Asymmetrical Information

According to the Rocky Mountain Institute electric rail systems are substantially worse on a CO2/person/mile basis than private cars.

With subways, while a 2 minute delay getting to the station may lead to a substantial delay, it is more likely to lead to no delay at all, in exactly a proportion such that the expected delay is 2 minutes.

For example, if trains arrive every 20 minutes and you're 2 minutes later than planned, you have an 18/20 chance of catching the same train you would have had you been more prompt, thus no delay, and a 2/20 chance of a 20 minute delay. Average = 2 minutes (assuming you don't know in advance that a train is expected shortly after your intended arrival time at the station -- this is normal for subways.).

Of course, randomly being delayed 20 minutes 10% of the time might be annoying, but if you're taking the subway already you were already facing the same variation in arrival time.

Also, your worst case arrival time has only gotten 2 minutes worse.

So what is it that actually makes NYers delay-intolerant? Have they not thought through the math? I think many people routinely plan subway trips such that they're already running the risk of being a little late, and going from 5 minutes late to 7 minutes late would cross some line.

So Jane, an earlier comment raises an interesting thought experiment -

Assuming you confirmed to your satisfaction that electric rail emits more CO2/mile than the average car

- would you be willing to personally switch from electric rail to something like a Prius to reduce your carbon footprint? If not, why?

- would you be willing to tax mass transit to encourage people to switch to cars?

I am glad I'm not the only one who detected 'tone' about the book thing. He did grant that it was solipsism, but still.

yes, Jams B that is true, except that the train doesn't produce CO2. it is the maker of electricity that does. If electricity is made in a different way [lets say Nuke] then the equation changes a lot. Naturally there are some uncertainties with the figures, particularly since an auto produces exhaust any time it's on. Sit in a traffic jam for 2 hours, and your emissions per mile skyrocket, because you are producing emissions without moving. My assumption is that the per/mile emmission on the majority of vehicles is actually far worse, especially in congested areas... it's not a worthwhile argument against mass transit because the actual total number of miles traveled is also likely to be less per person, because they may well live closer to everything. Mass transit has other reasons for not working well, this isn't one of 'em.
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Single people like trains. People going to work may like trains if things are lined up correctly.

Try taking the wife and 2 kids on a trip in the train. You quickly see why a car is necessary both from a ticket price but also just to keep track of the kids, the toys, the diaper bag, etc.

Now I know you're not saying trains are for everyone, but when you move a family to a big city that mostly uses trains and forces you to pay a huge premium to drive a car it sucks. Because trains become a HUGE inconvience.

Try taking the kid to Tball practice with his gear and uniform on in a train.

Try getting to a destination to go mountain biking or on a backcountry backpacking trip in a train.

Trains are pretty much useless for anything other than going "downtown" with one maybe 2 people. (assuming that one person is paying for all the tickets in a family scenario that is)

The link in the first post is, uh, fairly light on details of calculation or source literature, but I'll take their numbers at face value. Sure, electric rail "emits" more CO2, but it uses about 12% less energy for the average occupancy case and 46% less for the driver alone case. Odds are the emissions numbers they use are based on electricity generation, which is well out of the control of the transit company. So, assuming the transit co. doesn't have their own coal plants and requisite moustache-twirling villain to run them, the comparison still favours rail.

shwan, the btu figures for electric rail are being produced by a straight conversion from kwh. However a typical fossil fuel power plant will produce 2-3 btu of thermal energy in order to generate 1 btu of electricity. So the electric rail btu figures should be multiplied by a factor of 2-3 for a fair comparison with the figures for cars.

And arguing the CO2 emissions aren't attributable to electric rail because they are produced by the power company seems disingenuous.

Jane, for the commuters I have a suggestion -- leave the legal minumum distance in front of your car. All the time, even when stopped at a red light. When commuting in St. Louis I found that leaving enough room in front of me for two cars to pull in didn't cost me time, relieved tension.

