running errands on public transport is an absolute nightmare. Imagine having appointments, hauling bags of groceries and maybe even having a child or pet on a leash, all while trying to catch busses and trains. Public transport is great to get a lot of people to a common place, but that's about it. Its not exactly cheap either. Where I live, a single one direction train ticket costs roughly as much as 2 liters (~½ Gallon) of gas. 2 liters can get me in and out of the downtown area about 3-5 times, depending on traffic. Or once with an hour of parking. If an electric vehicle would fall out of the sky into my lap and the only thing I had to care about is fuel (electricity) I'd definetly would save money and time compared to public transport. Public transport is absolutely necessary, but not the solution for everything.
I see people doing all the things you list on the trains and busses in London all the time.
Doesn't mean it's not a nightmare, and that doing it with a car wouldn't be easier. Try doing this with two toddlers one day, lol, I promise you it's not as easy as watching someone else do it.
Depending on how rowdy kids are, it's not even easy in the car. You're strapped in, focused on roads, and any "incidents" they incur may require you to pull over.
The other thing about public transit heavy cities is, in order for people to use them, they have to be much more walkable - in other words, not wasting their wide open space with eight-land roads, or ocean-sized parking lots. That also means, if all you're going out for is groceries, it would be a waste of time to get in a car, or a train; just walk to a grocery store and back. Plus, if the trip genuinely does work out conveniently, you would not need to buy huge quantities in bulk each trip - just take multiple short trips through the week.
I happen to have a somewhat lucky city living situation, and this is pretty much how it works out for me. Sometimes when someone visits me, they offer to drive me to the grocery store, and it's basically just as much hassle as walking, thanks to the pedestrian underpass I normally take home.
I can fully understand your position. People in big and densely packed cities profit a lot from proper public transport and vice versa. Plus the city itself is layed out to function with public commute in mind, I've experienced it personally in New York. I'm from a rural area. Our public transport system can't fully replace cars. The main transit traffic is concentrated around rush hour in the morning and evening. To provide most people with public commute would require an immense increase in busses and train lines, only for 80% to be idle during low traffic hours.
There's often a visual comparison between how many people a full car and bus can carry. Obviously the bus wins. But you rarely see the comparision between the space needed for a single empty car or bus to be parked. Cars can park on the side of the road or have a parking lot on location (even underground). Busses need ports and infrastructure. Trains are an even bigger problem to store. Their ports can easily take up a good chunk of the entire city. That's why there's always a financial incentive to have too little busses or trains than too many. People can tolerate waiting, but can't tolerate higher prices to sustain a surplus on transport.
Also, public transport is often confined to local bubbles. Go outside your bubble and things start to get messy. When I was in High School, we had about ¼ of our class commute every day from one city over. They were either way to early or always late, because one cities train and bus plan wasn't tuned to the others, resulting in people either having to get up about 2 hours before school starts at 7 am to catch a train or run the risk of missing their bus connection to the school. It's even worse if you are crossing train districts and have to buy multiple tickets. When I was in college, some people came from another major city about 40km away. Their district covered half the state therefore their price was ~300€ per month and additionaly they had to pay 90€ per month for our smaller district. And both of those were the reduced prices for students. I could leave my car running idle for 20 days straight for that price.
EWs are important because cars are never going to be replaced by even the best public transport systems. But at least with could reduce the amount of cancer we get from sitting in traffic and breathing commute air. If I could choose, I'd rather have a power plant spit out steam and gas through state of the art filters somewhere in the outskirts, than to be surrounded by combusted gasoline resedue all day.
Part of the problem with American public tranist is cities assume the transit to be directly profitable. Tramsit functions best when heavily subsidized (just like car infrastructure is). The value brought by transit it terms of property value and connectivity will outweigh the cost of subsidizing it.
I doubt the US even has a say in these dissussions. Their intercity train system is mostly commercial to transport goods from coast to coast or border to border. Sparse availability of public trains means spending roughly the same on 48 hours train ride or a 1 hour plane flight. Building a single highway trough dessert heat of the Midwest is already a toll, but building a countrywide train system would, even if subsidized with the full military budget still be a nearly impossible task. Furthermore you have 50% of the population screaming to stop this socialist nonsense. There are enough examples of unfinished train sections that show what happens if money runs out.
And one might ask them self, how did the US get from cowboys and farms to the beacon of technical advancement? The answer is oil and slaves. They played dirty for 200 years and got ahead. So how does the entirity of Europe have a extensive network of rails spanning millions of kilometers? Was it because they where built before unions and labor rights were a thing? Turns out multi continental projects were mostly achieved through human suffering and disregard for safety. None of which goes nowadays to the same extend as back then. If a project isn't finished within one legislative period, why even start? Policaly you won't reap the fruits of your labor.
