High Speed Rail: what do other know that we don't?
11-29-19, 09:28 AM
#126
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11-29-19, 06:14 PM
#127
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You're talking about freight rail, not passenger rail.
Have you ever taken a real critical look at a multilane highway filled with cars? If you own stock in auto companies, that might just look like money rolling in, but if you think about transportation efficiency and land/resource waste, it looks like a bag of popcorn kernels that's been opened and popped until it takes up an entire bucket.
Buses consolidate traffic on highways, so they are good for that reason; but trains don't have tires so there is less rolling resistance, plus all the cars of a train are linked head to tail, so each car doesn't have to cut through the wind on its own, the way buses do.
Now I don't see why automation technology shouldn't be used to link multiple buses in close sequence so they could get the same wind drag advantage as a train; but if some foolish human driver caused the lead bus to crash, the rest of the 'bus-train' could derail and the result would be real train wreck, so to speak.
Have you ever taken a real critical look at a multilane highway filled with cars? If you own stock in auto companies, that might just look like money rolling in, but if you think about transportation efficiency and land/resource waste, it looks like a bag of popcorn kernels that's been opened and popped until it takes up an entire bucket.
Buses consolidate traffic on highways, so they are good for that reason; but trains don't have tires so there is less rolling resistance, plus all the cars of a train are linked head to tail, so each car doesn't have to cut through the wind on its own, the way buses do.
Now I don't see why automation technology shouldn't be used to link multiple buses in close sequence so they could get the same wind drag advantage as a train; but if some foolish human driver caused the lead bus to crash, the rest of the 'bus-train' could derail and the result would be real train wreck, so to speak.
I think that the biggest problem with cars versus HSR in the U.S.A. or Canada is the convenience of the automobile. With HSR the bottleneck seems to be getting to where ever the HSR line is. Also getting from the HSR line to wherever your final destination is.
In my area they just installed a section of HSR that replaces half of the former Express Bus route. Now it takes longer to make a trip than it did with just the Express Bus because of the wait time at the transfer station from the Express Bus to the HSR line.
When I take into consideration the wait times for a bus to get me to the terminal here in town, the wait for the bus to take me to the HSR line, the wait time for the HSR train to come in and then the wait time for the bus from the HSR line to my final destination it becomes faster for me to BICYCLE there than to use the HSR line. Weird. It was the same with using public transit in Toronto Canada = due to walking and waiting for connections it was faster to bicycle than to use the transit.
Cheers
