* CA talks a lot about replacing cars, and accomplishes nothing.
* FL makes no pretense about being primarily a based car-culture, but successfully implements mass transit where it makes sense
I know the supply chain got messed up, but given that trucks are so crucial to transporting goods (at least here in the US) I would think that trucks remained on the road during the pandemic while individuals driving cars all stayed home during quarantine.
I'm really curious how this conclusion ('trucks are the primary cause of pollution') was reached
> In the most recent year for which data are available, combination trucks made up only 1% of the vehicle population but were responsible for 6% of all vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and 17% of vehicle fuel use.
Given that diesel is often considered "more polluting" you can probably make it work out given a bunch of assumptions that may or may not apply. Trucks are the primary cause of road wear, for example.
Modern diesel engines are less polluting than unleaded cars, thanks to diesel particle filters:
"gasoline cars emitted on average 10 times more carbonaceous PM at 22°C and 62 times more at -7°C compared to diesel cars"
Effectively no FL city has mass transit, unless you want to count South Florida which has a commuter train (Trirail) and the Metro, which are both essentially north-south only. It makes sense to do everywhere, but has been done nowhere.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney_World_Monorail_Sys... [2] https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2020/news20200225
You probably don't like that it's a private company on private land, but that's irrelevant to the question of decarbonation.
So why not compare Disney to Disney and the metros to... well...
Unless you are saying maybe we should pursue more local governments run by a corporation? That also feels wrong, all told. Though, I would grant I don't have enough perspective there to know.
Part of the pitch to getting the Reedy Creek Act passed, was the plans for E.P.C.O.T. (Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow) and the plan to build a new urban development. Those plans were complicated after Walt's death and permanently shelved after his brother Roy's retirement in 1968, but Disney retained its exemptions in spite of never truly undertaking the original plan and simply operated a tax-reduced, virtually regulation-free amusement park, until this year.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reedy_Creek_Improvement_Act [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20140903204555/http://articles.o...
At the least, it is far more complicated than makes sense, and can't really be used as evidence one way or the other for Florida making good choices.
There's only one definition of "mass transit" that matters and it's the one you know CA can't deliver on.
His plans for EPCOT were originally to build an actual planned city using these technologies to manage traffic flow: https://sites.google.com/site/theoriginalepcot/overview/the-...
Your BART number is also in the middle of the Pandemic, back then the daily ridership of the Disney’s monorail was 0, as the park was closed.
Most resent number for BART is (Q4 2022) 146,500 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit
I’m having difficulty finding ridership numbers for Disney’s monorail. The best I can give is 150,000 per day. https://www.tampabay.com/life-culture/2023/05/04/disney-desa... which is something some legislator says while playing politics.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jan/07/california-b...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-speed-...
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-09/californ...
https://ktla.com/news/local-news/poor-decision-making-manage...
But my understanding is that they were feting a plan which left passengers with a 20 mile bus bridge to Bakersfield, and that’s just deranged
Personally if it were up to me I would have started the CAHSR between Bakersfield and LA simply because of the lack of any current rail connection. However this is by far the most expensive portion of the phase 1 plan, and given the lack of funding it is no surprise they started with the cheapest portion.
If you start in SF or LA, you at least have a fast train serving an area with terrible traffic and a population of millions.
Brightline is very successful, part of which is due to having so few stops, something that a public railroad could never get away with politically. The Amtrak trains stop so often that they spend very little time at their top speed.
They had 1.2 million rides in 2022, that's good by any measurement. Pacific Surfliner in Southern California is a wildly successful intercity rail and only had 1.6m rides in 2022.
Some people may use them to commute but it's not primarily commuter rail, would be my guess.
The San Diego trolley has 63 miles of track and 34 million riders in 2022; but that's an entirely different type of rail that serves a different purpose. Even if it eventually reached all the way to Los Angeles there would still be uses for commuter and intercity rail.
Many places in Europe have the various types of rail all sharing the same "lines" or stations, but the ICE is a completely different beast than the Regionalbahn or Regional-Express.
With that said, as you point out, it's a new intercity service that is actually operational, popular, and being used today, which for the US is an enormously rare feat.
It's half-assed compared to what California is building.