Plus, the gap reduces time for traffic to speed up after a slow-down or stop. Especially at a stop light, a gap reduces instantaneous pollution levels, although not for the city since the total number of engines stays about the same.

Except. I believe this one simple tactic could end stop-and-go traffic. The model comes from managing production in a factory. Every car can slow at reasonably the same rate, mostly the same as the car ahead (usually). But cars accelerate at different rates. Each vehicle accelerating at a slower rate than the fasted gas hog permanently costs everyone behind a small slice of time. Which adds up a few cars back. This means that most stop and go traffic occurs because someone cuts off (scares) another driver. Leave the 100-200 foot gap between cars, and the difference in acceleration stops bothering the car behind.

Don't drive slower, just maintain the required distance from the car ahead, and never switch lanes without leaving the same gap between you, if possible. Highway patrols could end grid lock by ticketing every car that approaches within 100 foot (less that 45 mph posted limit) or 200 foot of the car ahead. Ticket everyone bound up in gridlock (the law doesn't allow for actual speed or even stopped, only posted limit) and pretty soon that problem gets solved. Less vehicle and personal time lost parked in traffic.

Think of it. Everyone for a mile stopped (accident, street light, whatever) with 200 feet between cars. And when the first car starts, nearly every car starts rolling forward. Today's 'rub bumper' tactic means about 5-10 seconds for every car stopped, before the last car starts rolling.

Brad,
Buffering around yourself is good stuff, but your model has some problems:

1) That'd drop highway capacity substantially - now you'd have to build 2-3x as many highways to get the same numbers of people through.

2) It doesn't solve the inherent randomnessnes of people and tendencies to leave work in group in short spans of time. Timing lights do a good job of that.

3) It does nothing for roads at overcapacity. In fact, that capacity reduction means that it'd just get worse.

4) You see lots of stop-and-go traffic because small waves of stop-and-go traffic propagate far indeed, just as the additions and subtractions of ripples from one pebble can spread along the entire ocean. Thus, it's alot harder than it looks to suppress. Timing lights help, but are only a partial fix.

Brad, that's kind of interesting, but the problem isn't with the car's acceleration, it's with the dumbass who doesn't notice things are moving.

Aside from that, your plan would severely limit the number of cars on the road, although you may consider that a feature, not a bug.

The problem with mass transportation is that it takes you from somewhere close to where you are to the general vicinity of where you want to be. Your car takes you from where you are to where you are going. Non-rail (bus) transit is at least flexible - you can re-route busses for peak traffic, or if demand changes.

My own transportation saga is, I think, unusual. I lived close enough to a BART station to walk - but it was a long walk, so I usually drove to the station on those rare occasions when it was convenient to take BART. I lived a block from a subway station in LOS ANGELES - I usually had to park my car further away; minimally useful, but kind of nifty. When I'm home for the summer, I live in Vegas, with zero tranport options besides my car.

Mostly, I live in China. Living in Shenzhen for two years, I found the bus system very useful and cheap, if time consuming. Sometimes, the (brand new) subway was convenient, but mostly, it was the bus. This year, it's been Zhongshan, which is a smaller city, and I am entirely ignorant of the bus system; no lines stop near me, and I either walk or take a cab.

If you want high population density for your mass transit experiments, I'm thinking Asia is a good place to look. Hong Kong, I believe, has a lot of privately run transit - I'm not sure about the metro, but I'm pretty sure the bus routes are private.

Certified human meet is the best...

I mean, uh, what?

You're not a libertarian. You may think you're a libertarian, because the rest of the spectrum is so unattractive and inconsistent, but you're a Tory wet.

When you ride a train, you ride on someone else's schedule, which means it takes longer.

And I suspect that busses mean you are riding on someone else's schedule, in a vehicle that is extremely uncomfortable when full, but spends most of its operating time nearly empty so it emits more CO2 per passenger mile than someone driving alone in a SUV.

