I think that taxing urban sprawl would be a more effective deterrant to rising commuter congestion, AND would spike property values for inner city lots, sparking re developement.
Then main reason we are addicted to inflating the suburbs is because it’s (relativey) cheap to do so.
The transportation nightmares caused after residential communities swamp around the new rural malls are just as much a result of the initial building of those malls as the original roof raising was.
So, let those developers who got rich building the malls in the first place, pay their share towards correcting the eventual problems they create. Stop letting them shift that cost onto a generation of taxpayers 30 years into the future.
First of all there is usually only one person per car. If you can find two per car they would be in the Diamond lane. If your test is done at rush hour NONE will be flying by but they will be lined up bumper to bumper. Grand Central in NYC and its related stations move well above that number per hour every weekday morning and evening.
G’day, Y’all,
In Washington, DC, dedicated bus lanes were instituted and during the energy crunches, ridership only got to about 2/3 what was projected and even that fell drastically when it was shown tghat there were still plenty of dead T-Rexes down there supplying oil. But now they have rail and ridership is way up, like 900 percent! These people are not rail fans; they are former motorists who have determined that commuter rail better fits their lifestyle than driving. It takes a minimum of 550 square feet, 10.5’x50’, for each motorist on the road at rush hour, since nearly all trips awe single occupant. That is plus right of way which is usually 300 feet for highways. By contrast, two rail passengers can fit into a space about 3’x3’. Obviously, we will eventually run out of space for cars unless we take Wendell Cox’s advice and run highways through everyone’s backyard.
And who says it is government’s job to give motorists what they want? If the rest of us wanted no taxes, could we have that?
My point was, if for heavy rail to get those high numbers, a set up of optimal conditions was necessary, then lets be fair and allow all competing options to set up optimal conditions.
You ain’t gonna get 80,000 people to board a train in one hour. let alone continue on to drive it past a single fixed point.
You seem to have a desire to compare apples to oranges. Rail already has optimal conditions to get those numbers. It would be unfair advantage to expect cars to. The fact that you are unable to beleive it has not stop rails from achiveing it. Tokyo routinely does it and makes it look effortless. [%-)]
It seems to me that you are under the misaprehension that 80,000 people get on a train at point A and an hour later they are delivered to point Z.
Commuter railroads don’t work like that. Trains originate at points A to M (some a couple of hours away from point Z). These points are usually even on multiple routes. On their way into the city the trains also stop at points N to Y (and then some). Eventually all the branches come together and all of the trains arrive at the terminus, where in the hour between 08:00 and 09:00 (say) 80,000 people arrive.
Consider this, a 12 car double deck train has 1680 seats (140 seats/car) and has room for the same number of standing passengers giving a total of 3360 passengers per train. So to carry 80,000 passengers you only need 24 trains. Commuter railroads can easily handle 24 trains/hr. (that’s a headway of 2 and a half minutes).
The low friction, self-guiding principles of rail transport are most suited for high tonnage, long haul, bulk loads such as grain, coal, ores, and chemicals. The general inertia of this system, however, renders it less effective for higher value, time-sensitive, low-density, short haul cargo such as televisions, coffeemakers, and people. So it is not a fair comparison to say that rail is more efficient than road transport for commuters by citing the bulk cargo tonnage advantage of rail. People cannot be handled like coal.
Rail may indeed be perceived as more fun than road transit, but this hardly seems like a proper justification for spending taxpayer’s money. Commuters would probably think it even more fun to be transported in small flying machines, even if they were less practical than rail as a transport alternative.
Commuter rail made sense 100 years ago when roads and vehicles were in their infancy. Furthermore, the initial rail corridors attracted development. The development clustered around the corridors, creating a density of users that justified the hauling capacity of the rail line. So the corridor patterned the development, and the pattern justified the corridor. Minneapolis had an extensive electric streetcar / interurban network with corridors matched to corresponding development. In the 1950’s, when rubber tired vehicles and roads had matured, they scrapped the rail system.
It was seen as a natural evolution. They said it was absurd to tie transit to rails on fixed routes when you could liberate it to go everywhere on the roads. Moreover, because roads were far less costly to build and maintain compared to railroads, you could produce a network of roads covering the entire area rather than the select linear corridors of railroads. It made a lot more sense because the city transport requirement is patterned in an area, as opposed to say a freight haul across Montana, which is a linear pattern.
Nonetheless, it is still the case that if you have a large number of commuters moving from points A to B (or points A, B and C to D), half of a double track will move as many as a multilane expressway without the wasted space, pollution, and much higher accident rate. A luxury? A hobby? It is true that in the USA heavy-rail commuter tends to work as a subsidy more toward the middle class than the poor, but that’s because most such commutation still heads to a fixed point–the inner city–and is more efficient that way than the spread-out driving habits of the working poor. That, too, is changing, though–compare a fixed-downtown system like Chicago’s Metra to the more linear, on-and-off boardings in many of the California systems. These benefit everyone.
Sorry if it looked as though I believed that. my intention was more to exploit the concept as a comparative improbability.
It’s clear that any such train would HAVE to board at numerous locations, spanning well beyond the parameters of the one hour time frame.
My (intended) point was along the lines of ‘~okay, if we are going to allow these trains 3 hours to ticket and board, then stage them to speed past a single point so that we can claim rail has a capacity of 80,000 passengers per hour, then clearly we are making some optimal assumptions, to give the rail option such a huge advantage.~’
Okay, THAT was my point.
