I recently took a train from Seattle to Portland with my family. One difference compared to flying that it took me a while to realize was how amazingly quiet it is.
On a plane, the engines are right there out on the wing screaming and conducting that sound directly into the airframe next to you. With a train, the engine is way up front, hundreds of yards a way, separated by several linkages.
The end result is that a train car is as quiet as a coffee shop. I love it.
Love that route. Also, on a train the ride is so much smoother - no starts or stop or dealing with traffic.
The pricing is nuts, though. A one way train ticket for that route is $36. The same trip via car takes about the same amount of time and $20 in gas. The train is a nice luxury for one person, but for the whole family it becomes very expensive.
I guess I wouldn’t have thought that expensive for intercity travel. Certainly doesn’t strike me as such relative to shorter haul European trains I’ve taken.
And in the US, I’m a decent fraction of that ($13) just to take the commuter rail into the city one way.
The problem is that the train has to compete with 3 hours by car... And then the ability to actually use a car at your destination. The transit systems in either Seattle, or Portland, are nowhere near as good as they are in New York.
Much of my car's wear and tear is from age, so I can discount some amount of that that. Free parking is plentiful in 95% of both cities.
Driving 1 person is already close to the price of a train ticket. Driving 2 people is ~50% discounted. Driving 2 people, and then not having to rent a car/taxi, is something like a ~75% discount.
With a real carbon tax, these numbers would look a lot closer to eachother.
With a real carbon tax these numbers would actually be further apart. I was surprised to learn that in the real world trains are not more efficient than a the average car when measured in passenger mile per gallon equivalent. And trains are much less efficient when compared to a high MPG cars like a Prius. In fact I'd be willing to bet that there are only a few of city/regional public transportations systems in the world that are more energy efficient than just taking your Prius.
They report some 80 passenger-km per liter of Diesel equivalent energy, compared to 13 passenger-km in a modern hybrid. Both values include the energy production, utilization and energy expenditure for infrastructure.
This assumes a modern network with electric trains though. I'm not sure if the article you cited still uses diesel-powered trains to arrive at such extremely different figures.
But that's just looking at fuel efficiency. What about the carbon cost of manufacture? How long does a train car stay in service vs a prius? What is the cost to manufacture a train car vs individual prii for n passengers?
Depends where you want to go in the city and what you want to do. Portland has some hellish traffic at times, and free parking isn't as plentiful as you describe. The inner suburbs all have metered parking on 2+ lane streets, and extremely competitive side street parking. Plus, the west side suburbs have zoned parking to keep out non-locals: https://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/39277
Taking a bike is a much easier thing to do if you want easy access to the inner burbs and urban core of Portland.
An anytime return London Edinburgh £323, off peak £238, super off peak £147. Anytime first class return is £504.
Regardless of what you think of these fares (it is cheaper if you book in advance), considering HMRC allows you to write off 45p/mile and it is slightly over 800 miles, only the anytime return is really more expensive if travelling for work vs a car. Plus you'll have £30-40/day parking in central london on top, so apart from the first class return the train (even at its most eye wateringly expensive) is cheaper than a car.
The "subsidy" is not straight-up tax dollars being given to Exxon & co, but computed against "prices fully reflected supply costs plus the taxes needed to reflect environmental costs and other damage, including premature deaths from air pollution".
The total includes direct subsidies, such as tax incentives that reward fossil fuel investment, exploration, and extraction in addition to indirect ones you describe.
In the US, like many countries, these are very substantial:
There’s very little federal tax, its mostly state tax (which varies).
I add the cost of “development” financing/spying/regime change as part of the cost of oil, and the U.S. pays for all of that, which is a de facto subsidy.
Most of the costs of a car are fixed once you own it. Wear and tears per mile is actually small. Insurance is the same for a car driven 7000 miles a year as one driven 30,000. there is a small discount for less than 7000 miles/year, but it is still fixed. Likewise the car payment doesn't change at all.
The IRS has to come up with a fair number that translates all those fixed costs into per/mile. It is a good financial number, but worthless for this discussion.
Buying new tires are a thing. Even if you buy cheap tires and get good life out of them (and that combo is...rare, you get what you pay for), that's, say, $400 ever 40,000 miles, that's a cent a mile right there..and tires are usually more expensive than that and don't last that long.
The most obvious cost of wear and tear though is that eventually the car needs to be replaced. More miles = sooner replacement.
Any modern car that is well maintained will last far longer than you will own it. People give up on their cars because their self image needs an excuse to get a new one. A lot of the maintenance cost is time based as well: UV and ozone are destroying rubber parts even while the car is sitting.
