this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2023
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how is connecting smaller towns/villages to bigger placed by train inefficient?
They may have been talking about economic inefficiency, if you don’t have a busy enough route to justify the initial investment.
And in the US at least, there is a LOT of land, and huge amounts of it are sparsely populated. But that still adds up to a lot of people.
The more stops you have for a train, the slower, more expensive, and less efficient it is. They like hauling for long distances without stopping.
still more efficient than anything else...
and then usually how it works is that some trains go local and stop everywhere and others are intercity and stuff and stop at less stations etc.
"Efficient" covers a lot of things. There are often reasons to avoid what is technically the most efficient solution by some measure. For trains, their high up front cost has to be made up by low marginal cost, which typically means having a high number of passengers for each stop.
And before you say it, no, I'm not demanding they be profitable, just that they be cost effective.
Trains and good public transport are one of the most productive things economically and the best tools for rising economically for individuals, it might have a higher up front cost (which I don't think it has, I highly doubt a mile of tracks costs more than a mile of road, especially long term), but it's absolutely worth it long term.
pretty sure a lot of US towns spawned from being railroad stops or railroad adjacent, if they can make that happen, they can also revitalize the local economy, meanwhile cars are woefully inefficient and serve more as a gatekeeping device, if you need a car to function you have basically put an entry fee on society.
It does. Highway costs around $10M/mile, and rail (without tunnels) close to $120M/mile. We also don't need to build many new highways, while our aging rail infrastructure needs a lot of work just to get what we have up to snuff before we even talk about new rail.
Mostly, this comes down to things that go away with experience. Get rail projects going en mass and the problem will go away. That said, hooking up every town along the route is only going to make the initial build out worse.
mile? see that's your problem.
rail doesn't cost that much in Europe.
Yes, I'm aware. That doesn't actually address the problem.
well the good news is that while you accounted for costs going down once projects are built, you also failed to consider the difference in capacity between railroad tracks and roads and also the maintenance costs that are gonna be much higher for roads.
so even if it's more expensive upfront which it really isn't, it's so much better long term
Of course it's more expensive up front. That's trivially true when we have highways and not high speed rail.
The last miles are a huge problem in villages. Train stops and you then walk 5 miles every time? The bus needs to ride every 30 minutes to bring along 5 people that's super expensive.
Also everyone there already has a car anyways since it's basically required there.
Cities however can use public transport far more efficiently.
you do realize trains are part of the public transport and no reasonable person would think you can't take a car to the train station?
what do you think I am talking about? a bus going every 30 minutes to every house in bumfuck nowhere on the off chance they get a passenger?
Yes but then you already have the car.
And if you already have the car then that's usually far more practical than public transport.
Public transport works well in cities because it can completely eliminate the need for someone to own a car.