[bobthepanda]

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.

[Shivetya]

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.

[bobthepanda]

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.

[seanmcdirmid]

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.

[burfog]

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.

[seanmcdirmid]

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.

[burfog]

Small cities don't have trains.

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)

[seanmcdirmid]

That’s funny, since the last time I was on a commuter train was in Boston from Wesley to downtown. It was pretty packed as well.

[masonic]

  I haven’t sat on an empty train in a big city in a long time

Come check out San Jose's VTA.

[ams6110]

I don't think the rolling stock is anywhere near the top of the list of reasons that passenger rail doesn't work in most of the US.

This change will benefit regional systems that are already established but I don't see it making much of a difference beyond that.

[bobthepanda]

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.