This isn't about light rail. This is about allowing lighter train cars--that aren't designed to survive collisions with freight trains--on regional rail lines.
> that aren't designed to survive collisions with freight trains
They are designed to survive collision with freight trains. In Europe we also have freight trains on our passenger tracks. They're just designed to survive them in a different way - by deforming to absorb impact rather than being rigid to resist it.
Exactly. Nobody cares about the cars, it's about the contents. And a train that cannot deform, will come to a very sudden stop when it hits an unmovable object, which is not going to be good to the occupants. Crumple zones are generally better.
Downside is that that's probably where the train driver is. Preventing collisions is definitely the better approach.
I think the arrow points the other way in Europe. Their passenger rails are smooth for a nice ride. They run cargo over the smooth rails. In the US, once you leave the East Coast, you're on freight rails which are bumpy and annoying.
In the US, once you leave the East Coast, you're on freight rails which are bumpy and annoying.
Yeah. In a few spots, it's OK, but the majority of it is pretty bad. I take a lot of long-distance Amtrak trips, and sleeping can be hard if you haven't done it in a while and you're not used to it.
I was surprised to find that the Shinkansen in Japan is a pretty rough and unstable run, too.
Americans on the internet like to imagine Japan and its technology as perfect in every way, but the HSR between Tokyo and Kyoto can be almost sea-sickness worthy.
I don't think this is because of bad rails so much it is that the infrastructure is so heavily used, and aging, since Japan was a pioneer in this arena.
I have used that particular Shinkansen route at least thirty times in each direction. Admittedly not so much recently. I have also traveled by high speed rail in Northern Europe, for comparison.
Your experience on the Shinkansen is very different from mine. The only explanation I can imagine is that your train was travelling slowly, which can happen - rarely - in typhoon season.
Otherwise, which high speed lines have you used that did not induce seasickness in you?
You're right. It does, unfortunately without citing any sources of its own.
In Europe, freight rail is less than a quarter that of the US, while passenger rail is much higher than in the US. Where tracks are shared, passenger rail generally takes priority in EU, and vice versa in the US. When reading about European railcar crash standards, I found no evidence that modern design standards include any requirements on crashing into freight trains. Just generic crumple zone requirements.
Don't forget heavy rail and regional rail! European EMUs and DMUs will go a long way towards making passenger rail in the US feasible again.
It's ridiculous how few places in the US have even considered subway anymore. Seattle's light rail, for example, is pretty much a subway except for one at-grade segment.
because of cost. seattle's system is a multi billion dollar boondoggle. costs for just three stations went up by half a billion dollars on a current expansion that was to only cost two billion. systems like Seattle's burn through so much money because politicians in the local area get to decide who gets service and how instead of focusing on who needs service and where. then throw in the billions that system is already backlogged on maintenance and it will fold under its own weight if not cut back services on other parts to pay for the rail.
If you took all the money people spent to buy, maintain, and insure, their vehicles, then topped it off with the money the highway fund put into the roads to support it the cost per mile is one third what mass transit it costing.
light rail isn't flexible to the needs of a changing city. it however appeals to a romantic version of transit that does not exist nor did it ever outside of two or three cities in the world of which only one is in the US though if you push it Chicago can almost count. Instead it benefits politicians who love ribbon cutting and paying off contributors.
The cost per mile lumps in cheap to build rural roads with urban roads, pulling down the average. It also doesn't take into account the several hundreds of billions deficit in roads investment. At today's levels of investment American roads are crumbling and are barely holding together. And that's just the federal road system. Most states also have issues funding roads. And this is before we also calculate the cost of requiring all the parking to support a roads-or-nothing environment, or health externalities from pollution and inactivity.
The reality of the situation is that if you want a city to have more than Oklahoma City levels of density, while not having congestion completely strangle the economy, you need to build rail, or at least invest in usable mass transit. A two-track subway in Manhattan can carry something upwards of 80k people very reliably within twenty feet of right of way; a highway lane only carries about 2.7K per hour.
Have you ever been outside the USA? Transit obviously can and does work in the vast majority of the world.
We can’t really win the battle with roads. For one thing, we are running out of places to put new roads in big cities, so bandwidth is already pretty constrained. For another, single occupancy vehicles aren’t very energy efficient, nor can they be.
We can live in small cities. There, roads work fine.
The energy efficiency issue isn't so clear. Single-occupancy vehicles don't run empty, at least until self-driving makes it possible. In typical systems, trains are pretty empty.
I haven’t sat on an empty train in a big city in a long time. If it’s a small city without a lot of economic activity, it makes sense that your trains would run empty.
Maybe you consider Boston to be a small city? They have some pretty empty trains, particularly the commuter rail. (yes it leaves the city, but that is the whole point of something that we aren't calling a subway)
It's not, but it's certainly a factor. EMU and DMUs are not manufactured on a regular basis in the US due to the different requirements and the size of the market, so each order is essentially an expensive custom order. The rolling stock that does exist here usually performs less well.
Because of the cost of (and in some cases impossibility of) buying multiple-units, passenger railroads here are operated using a locomotive and some railcars; this is very inefficient, especially for commuter or regional rail which stops and starts fairly regularly. DMUs would almost certainly be cheaper and more performant to run.
The Docklands Light Railway has worked quite well. It gets you from A to B much quicker than a bus although the top speed is not high, by avoiding jams etc. It's also driverless unlike the busses.
Where's the funding going to come from? USA has no money for infrastructure. MTA is struggling in NYC. Seattle's light rail is going to be completed in 2041+ and is being paid through a regressive car tab tax. I think it's a pipe dream that rail or transit will ever be improved other than very modestly in the USA.
In other words, if we can become less dependant on oil / natural gas (i.e. pipelines for them) we'll have more money for mass transportation. The irony is, our love of personal transportation is foregoing our transition to trains and such.
