Dear Tim:
Yes if you want to get a lot of people from defined point A to defined point B, you can do so more efficiently with railroads then you can with cars and highways. But while rail might be more efficient in that sense they are far less flexible. And trying to provide enough line and enough stations and enough rail cars and engines to even remotely approach the flexibility of a road network combined with cars and trucks is totally impractical. So just comparing the number of people that can be moved along one linear route with full rail cars compared to the number of people that can be moved over the same linear route with highways and private cars isn't very meaningful.
Point to me where I stated that rail should replace road entirely. I want rail to do most of that inter regional freight and passenger hauling. And to do a good deal of the itraregional intercity hauling. On any given Class I main line you have long distance trains, regional trains and local trains. The long distance ones are like Amtrak which hauls passengers, priority freight and mail between regional cities like Denver, Chicago, LA and NYC and Burlington Northern-Santa Fe. The regional ones are like Wisconsin & Southern Railroad Co. which hauls freight from Milwaukee to Oshkosh and Madison to Prarie Du Chien, Milwaukee and Chicago. Local ones are like the Tomahawk Railway which hauls freight between Wisconsin Dam and Tomahawk or Progressive Rail, Inc. which hauls from Chippewa Falls to Rice Lake and Barron.
My point was that just using the long distance and regional railroads, you could cut intercity semi traffic which is mostly containers by now by 80 to 90%. You would still have local hauling like gasoline, garbage, dump trucks and log haulers but, most of that is local anyway. For going say from Madison to Chicago, a semi would pick up the container at the Madison plant and haul it to the Madison intermodal terminal where the container is loaded onto a rail car. It is then taken by train to the closest to the destination in Chicago intermodal terminal where the container is put on a truck which takes it to the destination plant. That way the traffic on I-90 is reduced by a semi. Multiply that by the hundreds of like loads and by the dozens of cities along or near I-90 and about 80-90% of the truck traffic on I-90 is removed. The vehicles left over don't have as long a wait at the toll booths in Illinois and the traffic moves much swifter and with far less slow patches.
Now look at this railroad map of Wisconsin: dot.wisconsin.gov
You can see where just using the long distance and regional railroads in place that if every city marked had at least one intermodal terminal that very few loads would nee to travel more than 30 miles to get to a terminal. In small towns a terminal could be just a siding or spur with a forklift to move containers on and off rail cars and semi trailers. The bigger terminals would have special equipment to speed things up. And each large terminal would have a place to store containers waiting to be picked up or on to rail cars yet to arrive.
The large ones also would have a car train terminal as well. This is likely because the number of trains coming through the terminal means that there would be a short wait. Passenger cars would be attached on one end of the rail train while those rail cars with autos would be on the other end. The auto's passengers follow it in comfort and transfer to other passenger cars when the car is moved to another train. So if you want to go from Wheeling, Il to a ski resort north of Santa Fe, NM you drive to Chicago, board a car train to Denver. In Denver you car would be moved (or the rail car it sits in moved) to the car train going to El Paso, TX. When that train gets into Sante Fe, you get off and drive the short distance to the ski resort.
Once this becomes more prevalent, those cities that had trackage removed would clamor for it to be replaced. Those converted to bike and snowmobile trails would just displace them by moving them to one side or the other (making a double track upgrade feasible later on). You can see quite a few cities that used to have service centrally placed in currently bare areas.
Now in no way would this plan replace all 800K miles of roads in Wisconsin. In fact no roads would be removed, although some may be downgraded. What is there though won't need as much maintenance, except possibly those near the terminals. Thus it lasts longer and is quite a bit less busy.
As I said its not fictional, but it isn't typical. I can tell that to anyone, and even if they commute that distance or longer it doesn't change the fact that its not typical. If I said "a typical person can not clean and jerk over 500lbs" would you say "tell that to champion weightlifters"?