Way back when trains were new, and were the only land transport faster than a horse, Henry David Thoreau noted the affect of the inflexibility of train systems: "The train is in the saddle and is riding mankind."

However, outside of Manhattan Island, scheduling inflexibility isn't the biggest problem with train-based mass transport; the bigger problem is that for most people, where the train goes is not where they need to go. When I lived near Washington, DC, their Metro system was new and shiny. Several times I took the family to the Smithsonian on weekends by driving to the nearest Metro station, parking, and riding to the station under the mall. But that was the only area we were interested in that was reachable by Metro. The National Zoo was miles off their grid, and they couldn't even tell us how to connect with a bus going that way from the Metro.

I lived and worked in the same far-off suburb, so normally my commute was a short car trip, but sometimes I had to go to company HQ in a Beltway suburb, which took two or three hours in stop and go traffic unless you left about 4 am. But it was still faster than public transport - the Metro went nowhere near that other suburb.

yes, Jams B that is true, except that the train doesn't produce CO2. it is the maker of electricity that does. If electricity is made in a different way [lets say Nuke] then the equation changes a lot.

But if we're talking vision of the future when electricity will be generated from non-fossil sources, then we might as well envision a future where cars are powered by that same clean electricity (via batteries, or hydrogen fuel-cells, or even compressed air).

Here's the bottom line. Jane likes mass transit because she grew up in New York and loves the big-city, car-free lifestyle. She would love mass-transit regardless of its environmental impact. And, in fact, she loves it now even though it appears that, given our present methods of generating electricity, it is environmentally worse than even driver-only vehicles. (And our power generating infrastructure is no easier to change than our auto fleet -- much harder, actually, since power plants are huge investments with much longer useful lives than private autos).

Leftish types love mass-transit and hate cars for non-environmental reasons first and foremost. They've hated cars and the 'soulless' auto-based suburban life for much longer than anybody has been worrying about greenhouse gases. They dislike the idea that cars provide independence and personal freedom, and that everybody is in his own little air-conditioned pod with his Big Mac and Big Gulp. Global warming is merely a new stick to use to beat an old hobby horse.

This is really a shame because addressing global warming is a lot more feasible if we focus on green personal transportation rather than trying to work against both the infrastructure of our communities AND the desires of the vast majority of the people who live in them. It's just NOT going to work to force most Americans into a high-density, mass-transit lifestyle. And there's no good reason even to try, since we've hardly begun to optimize the efficiency of cars and trucks (and have hardly begun to take full advantage of electronic communication and telecommuting).

Great post, Slocum. Carbon emission free transport will likely be the result of a changeover to carbon emission free electricity generation, no matter if the transport is by car or by train, and that will take time. I rather doubt that enough land mass can be converted to switchgrass production, assuming that energy efficient celluosic ethanol production technology is perfected, and don't get me started on corn-based ethanol, or the prospect of deep fryed foods getting popular enough for us all to get to where we want to go with what we used to cook our french fries.

There's a lot of irony in Jane's last paragraph. The more statist among us quite often accuse the more libertarian among us of being consumed with a Faith that the market will solve all ills, when it is usually more accurate to say that the more statist among us are consumed with a Faith that all problems are solvable, especially
if those damnable people will just act in the way that the Faithful demand. Even if this Faith were to be borne out, which it won't, of course, in this Vale of Tears, there is also the small matter about agreeing upon what constitutes a "problem".

And arguing the CO2 emissions aren't attributable to electric rail because they are produced by the power company seems disingenuous.

I admit I sacrificed clarity for caricature, but my point was that (as has been covered elsewhere) the CO2 emissions related to electric trains could be removed with a different of method power generation without changing the technology at all. Your car, on the other hand, would need to be replaced by a cleaner alternative.

