As you while away a lazy Sunday afternoon in August, allow me to guide your attention to a few rail policy links bound to infuriate even the most placid of rail advocates. Both of these articles use incredibly misleading arguments and rely on false logic to paint rail options and their advocates in negative lights.
We start with The Overhead Wire’s critique of an anti-rail piece in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. As always, rail opponents are still trumping the power of some Holy Grail electric automobile that’s just around the corner and will save the environment as we know it. Why should we invest in rail options if cars can save us all? As you could guess, The Overhead Wire eviscerates the Texas piece.
If that doesn’t quite boil your blood enough, mosey on over to the Hawaii Reporter and get a load of this gem. The headline: A Vote Against Rail is a Vote for Freedom and Prosperity. The pullquote: “Today’s average car is far more energy efficient than the average rail line.” Need I say more?
These arguments speak volumes about the state of the rail debate in our country, and while New Yorkers, by and large, understand and appreciate our region’s need for viable public transit, many Americans do not. Streetcars may be making a return in theory, but those transit advocates are facing an uphill battle. As funding public transit on a national level gets pigeonholed into the Red/Blue debate that so dominates politics today, everyone suffers in the end.
12 comments
I think the Fort Worth piece was ok, it was just the comments by that local official. Technology will save us! It might as well be a new religion.
OK, the articles have problems, but we do need to continue investing expansion of our roads. Now, I’m as strong a supporter of rail as most – it makes sense for certain intercity rail corridors to be HSR, several cities expanding their subway systems, massive improvements to existing metros and commuter rails, etc – but we need to build more lanes, either through double-decking existing freeway, tunneling, or new bypassing Interstates. Why? Even the most mass transit dependent metropolitan area in the world, Tokyo, has ~20% of its 35 million people driving. And NYC proper does only have around 33% of its 8 million driving (which could be reduced by transit expansion / improvement), but the 18 million total metro area has +80% auto usage. Even if we could cut that number down by a 50% (which would be incredible), future population growth will begin to get some more cars on the roads; you’ll never have 100% transit usage so you’ll never be able to fully remove personal auto usage. Therefore, the Cross Bronx Expressway will continue to be Hell ™.
Electric cars will ultimately be more beneficial to the environment than all the proposed rail service in this country. Since all of our metropolitan areas are not suddenly going to be as comprehensively served as the Tokyo metro area, we need to cut down on the prodigious greenhouse output of the auto (which contribute nearly 50% to the greenhouse output of the United States). Coupled with more “green” energy production, you would almost eliminate that source of pollution. However, you’re still left with the economic problem of traffic congestion and here rail can help. The future of railed systems will be to decongest our freeways since we’re going to be seriously lacking in road capacity.
Unfortunately, we’re still going to see the same deficiencies with rail in the future that we do now: low suburban usage. Commuter rails can’t cover the vast area of low density suburbs that surround our cities. This will take policy change to prevent sprawl and centralize regional planning. The cities themselves, though, could build up their subways greatly. After all, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco all have higher population densities than Berlin, with Washington DC not far behind, and yet none have the transit share of the German capital. Clearly our cities can be doing better and indeed should be doing better with their mass transit.
Berlin actually has a very highly used suburban rail system, the S-Bahn. So does Paris: while Paris proper is very dense, there’s a large density drop off in the suburbs, so that the total metro density is no higher than New York’s; nevertheless, Paris’s commuter rail systems have almost a full order of magnitude more ridership than New York’s.
The problem with what you suggest for roads is that they create their own demand. Even areas with low levels of population growth and ample highway construction, like Chicago and Los Angeles, can have clogged roads. In contrast, discouraging car ownership and promoting mass transit can reduce congestion even if there’s relatively little highway building, as the examples of New York and San Francisco readily show.
In addition, the main draw of roads is that the way highways are currently built, they’re cheap. But as soon as they’re in tunnel or elevated, costs rise to almost subway levels; capacity, however, remains far lower. A modern heavy rail system can carry 55,000 people per track per hour. A modern highway can carry 2,400 cars per lane per hour. The multibillion dollar Big Dig projects are multilane, but they don’t have that many lanes.
Building more lanes does not automatically translate to more road capacity. New York City has too many bottlenecks, mis-timed traffic lights, double-parkers, lazy traffic cops, and bad road surfaces. There’s a myriad of little problems that make the number of lanes in the widest spots pretty much irrelevant.
