>>The fact is that we need to greatly reduce road building in America, and transfer the majority of the money into building state–of-the-art train systems like in Europe. A rational well-used mass transit system is key to our strategy,” he said, noting that such a transition would take several decades.
A key issue here is that most of Europe was built up pre-automobile, and thus is much, much more dense than most of the US. This is important when you are discussing what sort of transportation options make sense. Trains only work if you have significant density, lots of multi family housing in close proximity to the stations.
Post-automobile cities, particularly those in the Sunbelt, are built around the single family house in the suburbs. The density simply isn’t there.
Unfortunately, we have a large number of policy/media elites who live in NYC (Manhattan in particular) and DC. Manhattan was built out before the automobile, and has density such that trains do work. DC has a significant train system for the suburbs, but has the advantage of being the Imperial City on the Potomac, and thus this system was heavily subsidized by the rest of the country. This is not an option for, say, Indianapolis.
The city planner establishment has totally drunk the mass transit / greater density Kool-Aide, from what I can see. People still largely want to live in single family houses, though “walkability” is something people do like. The two concepts are at odds with each other.
I see trains as a 19th Centuy solution to 21st Century transportation problems. For me it’s like continuing to use hardwired circuit-switched networks when the packet-switched Internet has been the way to go for 20+ years. People like the much greater flexibility afforded by cars. With Uber and the coming autonomous cars, roads are seeing and will see a utility jump.
Trains should only be expanded in the most dense of locations. They make no sense at all in places like the Inland Empire of California, which is essentially where Brown’s train to nowhere is being built.
There needs to be a much more robust public discussion of this issue, and people should not just let the train fanatics and density mavens who tend to dominate the city planning establishment rule the day.
I will agree with you that a big problem is that these transportation planners are from NYC and are all in on mass transit. They do not realize that a major portion of the population that needs to be convinced their schemes can be implemented, never mind practical has a very different lifestyle than the one they are so familiar with.
I think the divide gets to the point where you have people who walk and take mass transit from their apartment to their office trying to convince small farmers who live on 1/8 sections that transit is the way to go. The transport needs of the two populations are so different as to be incompatible.
I like trains, but their limitations need to be acknowledged. They are a very large upfront capital investment, and the ongoing maintenance is entirely borne by the operator. With roads a large chunk of the maintenance is borne by the users (vehicle repairs and preventative maintenance). Trains can be faster than the alternatives, but this requires a destination near the train station, and still trains are only faster when the train train is less than ~4 hours. Much more freight could and probably should move by rail, however, the class 1 railroads are not interested in cargoes that are less than 1 TEU (basically a 20 ft shipping container), or are traveling less than 500 to 750 mi (probably varies by region and railroad). This means that US RRs do not want less than car load shipments that could be truck shipped to their final destination is less than one day.
On the other end of things, once density get past a certain point adding lanes to the roads gives diminishing returns. I am highly skeptical of the plans here by the DC beltway of widening 66 through Arlington VA, due to the need for all those people that have been encouraged to drive in having to find a place to park.