Will: Even if we can make ethanol from switchgrass or corn with zero input of CO2 in the form of fertilizer and harvesting/transport, we're still pumping CO2 into the atmosphere by burning it. And growing the stuff doesn't make it net-emission-free unless the land was lying fallow before the crops were planted. If the land was originally sucking CO2 out of the air and turning it into wheat, then all we're doing is changing the method by which it's combusted and who is doing the combusting.

I love trains. Buses I would be happy to see vanish from the earth in a cloud of diesel exhaust.

Without buses, how do you get adequate coverage in cities that aren't as oblong and/or densely packed as Manhattan?

FMB --

There are two things you're not considering:

1) People do not typically plan their arrive-at-the-station schedule in a random distribution. They plan it around arriving shortly before the train departs, because they don't want to spend twenty minutes waiting at the station. Therefore, your math is inapplicable; few people are arriving at the station 16 minutes early instead of 18 minutes early because of a two-minute delay, while many more are arriving one minute late instead of one minute early because of a two-minute delay.

2) Even if the average delay is 2 minutes, the minimum delay is 20 minutes. An occasional 20 minute delay is a lot bigger problem (because it throws off plans by a much greater degree) than a consistent 2-minute delay would be.

Environmental problems could lead to, say, 90% of the human world population dying and not getting replaced for a long time. They could possibly drive us extinct. That isn't the sort of thing that leads me to shrug and say "Some problems just don't have solutions.".

Markets aren't good at that sort of thing. Markets are very good when you're interested in the trend over the next 2 minutes.

But then, entrepreneurs who come up with a wild variety of solutions might possibly be good. They look ahead for future needs and look for ways to get paid filling those needs. There are possibilities there.

And there are possibilities for giant corporations to do some sort of long-range planning. It doesn't make a big difference whether the work gets done by salaried employees of giant corporations or salaried employees of governments. The effect is likely to be similar. I don't even care if it's salaried employees of the catholic church. Or salaried employees of rich philanthropists. If we need a lot of people to coordinate stuff, somebody has to organise it. I hope they organise the right things instead of the wrong things, but whoever it is gets to choose, not me.

What's special about my government is citizens get some little say in what happens. And they get to coerce people in unsubtle ways, more than other large organisations do. Those are two things that can be useful or useless, depending.

Anyway, we have a whole lot of species whose genomes were shaped by the last 30,000 years climate. Those are going to be worth a whole whole lot once we learn how to exploit them, and right now their market worth is only what somebody will pay for them Tuesday. Extinctions are not good for us, but there isn't a whole lot of money going to prevent it. There isn't even a lot of money going to prevent our own extinction. A big part of the market isn't thinking very far ahead....

And if you ask me exactly what we need to do to reduce our chance of extinction, I can't tell you in any detail. We don't need to spend a lot of money on stuff that just sounds like it ought to be a good thing.

But I think we really ought to put more resources into finding out what might help.

"Buses are like cars, except crowded, slow, and ungainly."

And flexible. And far more practical for a city that isn't quite as characterized by the "live in the fringes and work downtown in an incredibly dense mass" ethos as Manhattan.

I actually agree with your assessment. I loathe buses, and actually like trains (although you're not going to catch me without a car anytime soon). But trains are horrifically expensive and inflexible (forcing huge swaths of land to be completely devoted it it, and making the response demographic changes extremely costly). It seems to me completely reasonable that LA in the 40's and 50's got rid of the trolleys in favor of buses (and converting the trolley lines to one more lane on the highway).

I realize that this thread is essentially dead but I really had to reply to this:

"Environmental problems could lead to, say, 90% of the human world population dying and not getting replaced for a long time."

This is the sort of hyperbolic codswollop which makes most people roll their eyes and stop listening.

Uh..I work at a transit agency and buses are not that flexible. True, they physically can go where ever there are streets to support their weight. The problem is that people living along the planned route do not want them and exert pressure on their political rep to prevent them from using that route. 80% of our routes have not changed in 70+ years and where changes do happen the streets involved previously had transit so the change is no biggie. Will Allen is really on the nose with his comment. At least from the transit workingmans prospective....

