[ekianjo]

Even in Japan where trains are tightly operated, you don't get trains every 3 minutes (talking about long distance trains, not metros). At best one train every 15 minutes on average between peak hours and more calm periods. That divides your capacity by 5 already, so you are now at around 10 000 passengers per hour with your trains.

Add to that that freeways don't have a single lane, but usually at least 2, if not 3, according to your numbers you get 7000~10 000 passengers per hour with cars.

Now consider than most of the trains are not running full, and don't run at night at all between 10 pm and 5 am, and you can clearly see that there is an inherent advantage in terms of flows towards cars (since traffic never stops) per day. Plus you have mass transportation on freeways with buses, too.

And still the major advantage of the car is that you can stop exactly where you want to go. The train may get you from A to B, but most people want to go to C, D, E or F and not just B so trains are always a trade-off unless you have a very standard route every single time.

And I'm not even talking about cost yet. For passengers, trains are way more expensive (even in Japan, where trains are highly developed) than the same trips by car (even though the freeways are heavily taxed).

[Johnny555]

The OP was talking about max capacity not real world capacity.

Some JR lines run at 4 minute headways during peak times and subways run reliably at 2 minute headways.

No freeway today has has 4 passenger cars running at 1 second headways so you end up with a more realistic 1000 to 2000 pax per hour. Which is about the number of pax you can fit in a single train.

A 3 lane freeway takes up about the same amount of space e as 4 sets of train tracks. And the areas that have heavy congestion are also typically the areas that have little space to spare for more lanes.

The road toll from Osaka to Kyoto is $20. A local train costs about $5, a slightly faster JR train is $12. The toll from Nagoya to Fukuoka is $160 and the drive takes 9 hours. I paid about $165 for a Shinkansen bullet train that took about 3.5 hours. And the toll prices ignore the cost of the car

[wskinner]

So your point is that in ideal (not real world) conditions, trains have higher throughput. And in Japan, the cost to a consumer is higher to drive.

A) why should we care about ideal rather than real world scenarios? If the train is only 30% full on average, it doesn’t matter that if full, it would transport more pax per hour. And based on the number of cars on these highways, I don’t think the trains will be very full. If the trains are going to be empty, operating them and building the tracks is probably not cost effective.

B) Without knowing the all-in cost of the two options, comparing these prices is meaningless. It’s very likely the Japanese government sets tolls high enough to incentivize people to take trains. That doesn’t by itself mean trains are a better option... I could point to plenty of places in the USA where driving is cheaper than taking Amtrak. What does that illustrate? That American states pay for roads with taxes instead of tolls? That Amtrak is inefficient and expensive? I have no idea.

[icc97]

I think the parent's point was that you can have higher throughput on trains in both real world and ideal.

[vidarh]

To add to that:

Some London tube lines run with <100 second headway, and the highest capacity London underground trains have a capacity of nearly 1200

And my local heavy rail station regularly handles 3-4 trains to the same station in a 10 minute interval. E.g right now there are 3 trains for London Victoria scheduled to leave in a 7 minute period, and that's not peak time.

[ekianjo]

> Some JR lines run at 4 minute headways during peak times and subways run reliably at 2 minute headways.

I was talking clearly about long distance trains. Not Kyoto to Osaka distance.

[Johnny555]

JR runs long distance as well as metro trains.