In Europe high speed rail works b/c once you get to destinations you can literally WALK the last km or two, no prob. In U.S, get to end train station and you're 5 - 15 miles away with no car, 83 other people are using the Ubers, and walking means through the crack dealer's hood which congregate around train b/c of low property cost. Plus gasoline in U.S. is ~ 5 - 70% cheaper than Europe, 2 - 3 times as available, and, most regrettably, Americans tend to live for the destination rather than the trip. Thus why US cars are packed with cupholders and stuff, rather than memories.
So I had to upvote because that air traffic comment made me laugh. That said, there tends to be distinct differences in the average use of airfare compared to rail, especially high speed rail, in places like the USA. While there are some “air commuters,” they tend to be in the minority, and the majority of people traveling for work are usually going on a business trip or to handle “on sight” issues as opposed to commuting.
Rail has its “pleasure seekers,” but by the numbers when it comes to travel, people tend to use rail and light rail for things like daily errands and work. In many places like states with train routes to NYC or LA or SF, a person might take a 2-3 hour train ride or have a 2-4 hour commute everyday. Because air travel tends to be for direct business requiring travel, or occasional pleasure, and trips via air tend to be more expensive trips total (even though long distance train tickets often match or exceed airfare, the nature and particulars of the sorts of trips..
.. most common to each method tend to mean if you’re traveling by plane or is either critical business where time is more important than money, or it is a trip that will cost more total..), it’s somewhat easier to absorb the cost of the “final miles.” Moreover, it is very common for convention centers, hotels, and certain other business travel “hot spots” to be located near airports or have easy access. The fact that even the fastest trains couldn’t beat an aircraft in time across country also means that even when time is the main concern, you’d probably arrive sooner most destinations long distance by flying in and then having to wait for final leg transport and travel that over road vs. if a high speed train dropped you off a block from your destination. It starts to make more sense when we talk about short and medium distance trips because time spent taxiing, boarding, etc etc. start to reduce the speed benefit of air travel, but compare Japan to California (Japan is slightly…
.. smaller than the state of California, but longer and more spread out.) if we take the relative distance of the Shinkansen route and impose that on California (probably one of the solid contenders for high speed long distance rail), we would see that the potential benefits might be debatable vs. the already common computer flight, existing rail, or road options. In the populous Bay Area of San Francisco region, light rail services exist but have historically struggled to self fund even in a market with large dense commercial areas and outlying population zones- a seemingly perfect fit. Trains run from the south of the state to the north, but are likewise not the most popular choice for those traversing the state for any other purpose than scenic rail rides or who have special circumstances that make rail the clear or only choice.
So I thought it was funny, and it’s a good point, but there are some fundamental differences in how the average rail travel and air travel tend to be structured that changes that dynamic. In many urban or more developed areas, rail often terminates at hubs like local bus or light rail stations, or transfer to light rail lines which get you to a transit hub. This can add cost and complication, and works better in those relatively rare cities with comprehensive and well designed public transit. So where sorry travelers may expect a long trip from their point of debarkation to their final destination rail travelers generally do not. While air travelers may not leave the area or even the airport itself, rail travelers likely will. Probably the first step to high speed rail adoption in the USA would be to develop a comprehensive and well functioning public transit system across the entire country. Not a small task…
In fairness- it says high speed rail transports people- there aren’t a lot of high speed cargo trains nor is the use case very sound. There isn’t really a common need to rush bulk freight at the speeds of high speed rail, and perhaps some safety reasons not to. Mass freight by rail stresses the rails- cars full of people weight far less than those loaded with freight and bulk goods. An entire passenger train may weigh less than a few Freight cars. While it isn’t uncommon for passenger and freight trains to share rails, especially long distances, sharing precision high speed rails with Rodger trains can pose problems. Add in the other issues with the upkeep and safe running of high speed rail, and development costs, and so far high speed freight doesn’t make a lot of sense. In short- “true” high speed rail like “bullet trains” basically need their own tracks- you can’t generally just throw them on existing tracks and blast away at 150mph+. You generally need to secure the railway as…
.. well since a random car or person or animal or debris etc. could cause a catastrophe. Culture, geography, land rights. Environmental concerns, and other factors hinder high speed rail- especially in the USA. That isn’t to say it can’t be done or can’t work, but the hurdles are fairly large and because we have existing roadways serving peoples needs pretty well, the economics and feasibility are.. problematic. The US also didn’t have a great deal of urban and interstate infrastructure before the 1800’s, and didn’t really see booms in development of scale until later, with a good deal of infrastructure laid down in the 20th century. Compared to countries like Europe where cities and roadways often were built up from existing ones, some hundreds or even thousands of years old, and from times where more thought was put towards walking etc, the US really took shape around cars. That meant that we moved to decentralized suburban models where people would live one place and likely work…
.. impractical distances away, and shop impractical walking distances away from both. One way to help the environment, and arguably build stronger communities and help keep wealth within communities would be to change our strategy if building from one where we tend to “district” things by type, so instead of 10,30,50 square miles of homes in clusters that don’t have retail and service spaces to tailor to the local population, mixing homes and businesses and production facilities etc. could create areas where people don’t need to travel so far just to get basic goods or services. In turn, this wouldn't just potentially help the environment itself, but could allow for high speed rail to become more feasible as the number of destinations and their proximity decreases.
