Comment by djsumdog
9 years ago
It's still incredibly wasteful compared to a real subway. The amount of people a real mass transit system can move is orders of magnitude above tons if individual little cars:
http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-sol...
..not to mention all the energy required to move each of those vehicles compared to a train that can move hundreds of more people in a similar space.
Americans need to get over all their train/bus hate. Other countries love mass transit. Many Americans try to shoot down any attempt to even put in a small system (small systems can grown) and kill off attempts to grow existing systems (see the Seattle Green Line).
Self driving cars can work great in Europe, where there is tons of transport and you just need to solve the last leg (or where self-driving trucks are rented just to move large items). In America we have massive gridlock due to a lack of rails and that needs to be fixed before self driving tech will fix anything.
>It's still incredibly wasteful compared to a real subway.
Because real subways have miserable sardine-can standing room conditions during commute times. Public transit is dead in the water in the US because its advocates use terms like "incredibly wasteful" to describe making systems anywhere near as comfortable as private cars.
For most people, the most comfortable chair they own is their driver seat. For many, the commute is the only time they get to be alone, meditative, and in complete control of their environment (cube farm or open office at work, children at home, etc).
When the CIA forces people to spend hours with their arms fully extended over their heads while bombarding them with 100db noise, there's a Senate inquiry. When BART does it, it's a regular Tuesday at 9am. (Yes, this is an extreme comparison, real stress positions are much worse, but your average Midwestern suburbanite used to his Toyota Camry is in for a real shock).
If you want Americans to get over their train/bus hate, then don't advocate such drastic reductions in the quality of our lives or the livability of our cities. Your average SUV-driving Wisconsin soccer mom has been to Manhattan as a tourist and decided that her one accidental peak-hours train ride was enough for one lifetime.
That, or densify the environment. We might put up with transit if the rides were shorter.
(I am a daily BART rider, and public transit dependence is the #1 reason I want to GTFO of the Bay Area).
I personally find trains to be dramatically more comfortable than cars. Feel free to disagree, but a) not having to pay attention, b) not facing any congestion, c) not dealing with the motion sickness and dizziness that comes with doing anything in a car, d) not being stuck in a cramped cage, e) not worrying about getting into an accident, throwing away a boatload of money and potentially hurting randoms strangers or myself for reasons that may be entirely out of my control—all of these things make trains WAY WAY WAY more comfortable to me than cars ever can be.
Have you ridden on systems that are better than our crappy one before? Riding in cities like Singapore and Hong Kong is a wonderful experience.
The real problem is that we have nowhere near to as much capacity as we need, and nowhere near to as much coverage either. And that's 100% a result of political incompetence and a lack of funding for something that almost certainly would improve the livability and productivity of this city.
Coupled with how filthy San Francisco is and how pitifully little we do to address affordability and the resulting, predictable homelessness and mental illness crisis we see here, you get an uncomfortable transit experience.
Our lack of a robust, functional public transit network is a big reason I want to GTFO of the Bay Area.
Yeah, compare the BART to the subway in Stockholm and it's night and day. Nice public transport is absolutely possible. I remember the first time I lived in the Bay Area they were building BART and I had these expectations... And then years later when I rode it for the first time, I wondered why public transport this close to the center of the tech universe was so shitty. I mean, the trains in Europe have wifi and are clean and beautiful and comfortable and quiet. They're also secure, mostly because of how they handle as a society the kinds of people that make public transit a bad experience. It is astonishing to me that we don't have and can't have nice things in the United States.
If subways are already as tight as sardine cans, how would giving everybody in that train a full car full of room even be the slightest bit possible? There just isn't enough physical room in the tunnels for that.
Running at the proposed 100+ mph should provide the necessary throughput (and actually require seating - have fun with those gs while standing).
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Saying we shouldn't be wasting a ton of resources on private cars is a "drastic reduction in the quality of our lives"?
Quite frankly, I would much prefer to not have the costs and issues of owning a private vehicle.
One weakness of all public transportation is the lack of personal space. Maybe if someone would have solved that either by more space or some deep psychological insights, it would become more popular among Americans?
I disagree. Europe has many countries with at least the same wish for personal space as the US, and public transport works just fine. I'd suspect a big reason is the car-centric culture, which also gives rise to the image of public transport being only for those who can't afford a car. It's a cultural problem that'll be hard to straighten.
> Europe has many countries with at least the same wish for personal space as the US
Maybe this is me being ethnocentric, but it seems the American way of embracing diversity (through political correctness, affirmative action, etc) has come at the cost of craving for isolation and independence from each other.
