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As long as it goes right from my house directly to where I need to go, take me and whomever I need exclusively, and also optionally be my own little space I could customize to my taste, then hell yeah, I'd take the tram.
But at this scale rails seem to be inefficient. PRT is where it's really at.
How many times will techbros reinvent the train/tram until North America finally starts laying down rails?
Don't even need to lay down rails. The rails are already there. Built by Chinese slave labor 150 years ago. We need merely to seize them.
Or just cut a check to the freight companies.
Many cities paved over their tram lines. Sometimes they poke through during road work. We had trams in nearly every city 100 years ago yet today people tell me we can't afford it or our population is too small to support it. If we could do it 100 years ago we could certainly do it now.
Even the rural college town my grandma grew up in had tram lines running down the main streets in the 30's and to both colleges. If a city had more than 20,000 residents 100 years ago, they probably had a tram system that was pulled up at GM's behest.
I'd be very concerned about the state and safety of those rails.
Amtrak currently runs trains on the freight tracks, but as Amtrak essentially leases the privilege of using the tracks at all from CSX and BNSF and Union Pacific and the like, their traffic gets heavily deprioritized to freight trains. You can totally catch a train from Fort Worth to Los Angeles, but it will take a few days longer than driving, will be almost as expensive as flying, and the train will be delayed many times for freight traffic.
If the federal government nationalized the rails, put them under the care of the FRA, properly funded Amtrak, and gave it a healthy advertising budget to let people know rail is the clear choice for medium length trips (like Chicago to St. Louis), there's no reason we couldn't send passengers on the same rails and with the same priority as freight trains. They're perfectly safe, and the reason we've been hearing about so many train wrecks lately is the degradation of work conditions for rail workers. Longer trains and longer hours make for more dangerous operating conditions and more frequent wrecks.
And while the trains wouldn't run 190 miles an hour, many long, straight stretches do exist, and it's not unheard of for a train to be running 80-100 miles an hour on those stretches. That kind of speed is very doable for passenger rail. Hell, some Amtrak trains are capable of 150 miles an hour.
My point wasn't to use 150 year old rails. It's that the rails already exist so it doesn't need to be a decades-long multi-trillion dollar project. It's highly unlikely that any of the rails in use today are from the 19th century.
I love this Adam Something classic where they keep optimizing the tech bro idea until it turns into Thomas the Engine
The US has so much tarmac they don’t even need rails just turn some of that tarmac into dedicated bus lanes. And put one of these long boys on them
Bus lanes are too easy for the next politician to remove bus priority and allow cars back into the lane. At least with rails it's a lot more costly to remove the route. Busses also still contribute to microplastics and tire waste compared to railed trams. Trams are also easier to automate which can make employing drivers and adding trams to lines less difficult compared to buses. The rails are also more effecient as there is less friction.
I'd defintely take BRT over no transit but many cities are dense enough to justify electrified trams.
Just lay rails in the lane. Turn it into, I dunno, a fuck you I'm a train lane
On account of the election, you can basically be sure that passenger rail will not happen to any extent any time soon. Expect bigger cars and more highways instead, as this is what is outlined in Project 2025.
Incredibly bleak.
Going backwards while the rest of the world builds more functional and fair cities. We feel just as bad up here in Canada where our provincial premier is overstepping cities to force them to remove bike lanes that just got installed. The lanes are along a subway corridor and there are several apartment buildings planned on those roads that have extensive bicycle parking plans with much less car parking. And we've got big plans for new highways while we refuse to build rail along the densest part of our nation.
Take any tech bro take on transit, and if you try to perfect it, you'll almost always end up with a train.
What about those giant quadcopter type things they keep wanting to build to fly from building rooftops in cities for some reason?
Within cities?
Look, aircraft are Hella noisy and if stuff goes bad, they'll smash into buildings. Using them for intra-urban transit is not safe. Besides, I don't know if multicopters can autorotate^[1]^, which only adds to the safety concerns.
So why not bring it slightly closer to the ground. Maybe put the transportation device on a bridge or viaduct. And while you could put some stairs up from the streets, you may even choose to link buildings into them directly. Most tall buildings have lifts, after all.
Next, giving each building its own link into the system would be excessive. You can achieve 90 percent of the utility if you have larger entry hubs for multiple buildings, and expect people to walk the last mile.
Anyway, back to the vehicle, since a vehicle for a handful of people is rather inefficient, why not build the vehicles for many dozens of people? Why not build it to connect multiple vehicles? If you run, like, four of these, every five minutes, most people will be able to walk up any time and just go.
And to make that movement more efficient, let's have our vehicles roll along a specifically designed path, optimised for minimal friction by using hard wheels on a hard surface.
There, I replaced the quadcopters with a train.
EDIT:
^[1]^: According to one answered question on a StackExchange page, the answer to this question is probably no. Autorotation requires some magnitude of control of the pitch of your rotors, something that most multicopters do not have.
It does make me intrigued to see what'd happen if you could or did fit a multicopter with swashplates and pitch-adjustable rotors.