well most shipping, which is done by truck wouldn't fit on a train in the loading time, so pick your poison, either way we are screwed; even if we solve it all it just means more people, which means more h20 stuck in people, which means droughts, which means higher temps anyway. This planet is so far out of whack it'll take a bottleneck event to fix it. We're an infection; and what does the body do when it has an infection? It heats up to kill the infection.
I don’t disagree with most of your points entirely, though I differ a bit in view.
Hands down loading trucks is slower than loading trains for bulk pack. When it comes to distributing smaller loads such as to businesses and consumers like retail goods- trucks win in almost every way. Because trucks are cheaper than trains and roads work better than rail for “hops,” you can have 100 trucks delivering, 60 for target and Walmart and “Dave’s home town business” and then 40 for home delivery for example. Whatever the number of stops, it is at least 100, each individual gets their goods faster and the time between the first and last stop would be much shorter than a train snaking 100+ stops including residential. (Not to mention the disruption to how towns and cities would have to be designed for rail service to these locations…) we can go up the supply chain from end user to distribution center and outside of HUGE bulk goods like raw materials for construction or factory use, it’s going…
.. to pencil out to be faster and generally work better to rely on trucks in the current model of society and commerce. A train could work very well and potentially be more environmentally friendly if each town/city/zone had one central depot where a train stopped and everyone, including commercial sellers, picked up their goods there- you’d need to structure the train route and the location of factories etc. so that it was efficient for the train to act as a “caravan” carrying goods and people and such long distances one stop at a time- and you’d still need a lot of man power to make that work with speed, as well as the question of how people are getting to this central depot (are 100 SUVS driving to pick up packages less polluting that the current system..?) etc. forcing retailers and sellers to operate their warehouses and store fronts from these “hubs” could mitigate the impact of transporting the goods by truck to their final destination- but then we have basically the current..
.. problem magnified, people not living close enough to production/sale of goods and services to conduct tier lives, go to work, the doctor, the store, without relying on cars or polluting transportation. One way around this would be to centralize certain types of business that are beyond the scope of the cottage industry or small producer and then create communities based around farming and production of of goods and materials that are practical to rely on local production. Each location would have somewhat unique goods based on what they produced and people would rely mostly on local items, then travel to a central hub where larger stores sold no local goods and factories produced what couldn’t be made at home. Which… is basically how life worked until the mass industrialized society popped up, and has lots of problems. So I don’t see trains being the best thing to base freight around, but they are certainly a good tool to use to help solve the problem.
oh i'm not disputing that there are better routes and better ways to use trains; i was referring to emissions, which like what? 70% are caused by shipping? Some ridiculous number.
oh and while the local thing sounds good in theory; all it would do is spike up costs and emissions; what if i wanted an avocado a tomato, garlic, jalepeno, an orange, red onions, a bison steak, a deep fryer, a new vacuum, paper towels and toilet paper all at once? I'd cause so much more mayhem than a single train and a single truck. It's still crazy how much the emissions are already. What could helm is maglev trains, sure a high upfront cost, but after that it's all gravy.
Basically my point too. The local thing goes backwards if we try to fit it into our present system. There just really isn’t any sustaining things as a continuing trend with how they’ve been going except for “magic,” basically. Which brings me to my second divergence (sorry I didn’t get to that earlier or reply sooner- I was pulled away for work and barely had time to finish the trains part..) lol.
The second part is- I don’t know that we’re an infection- or at the least we aren’t a good one. Most people walk around with all sorts of infections of various organisms living off them. The most successful infectious organisms in the body tend to be ones we don’t really worry about because they’ve evolved to have little or no symptoms and in many cases not even trigger the bodies defenses. A dead host doesn’t support the life of infectious organisms long term. What’s more, as symptoms become increasingly severe, the odds to spread become lower because the infected will either tend to avoid others, be incapacitated and unable to spread the infection, or others will tend to avoid the infected as they display severe symptoms. When infections are easily spread and have rapid mortality those organisms tend to die or go extinct unless they evolve. It isn’t that these organisms are even conscious of these facts, it’s just that mutation favors the survival of more mild strains which…
.. then reproduce and that’s how some infectious strains can survive as a species for such long periods and others (like certain engineered weapons) can’t exist outside a lab for long and are only really effective at an initial high mortality and then fall off.