I know I'm exagarting, but the principle is simple. The early bird gets the worm. Europe has their trains and the US has their cars. Better to let each one figure out their own thing and then share the knowledge.
The system does not need to just suddenly be country wide. There are many major population centers within the same state or neighboring states that could greatly benefit from high speed rail connection. In this meme's argument trams serve a similar purpose and could be implemented much more locally. Many rail lines have a troubling past but we should not use that as an excuse to not build new ones with modern labor and safety standards.
I can only speak from the experience I have, which is New York and Flint, Michigan. Both are obvious contrasts between one of the richest and poorest cities in the US. New York has maybe one of the best Subway systems in the world. Having a car in NYC is insane. Everything that isn't covered by bus or train, is bridged by rentable bikes on each corner of a block. Flint could desperately use a couple of busses and a tram, but they can barely afford to keep their river and parks clean of (hopefully) dog poop. I remember seeing tram rails on the road but they where in an inoperable state. The north and west coast has a decent railroad system already but its basically inaccesible without having a car taking you to and from the station. It really felt like each city in the north was fending for their own. A bus system is quite the investment for a city. You can't just start with a couple of busses and then expand. Otherwise you are running the risk of it being the first thing people point fingers at, once city funds run dry.
A lot governments in the world push for increased public transport spending on the federal level. But it seems everybody is to busy trying to put out political fires to properly appropriate state funds. And if they are approved its often half assed and the cities have to make due with what the have anyway. It's the same in my country, I bet its the same in the US. Just because the urgency increased, doesn't mean the capability did es well.
As an examlme of intercity travel, the average annual milage for cars in Michigan is ~12,370 miles . Let's say that's mostly work commute (which from my experience, it is) so that's roughly 50 miles a day during week days. A US class I railroad trains average speed is ~25 mph, a cars about 50 mph (source: readout from my car back during my stay). You'll spend roughly twice the amount of time on your commute. Thats excluding the fact that a car goes door to door and not station to station.
In rural areas of the US a local bus and tram system would surely improve the life of some people. But its not enough of a reason for Americans to change their car culture or for cities to put some money on the table.
First lets start with the obligatory mention that thanks to zoning laws in the US you are even in this predicament. My grocery store is like just a few hundred metres from my apartment and on my way from work. Instead of weekly shopping I just do it daily / every other day with just the few things I need for those few days. No for hauling grocery bags. And like you wouldn't go shopping before appointments either...
Also you completely forget to factor in the cost of owning an maintaining a car. A yearly ticket for public transport for me is around 500€. I don't own a car so my expense on public transport is just that 500€ with a bit more for holiday trips etc compared to the cost of buying a car every X years, paying for maintenance, and for fuel.
I'm in Europe, not in the US. You are very fortunate to be living in a way that doesn't require a car. That's not the case for most people. Here, we have a lot of smaller towns and ignoring backeries, they have zero places that sell food. I see a lot of elderly people commute by bus for daily grocery shopping. But in this heat, they are in serious danger spending that much time in barely climate controlled busses and trains. Mostly, somebody from their families swings by once a week to fill up their fridge. The most common scenario is a family, both adults working 9-5, 1-2 children school aged. With children and jobs most people don't have the time to do daily grocery trips. That's why shops are usually overfilled on Friday evenings and Satruday mornings (I worked those shifts in retail). From my experience growing up, a full week of groceries for a mid sized family is impossible to carry by hand. Also from my experience, public transport is a godsend if you live alone and are tight on money. It takes the burden of maintanig a vehicle of your back. But in a family or a close circle of friends, a car is usually a communal workhorse, used by everyone for everything to avoid the hassle of public transport.
i agree with everything you said, but i do have to say that the problem with Europe isn't proving that public transport isn't that good(i know that's not what you're saying but I can't think of any other way of wording it rn), but rather than the city planning is... unfortunate
Yes, that's what I'm trying to say. In r/fuckcars and also here the term "car centric" and "pedestrian centric" cities is thrown around a lot. Europe is often praised for being build before cars were invented and is therefore naturally friendlier towards pedestrians. But it's not like busses are hovering above the buildings, they are as much car as an SUV, even bigger and bulkier. They have to squish themselves around tight corners. Whole roads get turned into one way streets because a new bus line was opened and now a bus and a car wouldn't be able to pass each other in this medival inner city alley. Public transport requires infrastructure, which means property has to be acquired. One douche not wanting to sell his shed to the city, can grind a whole project into halt. Even if the government took extensive action to invest into public transport, there's only so much they can do. And theres a long line of burrocracy between cause and effect.
