No. This is something Texas is having to come to terms with right now. Cars and roads only scale so much before you physically can't move more people fast enough even with more roads and more lanes. Rail scales way better.
So Texas is pushing a high speed rail line that will allow people to commute 30-90min into a city from locations that currently are 1.5-3 hours away. And at that allow those people to commute to cities on either ends of the line while still being a relatively accessible commute for anyone in between the cities.
And of course as great as that is, the rail line will be able to relatively trivially scale capacity by adding more trains to the same line at a rate far above massively expensive road expansion projects that cost comparable to the entire planned rail line.
So if you want to grow past a certain density you do have to start switching to rail and higher density does mean more business opportunities and generally greater options for prosperity for the populations in the area.
Is Texas "coming to terms" with it, though? Cars don't scale infinitely but are also way more flexible than rail lines could ever be. If your goal is to have everyone work in downtown Dallas then yes, they suck. But you can just build offices and manufacturing facilities all around the state instead, avoiding the creation of single bottlenecks.
> has huge ongoing costs in terms of resource and energy use
TxDOT (government organization responsible for road maintenance) has a budget of $30B/year or about 10% of the total state's budget. Not that big of a deal for Texas.
That figure includes every single government-owned street, AFAIK. Total infrastructure costs are higher but don't seem that much higher than in Germany?
> Cars don't scale infinitely but are also way more flexible than rail lines could ever be
I'm not convinced this is true. Because a train enables more density, it enables more places you can reach once on it. A car enables more geographical area, but there is a lot less things to do in that area, and those things to do are what matters. If you want to go camping miles from anyone else than a car will get you there, but if you want to do a city activity (restaurant, movies, live music, show, work) a train can get you to a much greater variety of those things.
Note that with both the real question is the network. A car where there are not roads won't get you anywhere. A car where there is one road doesn't get you far. Same for a train - I live in a city without a train and so obviously I can't get anywhere on it. I've been in cities with trains and I was able to get places on it - enough that I didn't need to have a car.
At this rate I would be surprised if the Texas HSR is complete before 2050. Texas has not come to terms with anything. I say that as a resident for the last 10 years.
> Cars and roads only scale so much before you physically can't move more people fast enough even with more roads and more lanes. Rail scales way better.
Before scaling people moving up so much, I'd question why encourage so much movement.
Instead, let's encourage local areas which are walkable/cycleable that contain 95% of what people need. By eliminating the need for 95% of high-speed people moving (whether by car, train, bus, no matter), that problem becomes automatically solved. And we get a nicer life walking/biking to most places and when we need/want to drive farther, there's no congestion.
95% is way too high a target! I sometimes want to get supplies at the special Asian food store - there won't be one in my 95% neighborhood - nearly everybody has enough of their own special hobby/interests that they cannot live 95% in their neighborhood. Note that I only counted for me - in the real world most people are in a marriage like relationship, each of the pair has their own interests and different jobs.
What we should aim for is everybody is in walking distance of 5 restaurants, 1 grocery store, 1 general goods store, 1 library, 1 elementary school (but not higher level - after about 6th grade students benefit from larger schools where they can take classes different from their neighbors), 2 parks, 3 churches. Then put them in close walking distance of good public transit so they can do other things that they do in life all the time (Note in particular going to work every day is not in the above list for most!). You should of course debate exactly what should be on the list and exact numbers, but the above is a good starting point.
> nearly everybody has enough of their own special hobby/interests that they cannot live 95% in their neighborhood
Agreed. I did mistype what I was thinking though. Not 95% of destinations one might ever want, but my thought was 95% of trips. Nearly all my trips are routine, either to/from office (bikeable) or supermarkets (walkable), movies/library/restaurants/misc shops (all walkable), parks/sports (walkable), basic medical care (walkable).
I certainly have hobbies/needs I must to drive for, but those are fairly occasional trips. My thought is that if we as a society make it so that nearly all routine trips can be local (walk or bike) then the exception will be rare enough that we don't need more road capacity.
> Instead, let's encourage local areas which are walkable/cycleable that contain 95% of what people need
The only way to achieve this is density. Urban areas.
