Randal O'Toole, a transportation policy critic, writes about transit, rail, highways, and subsidies, usually arguing against rail and urban planning.
HN commenters cite it for per-passenger-mile subsidy figures comparing roads, air, Amtrak, and transit, and one calls it a blog that questions whether rail makes sense.
I don't really follow.
The idea for roads is that congestion moderates the utility of roads, so over a wide range of capacities roads will remain congested or even become more congested as you add roads, since if you build more you make the roads more useful (reaching more places faster, through better connections or increased capacity) and so people will use them more, potentially resulting in more congestion but almost certainly not less.
The parallel idea for housing would be that cost moderates the utility of the city, people move into the city until the cost matches the benefits of density for them (driving up costs and pushing out people for whom the equation no longer works out). If you add units, you've just allowed more people to move from Idaho into the city, and made the entire city potentially more valuable from increased network effect and caused costs to go up further.
This process shouldn't be expected make it affordable to live in the city, unless you've managed to either damage the utility of living in the city through the secondary effects of increased population/density or you've managed to build enough supply the you can sink the entire worldwide demand for living in one of the best and most valuable place, such that there are no more wealthier people anywhere in the world to sell to and you must go down market to get more customers.
It would however, increase the number of people who can have the benefits of living there, but at the cost of…
Freight traffic dominates the utilization of the rail network in the US and is prioritized over other traffic. Freight trains travel slowly.
This is why US passenger train service is so poor compared to Europe.
> The picture for freight is different. According to Panorama 2009 , 46 percent of EU-27 freight goes by highway while only 10 percent goes by rail, while in the U.S. 43 percent goes by rail and only 30 percent by road. (In both cases, nearly all of the rest is waterways and pipelines.)
> So, it isn’t so much that Europe decided to move people by train rather than by automobile. It is more that Europe decided to use its railroads to move people while the United States decided to use them for freight. America moves almost six times as many ton-miles (or tonne-kilometers) of freight by rail as Europe, while both move about the same number of tonne-kilometers by road. While Europe moves about twice as many tkm of freight by waterway as the U.S., we move six times as much oil by pipeline. [6]
- area of Continental US: 3.12 million sq mi [1]
- area of Europe: 2.306 million sq mi [1]
- rail network length, US: 141,808 mi [2]
- rail network length, Europe: 157,667 mi [3]
- goods carried, US: 1.558 trillion lg tn mi/yr (long ton-miles per year) (world rank: 1st) (2015 estimate) [4]
- goods carried, "Europe": 0.32604 trillion lg tn mi/yr (long ton-miles per year)
[1]…
That is not the case at all[1]. I appreciate the thought out post and tone /sarcasm.
For further reading.[2]
> The picture for freight is different. According to Panorama 2009 , 46 percent of EU-27 freight goes by highway while only 10 percent goes by rail, while in the U.S. 43 percent goes by rail and only 30 percent by road. (In both cases, nearly all of the rest is waterways and pipelines.)
So, it isn’t so much that Europe decided to move people by train rather than by automobile. It is more that Europe decided to use its railroads to move people while the United States decided to use them for freight. America moves almost six times as many ton-miles (or tonne-kilometers) of freight by rail as Europe, while both move about the same number of tonne-kilometers by road. While Europe moves about twice as many tkm of freight by waterway as the U.S., we move six times as much oil by pipeline.
[1] https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=11847
[2] https://www.freightwaves.com/news/railroad/us-and-european-freight-railroads-are-on-different-tracks
NYC needs to build more.
Transport networks really benefit from network effects; each additional line benefits from connecting to the existing network. The IBX rail project was recently proposed in New York and found to have 100k+ daily riders, which blows pretty much everything else in the US out of the water.
The other issue is that land use planning in the US except in a select few places like New York is really bad for transit. Transit can certainly be "build it and they will come", but also the land around transit needs to legally permit that as well. Rail is only really efficient at high utilization, and most US cities refuse to permit the development that makes rail useful.
This comparison picture really brings home the point that in most US cities the land use is causing rail value per dollar spent to be really low: Atlanta and Barcelona had similar population numbers and metro lengths in 1990. https://ti.org/images/AtlantavBarcelonametro.jpg
Your statement about trains is not correct. US rail is optimized for transporting goods rather than people and overall does a good job. It is also quite profitable. For example, the Union Pacific 10-K shows a healthy profit for FY 2018. [0]
One recent stat I found claimed that in the US 43% of freight travels by rail whereas in the EU it's only 10%. [1] European highways are consequently choked with trucks, something you notice pretty quickly if you drive in countries like Germany. It's easy to overlook, though, when traveling in one of their nice passenger trains. :)
[0] https://www.up.com/cs/groups/public/@uprr/@investor/documents/investordocuments/pdf_up_10k_02082019.pdf
[1] https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=11847
Amtrak is more subsidized than those other modes: https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=18116
“Americans spent an average of 25.0 cents per passenger-mile driving their cars, light trucks, and motorcycles, while highway subsidies averaged 1.1 cents per passenger-mile. Subsidies to highway trucking, incidentally, averaged 0.8 cents per ton-mile. These highway subsidies compare to subsidies of 1.1 cents per passenger-mile to air travelers, 36 cents to Amtrak passengers, and $1.09 to transit riders. Amazingly, air travel is by far the least-expensive mode of travel, costing passengers just 13.8 cents per passenger-mile, while Amtrak fares average 38 cents and transit fares 30 cents per passenger-mile.”