I go to these cities and ask people who work there. A good deal state that they can't afford to live nearby or don't want to (high crime rate or like East St. Louis smells bad). Now it may not be a problem in NYC, but affordable housing is hard to find in suburbs with a lot of industry or offices. Those that are there want lots of money for theior house's location. So you move to new housingwhich is far away. The reason it is relatively cheap is that the area hasn't been built up yet and to defray the cost of commuting. It may be only 10% of the workforce and is generally the lower people on the totem pole. Those that don't have to go quite so far are those who did it when they started out 10, 20, 30 years or more. And some got lucky that the hot new office center was located nearby. But in a place like Chicago, even 10% of 14 million is 1.4 million people which is bigger than most cities. Even 1% or 140K people is bigger than most regional cities.
They buy their homes close to a Metra line because it saves them time and money. A very big high density development could even get Metra to put a new station right in the development. People buy there because the Metra is there and so the volume is high enough to be quite profitable to Metra. And the locals like it because it would be less of a burden on local roads and traffic and they can use the station as well boosting their home values. As long as the main city is growing, commute become longer and longer. When that growth stops or starts shrinking, the commute times would get shorter and the problem of long commutes slowly evaporates. People can now afford to get close to their work.
Now you wouldn't call 1.4 million a few? Or how about 140K? Using the rule of thumb that the average commute is 1/3 the diameter of a metropolitan area and that Chicago Metro is 120 miles across, you get that the average commute is 40 miles. In places like Chicago and Milwaukee where a good deal is unusable due to Lake MIchigan, its usually some what longer. But, lets ignore that for the sake of this discussion. The commutes are also longer because commuters usuaklly try to avoid congestion. They would rather drive around downtown rather than go through it. Even though its longer, its generally faster. Again the lake causes congestion because you can't drive over it. So a 40 mile drive at 45 would take an hour (you lose time due to traffic lights, stop signs and the occasional train or open bridge). Now ad din the traffic from all of those others trying to commute to work and you get slowed down. Because of the way the city was built up layer upon layer, you have to pass 80 traffic lights to get to/from work. Most of those occur towards the beginning and the end. IN the middle you have few on the freeways and limited access arterials. But if half of them are the wrong color, you wait a minute until they change to green and you hope you will get through them before they change to red due to the line in front of you. Since half of the time they are red, add half a minute for each one. Now you are up to 1.67 hours. Add a little more to go around congested areas and use freeways that don't quite go where you need and you are easily up to 2 hours.
Now you are going to say that buses would have the same problem. Well they have a few aces up their sleeves. They can use the parking lane as a traffic lane. You can't turn right in front of the bus at stops, so they are usually right at the light when it turns green. They can use the right turn lane even if, they will go straight at the intersection. They also can use any express lanes instead of having to keep to the slow lanes and they can use special exits and entrances. And they don't need to pay tolls so they simply bypass them.
As to saying that 30 minutes is average for Chicago, IL. Counties that are suburbs of Chicago like McHenry take over 40 minutes to go to work. Here is some percentages I found:
metroplanning.org
14 percent take at least a hour to go to work. And this is skewed by the kids who work at the local resturant or government workers who have to live in the community they work for. Peel those away and the number is quite a bit higher. 28% use public transit in Chicago.
I think that is a completely unrealistic assumption. As is your hope to reduce long range car travel by 50%.
Well currently intermodal is climbing even against subsidized trucks. There was 40% growth over the last 5 years. Trains move containers about twice as fast as trucks. The biggest current problem is intercompany moves at the destinations. It takes just 40 hours to move a container from LA to the NY area, but another 40 hours to get it to the intermodal terminal of the trucking company that takes it the final distance to the destination. By removing some of the bureaucratic shuffling, overall tranit time could be cut another 30-50%. If the rail portion was cleaned up and efficiently run, 80-90% won't be that much a reach. Having fuel taxes pay for intermodal terminals and trackage like it is done for highways for trucks, the costs would make a switch quite quickly. And the same for people. If the fare would be cuit to a third to $10 from the current discounted $30, would you think of using rail instead of driving? Don't you think that 50% of the people with a fast reliable cheap transit alternative might switch?
Think that with increased volume, the prices would go down? The mareginal cost of adding another passenger car to a train is far less than adding an additional bus to a route. That is why more volume would help make average transit costs cheaper.
Pete |