When people want to live in big sprawling suburbs with nice homes, you just can't get this. It's not possible.
The problem is that you can make MUCH more money building huge homes than affordable housing. And people, being ultra-individualistic, believe they need the huge home as opposed to denser housing. So here we are.
> When people want to live in big sprawling suburbs with nice homes, you just can't get this. It's not possible.
What you call "not possible" is where I live, so clearly it is possible.
Trying to shoehorn all solutions into one and only one way of doing things turns people off and hinders progress.
Sure you can have dense urban areas that are walkable/cycleable. You can also have suburbs that are walkable/cycleable. Instead of turning people away from a good cause by telling them they can't have the life they want, let's promote walkable/cycleable communities in all areas.
> You can also have suburbs that are walkable/cycleable
You can, but not to the same degree. Because it's just a matter of distance and density.
If you have a store and you have to service, say, 1,000 people to make it profitable you might have a store every .5 miles in the city. Maybe that then translates to 5 miles in the suburb. Well... it's not very easy to walk 5 miles. It's trivial to walk .5 miles.
Stores are one example, but this really applies to literally everything. Besides things like parks, which don't need to turn a profit.
Sure, you can have walkable suburbs in that you can walk in the suburbs. But, to me, that's not what walkable means. Walkable means I should be able to do ALL of my tasks, whatever they may be, without a car. That's not possible in a suburb. I can't walk to the office, or the store, or the bank, or whatever. But it's very possible, and even trivial, in cities.
"Walkable" infrastructure only really matters if there's somewhere to walk to. Sure, it's nice having sidewalks that lead nowhere, but people won't turn to them like they would in Chicago.
> You can, but not to the same degree. Because it's just a matter of distance and density.
Agreed, but you don't actually need the same amount for the suburban demographic.
For example where my friend lived in Manhattan (and I spent most weekends) we could walk to tons and tons of bars, multiple clubs, music venues and such, in addition to stores for food/medicine/etc. The sheer volume of that can't be replicated in a suburb.
But.. it is also not needed. Ones moves to the suburb when being a bit older, less single and more parent. So I don't need to be able to walk to dozens of bars anymore.
> That's not possible in a suburb. I can't walk to the office, or the store, or the bank, or whatever.
Sure it's possible. Like I said in original comment, that's where I live, a walkable suburb. I can walk/bike to the office, two supermarkets, theater, daycare, middle school, movies, at least 3 banks, library, pharmacies, clothing stores, restaurants and many other specialty stores I'm not listing. Also a couple city parks and a state park. The only thing in short supply are bars (one brewery within walking distance) and music venues (one bar/restaurant/live music hall within walking distance). But given the older married parent demographic, that's plenty for me.
Induced Demand needs to DIE as a concept. It is a GOOD thing - if you build any infrastructure and people change their behavior because of it, that means your city wasn't meeting the needs of the people. The whole point of a city is all the things people can do in them - if you just want to stay you get out of the city: you can find cheap houses in Montana with nothing around that will meet your needs just was well. The rest of us live in/near a city because as romantic as the cabin sounds, we overall prefer all the options a city gives us.
Note that I didn't specify you should get ahead of induced demand, only that you should. Trains are much cheaper in the long run for most cities but it requires a large investment to make them useful.
I don’t think you understand how this concept works. Because commuting by car after increasing the road capacity gets easy again, and because it’s also the most co convenient and (for a brief moment) fastest way to commute from point A to B, people switch over from using other means and the roads get saturated again soon after. You cannot increase the capacity to accommodate everyone driving, and everyone absolutely would want to drive if possible. It has nothing to do with the city’s ability to deliver, it’s about human condition and our innate need to make lowest effort possible.
Also, this is such a wildly American take, from a European perspective. No one expects city to somehow make driving cars easy here, not anymore. Would also be wild from NYC or Chicago perspective. Having lived in NYC I would not replace Subway with a car in that large of a place. Even without traffic it would take too long to move about.