In my city at least, I've never experienced the government trying to cull the public transport, there's been a steady improvement over the past 15 years. New lines, Better busses (also electric ones) have been added. Busses have their own traffic lights to give them time to de- and accelerate. But the city is literary at its capacity. It has reached the point of diminishing returns for public transport.
People do that all the time on transit, groceries are the biggest problem though.
You're forgetting the cost of buying the vehicle, maintaining it, and perhaps parking it. You can't leave those out and then say driving is cheaper.
I personally consider the price of the car as the privilege of ownership. Its not like you can change the color of the train if you don't like it or throw you trash in the corner. If the train is to slow, you can't put a turbo in it. Plus, you can always sell you car, but you can't sell your used train tickets.
I've owned my car current car for roughly 4 years now. I got it used and it lost about -1,000€ in value. Maintance is incredibly low, roughly -300€ in total. Insurance was the big money drainer with about -2000€ in total, but I got in a couple of minor fender benders that weren't my fault and only resulted in scratched plastic so I got a payout of about +1300€. So in total, if I were to sell it right now, my car my car cost me 500€ annually over the course of 4 years (fuel exluded). Thats a fair price for the freedom a car gives you.
But there are certain situation that essentialy prohibit using a car. Getting to the airport is far easier by bus (my city has a direct line) and you don't have to pay for weeks of parking. Late night bus lines make going out to parties and clubs actually enjoyable, because you don't have to leave your car in a shady part of town over night. Parking is another problem. The US feels like 80% parking space but Europe doesn't have that. The biggest parking area in my city is basically right at the central bus hub. So it wouldn't make any difference time wise to go by car. But thanks to 20 traffic lights, riding a bicycle doesn't either.
Bicyles are like the best extension to public transit. And its highly undervalued. I'd rather have them reduce prices for train tickets that include a bike, than build more train lines. Currently they are nearly twice as expensive as normal tickets (because a bike takes up more space I guess).
You can sell it and then it's called depreciation from use anyway. It's cost of ownership. You can't ignore it and say it's cost of gas only.
I didn't say it cost gas only. Quite the opposite, I ignored the gas cost and shown only my rough cost of ownership. It's just the fact that the huge entry price of buying a car is put in parallel to low ticket prices, when really, it shouldn't. Otherwise you could also add the cost of shoes and clothes to the train ticket, because well you can't exactly ride a train barefoot and in your undies. And all the food for the energy spend walking from station to station, can't forget that.
Yes a decent car can cost between 5 - 10K used, but if you take care of it you will get most of that money back. And I'm not talking about SUVs or Pickup Trucks, but compact hatchbacks with 30mpg or 6-7L per 100km. The engines easily last 10+ years with regular but minor maintanace. 2000s Honda Civics and Toyota Corollas can easily outlast multiple generations of trains and busses.
My city has gone through 4 generations of bus fleets while my buddies dad still rocks a VW T4 camper probably on his 2nd milage gauge loop. We figured out how to make the perfect car in 1993 when McLaren build the F1. Nothing beats low weight and a reliable engine. The big mistake was letting heavy SUVs become the go to car for everybody. Historicaly speaking, it's an overcorrection from the US being invaded by small cheap and reliable Japanese hatchbacks in the 90s. An that I itself was an overcorrection form gigantic 20 feet long cars from the 70s and 80s. SUVs and Pickup Trucks are like a fashion trend, they are not here to stay. Slick E-vehicles seem to be the newest trend, they just haven't fully found the shape they want to be in yet.
From the point of physics, a train weighs hundreds of tons and is pulling another hundreds of tons of weight. A hatchback weight 1-2 tons. They work on the same principles. They need energy to accelerate their mass. Trains need to carry a lot of people to break even otherwise they are just pulling themselves for nothing. You should be uncomfortable having a whole cart to yourself. Sure a car might be 100 times lighter but the train can carry 200 times more people at max capacity. Max capacity being an important factor. Most trains travel way below that. Remove all the traffic lights and hills from a cars path and it will be just as efficient as a train. Trains are just really good mass haulers.
One of the major advantages that trains have over cars is their electric engine. Electric engines have an efficiency of roughly 80 - 90% for transferring energy into motion. Car engines only 20 - 40%. And combustion engine are at their economical limit. Putting electric engines in cars is putting them directly on par with trains.
