Electric cars are a pipe dream

You miss the point.
These rail systems in our biggest cities have already made their big dent (and only 11 cities have the very expensive subway systems).
Adding more rail has less and less impact.

The numbers speak for themselves, highly subsidized rail has a 100 times less passenger miles than private cars (and rail has about the same as Bus service).

Even massive investing in more very expensive light Rail is not going to make much of a dent in those numbers.

Worse, their passenger rates per mile are pathetic: Rail only averages 26 passengers per Train trip and Buses only average 10 passengers per Bus trip for the simple reason that they have only two heavily used periods per day and yet to be useful to commuters they have to run all day/night long. You can't just look at their peak periods and say, "gee, that's efficient", you have to look at their entire daily schedule, which when you add in the extra commute to/from your home and place you really want to go to, is not efficient at all.

 

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I'd disagree there. The LIRR is about to add a significant increase in capacity to its main line, and although the amount of rail added won't be huge (another 10 miles of track) it will enable another 24 trains a day to reach a second terminal in Manhattan, thus reducing the load on the subway system there and increasing overall capacity significantly.

The numbers speak for themselves, highly subsidized rail has a 100 times less passenger miles than private cars (and rail has about the same as Bus service).

It took me 60 to 90 minutes on the train to get to Manhattan. It took 2 hours to drive there on the rare occasions that I tried to drive in during rush hour. That's a very significant increase in efficiency (and time saver.)

And the LIRR does what most train systems do - runs a lot of trains during rush hour and very few during off-peak times. Thus increasing overall efficiency.

 

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What's significant?
Let's see some actual numbers to see how significant this is, particularly compared to the cost.

Yes, because it doesn't make economic sense to build rail outside of dense transportation corridors.

But 20% of the US population is rural and 20% live in Urban areas less than 200,000 in size (typically too small to support any kind of rail system), and once you get past the top 50 or so urban areas in the US, rail rarely makes sense.

You think that this example is typical?

Here's a hint.

It's not.

And yet STILL the passengers per TRAIN only equals a pathetic 26.

 

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I agree. It makes sense only in densely populated areas. Fortunately these are also generally the areas with the biggest traffic problems.

That seems about right. Which works out pretty well; Billings, Montana doesn't have too much of a traffic problem.

Have you ever lived in New York?

Hmm. Let's see. On a typical weekday the LIRR runs about 600 trains on 11 lines total. ("About" because the schedule is always changing, they run more trains in the summer, they run trains to seasonal baseball games etc.) About 303,000 people ride a day. Let's say your average rider rides for 1/4 of a train's total trip.

That comes to about 125 people per train. That's average including off peak and reverse peak trains. Looks like you're off by about a factor of 5 for the LIRR.

 

And if the rest of the country resembled NYC metro area, then this might be a good idea.

My figures on rail transit and other public transportation systems are from the Federal Transit Administration’s National Transit Database so are not skewed to what works in our largest/densest city.

I've recently lived in Atlanta, and it had a rail and subway and bus system. It was subsidized by 1% of all sales and still was losing money and raising fares and still the vast majority of travel was by car, and that wasn't going away since all the rail lines connected the suburbs to the city and yet about half the traffic each day was cross suburb and it wasn't practical to build any more lines since no area had sufficent population/traffic to justify the cost of a new line.

http://www.itsmarta.com/rail-schedules-or-route.aspx

 

No other city resembles NYC very closely. Manhattan is pretty unique - an island with over a million people living on it and far more than that working on it. Nevertheless, many other cities (Jersey City, DC, Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Arlington, and Chicago) have a lot of their commuters - more than 25% - get into the city via mass transit.

So the question is - do we have lots of cities resembling NYC _or_ DC, Jersey City, Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago etc? And the answer to that is - yes, we do.

As you mentioned, smaller cities do not have the population density to make such mass transit solutions practical. But if we can solve transportation problems in even our 50 largest cities - we're doing pretty well, because that's a big fraction of the total population of the US, and it's where most of our traffic problems are.

 

And yet we already have light rail in roughly our 50 largest cities and extensive bus service and subways in our largest 12 or so metro areas, and yet our transportation fuel use is and car use in those 50 cities is what it is.

What big additional miracle do you expect?

Do you really think LA, Dallas, Atlanta, Phoenix etc can do without it's cars?

 

I think if it's a matter of efficiency you're trying to argue then cars obviously win. A train which 100 people use will never be faster than a car that 1-2 people are using.

I am currently living in NYC (moved here from California), so I've had a taste of both worlds, and yes, it is insanity that it takes approximately 45-60 minutes to travel about 10 miles from Queens to Manhattan, but the NYC transit system, though one of the best I have ever witnessed (Tokyo is pretty good) has a lot of problems of its own which expand beyond just modeling (Such as the politics in the MTA).

While I advocate better public transportation as a means to replace cars (versus better cars running on cleaner fuels), I think looking to NYC on how to model it is completely wrong, I agree with that. No city is like NYC, it is extremely tiny, densely packed together, and thus, with the high density/low area, it is a much easier task to accomplish a public subway/railway system for all to use.

@Bill, even with the LIRR expansion, the LIRR is not a common mean of transportation for most people when a ticket one way costs 16 dollars during peak hours. Sorry, but that's just too much. I ride the subway about 5 times a day and so I bought an unlimited, but that still costs me 100 a month (Like I said, NYC public tran has a lot of problems of its own I've become aware of after living here).