Good comment except for the first word. Obviously cars enable all sorts of movement and economic activity, so why not just admit it? The rest of your comment is just talking about how rail may do all those things to a greater extent than cars. You don’t need to deny benefits of cars, it doesn’t bolster your arguments. Better to just be honest and then extol the virtues of rail and other transportation methods.
I actually do stand by my assertion in this case. The reason is because unfortunately, after a certain scale, cars are actually actively harmful to growth.
That's why I brought up Texas in particular. Interstate 45 as an example is effectively at saturation. Even if you add new lanes to it, you only get marginal throughput benefits when you actually try to get between Dallas and Houston or commute to either city from the region between them. The same goes for I-10 out of Houston.
Texas has reached the point where car ownership is actually costing the state and local governments astronomical amounts of money for marginal amounts of congestion relief (that is then immediately saturated).
I don't deny that cars have a place in low density regions and I think they are great for specific uses or areas but generally I believe that cars hinder growth in any metro environment in the long term. Doubly so because car centric infrastructure is extremely hostile to anyone who doesn't use a car which makes transition at that density threshold extremely painful for everyone involved.
Of course a car does, but does that mean you should ignore all the benefits brought by bicycles? And if we go that far, should we overlook our own muscular locomotion? It all enables the same mobility after all.
Cycling at 110F ambient temperature can be outright hazardous (speaking of Texas).
Cycling at 80F is okay as long as you have a shower at the destination. (Most offices don't.)
Also, cycling in a city, when you cycle for 2-3, maybe 5 miles, is fine. Cycling for 20 miles is pretty taxing and time-consuming, but in a low-density, car-oriented environment 20 miles correctly qualifies as "nearby".
> Cycling at 80F is okay as long as you have a shower at the destination. (Most offices don't.)
1. Shower at home.
2. Have a change of clothes.
In the Before Times (pre-COVID) I cycled to work five days a week and never showered there (even though available). (And believe me: people I worked with would have told me if it was a problem. )
Sweating does not make you stinky. Sweat is not stinky. It is bacteria that causes the stinkiness. If your skin is (relatively) clean, there would not be any (food for) bacteria and you won't stink.
Also:
3. How much you sweat depends on your exertion level: take it easy and you don't sweat as much, at least in the morning when it's cooler. (I'm in Toronto, where summer afternoons are sometimes >30C, and I've cycled home in 35C weather; high-ish humidity too.)
> Sweating does not make you stinky. Sweat is not stinky. It is bacteria that causes the stinkiness. If your skin is (relatively) clean, there would not be any (food for) bacteria and you won't stink.
As much as I agree with your general point, this isn't strictly true.
For a sizable chunk of the population, sweat doesn't contain high concentration of compounds that when digested by bacteria produce body odor.
However, despite being a sizable population, people lucky enough to have this trait are in the minority. I don't know the actual percentage but among European populations it's as low as 2% and among east Asian populations it's as high as 50%. Either way less than half the population.
The rest of the population has variations of that trait and their sweat produces moderate to extreme amounts of amino acid based compounds that when digested by bacteria produces the VOCs that make up the infamous body odor smell.
You can't just compare the entire multi purpose road network of the US to a single rail company. That's just not a serious comparison.
Besides, you didn't include the cost of the vehicles or the cost of fuel for the cars. I presume the number for Amtrak include all operating costs.
The truth is that different modes of transport have different strengths and weaknesses. In densely urbanized areas trains and trams are typically more efficient than cars.
There are definitely places where rail is awesome, a great example is New York to DC. Better than driving or flying by a mile.
But on a purely cost basis, rail is very expensive. It just more expensive for the government to build an operate rail than it is for them to build and operate roads. You’re right that part of it is because some of the cost is shouldered by the car owner. But, even in Europe, car ownership is very common outside of city centers. You can’t really expect there to be a rail station taking you from anywhere you want to go to anywhere else you wanna go unless you’re in an urban hub.
I gave data showing that the hundreds of billions of tax dollars spent on roads supports trillions of miles traveled, while billions of dollars spent on Amtrak (largest rail system in the US) leads to an order of magnitude less miles traveled
Yes but like I said the comparison is totally flawed since you counted all costs for Amtrak but only a subset of costs for car traffic.