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Try any "excellent" public transportation system during commute hours. The lack of personal space isn't misperception. Systems are explicitly planned to have standees, and lots of them, in close quarters. We've gotten acclimated to something much more comfortable, and we get to vote.
It's not clear how public transit advocates will convince us to vote to downgrade our lives. Maybe the bicyclists and pedestrians in cities will be able to block suburban drivers from entering.
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I find that I have plenty of personal space on mass transit as long as there's enough transit. If I'm taking the 2/3 subway (in New York) or the 27-Bryant bus (in SF) at 9 AM on a weekday, it's totally fine. If I'm taking Caltrain southbound at 9 AM on a weekday or the 4/5 towards the Upper West Side at 5:30 PM, it's miserable.
That is to say, there's a known solution already: funding.
For me the main disadvantage is that it takes an hour, comes once an hour, has inaccurate timetables, costs 13$, and stops running at midnight. Hence why I drive from mountain view to San Francisco rather than bother with Caltrain.
It's too bad Caltrain electrification is getting screwed over... But it's even worse that BART was blocked from just going down the peninsula, to the point that we literally went the other way around the bay to get it down to San Jose. Criminally dumb.
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Doing some googling I found this as one of the links:
http://www.lamag.com/driver/l-s-subway-cars-will-definitely-...
It's a shame. Public transportation would be so awesome if it weren't for the bad press.
Is it really wasteful? It seems like it is an ever moving system. In terms of people capacity it seems it would carry more by being always flowing vs a stopping starting transit system.
The amount of people that can fit in 1 car is roughly maxes out at 4-7 people, depending on the car. There needs to be enough spacing between each car so that in the case of a failure, cars have space to brake to a stop without catapulting the people in it, or causing them to become overly nauseous. So there's going to be a decent amounnt of spacing between each car.
The number of people that can fit on 1 bus can hit in the ballpark of 50 people, so we're getting a roughly 10x capacity boost here. You lose the "ever-moving system" benefit doing this, but I highly doubt some stopping and starting would lead to an order of magnitude slower speed.
Now, the number of people that can fit on 1 SF BART train is in the realm of 10 cars * 200 = 2000 people per train. The spacing is not going to be on the order of 100x longer than in the individual car case, and the starting-stopping speed is going to be not a bit slower than the bus case.
I'll let you work out the math on that, but it's not even orders of magnitude close. Don't need to be a "visionary" to see that.
A well managed train system can manage 1 car per line per 5 minutes. 2000 * 60 / 5 = 24,000 people per hour. Highways can handle 2,000 - 2200 vehicles per lane or so at the low end 1/12 but that's very much an edge case. Most lines are closer to one train every 20 minutes and you can average 3 people per car which makes them equivalent.
The real issue is not highways, but what happens when people try and get off or onto them. It's possible but rare to do this well.
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According to the DOT, a train is only about 33% more energy efficient then driving.[1]
In addition a subway or bus system has to run on a schedule even when the train is mostly empty. The train and bus is always starting and stopping and causing all it's passengers increased delay to serve the needs of the few entering or leaving.
Public transport is the token ring networking of transportation. It's just inherently less efficient compared to a P2P routing system that only operates when there is a need and with the minimum number of stops (which is exactly 1).
[1]: https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pu...
First of all, the most recent data in the document you linked to shows Amtrak at 1,629 BTU/passenger-mile vs 3,877 BTU/passenger-mile for cars -- a 58% reduction in energy consumption, or alternately 2.4x better energy efficiency for trains over driving.
But it's also important to note that the numbers for Amtrak are averaged across the entire system -- and most Amtrak routes outside the Northeast Corridor operate way below capacity, despite it being very inefficient to do so. If you look at rail systems where this is not the case, like in Switzerland (716 BTU/passenger-mile) or Japan (534 BTU/passenger-mile), you end up with 5.4x and 7.3x improvements energy efficiency over driving, respectively.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport...
This is something I've never understood — why can't those trains operate with fewer coaches, perhaps all the way down to one, in rural areas, or at off-peak times (for metros)?
On the other hand, the train runs on a schedule which can give you a pretty accurate idea of when you should leave and when you will arrive at your destination. The car might be faster sometimes, but sometimes it is slower and you can't always predict which it's going to be.
It's not a wasteful when US has huge land and those fuel vehicles need to travel a long distance may encounter car accidents e.g. fatigue, winter, floods, would be benefits from reduce air pollution in the these concept tunnel, in contrast, the size of Singapore is a lot smaller.
The tunnels could use solar energy which is not wasteful.
Uh... if the solar energy could be better used elsewhere, you're still wasting energy. We're not post-scarcity yet.
Actually it's the land use on roads and parking which is most wasteful. Maybe we could solve half the problem with this, even if it is boring.