I don't think railways are a viable means of public transportation in a less densely packed urban setting where traveling 10 miles is normal to get to the grocery, versus madness in NYC (Los Angeles/San Antonio/Seattle/Chicago being the perfect example), but there are a lot of things I liked in NYC which I think we could copy in order to improve our own busway system (Because the current one is just simply terrible, as there is no real incentive to improve on it).

 

Closer to 20 by my count.

That is correct. (That in fact is a tautology.)

?? I don't know. What sort of miracle would you like?

Light rail is just one technique that can be used to combat traffic by getting people to and from cities without adding lanes to freeways, cars on the road or gas consumed. It's a good solution in high density cities. And as more people move from rural areas to cities it will become a good solution in more and more places.

It's not a miracle solution, any more than "just add more cars" is a miracle solution. It does, however, have the benefit of reducing rather than increasing traffic and oil usage.

No more so than Manhattan, San Francisco or Boston can do without its trains. Both are needed.

 

No argument that it's expensive, but a third of a million people disagree with you on the "it's too expensive" thing. A $300 monthly ticket, to some people, is preferable to (and often cheaper than) gas, tolls and parking fees.

Definitely agreed there. In rural areas it makes no sense.

 

just a matter of public pressure and time , unfortuantely

nothing like a big block gas engine , love the sound and power

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been there

and frankly hope some day to be there again

 

Nah

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rail_transit_systems_in_the_United_States

Cheap batteries that have higher energy density would be nice.
Cheap Fuel Cells would be nice.
My guess is that plug in versions of the Prius type hybrid that gets 70 or so MPG and doesn't cost much more than the standard Prius will likely be the sweet spot for some time.
Improvements in the car are likely to be much more valuable to more of us then adding more light rail.

But as pointed out, light rail is already in use.
Adding more lines would be to areas of less density, thus even lower ridership numbers than the pathetic ones we have today.
Of course it has it's place, and from what I can see, it's in most of those places already.

 

So are cars.

As city populations increase across the country, it will become more practical in more places than it is now. (And is a good way to reduce traffic in places that are already very, very dense.)

 

Right, and they account for 100 times more passenger miles than do all train systems, so they need to be our focus.

It's easy to see that even if we doubled the amount of rail we have (which would cost a fricken fortune) it still would have little impact on our overall transportation system, and from an economics perspective make no sense at all.

Well it's a good way to use the general public to subsidize the transportation costs of the selected few who can use them, beyond that, it makes little sense.

If users had to pay the whole cost they would never get built.

 

Both need to be "our focus." A single rail line moves 2 to 4 times the number of people that a single lane of a freeway moves, so in places where there's very little land to be had, it makes a lot more sense than adding new lanes.

Also, in major cities, there comes a time when adding more lanes will only cause _more_ problems. All those cars have to go somewhere - and the secondary roads, parking and car support facilities can no longer handle the load. Thus in many high density cities adding lanes makes traffic worse.

Light rail (any mass transit actually) solves this problem by moving that land requirement out to the outlying stations, where room still exists for parking and feeder streets.

And yet cities keep adding rail - and people keep using the new systems.

True of highways as well. If people actually had to pay for the cost of the land, the construction, maintenance and operations cost - they'd be a lot more demand for train systems, and a lot fewer cars on the road. Instead, in most cities highways are "free."

 

Highways are paid for by the users.
You pay for them with every gallon of gasoline/diesel you buy.

If you took the tax off of the gasoline people would drive even more.

Fully 86% of people use a car to get to work, about 5% work at home and about 3% walk or bike to work.

So only about 6% use public transportation, and the biggest part of that is Bus and Subway. Rail is the least.

http://www.bts.gov/publications/tra...report/2010/html/chapter_02/figure_04_11.html

 

If I had to design an electric car with the same range as a fossil powered one, I'd do it like this;

Generate the electricity with a nuclear reactor or other non fossil method, use it to catalytically hydrogenate atmospheric carbon, pour the resulting oil into a car and convert it back to CO2 using a fuel cell to generate electricity. (Or other contrivance, though the options which fulfill the criteria of "electric car" are limited.)

Actually with some types of nuclear reactor you wouldn't need to generate electricity, you'd just use the heat directly.

If everything is fine about electric cars but the energy density of the battery, use some other substance to store the energy.

I think people get too hung up on oil versus electricity when the main thing is fossil carbon versus non carboniferous energy sources.

 

Well all those things you mention exist today and yet no one has been able to make a viable fuel cell vehicle (even using relatively cheap CH4 as a fuel source) so given that do you think there might still be some fundamental problems with creating cheap/reliable fuel cells of sufficient power for automotive use?

 

I don't believe so. Depends what you mean by fundamental. If you mean physics or materials availability, no. If you mean manufacturing costs for things we're not very experienced at making, and only have a small market for, I'd say yes.

Really I only put the part about fuel cells in so that it would fall within the specification of the thread's topic.

As long as the energy is generated by a non-fossil method, I don't mind what you store it in. Batteries for short planned routes with lots of stopping and starting (as are successfully used for delivery vans, buses, and commuters) and hydrocarbons synthesized from atmospheric carbon dioxide for long journeys, the military and middle aged guys who are compensating for something.

Personally I'd like a hybrid of a gas turbine, an electric motor and a rack of molten salt batteries. But that's mainly because I think turbines are funny.

 

Small market for?????

Global sales of automobiles is expected to be 77 million units this year, so putting fuel cells in even 1% of sales is nearly a million units.

What is large to you?

http://www.businessweek.com/news/20...-advance-6-7-on-chinese-demand-polk-says.html