If you are convinced roads+cars is an order of magnitude more efficient than rail, maybe you can explain what you think is the cause of that difference. Does rail require more land? Does it require more maintenance hours? Does it require more expensive materials? Does it require higher insurance fees? What's the reason?
operating and capital costs for transit in the USA are absolutely sky-high compared to the rest of the world. It doesn’t cost Japan billions to extend their subway a couple miles, but it does in NYC. The “why” is complex but well documented.
> rail station taking you from anywhere you want to go to anywhere else you wanna go unless you’re in an urban hub.
The specific people pushing this form of development also want you to live in ultra-high-density housing in an urban center - that's the whole idea and eventuality of this type of development.
You WILL raise your family in an apartment, they WILL ride a bicycle everywhere they aren't using mass transit. You will own nothing and like it.
I don’t really need to jump to that conclusion. I think there’s a certain naïveté that if high-speed rail is ever built in America, it’ll be this wonderfully efficient, cheap system that takes me exactly from where I am to where I wanna go faster than flying. When the reality is that high-speed rail really only makes sense for certain very dense corridors then things like the Philly to Pittsburgh high-speed rail wish is the kind of thing that would be an economic disaster.
The idea isn't to "force" people to do anything, it's to stop PRIORITIZING those people.
Suburbs are on heavy welfare from city centers, who pretty much provide all the money. Roads are prioritized to such an insane degree that everyone suffers. The people you may identify with - low-density huge homeowners - don't realize it, but they're being heavily subsidized by everyone. Particularly those in denser areas.
People would like to live in denser areas and have it, you know, not suck ass. They would like to be able to go anywhere without 1 hour of traffic. They would like to be able to bike without risking their lives. That means SOME money given to urban sprawl and roads needs to be diverted to public transit. Boo hoo.
Anecdotally, I frequently take day (or weekend) trips to other European cities by rail. It is usually quicker than the roads but also crucially you can be productive on the train. If I had to drive my car there then I probably wouldn't bother.
This reminds me of this Swedish office on a train https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HbrI3refig , made for a company which had an hour train commute from Stockholm. It's even got 8 telephone line (4 in and 4 out)!
I guess a lot of people would use work booths/conference rooms on trains, but the price/profit has to work for both sides (the train company and users). As for trains, the old-fashioned 6 seater compartments offer more privacy for groups.
This is an aside, but I’d never seen that “Beyond 2000” show before.
Retro future is a favorite topic of mine, so thanks for sharing.
Yeeesh though, re: part 2 of that episode, it’s wild to watch people in 1988 articulate the looming threat of global warming, and to hear them say on this 25 year old program “we’ve known about this for 30 years”
Yeah - as someone born in 1979, I find repetitions of the idea that global warming / climate change only came into public awareness 'in the last 15 to 20 years' on TV news and in documentaries deeply troubling. Global warming was constantly discussed on (British) television during my childhood. At least as much as the hole in the ozone layer and acid rain. Perhaps this wasn't the case in America?
The funny thing is that people were calling for protecting the future of the children - and now we've just moved the goalposts to those children's children.
you could also work from a car if someone else is driving it like a taxi, but imagine the price difference to travel such a long distance every day over rail versus metro + rail.
Another point I haven't seen mentioned much is safety. Rail is vastly safer than cars and results in less strain on the medical system.
We could bring down the cost of the taxi by putting more people in the car, to share the cost of the driver. That'll bring the costs down significantly.
If the car is sufficiently large, we can get, say, 50 people in a car with a single driver. That should make the extra cost of the driver split between the 50 lassengers significantly cheaper.
We could go further and link multiple cars together, with a single driver up front. They will be driving on one another's slipstream vastly improving fuel efficiency which will bring down costs even further.
Imagine if we can get them to run on some sort of rail or metal track, which makes rolling resistance of the wheels basically 0. No more expensive rubber tyres that need replacing and yet again improved fuel efficiency. This will bring down the costs even further!