It depends on the car, but typically you are looking at $.20/mile for fuel, and $.05 for all other maintenance (including tires).
The average new car payment is something like $550/month. The average used car is somewhat less of course. Most people are making payments. Insurance is $500/year if you have a perfect driving record, many people pay more. These costs have nothing to do with how far you drive.
A few years ago I calculated my actual per/mile cost for my car, it was $.15/month, even though I bought it new (I track every fill up, though at 46mpg my fuel costs are less than average). The car had 200,000 miles on it to spread all the fixed costs across, and had been paid off for a few years.
The point is the marginal cost to drive a car you already own is low.
Considering I was driving 30k/yr at one point while commuting, I can imagine quite a lot of miles, actually.
PS: Your insurance costs are fantasy land. The average US driver pays almost $1500/hr. I haven't had so much as a speeding ticket in a decade and live in a safe small town and am still over $1k/yr.
Lower mileage insurance can help reduce that cost by the way, if you tell your insurer your only adding 2k miles a year to the car rather than 10k miles, they will drop your rates commensurately.
Sub in an eBike for the commuting & errands, its quite doable to go car light or car free (esp. if Car2go, Lime pod or another service is available in your city).
We've hit peak car in North America. This new generation will see car ownership go down.
Less car ownership on the horizon;
1)Cities are congested
2)The congestion in the suburbs is even worse than driving in downtown
3)For years the solution was to build more highways, but land for doing so is running out
4)Car ownership is no longer cool
5)Ride sharing and renting is become easier (GPS, Internet, Smartphones)
6)Cars have become safer, but the joy or riding in them has been killed. It's like being trapped in an egg carton.
I agree once someone doesn't own the car the numbers change. However if you already have a car the additional marginal cost to drive it on a trip is very low.
Which is pretty normal most places in the US and at least Western Europe unless maybe parking is especially expensive at the destination. Even so, if two of us go from the Boston area to NYC it’s almost certainly cheaper to drive although I almost always take the train because it’s a lot more pleasant. With a family the train would be a relatively expensive alternative.
No, this is awesome. All of that time is yours without having to worry about the road.
I wish we'd install more rail corridors. Especially outfitted with business and luxury amenities. I'd travel by train everywhere I could to avoid planes and long distance driving.
Distance Seattle Portland is about 280 km. That's similar to the Distance of Munich to Würzburg in Germany. The Deutsche Bahn takes 75 Euros, about 85 USD from you in economy class.
The problem with the US is not that rail travel is expensive (it is not), but that gas is waaaaayyyyy too cheap. (In Germany you pay around 6.20 USD/gallon)
Worth noting that trains with a locomotive up front are quite rare these days (although most common in the US - Amtrak Acela notwithstanding).
Most of the rest of the world has gone down the "multiple unit" route, where there are smaller motors in each car, under your feet, and there are no dedicated locomotives.
Yes but the TGV is all based on 70s technology. The more modern trains (such as Siemens Velaro, Alstom AGV, Bomardier ETR 1000) are all multiple-units.
One notable exception is the Bombardier/Talgo 350 (known in Spain as "the Duck" for obvious reasons).
The TGV Duplex was developed in the 90s, and continues to be developed, the new version (avelia horizon) coming out in a couple of years. There's a reason it uses a locomotive ("powercar") concept, it relates to it being a double-decker (which all the other trains you mentioned aren't.
I believe the Acela replacement (avelia liberty) uses powercars as well.
The UK sleeper trains were refurbished recently. They go out of London up to Scotland and down to the South West of England.
They are not multiple units or likely to be if they were refurbished tomorrow. The reason being that the stock is not in 24/7 use. It does the one long night journey then gets parked all day.
The train out of London gets split to serve different bits of Scotland, so you do get some shunting around going on when they do things to the train.
It doesn't go that quickly as a train because there is no need. Being in Euston at 5 a.m. is no fun, might as well be there at 6 a.m. with some sleep had.
So the loco that pulls the train can be any old freight thing. Although now it is likely to be a Class 73 diesel electric that can use electrified track as well as diesel. Note that there i no electric track all the way out to Scotland.
And it’s still not annoying, at all. It’s very quiet, and I personally find the sound of electric motors much more tolerable than anything involving combustion.
On a plane, the engines are right there out on the wing screaming and conducting that sound directly into the airframe next to you. With a train, the engine is way up front, hundreds of yards a way, separated by several linkages.
The end result is that a train car is as quiet as a coffee shop. I love it.