If they really want rooftop travel, a gondola system could probably work.
Everyone thinks the sky is big, without considering just how unscalable flying cars are
Let’s stop worrying about new ways for the ultra-rich to avoid the frustrations the rest of us have to deal with, we’ll all be better off if they also have an incentive to design more effective cities and transportation for everyone
What about the moon? Surely not...
Well, ultimately space elevators are the most energy efficient way to escape Earth's gravity well. And once we have one of those, mind as well build a mass driver at the top so rockets don't have to carry so much of their own mass. Then we can build a laser-based photonic sail on the other end to decelerate the cars and make them even lighter/faster, and then build track at the bottom...
Train.
What about interstellar travel?
Well, ultimately wormholes are way more efficient than any subluminal travel once the infrastructure to build them is in place: https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/48545a0f6352a
So we control traffic on each side carefully. In fact, we could just suspend a really strong wire on either end...
Yep. Train.
The problem is "perfection" looks different to different people.
If you're optimizing for efficiency, then you're absolutely correct.
If you're optimizing for convenience then shit like personal taxi drones is probably gonna be better.
Trains are extremely convenient. You optimize them for convenience by adding more trains.
That's how you get to cars.
Add more trains.
The trains now need to seat fewer people so make them smaller. Maybe 2-7 people per train.
Most routes aren't needed at any given time, so you might as well only run the train when someone needs it.
Rather than keeping the unused trains in a central depot, keep them at the departure points
We can't staff all these trains, and if the departure points are peoples' homes, then let's have the people themselves drive it
The network of destinations requires a TON of rail switches, and coordinating that is a complicated. Better to use a technology that doesn't require switches, like wheels on pavement.
Boom, cars.
So it really depends on what you're optimizing for.
I want to be done with car shaped cars... I want a self driving room to show up...I want to say "send me a living room/bedroom/office/whatever," and have a room shaped vehicle show up to get me. I want that vehicle to drive me to the nearest train tracks and hop on the tracks itself and then zoom me to the nearest hyper loop and jump itself on that to zip me across the country in an hour... Join up with other "rooms" as you go to create a typical looking train
Having slept in a train bed that has a bathroom and was 3 doors down from a kitchen, it's wild that we looked at a car and went, "That's what I want."
Jetsons theme starts playing
Can't we just do like, lines on the road that have specific meanings? We could put it all in a book of rules and standards? Make it a nation wide system?
For an international system, the EU has taken some measures to try and make the road markings and such easier for self-driving cars to recognize and whatnot.
At the request of the European Council, the European Commission has introduced that road markings and traffic signs shall be designed and maintained in such a way that they can be properly recognized both by human drivers and by autonomous vehicles.
I think what they want is trains with individual private cars that can automatically choose the tracks you want by selecting a destination. Which would be fucking awesome it's how I thought cars worked when I was 4, I swear all the steering wheel did was change lanes (my folks were good drivers I guess).
next up in the agenda: what if we make cars larger so more people can travel in them simultaneously
I know it's just a meme but they both solve different enough problems. A self-driving car can easily turn back into a non-self driving car, meaning you can self drive for long transit and switch to a normal one in the city or hectic areas. This basically solves the issue of self drive tech not being smart/reliable enough. Which, as you probably also agree, is still quite far from perfect.
Self driving cars will allways use far more energy and space per passenger than a train or light rail. And personally owned cars will spend more than 90% of their time just standing around, being useless and wasting space. If you propose self driving taxis, you're just another step closer to trains.
Didn't Elmo muskrats tunnel end up causing more traffic?
If tomorrow we banned non-self-driving (NSD) cars, sure. But in most countries, grandfathering in old cars is going to happen for a while. Which means that self-driving and non-self-driving cars will have to share the road.
I could see some transitions possibly. For example, on a 4-lane highway: "In 2027, lane 1 will be separated by a barrier and only allow SD cars. Lanes 2-4 will be for NSD cars only. In 2029, lanes 1-2 for SD. By 2033, NSD cars will be banned on this highway."
I just keep thinking about the automated robots that have existed since I was a child that just followed a painted line on the ground. Those operate around people, other robots and vehicles in ways similar to traffic on a public road, and yet they have none of the issues autonomous cars have. They're far, far more simple.
If a line-following robot bumps into a 3 year old, it might knock them over. It's a different situation with high speed 2 ton death machines
Let's bring back trams and trollies
There's trolleys in my city. I love them riding on their little tracks and I go choo choo.
It's not a hard problem to solve. It's not hard to see the reasoning behind a desire for self driving cars. Anyone who lives outside of a big city in the US knows this.
Roads are already present. Traffic control is already present.
Tie the goddamn roads to the goddamn traffic control and have it coordinate the cars. The cars input their destination, and have radar to stop the car to prevent accidental collision.
The problem is people don't like that they can't get to their destination faster, they don't have the freedom of choosing their exact route, and they can't just rev their engine whenever they want.
It's not mass transit, but it solves the final distance problem.