And if we put those rails in a tunnel or on a elevated structure we can automate the whole process and get rid of that driver. (we cannot automate anything where humans or animals might get in the way - it remains to be seen if we ever will)
Europe is not exactly the standard bearer for productivity though, is it? If one wants to advance an argument for emulating European style passenger rail, this is really not the right argument.
Cars destroy walkability, cyclability, ability for kids to freely play outside, enable sprawl (hence more energy consumption hence more carbon emissions).
There’s no free lunch with using more surface area, which cars greatly expand people’s ability to consume.
True to a degree but cars also make parenting easier: you get bigger houses, bigger backyards, don't have lug your kids around on public transit, deal with the weather, don't need to worry about rail worker strikes, etc.
All America's missing is laws that allow kids to walk to school and adding more sidewalks to enable this, but this is changing over time (see Utah's free range parenting law).
Do bigger houses make parenting easier, do bigger backyards? I’m inclined towards a large communual yard (a park, if you will) being many times more efficient at keeping them busy, especially if you have a single child.
Lugging your children around on public transit builds character that chauffeuring them around in a car does not. They’ll be exposed to a variety of people and situations they’d otherwise never experience.
Similar thing for the weather. I don’t want my children to grow up thinking that any kind of weather limits their options if a car is not available.
I realize my opinions might be different if I were living in a US city, just wanted to give a different perspective.
The other great thing about public transport is you don't have to "lug" / "chauffer" them at all after about 8 or so (what age makes sense depends on area and the kid of course). They can exercise some independence.
Maybe that's true in small, peaceful countries like Denmark, but in the US children "excersising some independence" would likely be kidnapped, raped or killed.
This has never been significantly true, and becomes less true every year.
The probability that any given child will be kidnapped or otherwise threatened by a stranger is minuscule compared to the chance that they will be abused, kidnapped, or killed by a family member.
By that thinking, looking at the data, you should prevent kids from seeing their family… Understand the nonsense? But nonsense gets often commonsensical when everyone in your circle believes it. Going outside has more benefits than risks. Like biking, yes you are at risk of accident, but in the average you’ll be fitter and live longer.
The US has much better access to mental health care than any European country. Not to mention everyone who lives in a walkable city there lives in a state where healthcare access is good.
> Lugging your children around on public transit builds character that chauffeuring them around in a car does not
I'm talking about ages 0 to 3 when parents need to use a stroller. It's a huge pain to do this in public transit. It's easier when the kids are older but if you have more than one child the car still wins.
Both my kids were born in Berlin (now 6 & 8 years old) and we never owned a car. In some ways transit is even easier with a stroller as you can just roll into the subway/train instead of having the disassemble the stroller and put it into the trunk. Buses require a bit more effort to board with a stroller but newer busses allow the driver to lower them near the curb to make boarding with stroller easier. We’ve done that for the entire time our kids used strollers.
I'd bet good money on your life being overall easier in a less dense city and two cars. But yes, you can do it and people have raised kids without cars for millenia.
Life in a less dense city itself would be different (fewer career opportunities - despite remote work, less cultural opportunities, etc). Also kids become more independent earlier so we won't have to drive them everywhere as teens etc.
>All America's missing is laws that allow kids to walk to school and adding more sidewalks to enable this, but this is changing over time (see Utah's free range parenting law).
Laws and sidewalk curbs don’t stop a giant SUV/pickup truck driven by someone looking at their mobile at 40mph in a residential area.
And crossing a 50ft+ wide intersection of a 40mph road (which means people drive 50mph) is daunting even for adults, and simply not advisable after the sun goes down. Those arterial roads basically box in your kids’ roaming area.
> And crossing a 50ft+ wide intersection of a 40mph road (which means people drive 50mph) is daunting even for adults, and simply not advisable after the sun goes down.
At least here (California) those intersections have stoplights and pedestrian crossings, so the width and moving speed of the road are not relevant. The cars will be stopped when you cross by walking.
I don't remember exact age but certainly before kindergarden age my child (and all the neighborhood friends in that age range) knew how to operate the pedestrian walk buttons and cross safely.