Thats why we shift towards EVs, because we already have everything but the batteries and charging figured out anyway. Public transport is a political issue, EVs are an engineering and marketing issue.
Jeez I'm not reading all that. You have now twice tried to discount the cost of the vehicle. First you wanted to account only for gas. Second you wanted to call it "privilege", yes you then broke it down for some reason but you want to call it a "privilege" and not account for its cost in the actual transportation.
Fair enough. I realize that I mixed up owning a car, and being able to afford one. I double checked, and, one can own a car in my country while having low or no income and live in subsidized housing. But the value of the car is limited to a certain amount. So I stand corrected, technically "No" owning a car is not a privilege but is considered a basic necessary by our government. But thats only the case if you start collecting financial aid and already have a car. You won't be able to afford to buy one with the aid alone.
I was fortunate enough to have my parents pay upfront for my first car that I couldn't afford while I was in college. I paid them back in full over 2 years and didn't have to pay intrest to a bank. I call that privilege.
Groceries are solved by having smaller but more frequent supermarkets, I can walk to 3 different ones from my house including one that's literally 2/3min walk away (and I live in the countryside), we go daily so we can just carry it back because it's smaller groceries. If bigger, personal carts exist and are gaining popularity around here.
I think grocery delivery is the more likely and better.
Yeah that would definitely be easier to implement in North America, due to the current layouts, I was talking about my own environment in Europe.
If that's what already happens, then there's no issue to be solved.
I love good public transport. It's great to not have to worry about parking or having to drive. Good cities, like many in Europe and New York in the US, a car isn't really required.
But out in the countryside, a car is a must. Electric cars are massively better for the environment and way cheaper to run (like tenth the cost with a night rate).
since wen this sub is full of carbrain? like bruh.
Because North Americans were tricked by the oil and car companies in the 50s to think that car ownership was part of being human, and now we're addicted to sitting in traffic, breathing fumes, and killing pedestrians in the name of muh freedom.
Cars can pick me up 10 feet from my front door(my car). No train tracks within 5 miles of me. I would love if their were tracks closer.
Trains are great to connect cities. But a train trip for me will tipically take me will typically take 3 times longer than it would with a car. Last time I had to take the train/bus it took me 6 hours and had to change between 3 busses and 1 train. I could have done the whole trup in 2 hours, no changes and actually same price as I spent on fuel for my car.
And this is in Scandinavia where things run pretty smoothly!
I agree that within cities public transportation is great. But there are people who need cars no matter how many trains you set up or electrify. For us, EV is a good option (when they become more affordable)
This falls apart as soon as high-speed rail comes into play. I've done multiple train trips that outpace car trips primarily cause the train goes faster than the car.
Honestly no matter how fast the trains go, I won't get home faster than when I use my car. You may, and many others may. The train I have to use connects two major cities. That connection is fair I need to change to several busses though to get from door A to B and that messes things up.
Trains are great if you live in the cities they go through but you can't gave trains go through all cities let alone villages
Ok hear me out, what about trains on streets (also known as trams :P)
That's because your country has a shitty rail network.
Before there were roads everywhere the car were not as practical.
the thing with trains is they get more inefficient the more tracks there are. Trains are great for connecting a few high spots with high traffic between them, not for everyone's daily transportation needs.
No.. I trains are great to comment A and B. But If you don't live in A or B, the they are not great.. The train network is fair where I live and covers a lot of the country. But still not everyone can use them. The majority of people living in cities can though. It will never cover the needs of all
In my country, 30 years ago, there was a train station every two villages.
French government built a crazy train network in the first half of the 20th century because it was the backbone of war logistics, and it allowed people to move. Cars and Europe made both these needs obsolete, so the rail network was abandoned.
You don't need to go more than 2km to find a train station in my country, it's just that most are abandoned now.
A car doesn't need a road that's the thing.
Yes it does. Even a dirt road is still a road. Debris free and compacted. You want to prove me wrong, try driving your car on farmland or through forest and see how far you get.
Oh, I did just that for many years while living in a countryside of a small country in Eastern Europe. Does that look like bloody road to you? Debree free and compacted?
Trust me, you don't need roads for cars, any wide trail suitable for walking or horse riding will do. And there are more trails like that in the world than all the paved roads and railroads combined.
That's exactly what is is. Dirt road. Look it up.
Is it debris free? No. Is it compacted? No. It's not even flat.
What is this statement? Do you really think this? Here's a trail I was walking on recently, please show me a car that could handle this.
That's not a trail, innit?
???
oh, let's just go drive across grass. Those traffic lights? Don't need 'em.