Road capacity does certainly come from more than just lanes (the great bottleneck being just exiting the freeway for the city), but that’s why cities like NYC, with an already dense subway / bus network, can keep road issues to lesser factor than someplace like LA. With some sweat, we can get a much better commuter rail system to reduce the pollution and congestion of our automotive users and provide comprehensive intra-city mass transit. We just need the political will (and some real money).
The Berlin S-Bahn and Parisian RER do serve a more sparsely populated area than the city proper, but they also function as subways inside the cities themselves, doubtlessly increasing their patronage. Of course, they do have good ridership in the suburbs as well, but the localities outside Berlin or Paris are still more dense than their American counterparts. My travels in and analysis of Europe are far from comprehensive, but their towns do have a more concentrated “core” and more easily identifiable borders than in the US. Just looking at Paris on Google Earth would show that most of the area surrounding the towns is just farmland while the towns themselves are rather compact – once again compared to US suburban areas.
Once again, I don’t feel mass transit can ever displace the personal auto and we’re not going to be building up networks like Tokyo (or even Osaka or Paris) any time soon. The major cities can certainly go mass transit crazy and the nation should be building HSR, but there’s so much suburban area outside even the vast metro areas that can’t be effectively dealt with by rail / buses; 20% of the United States’ 300 million people still live outside the actual urban areas forming the metropolitan areas. And population growth is still growth, something that will occur in every municipality.
It does really come down to effective leadership and a will to be mass transit Robert Moses / Baron Haussmann to move our metropolitan areas in the right direction. But once again, with the projected growth of our population, there will still be millions upon millions of personal autos driving about, forever stuck on the BQE or the Capital Beltway. Hence my belief that (pollution) solutions like the electric auto will be an integral aspect of our transportation future.
We can compare urban densities, measured in people per km^2 of urban land. The urban density won’t tell you anything about whether there’s a dense urban core, but it’ll tell you how dense the suburbs are. Paris has an urban density of 3,542/km^2. This compares with 2,050 in New York and 2,729 in Los Angeles. When we consider metro area density, the difference is reversed: the Paris aire urbaine has 770 people per km^2, compared with 1,077/km^2 for the New York MSA.
The RER isn’t very useful for intra-Paris travel. Its interstation distances are long, on the order of 2 km; on the RER A, the busiest lines, the interstations inside Paris are even longer, since the line runs parallel to existing Métro lines. It runs as a subway in Paris and some of its closest suburbs, but the LIRR and Metro-North run as rapid transit in some parts of Queens and the Bronx, too.
The main reason the RER has so much more ridership than New York’s commuter rail services is that it serves multiple destinations. New York’s commuter rail is very good at getting people from the suburbs to Manhattan. However, it doesn’t serve people who don’t work in Manhattan, because trains terminate at Penn Station or Grand Central, transfers are inconvenient, and schedules favor commutes into Manhattan over anything else. In contrast, the RER A runs through Paris instead of terminating in it; it serves multiple stations in Paris, as well as La Défense, the region’s most important edge city; it makes many easy transfers with the Métro and the other RER lines.
New York actually has an easier time developing such a system than Paris did. Paris had six train stations, all located outside city center, so it had to build new tracks to connect them. New York can just send NJT trains eastward as LIRR and New Haven Line trains, and only then worry about four-tracking the North River Tunnels, connecting Penn Station and Grand Central, connecting Hoboken and Flatbush to Lower Manhattan, etc.
Ah, the ways people twist facts and statistics in their favor.
A car most certainly does use less energy than a train, that’s for sure.
Problem is, a car at best will carry five people (and usually carries just one in real world usage). A train can carry hundreds.
And, as Alon Levy pointed out, there’s also the efficiency of space issue.
I’m not trying to pick a fight, but does everybody feel I’m some shareholder in GM? The only time I have had any interest in the automotive industry is when I was shorting it. Or yes, researching for electric auto investments since I honestly believe it to be the coming great investment of the future.
I would never argue that cars are more efficient than the trains or even buses – either materially or energy consumption – but I can’t believe that mass transit can ever eliminate the auto problem. Tokyo is a clear example of that reality. Not just that, but the current largest transportation projects going on in the Tokyo area are freeway expansion, completing the Shuto Expressway around the prefecture. There could be a dozen reasons why they chose that course of direction over increased support for the myriad of public and private transit systems, but part of it must certainly be pragmatism. As I mentioned before, even their superb system “only” gets around 80% of the daily trips. Very commendable, but that still leaves many millions on the road. Of course, they would still need to fix their quirky maze of nameless / numberless roads around the prefecture to maximize the gains from the expressway expansion.