I fully agree it can be nicer walk when you don't have to cross a larger road. But at the same time, the difficulty of doing it is often greatly overstated. Press button, wait a bit, cross. Done. This is not in the top-100 things I'd like to see improved in society.
> The cars will be stopped when you cross by walking.
You live in a place with some combination of far more traffic enforcement or far more conscientious drivers than me.
All I see when I look around is a sea of people glancing up and down between the road and their phone. It would be negligent to let my kids cross an arterial road, especially after dark.
Not sure about far more conscientious, but people do stop at red lights. Seeing someone run a red light is very rare, maybe once every 3-4 years. And even those aren't blatant, they are people trying to get through before the red but failing. So what I do (and teach the kids) is that when the pedestrian crossing goes green (or white, technically) then wait a second, look left & right, and if everyone is stopped, then cross. That eliminates the risk of someone trying to rush through in the last second, and at that point it is perfectly safe to cross.
It's currently being discussed in Europe, since the "independent import" route to import a special vehicle has started to be exploited to import unsafe American vehicles. (The Cybertruck is one example.)
And yet I frequently see (in New Zealand), properties with oversized double garages (often built to fit oversized American vehicles) and driveways that take up half the land on the property. Cars use a huge amount of space in roads, carparks, garages, and are responsible for pushing things further and further away from the home. And then somehow cars are seen as the solution for the very problems they create. There's plenty of real world evidence that there are better ways to solve this.
I don't think cars are responsible for bigger backyards at all. The size of the average property where I live only seems to be shrinking as the roads get more and more congested.
Honestly, I don't want that lifestyle. I live in the burbs with a big house and yard. We travel plenty and go to places that are dense/walkable but I love coming back home to my carbrained neighborhood with an HOA.
That's really too bad: your lifestyle does not support maximal economic output of the land you are using and tax dollars you're paying.
HOA? Hah!- those shouldn't be allowed, neither should home ownership generally. You really need to live and raise your family in an apartment.. taxes should be raised enough that we can phase out private home ownership.
Your children will attend a public school and understand and implement equity from an early age. They will learn to use and love mass transit, only the approved destinations are necessary.
The Party may decide that the 50% of your income you are generously allowed to spend on approved items is too much. Social programs aren't free, you know, you need to pay "your share."
As someone who grew up in suburban sprawl, maybe it makes parenting easier, maybe. But they also had to drive me to and from school every day, and band practice, and every single game, and whenever I wanted to hang out with my friends. I would argue my parents basically were moonlighting as my Uber driver for about 16 years until I got my own car.
Big yards are great, but empty. Mom, can you drive me to my friend's bigger backyard? That times the 5 other friends that want to go to the friend's house that has the biggest backyard. Comically the 5 cars all waiting at the same stop light before the final turn, taking up the entire residential street as we all get dropped off and later picked up.
Eh, going to my friend's house is tedious. I'll just fully immerse myself in world of Warcraft, get fat, get socially maladjusted by spending all my time on the internet and 4chan, and enter college as a practically sociopathic asshole with no social skills.
Could just be me. But if I have kids, I'm raising them somewhere where they can just get on a train to get to band practice.
This was the life of my farmland friends in Wisconsin. In Houston if I had ridden my bicycle the mere 2 miles to my friend's house (half mile to leave my neighborhood, half mile to enter his, one mile or so on actual roads), I would almost certainly have one day been killed by a car or truck that failed to expect a kid on a bike.
We didn't have sidewalks. That area is still missing sidewalks actually.
In some ways our beautiful outside world is safer than it was 60 years ago, in others perhaps it's more dangerous.
Trains scale better than cars in dense areas and offer more than just emissions reductions. Good rail infrastructure is a big part of makes a large city world-class and improves everyday lives. Subsidizing trains is better than a lot of other uses of government funds.
Germany has a pretty high population density and the metropolitan areas have evolved around medieval cities, so they are sometimes very bad a carrying a lot of traffic. Getting around by car in lots of major German cities is a major PITA and parking your car there (if you live there) is just as horrible. Inside cities, public transport is much more efficient.