But trains are horrifically expensive and inflexible (forcing huge swaths of land to be completely devoted it it, and making the response demographic changes extremely costly).
Trains are expensive and inflexible, yes, but it certainly seems that the auto-based transportation system is an even more voracious consumer of land.

BP,

Road-based transportation solutions don't force any land to be "completely devoted" to them, simply because roads admit a wide variety of transportation modes, from foot traffic through bicycles on up through huge articulated buses and 2- (and in some states, 3-) trailer semi trucks.

In addition, road extensions almost always integrate seamlessly with the existing road network, so if (for example) they built a brand new city from scratch in the middle of South Dakota farmland, the moment the first road from the new city reaches I-80 is the moment I'll be able to get in my car in my own driveway and drive directly to the new city if I want to.

The few exceptions to this, such as the designated busways in Seattle, are devoted to a single mode of user by fiat only, and could be opened to general road traffic by the stroke of a pen.

Kirk Parker:

Road-based transportation solutions don't force any land to be "completely devoted" to them, simply because roads admit a wide variety of transportation modes, from foot traffic through bicycles on up through huge articulated buses and 2- (and in some states, 3-) trailer semi trucks.

I was thinking mostly of parking lots. If parking lots aren't "completely devoted" to the road-based transportation system, they certainly come very close.

Outside of the centers of our more densely populated cities, do you really think that walking and bicycling are major components of the transportation system in passenger mile terms (or even in passenger hour terms)?

Your distinction between cars, trucks, and buses is interesting but I don't see how it somehow means that any of the space devoted to the road-based transportation system doesn't count.

The second paragraph of your post mentions what I would consider the primary advantage of the road-based transportation system: every point on it is more or less easily accessible to every other point, without a change of vehicle and on a flexible schedule, for both passengers and freight. The primary point of my original post was that this flexibility doesn't come without costs, and "land consumed" is one of them. Heavily used rail infrastructure may take up a lot of space (as the poster I was originally responding to said), but our current road-based system certainly takes up a lot of space too, and it has a tremendous impact on the form and the location of what gets built.

Jane:

I didn't notice it the first time I read this post, but I think that fixing unrequited love would probably equally useful to fixing US mass transit problems. Think of all the heartache that leads to ice cream eating / problem drinking that leads to T2 diabetes / DUIs. This is a problem we should fix.

The someone-else's-schedule and suburban-destinations problems are deal breakers for me, boo. Something like this --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit might entice me back, though.

"Uh..I work at a transit agency and buses are not that flexible."

Nonsense! I remember growing up in Philadelphia all of the buses were Flexible. Granted, "Flexible" was the name of the company that made them, so it might not count for much.

BP,

The point of distinguishing cars, busses, and trucks is the different purposes of each, and the fact that the rail system can't supply all of those needs. No matter how good it is, I still need to get from my front door to the terminal.

And that lack of terminal is the point about walking and cycling, too: you might not ever set out to walk from Seattle to Portland, or even to cycle that distance (though lots of people do the latter for sport), but there's nothing physical about the road network that would prevent you from doing so if you needed or wanted to.

That ubiquitousness is a huge benefit that gets overlooked in just about every pro-mass-transit piece I've seen. Take a look, for example, at these guys who are pushing a new streetcar system for Tacoma. They talk about "re-connecting neighborhood business districts" via the proposed streetcar lines, but every single proposed line duplicates an existing bus route. Part of the rationale for the system is the "several thousand new residents [who] will make Tacoma their home", but what's unstated is this: Every single big of new construction that might occur to house those new arrivals will have a road leading right up to it. All Pierce Transit needs to do to expand bus service into the new area is buy a new bus (or reroute an existing one if available) and assign a driver to it, whereas if the development happens far from the proposed trolley lines the only way to get them streetcar service is to spend an additional $10 to $40 million/mile on more streetcar lines.