Yeah, and it's GREAT!
Because people want a means to travel independently, as in they are in control and not riding with strangers.
/s
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.
No problem, I don't give a shit about America.
🤷 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.
Because in our current state with everything built around cars, creating a train system to accommodate it all is nearly impossible. Trains work great in a downtown, or centralized area. They are very difficult to build to accommodate our 1x1 grid system that cars use. Or at least that's my perception of it. Even if the system could be built, it'd have to be manned, it'd have to travel to certain areas at certain times to account for jobs. And it becomes increasingly unwieldy the more requirements you add to it. I wish things had built up along a sustainable train systems instead of cars, but placing a train system in to replace the decentralized nature that cars introduce is a monumental and perhaps untenable task.
Not every journey is possible with public transport. People will still need to lug equipment about in the electric future.
[Citation needed] on the 100000x easier part, but nice meme.
Electric cars seem like a stopgap more than anything to me.
I found a source. I hope that helps.
I am all for more public transportation in this country, but it wouldn't help me personally. I live outside of city limits- the closest bus line is two miles away. My work is even further outside city limits, a 10-minute drive south of me down a four-lane highway, past farm fields and into an industrial park.
There's just no way public transportation is going to help me there. And even if I didn't have to do it down a highway, there's no way I'm riding a bike there in the middle of winter.
So do please make public transport more available and expansive. Just know that it still won't be a universal solution. Individual transport is needed by some of us.
I plan to get an electric (not a Tesla) for my next car. I currently drive a hybrid.
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?
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.
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.
Batteries used gives you150 ebikes for every e-car
B-but think of the iNdIvIdUaL!
People here are saying a lot that cars are convenient because there's more roads... like... let public transport run on those roads? People seem to literally be unable to realize that things are the way they are now solely because you refuse to believe they can be in any other way and don't solve problems because "it's not practical". Short termed thinking runs too much
I'm not sure what you're talking about. Public transport do run on the roads, too. It's not "private car only".
never said it's private car only, but i did use wrong wording, sorry. what i meant was, those are the same roads public transport runs on, so the "cars can go anywhere" point kinda falls unless we're talking offroading. mildly inconveniencing, but that's just a tradeoff, it's the entire point of fuckcars
The problem with public transport is that it only goes on pre-planned routes. If you want to go elsewhere, you can't without a car. And replacing all nature with rails and asphalt is a very bad idea.
you don't need to replace anything, the roads are already there. and if you wanna go somewhere super specific, just walk, keep in mind that if transport is more invested into, it will barely be different from car travel. the mild convenience created by cars isn't worth the clutter that 10 times the volume of automobiles will create. also parking is already a problem now.
The problem isn't the roads, but needing to create a route that touches every single road. Public transportation can't really do customization, it's a one size fits all deal.
My city has a door-2-door system of minibuses that are a bit like the missing link between taxis and buses. They pick you up from wherever you are and take you to wherever you're going, they just pick up other people on the way too. It's generally marketed towards the disabled/elderly, but I don't see why it couldn't be scaled up and be marketed as either a bus+ or a taxi lite.
This is actually the first I've heard of this, and it's actually the perfect solution. If 1/3 of the fleet is dedicated to first come, first serve transportation, it helps a ton with what's otherwise the use case for cars.
Taxis exist.
A quick search suggests that here in the UK the average driver is spending up to £200 per month on their car (excluding any financing to pay for it in the first place). That much money would easily cover a monthly travel pass in most cities I've lived in, with plenty left over to pay for taxi rides when you need the convenience of door-to-door travel at a time that suits you.
I live in London zone 5, travelling to Zone 1 will cost me £267.30 monthly. One of my colleagues lives in Petersfield. His monthly ticket would be £613.70. You don't know much about train fares in the UK, do you? If you live in Scotland and need to travel to London, it is always cheaper to bloody fly! Sometimes it's cheaper to buy a car for one trip and then just dump it, or, even better, sell it and recoup your costs!
Which, by the way, would not be there like without a government making it so. And if those governments went "nah" to the idea of a stroad and any highway expansion beyond 6 lanes, and threw it all into railways in the '70s, the USA may have had a bullet train network today that'd make Germany jealous.
It's the path of least resistance. If public transport was more effiencent and faster, people would opt for that.
But then you're also dealing with the weather, or some people like the privacy or they enjoy driving their own car. Or not having to worry about time tables and waiting.
All these factor in, and that's why many prefer cars.
and that's what I'm talking about, selfishness and short termed thinking
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 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.
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.
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.
https://youtu.be/REni8Oi1QJQ
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.