Track upgrades and locomotive upgrades are also being done to the Pacific Surfliner which in theory could get it above 120 MPH at some points, putting it semi-officially in "high speed rail" territory.
Key here is coil-to-coil, NOT total charging efficiency, let alone "better than wired." Worse, it was a stationary setup with a distance of 5 inches between coils, so adding asphalt, protection for the car's coil, etc. is just going to make it worse.
Step 2: dig up the road at midnight
Just 'cause it's in the ground doesn't mean it's not worth stealing...
At best the cab door will have a normally keyed lock, but there's plenty of glass to break out so that won't stop a determined mischief maker.
I kinda hoped it was like a car’s windshield.
Some operators retrofit in plexiglass or in rare cases bulletproof material, but that is for special applications.
> Winston Churchill once said, “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else.” [Laughter.]
I hope we will do the right thing soon and begin working on a robust public transit infrastructure.
I think the problem, as always, is money. The US housing market is supposedly worth USD 30T+ What will happen to all "money" currently in the suburban ticky tacky [wiktionary] houses? If we have high density housing with maglev trains in major city centers, will that "suck" more money from the rest of the United States?
It looks like about 7% of the US housing market "worth" is in New York (City) while about 6% of the US lives here. Seems reasonable. However, what if there was some constellation of "high density" city centers all connected together by reliable high-speed trains? Will it cause the suburbia to lose value?
I am just thinking out loud. I don't own a house so I don't have a horse in this race. Maglev supposedly costs up to a hundred million dollars per mile, which looks very attractive considering a road cost one to two million dollars per mile lane, so four to eight million dollars for a mile of a standard US four-lane street/road.
[wiktionary] (US) Cheap, low-quality building material, especially as that used to make conventional suburban housing of a uniform design. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ticky-tacky
[US housing worth] The total value of U.S. homes was $45.3 trillion at the end of 2022, down 4.9% ($2.3 trillion) from a record high of $47.7 trillion in June. (redfin, https://www.redfin.com/news/housing-market-loses-value-2023/.... )
[New York housing worth] Among metropolitan areas, the New York City metro remains the country’s largest real estate market by value, but by a narrowing margin. The NYC-area housing market is valued at $3.51 trillion, with the Los Angeles metro right behind at $3.27 trillion. (zillow, https://www.zillow.com/research/us-housing-market-total-valu.... )
There's a potential depending on how far out the it extends.
Using property as an investment vehicle is a major problem in the US. It compels property owners to support policies that retain or increase their property values (e.g. NIMBY).
There's a symbiotic relationship between commercial and residential property. Locality to commercial real-estate creates demand for residential property and scarcity of residential property increases the value of residential property.
The pandemic closed commercial real-estate and made a lot of people and organizations realize they don't need to be present in the office. This is disruptive to the market as whole because the value of both commercial and residential property is tied to demand for both. That is why there has been such a push towards getting people back into the office.
If people do not need to be in the office, then commercial real-estate loses all value. If people don't need to live near the office then residential property loses some of it's value.
This could have an impact on the demand for transit as well.
Pros of dynamic charging:
- Substantially reduced need for large batteries, which reduces vehicle cost and contributes to overall lower cost of electric road transportation;
- Easier logistics planning, no queuing for charging, and reduced downtime for commercial vehicles;
- Cost of public daytime charging on par with private night-time stationary charging;
- Same access to charging for all, at the same time, at the same cost;
- Well adapted to high vehicle utilization (e.g., 24h operation, autonomous trucks and car sharing services);
- Greatly reduced need for high power fast charging, which wears out batteries;
- Greatly reduced need to build out infrastructure for stationary charging, which is not easy to do quickly and at scale;
- Potentially easier to connect to the power grid than static charging of equivalent capacity.
Challenges to overcome include:
- The transition phase from zero to many users;
- The transition phase from zero miles to coverage of most major highways;
- Electromagnetic emissions;
- Not in line with how the public and industry perceives that electric cars and trucks should work;
- Initial funding (requires public sector support, but not subsidies);
- Primarily benefits vehicle owners and transport buyers, not vehicle manufacturers and energy companies.
- Unclear if dynamic charging is cheaper beyond ~2045, due to declining levelized battery costs.
As for the argument that it is better to electrify rail - both should be electrified. Europe and Asia wonder why North America hasn’t electrified its rail network already.