Well Kirk, that's still not as dumb as building a monorail connecting Greenwood and downtown Seattle.

I've driven both Aurora and 15th Ave/Ballard Bridge many times in rush hour, both ways, and neither one was ever bad at all.

Plus the proposed terminus (15th and NW 85th) was smack in the middle of a commercial zone with only a very low-density neighborhood anywhere near it (Olympic Manor), while ignoring all the apartments on Greenwood Ave roughly a mile away...

Anyway, I moved away right after the tax hike passed. I hear they're not building it now.

Kirk Parker:

The point of distinguishing cars, busses, and trucks is the different purposes of each, and the fact that the rail system can't supply all of those needs. No matter how good it is, I still need to get from my front door to the terminal.

Trucks and roads for them certainly do seem necessary to the way we currently live our lives, and rail systems can't do door to door freight delivery, without a doubt.

On the other hand, you could walk from your front door to the transit terminal, or you could if your neighborhood was laid out to support it, and then maybe we wouldn't have to design the transportation system and everything else around 100% of personal trips being taken by car. Certainly, our current system assumes that you aren't willing to make that journey by foot.

And that lack of terminal is the point about walking and cycling, too: you might not ever set out to walk from Seattle to Portland, or even to cycle that distance (though lots of people do the latter for sport), but there's nothing physical about the road network that would prevent you from doing so if you needed or wanted to.

Our current system is optimized for cars, not for pedestrians. In fact, I would say that the viability of transportation by foot has been pretty explicitly sacrificed. Calling the system "usable" by pedestrians is a red herring.

The contribution of cycling to the entire system, especially as actual transportation as opposed to recreation, seems kind of negligible to me. Maybe it's different in the Northwest.

Note that I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with any of this, but I don't see any point to pretending that we've built this wonderful multi-mode system. We've built a car system.

That ubiquitousness is a huge benefit that gets overlooked in just about every pro-mass-transit piece I've seen.

True enough.

Take a look, for example, at these guys who are pushing a new streetcar system for Tacoma. They talk about "re-connecting neighborhood business districts" via the proposed streetcar lines, but every single proposed line duplicates an existing bus route.

I will admit to being mystified by the amount of rail advocacy out there. I think there's a certain amount of classism at work: the advocates feel (or they assume that their intended audience feels) that nice middle class people will ride trains and won't ride buses. They may be right. Or, at least, they may be right about the buses part, it's hard to say about the trains.

Or maybe it's all nostalgia.

Or maybe building the rail system is the first step to building enough density to support the rail system.

Part of the rationale for the system is the "several thousand new residents [who] will make Tacoma their home", but what's unstated is this: Every single big of new construction that might occur to house those new arrivals will have a road leading right up to it.

This is true. However, if you were going to build a development where you didn't have to assume that the primary means of transportation was going to be the private car, the road infrastructure would end up different (probably less costly, but who knows?) and the physical form of the development itself would end up different, and, in fact, the location of the development could well be different.

But that isn't what happens, because in our world, you always have to assume that the primary means of transporation is going to be the private car. It's not surprising that you can point at a new development and say that transit couldn't support it very well once you explicitly optimize for cars.

All Pierce Transit needs to do to expand bus service into the new area is buy a new bus (or reroute an existing one if available) and assign a driver to it, whereas if the development happens far from the proposed trolley lines the only way to get them streetcar service is to spend an additional $10 to $40 million/mile on more streetcar lines.

But is the bus really going to be any more used than the streetcar line? Cheaper, yes, but more used? I doubt it. Extending transit service at any kind of useful level to spread out suburbs is difficult if not impossible, especially as the likely destinations are just as spread out.

Once you optimize for cars, and all the development spreads out, and there's a practical upper limit on density, transit won't work any more. In this context, I don't see any point to arguing over how much one mode of transit costs vs. another, because they're all essentially unviable as anything but a public service to the deprived.

Love the last paragraph. Absolutely love it.

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