From the end of the video:
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.
https://www.strongtowns.org/
Thanks! Unfortunately there isn't a chapter near my location, the nearest one is 40 minutes away. Still, glad to see a movement already exists!
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.
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.
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.
Public transit good, but in america public transit is not well funded and only really available in big cities. I think sadly it will be years before americans can give up the independence of being able to have transportation direct from point a to point b. Consider that in rural areas it could be a 30 minute drive to get groceries with no transit options. As long as americans are going to drive cars, we can at least try to make them electric vs ICE.
I will continue to vote for public transit initiatives and if we had a bus or train system in my town I would use it. I have a fuel efficient ICE car but trying to buy electric as soon as I can afford to buy something that isn't a telsa pile of crap.
Yeah, but no train takes me from my front door to my job/the movies/my vacation place. And my car works even if the state decides to shut down the trains/buses.
People associated "freedom to go anywhere" with cars but it's a disguised argument. For the most part it's about not traveling with others. To a degree it's also about status symbol but for the most part they want to be alone and dictate their own schedule. If they really cared about freedom to move wherever they would get offroad motorcycles and never need to pay for parking again.
That's a very narrow view of things.
There are plenty if trains and buses where I'm from, and they still don't cover enough land area, let alone come along often enough and go largely in the direction I need to go to be useful.
Cars are about freedom and convenience. Being anti social is a secondary choice, and a perk.
No they are not. Public transport always needs improving, but getting to close where you need to be is always possible. Cycling after that or using some other sort of transport is possible. Even if you do want to ride your own vehicle to desired location, motorcycles are always better than cars. Even more convenient since you can filter through traffic jams, don't need parking spaces and spend less fuel.
Public Transport takes twice as long to get anywhere for me (and I live fairly close to both trains and buses), and motorcycles are way more dangerous, and can't really carry anything except yourself. Cars are a happy medium between the two, which is why people use them.
Motorcycles are "way more dangerous" if you drive them that way. Falling off of bicycle, motorcycle or a scooter at 30km/h is the same, with added benefit of wearing a helmet. If you ride it at 200km/h, then there's little to increase survivability. There's a reason why speed limits are in place. Sure they are still riskier than armored boxes in which you sit, but they don't have to be. Also if you really care about safety you'd switch to trains and busses which are significantly more safe than cars.
Depends where you live. If you live in the countryside in ireland, the public transport is severely lacking. A 20 minute drive requires you to take probably 2 hours of public transport.
Edit: After cycling for about... an hour to the train station, so probably 3 hours total
There are always going to be edge cases where personal vehicles make sense, but no serious proponent of better public transport is ever going to propose an outright ban on private vehicular use.
The fact is the majority of people in the world live in urban areas, where there shouldn't be the excuse of "oh I live hours away from the nearest station and too few people to justify adding a bus route."
No, I literally just want to be able to go somewhere when the trains aren't running. You can try and put words in detractors' mouths all you want but it's clear you'll only jam them full of lies.
Simple - Tracks vs Road ratio.
It’s not remotely easier. Trains carriages are easy to build, but the infrastructure is not. You have to move and extend roads, demolish buildings, lay the rails, build bridges, if you go underground there will be lots of digging and engineering work to protect nearby buildings, and don’t forget about maintenance. It is only profitable when the population is high enough and people have the need to travel to set places en mass. Otherwise it is just fantasy. If you live your whole live around any city Center, I can understand that you are not going to drive . But plenty of people lived in a tiny town of population under 10000people .
Because trains are massively inconvenient to anyone that isn't living in AND traveling to the most dense of urban areas.
You ever try taking your new mattress and bed frame on a train?
cars don't need to be driverless to be electric. i'm in favor of public transport but as long as we're in the long process of building it out it's still a lot better to have electric cars than gas guzzlers, with drivers still included.
there is a doctrine here where you fuck up a less optimal but easier solution just to force the world to adopt the better one but it's a shitty thing to do. public transport and electric vehicles aren't exclusive. in fact, for lower density stuff we will need buses and those should be electrified too.
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
Because as the wiseman said, somebody just wants to sell more cars.
Been seeing a big push for trains in Florida and California lately, hopefully things with Amtrak go well and we see more lines implemented in the future
In cities, yeah. Outside cities, impossible
But I'd love to rent autonomous electric cars to move
Because trains aren’t economically viable for the vast majority of the US, and where they are economically they are the topic of conversation.