Humans are perhaps like a bio weapon or a cancer as we are now in terms of the environment I think. All life natural in the world is mutation, adaptation, so we could change, but will we change before we go to far, ir before we must change just to survive? I suppose that’s less a concern for those alive at this moment than to “enjoy the ride while it’s there.”
that's why most viruses or bacteria start out severe, the decrease their devastation over time. We apparently haven't learned that, but we also have a far longer adaptability rate. What a virus or bacteria could do in 2 months would take us 5 centuries. Which is part of the problem; we breed like them, but don't die like them. A bunch of catholic rabbits humping any other rabbit it sight.
lol. Which may also be our undoing. We don’t adapt as fast as microorganisms because we are more complex. That means on a timeline of evolution our odds that they’ll adapt to destroy us faster than we can adapt to resist are high. Which I suppose parallels is and the earth. Although… in that way we are not just consuming the earth to live and reproduce as an infection would. We are actively altering its parameters to suit us, but we are bad at it, the earth is complex. It’s like if a bacteria tried to force a change in your genetic code make your bodies internal humidity more comfortable for it or to create faster routes around your body by adding to your circulatory system etc. Cancers do things sort of like this, they’ll divert blood flow or nutrients the way humans change the flows of rivers or alter natural systems to suit our growth.
True. I can’t directly think of any way that cancer could be made to help us, perhaps save for some extreme pocket cases.
That said- the earth doesn’t actually need us to help it though. It just needs us to not destroy it. Or I guess technically, we need us to not destroy our ability to live here, and other life forms need us to not destroy their ability to live here, but it’s unlikely anything we could do could make it so that NO life could exist here since there are all sorts of creatures that thrive in all temperatures and without water or sun, in radiation and even in the “clean rooms” used to sterilize space equipment and such. So I guess…. I’d still say in that regard we are more like a cancer. We could be benign and not cause any direct harm but just exist with all the other cells that make the whole, or we could be malignant and make it so ourselves or other cells can’t survive it potentially actually destroy the body so only the corpse supports life?
To be fair- such comparisons are never completely accurate. We also aren’t really exactly like a cancer- and depending on what aspects of human behavior or interaction with the environment we look at etc. we could also be more like a bacteria, virus, etc. it was a fun talk though. I appreciate it.
Rail has its “pleasure seekers,” but by the numbers when it comes to travel, people tend to use rail and light rail for things like daily errands and work. In many places like states with train routes to NYC or LA or SF, a person might take a 2-3 hour train ride or have a 2-4 hour commute everyday. Because air travel tends to be for direct business requiring travel, or occasional pleasure, and trips via air tend to be more expensive trips total (even though long distance train tickets often match or exceed airfare, the nature and particulars of the sorts of trips..
Hands down loading trucks is slower than loading trains for bulk pack. When it comes to distributing smaller loads such as to businesses and consumers like retail goods- trucks win in almost every way. Because trucks are cheaper than trains and roads work better than rail for “hops,” you can have 100 trucks delivering, 60 for target and Walmart and “Dave’s home town business” and then 40 for home delivery for example. Whatever the number of stops, it is at least 100, each individual gets their goods faster and the time between the first and last stop would be much shorter than a train snaking 100+ stops including residential. (Not to mention the disruption to how towns and cities would have to be designed for rail service to these locations…) we can go up the supply chain from end user to distribution center and outside of HUGE bulk goods like raw materials for construction or factory use, it’s going…
Humans are perhaps like a bio weapon or a cancer as we are now in terms of the environment I think. All life natural in the world is mutation, adaptation, so we could change, but will we change before we go to far, ir before we must change just to survive? I suppose that’s less a concern for those alive at this moment than to “enjoy the ride while it’s there.”
That said- the earth doesn’t actually need us to help it though. It just needs us to not destroy it. Or I guess technically, we need us to not destroy our ability to live here, and other life forms need us to not destroy their ability to live here, but it’s unlikely anything we could do could make it so that NO life could exist here since there are all sorts of creatures that thrive in all temperatures and without water or sun, in radiation and even in the “clean rooms” used to sterilize space equipment and such. So I guess…. I’d still say in that regard we are more like a cancer. We could be benign and not cause any direct harm but just exist with all the other cells that make the whole, or we could be malignant and make it so ourselves or other cells can’t survive it potentially actually destroy the body so only the corpse supports life?