Behold! https://c1.staticflickr.com/8/7177/6894934663_0619c8bea3.jpg
Bonus: the vehicle can be resized at will, depending on the number of passengers.
The problem with trains is that they are very, very inconvenient for most journeys. Sunday evening? forget it. After 11pm? Nope. Journey that runs perpendicular to the local line to London? Lol, enjoy a 5 hour journey to go 100 miles. Want to take cargo like a new washing machine? Lol. Want to go somewhere that's not near a station by bus? Enjoy Journey times that are 4, 5 or 10 times slower than a car.
Trains are good for busy commuter lines and nothing else.
2) a train doesn’t need to replace 100% of personal car trips to be useful. I’m sure you’re not transporting dishwashers or taking trips after 11 pm every day. Covering 90% of use cases is sufficient, and the other 10% can be handled by either renting a car or taking an Uber.
3) we can and should make busses faster than cars during times of congestion by giving them their own lanes.
- where you want,
- when you want,
- carrying what you want,
- as fast
- and as safely as possible,
- at the lowest cost possible.
Trains are weak on multiple axes here: they do not go where you want to go and they do not go when you want to go, and you cannot carry large amounts on them. They are also quite slow.
The only reason that anyone uses trains is because in dense urban areas like London, cars are even slower, and for intercity trips it is both slow and hard to park when you get to the destination city. There are perhaps some exceptions to this but they don't really exist in the West. Really fast intercity trains are a thing in China and Japan, but the UK has no trains that take you from A to B at an average speed greater than a fast car once you take waiting and stopping time into account. As far as I am aware the same applies to the US as well.
Trains do not cover 90% of use cases, they cover maybe 10%. In my opinion, trains are a technology that should be completely scrapped in favor of driverless minibus and driverless car networks. Modern electric & driverless vehicles with internet connectivity and global transport optimization like Uber would beat trains on every single axis.
Consider Singapore, which is tiny, has a kick ass public transport system (trains and busses) and where it costs 90-100k SGD to own a beater Corolla: people still own cars.
If you are going from one city centre to another, during the day, the train is the best choice.
If you are moving within a bike-friendly city, bike is best (or Uber, but it is banned here). If you are somewhere in an urban sprawl, it's car or Uber.
I definitely find trains useful, but I think that they are consistently overrated by people for emotional and irrational reasons. I personally use trains for maybe 1% of my journeys and trams for 0% despite them being extremely prominent in my city.
There are no commuter trains Tasmania.
The last train I could take on a Friday night was 10pm, but given it was a 3 hour journey that didn't seem unreasonable. Each year there was usually one incident that caused delays, but other than they worked well. If I took a fast train the journey time was around the same as driving - quicker in fact given on the journey I would stop for a break - and ticket prices were about the same as driving (for 1 person).
On the other hand I was working in London in 2018, and at weekends often flying from LTN. In the end I added an hour buffer (to a 45 minute journey) because the reliability of Thameslink was so bad.
But otherwise agreed a ton of this stuff could be solved with modern trains.
But appeasing all of the special interest groups in between has made infrastructure development impossibly expensive or takes a decade. So we keep driving cars even long distances between cities.
I'd say that, in the majority of cases, it's either no more difficult or outright easier than getting to an airport, as airports tend to be located on the outskirts of cities (requiring connecting train/bus service or private cars), while most rail hubs tend to be in city centers.
(compact towns & bicycles)
On top of that, I personally (and know many agree) HATE the stress of keeping track of times, scheduling around infrequent departures, logistics to/from stations, etc.
> Bonus: the vehicle can be resized at will, depending on the number of passengers.
Yeahno. "please wait 15-30 minutes as we shuffle cars around the rail yard" is not exactly "at will"
I gladly pick rail over car for good lines, because it's stress free. Get to the station in time (with public transportation it's quite deterministic, subways and trams don't get into traffic jams, buses sometimes do).
Cars of course win when it comes to flexibility (late night getting to a small town address).
Highway-autonomous vehicles would give you the benefits of rail service plus arbitrary departure times, more direct routes, on-demand route changes, and you're traveling in a vehicle that you can use for first and last mile and intra-city travel.