In a better world where our nation was to get its act together, there would be plenty of money and will to make much better mass transit a reality. I would love to see a reversal of the damage done to our transit over these prior decades, but we can’t see this as a black-and-white issue; roads and rail should not be considered competing projects. They need to be viewed as means to solve the issues of regional / national transportation. There are many, many instances of where rail can be of the highest benefit – inside the boundaries of our cities, dense commuter rail networks fanning into the suburbs, circumferential lines increasing access to wayward parts of the network, and the replacement of short air corridors by HSR – but there will remain a need for our road system: local deliveries, modest distances not covered by even an extensive rail / bus system, and the tens of millions that will still be living in “back-water” locals that will need to drive to conduct daily life (school runs, groceries, etc).
The problem with what you say about road expansion is that if New York had Tokyo’s mass transit ridership, it would never need to worry about road capacity. The New York area’s freeway system is designed for a metro area of 25 million at 80% auto share. If the auto share decreases to even 50%, the current road network will still be good at 40 million. Since New York is unlikely to reach even 30, it just won’t need any more road capacity.
I missed your reply comment to my second post, Levy. I’ll just get on it from here.
Fair enough. But what about several of the cities in Texas? Or Seattle? Miami? Many metropolitan areas are as sparse as can be. Many cities will also be largely starting from scratch and they won’t be able to build an effective system in any timely fashion. Not that building large freeway is any faster, especially when acquiring new ROW, but even operational improvements like collector/distributor roads for old cloverleaf interchanges or improved ramps (like the town I grew up in – Petaluma, CA – needs) would greatly aid in the flow of traffic.
I have a habit of writing on a whim and consequently don’t write to clearly, but what I really mean to say is that we can’t ignore our vast road network. There will remain a need even when the auto population does decline – and I’m certain it will happen – but that need will still likely overburden our roads even with mass transit growth across the nation; we can’t afford to neglect any of our transportation infrastructure.
Electric cars are of interest because most of the world will be supporting this development. In fact, the Danish government is in serious talks with an Israeli company to design an electrical infrastructure to supply battery-powered cars. The Chinese also have some interest in the same designs (thought their investment is less). And considering the political mindset of the United States, it is more likely that some of our pollution problems will more likely be solved by reducing the auto’s impact than by shifting a vast percentage of us on to mass transit. Of course, we need a more “green” energy sector to squeeze every ounce of benefit out of electric cars, but considering that nearly 50% of our emissions are auto related, the impact will nonetheless be substantial. And after all, wasn’t some of the myopic criticism in those anti-rail articles concerned only with the pollution benefits of rail rather than their urban utility?
Judge,
I was in Tokyo for 6 weekdays this summer and not once did I see a traffic jam. There are lots of excellent roads, sure, but the demand for them isn’t that great. So it’s really not about the roads per se, it’s about the right pricing point. Owning a car in Japan is very expensive, so even while many people have them, their cars are small, efficient, and spend most of their time parked in the driveway.
With electric cars, it’s a matter of keeping them expensive enough- by sufficiently taxing carbon-emitting power plants or by charging high taxes- so that a large chunk of the populace chooses public transit. Then our existing roads will be in good condition and unclogged, and there will be money for both autos and transit.
Electric cars have always existed. Before the Model T’s standardization of the industry, there were cars for any form of traction – steam, diesel, gasoline, electric. Thomas Edison predicted that soon there would spring up a national network of plug-in stations for electric cars.
The reason the internal combustion engine won out is that electric cars had limited range. Their range has gotten better since the 1900s, but is still very small compared to that of a reasonably efficient sedan. What electric vehicles are good at is performance: they don’t need gears, which makes them accelerate at rates previously reserved for Formula 1 cars. That’s a niche market, not something that could replace either rail or gas-powered cars.
Electric cars don’t require gas, but because of their limited range, that’s only useful for commuting and errand-running, both of which are natural strengths of public transportation and walking. The greatest strength of car is in low-frequency trips, i.e. vacations (which electric cars don’t always have the range for) and some shopping trips (which become transit-friendly as soon as the cost of driving exceeds the cost of delivery).