As far as why the conversation would center around the US, that’s just the regular American-centric tilt english conversations generally lean towards. Most of Europe has their shit together in some topics like this (public transportation, for instance) and the US is a huge consumer of automobiles and no one if building mass transit between the middle of nowhere to the other middle of nowhere where we could ‘efficiently’ move individually insignificant numbers of people at a time.
We 100% need more trains. But in rural America, we need cars to do anything.
Why is it that trains are always proposed as the alternative to cars? I, for one, really want PRT to succeed. It seems to be the best middle ground between efficiency and convinience.
The worrying thing here is the assumption that we can choose...
The world has 2 billions individual cars. Lithium extraction rate may not be sufficient to make 2 billions cars by 2030... and that's assuming we don't need lithium for computers, smartphones, but also not for batteries for the grid (because no solar cell works at night and wind farms are not on demand erther), and... not for electric trucks! Then comes the question of the other metals: copper, nickel, cobalt, ...
Trains will not work everywhere for everyone, but not deploying them now and fast will be a severe issue for North America when resources will get scarce.
We need a smart mix of trains, buses, subways, tramways, shared vehicles, bikes, everything but one individual car per person. That era will come to an end because we're closer to the bottom of our planet's natural resources stock than the beginning.
There's not even a real option of keeping gas cars a little while more, as cheap oil is also coming to an end.
The difference between accepting this and "choosing" individual cars is how ready countries will be when resources will get scarce. It may get ugly...
Trains are electric. They use diesel generators to power the wheels.
Because public transport is for dirty poors,, obviously /s
because in lots of countries there is effectively no public transport culture existing, and car companies take advantage of that. it's really just about car culture and taking advantage of people in my opinion
In some countries it's also more efficient to drive.
that's just because public transportation wasn't made to be as efficient
So true.
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.
Trains: live super densely, it's great. Cars: chill bro
because cars are more popular lmao. also they’re easier. cars are not going away.
How many trains run from my garage to the convenience store at anytime I want? Or from my garage to work at anytime between 8 and 9 am and then home at whatever time I want to leave? What about the trains that run to my mother's house or my sister's house in different cities? What about the one that goes to the snowboarding resort I like it in the boonies, or for that matter, the one in the middle of the mountains? I will never live in an apartment with other people for many different reasons, and it gets both miserably hot and dangerously cold where I live. There are plenty of other things to fix before going after vehicles, especially electric vehicles. Making me operate on some strict schedule with trains and buses it other public transportation takes away my freedom to do what I want, and I will fight tooth and nail to make sure that's not taken from me, especially when both can coexist.
I am all for individual transportation with whatever engine. I am however writing this while sitting in the tram commuting to work.
My city has metro lines that run every 3 to 5 minutes all day every day, and riding the metro affords me the freedom to do something, anything besides keeping my eyes on the road. I agree that adhering to the schedule of a train that comes every hour (or half-hour) sucks, but it doesn't have to be that way. My city is also building an automated light metro that will run every 2.5 minutes.
If we talked more about building quality trains places, and building good bike infrastructure for micromobility like bikes and e-scooters, train + micromobility would feel far more free than being caged in traffic. In my city, that's how it currently is for me. Metro + my electric scooter makes me feel crazy free within the city. Only thing I wish is they would build even more trains, including to the nearby mountains so I could easily go hiking and camping, too.
Scooters and bikes are not viable when it's literally freezing outside, especially with bad weather conditions. Unless there is transportation literally right out of my door, I would sooner keep my eyes on the road and drive myself. Trains and buses don't stop at the gas station on my way into work to grab my drink for the day, and if they do, they aren't waiting for me. If I need to run some errands, like go to the doctor or run to the hardware store, that is significantly less convenient with public transportation. I just got 4 bags of softener salt the other day that totaled 160 lbs. Not a chance I would try to lug that on a bike or carry it on and off a bus or train. I'm not saying I wouldn't use it sometimes, and have in cities like Minneapolis and New York, but I was visiting and either didn't have a car or wasn't in condition to drive so worked around it. Again, they can coexist , but fighting electric vehicles of all things is a dumb fight.
I’m with you here
I’m not biking in the rain. Period. That is miserable and I’m not subjecting myself to it. I’ve done it, it sucked. I turned up to work soaking wet and very unhappy. Snow is a complete non-starter since my city is famous for poor snow management.
Bikes work just fine when it is freezing.
Source: Have biked in sub zero often.
Btw it is possible to plan cities so you are not car dependent:
If I need to run some errands: I walk
If I need to go to the doctor: I walk
Hardware store: I walk
Do I need 80kgs of crap at home? Seldomly, but if I need it I put it in my bike trailer.