And I was just saying that if we factor in ticketing, change making, and boarding (all a part of the rail riding experience) then that optimized number goes way way down.
Alternately, lets figure in some unrealistic variables for the auto, and see how that modes listed capacity skyrockets.
Instead of assuming each car has only one occupant, lets optimize for the sake of numbers derived, lets cram 4 passengers in each car (with the driver), throw 3 more in the trunk, then stage the cars bumper to bumper, then let them get a flying mile head start to race past a single point and see what kind of contrived, albeit impressive number we can compare with.
Even with the optimized conditions for the trains, 80,000 passengers/hr is a staggering figure.
Lets look at that,how many passengers per train/ how many trains?
A not-too-often perk of commuting by rail is the ability to nap, read, or work enroute.
The Chicago-Milwaukee Hiawatha trains have one “quiet car” (which means no cell phones or other noise-making devices allowed) per train. In addition, there are snacks available on the train. And ridership continues to increase 7% per year. The local Amtrak operations people want to put an additional coach on the trains, but Amtrak has none available (according to my source).
The communities near the suburban stations of Metra continue to grow, and housing near the train stations is considered ‘premium’ property.
On the flip-side of commuting by rail, I think the extension of Metra from Kenosha to Milwaukee is a big waste of money. The $152 million needed to begin operations is an immense sum and is totally unjustified. It already takes 1.75 hours to get from Kenosha to Chicago; it will likely take at least another 45 minutes to go from Kenosha to Milwaukee (35 rail miles). Who is going to take a 2.5 hour+ train ride each day, when the Hiawatha can do it in under 1.5 hours?
80.000 past a point in one hour is done regularly in the existing hudson tunnels of amtrak and jersey transit, and is actually bettered on the queens boulevard express tracks used by the e and f lines in the borough of queens. in these two subway situations 100,000 per hour is more likely but a bit of discomfort results from such a packed standiing load. Note that the optimum speed for just moving the most automobiles past a point is about 22-25 mph, the faster few go by because the gap between cars increased more like the square of the speed rather than linearly. Light rail or commuter rail is not only valuable to the riders but the remaining drivers who have beter traffici coniditions.
Sorry if it looked as though I believed that. my intention was more to exploit the concept as a comparative improbability.
It’s clear that any such train would HAVE to board at numerous locations, spanning well beyond the parameters of the one hour time frame.
My (intended) point was along the lines of ‘~okay, if we are going to allow these trains 3 hours to ticket and board, then stage them to speed past a single point so that we can claim rail has a capacity of 80,000 passengers per hour, then clearly we are making some optimal assumptions, to give the rail option such a huge advantage.~’
Okay, THAT was my point.
And I was just saying that if we factor in ticketing, change making, and boarding (all a part of the rail riding experience) then that optimized number goes way way down.
Alternately, lets figure in some unrealistic variables for the auto, and see how that modes listed capacity skyrockets.
Instead of assuming each car has only one occupant, lets optimize for the sake of numbers derived, lets cram 4 passengers in each car (with the driver), throw 3 more in the trunk, then stage the cars bumper to bumper, then let them get a flying mile head start to race past a single point and see what kind of contrived, albeit impressive number we can compare with.
Even with the optimized conditions for the trains, 80,000 passengers/hr is a staggering figure.
It’s ALL part of the passenger moving business, isn’t it?
in order to ride the train, they have to board it, in order to board it, they need to pay for it…and if they are gonna pa for it, they are gonna fumble for “that nickle they know is down in that pocket, somewhere” etc etc You mean you don’t get idiots like that in front of you in payment lines? i always seem to, along with people who spend 10 minutes figuring out they have not brought sufficient money to make the purchase, but wait to make that determination until they are at the cashier’s station.
If you wanna exclude all of those mandatory niceties of the riding experience, then you are optimizing for the sake of convenience, so why not allow the auto option to “set up” for ideal circumstances as well.?
Well they just completed the Hiawatha LRT here in Minneapolis. I think it is about 12 miles long and cost almost $1 billion. It will cost $25-30 million per year just to run it. The riders swear by it, but of course, with 12 miles of route, the users are a select group. We are told that it may not make economic sense right now, but once we build a whole network of rail lines, and rebuild the city around them, it will all make sense.
Every person on that train is one less car on the commute. Talk about capacity issues it’s with our hyways at rush hour which is where the justificaton comes from. In NYC, Chi. and DC etc. it is physically impossible (parking alone) for all those train passengers to drive. Besides the air quality issues which trains help.
I still don’t see how this affects the ability of the railroad to carry passengers… Maybe I’m thick or something…
Buying tickets is part of the passenger moving business, but a different part from railroad operations. Most commuters buy season tickets anyway, so this part of their transport experience only happens occasionally.
Yes, but you should start something that is not absurd. For the money, it would be far more efficient to improve the roads and bus transit. If the objective is to clean up the air, why not get the job done sooner rather than later?
Thats the point of light rail and commuter initiatives. They want to start now instead of later. While the initial expenses are high they only get higher the longer you wait. There is virtually no room to widen existing hyways in many metropolitan areas. The expense of elevating hyways makes steel rails look attractive since they are a more efficent and effective way to move people. Both enviromentally and the effect on the landscape.