And if any of the distances between your errands or home are too much for you to walk, a frequent public transport network makes it easy to just hop on and off as needed, and not have to worry about parking. And for carrying a lot, cargo bike rentals are really cool, but just paying for delivery works well too.
I live in Canada. I rode my scooter to work all winter (including in -14 celsius weather) without issue thanks to good bike infrastructure that gets plowed promptly. Quite a few cyclists in my city do the same, as it's actually not nearly as bad as you might imagine it, provided your city actually cares about bike infrastructure. It was actually pretty fun.
For more, there are cargo ebikes or even just renting a car for the occasions that you do need to carry heavy stuff. And for most average people, we don't lug around 160 lbs on a daily basis.
My point in all of this is not that we should make a car-free society. It's that our focus on "oh, let's just switch to EVs and change absolutely nothing else in society!" is misguided. Sure, there are certain things cars can do that won't be replaced, at least not any time soon, but plenty of places in the world already thrive with much fewer cars and much more micomobility and public transit.
Nobody is forcing you to only use the transit. We just want the option to be available and be effecient because for some of us it is cheaper or more convenient.
Just remember that resources are limited and if you want to use your part of the pie for stuff like that, you’ll have to save in other places. Possibly eating less/no meat, not/rarely going on vacation, living in a small home and using less energy for heating/cooling or whatever works.
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.
Oh great, you pipsqueaks moved to lemmy? Fuck, you guys are annoying
Because I don't want to be on a train with loud smelly inconsiderate people.
Autonomy.
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.
if I lived in a much safer city with less homeless and robbers I'd agree with you
I don't know why you're being downvoted. Safety is my number 1 concern. The amount of times I've had to avoid dodgy / unsafe situations on public transport is crazy. Finally getting a car was the best decision ever. Until they make public transport safe, I'm not on it.
I'm 100% less likely to get stabbed by a tweaker in my car than on public transit in my city.
Because I value my autonomy and don't want to have to wait for a train to show up when I want to go somewhere. Also, paved roads are significantly cheaper to maintain than rail lines, which makes a substantial difference when you take into account the size of the US.
A frequent transport networks gives you much more autonomy than a car, since you don't have to worry about maintenance, parking, or traffic. It can be frequent enough to just turn up and go.
Cars come along with many external costs that are often not accounted for, such as the costs associated with pollution and the increased healthcare costs associated with that as well as injuries and deaths caused by cars. Plus there's all the parking and extra space needed between all of the places people want to go to needed for that parking and road space.
A train network isn't going to run 24/7 in a town of 300 people no matter how many subsidies it gets from the government. It doesn't make any sense to spend the resources and incur the pollution cost of running a train with nobody on it.
And before someone brings it up, I absolutely refuse to accept the idea of forcing people to live in cities, or anywhere else for that matter.
Most people live in cities. If those people don't drive, the problems are pretty much solved.
Small towns can be very walkable, since you can easily get from one edge of town to the other. And they can have a connection to the outside. But again rural populations driving isn't too much of an issue, as long as they aren't driving into the city every day.
Instead I have to worry about switching trains and schedules and the weird guy in the corner who might have a gun and the homeless person yelling at the voices in their head.
I honestly will never use public transit as long as a private option is available. Fuck being packed in like sardines with no personal space. It gives me panic attacks.
Because I like driving. It's really not that hard to figure out why the hive effort over EVs.
Trains are not flexible and safe enough.
I have been to Singapore and Tokyo (train-centric cities), but cars are, unsurprisingly, easier to use in there.
You have pregnant wife or small kids? Trains are suicide in rush hours.
this is dumb on so many levels... i cant take my train to go to the supermarket
I don't want to be stuck on and overpacked train or bus, dependant on train or bus schedules and like the freedom to go where I want.
Maybe cry about cruise ships and industrial shipping that spews out the equivalent of millions of cars?
I don't want to be stuck in traffic, dependant on a car to go anywhere, and I like the freedom to go where I want, when I want, and how I want.
It sounds like your local public transport system sucks, I'm sorry about that. Hopefully your local government can find the funds to fix it.
"Something else sucks too" is not a good argument. Go make a fuck cruise ships community, I will gladly support it.
False. More cars = more traffic = longer travel time at a lower capacity than what public transport could achieve. Also, if you enjoy driving so much, you'd very much want everyone else not being on your road, right?
I'm not sharing a cart with retards that bring food onto the train, obnoxious breeders and their offspring. Not to mention shitty infrastructure, lack of airconditioning and having to adhere to whatever schedule they pull out of their ass.
Fuck public transport.