I am mainly saying this from the perspective of behavioral economics. As well as improving the density problems American cities suffer.
AHC: Get more people in the US to take the train.
- Thread starter Duke Andrew of Dank
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SwampTiger
Banned
The issue of the 20th century is the automobile. Convenience and freedom of the automobile is the attraction. You will need costlier auto travel to quell the rush away from trains. Also faster and better train service. The use of toll roads instead of interstate highways, added fuel and horsepower taxes, and higher registration and licensing requirements would push consumers toward rail.
This. No or much later and more expensive interstates, more expensive fuel.
Also, but that's almost following, urban planning along urban rail and tram Linea.
Hate to burst your bubble, Schwamy, but gas was less than $0.35 per gallon (US-ians use gallons) back when the POD would have to occur...
SwampTiger
Banned
I paid $.25/gallon in late 1972 when a new station was trying to attract customers. Usual was $.50/gallon.
Rail nationalized in FDR's hundred days with a postwar japan-style buildup of both inter-city/interstate rail and urban metro systems as a job creation measure.
SsgtC
Banned
Hell, as late as 2000 I could get gas for $0.77 a gallon. And $0.90-0.99 cents a gallon as late as 2004. Fuel didn't spike to it's current level until 2005 when Hurricane Katrina leveled a couple of refineries.
SsgtC
Banned
Not feasible in the US. Japan is only 142,000 square miles. That's smaller than the state of California. Plus, Japan has a population density of 874 people per square mile (current figure, can't look up what it was earlier). The US has a population density of just 92 people per square mile. The areas where rail can be used, it is used. Long distance interstate train travel was dead in this country by the 50s/60s time frame. The railroads couldn't ditch it fast enough. If you want mass transit in the US, it's called an airplane. Because it's better to be uncomfortable for a max of 4 or 5 hours, than stuck in a car or train for days.
You'd have to do a total reorganization of it starting at least during the Depression period, including making it less like a luxury hotel on wheels. Affordable fares, clock-face scheduling, easier integration between the railways and public transit, and more frequent schedules on a regional/corridor level. By taking the opposite tack, it gave off the perception of the railway being a vanity project that was unreliable and inefficient as a service of the freight companies (who'd much rather prefer more frequent freight rail service than more frequent passenger rail service) which cars could easily address. This could have been helped along with better transit-oriented development early on, even with the suburbanization of the 1950s or so by making public transit easy to use, both as a means unto itself, as a feeder to passenger rail, and as a complement to automobile traffic, but for train travel it would require a much deeper organizational reform, which requires more than just a change towards newer rolling stock, or standardizing towards UIC types and relaxing the FRA crash-worthiness rules early on (and on that note, as a tangent I think that for the standard UIC-X design it would have been possible to come up with something that would match both the North American passenger coach standard type and the Deutsche Bundesbahn standard type which IOTL formed the base for UIC-X).
This is more perceptible when a casual observer notices that there is one huge gap in the various timetables, which would have been addressed easily if in a very different TL with a pre-1900 POD each state or group of states were a separate country. The US had plenty of commuter rail services back in the day, as well as long-distance trains that served as the stereotype for US rail travel in general. The gap was in what Americans would probably call "medium-distance" services but which everywhere else would have called long-distance, express, and/or (following the example of Britain) inter-city services. To borrow some terminology from German to illustrate the point and recapitulate it, US (and Canadian) rail travel throughout most of the 20th century focused largely on either Nahverkehrszug (= local transport), Regionalverkehrszug (= regional transport) or Trans-Europ-Express (on a national scale rather than a continental one), and occasionally - though inconsistently - touching on the F-Zug or Eilzug categories, but those are exceptions rather than a general rule. Rather, commuter rail in North America follows a Nahverkehrszug or occasionally a Regionalverkehrszug view of things (which touches on a mid-20th century view of how a commuter rail service should be run) rather than something like more an S-Bahn for urban areas and a local/express split elsewhere, long-distance travel still tends towards a Trans-Europ-Express view of things by making train travel an experience unto itself (and a precursor to what would inevitably follow when selling lifestyles in the general marketplace) and thus hanging onto lost glories of the past rather than as a general means of transport no different from a car. Meanwhile there's a huge gap where train travel would be more useful - in Eilzug, D-Zug (aka Schnellzug; > InterRegio; later in Germany IRE or InterCity), and F-Zug (> InterCity; in Germany, later taken over by high-speed rail in most cases) services - and which could serve as an intermediate step. In other words, have each US region (and the Québec City-Windsor Corridor primarily and secondarily in the Maritimes and a few other areas) function as if it was its own country, ideally like Switzerland and/or (West) Germany in terms of train services and management practices - but to do that requires an early enough POD where the necessary work would be taken, including modernization of the network and addressing bottlenecks and capacity constraints.
This is more perceptible when a casual observer notices that there is one huge gap in the various timetables, which would have been addressed easily if in a very different TL with a pre-1900 POD each state or group of states were a separate country. The US had plenty of commuter rail services back in the day, as well as long-distance trains that served as the stereotype for US rail travel in general. The gap was in what Americans would probably call "medium-distance" services but which everywhere else would have called long-distance, express, and/or (following the example of Britain) inter-city services. To borrow some terminology from German to illustrate the point and recapitulate it, US (and Canadian) rail travel throughout most of the 20th century focused largely on either Nahverkehrszug (= local transport), Regionalverkehrszug (= regional transport) or Trans-Europ-Express (on a national scale rather than a continental one), and occasionally - though inconsistently - touching on the F-Zug or Eilzug categories, but those are exceptions rather than a general rule. Rather, commuter rail in North America follows a Nahverkehrszug or occasionally a Regionalverkehrszug view of things (which touches on a mid-20th century view of how a commuter rail service should be run) rather than something like more an S-Bahn for urban areas and a local/express split elsewhere, long-distance travel still tends towards a Trans-Europ-Express view of things by making train travel an experience unto itself (and a precursor to what would inevitably follow when selling lifestyles in the general marketplace) and thus hanging onto lost glories of the past rather than as a general means of transport no different from a car. Meanwhile there's a huge gap where train travel would be more useful - in Eilzug, D-Zug (aka Schnellzug; > InterRegio; later in Germany IRE or InterCity), and F-Zug (> InterCity; in Germany, later taken over by high-speed rail in most cases) services - and which could serve as an intermediate step. In other words, have each US region (and the Québec City-Windsor Corridor primarily and secondarily in the Maritimes and a few other areas) function as if it was its own country, ideally like Switzerland and/or (West) Germany in terms of train services and management practices - but to do that requires an early enough POD where the necessary work would be taken, including modernization of the network and addressing bottlenecks and capacity constraints.
And watch whatever party passed such legislation get voted out of office and being replaced by the other party who gets elected in part by promising to repeal that.
As others have observed, it is mostly a question of altering the automobile. The airplane was going to derail long distance passenger rail, offering hours versus days, and the car is a hard target to keep public transportation viable, but it was no guarantee it could destroy regional and commuter services. I think it is a question of parking, make urban centers too valuable to build cheap parking, make the interstate a private-public toll based model, that makes driving that much more costly, and curb the suburb as affordable, that keeps most folks living in the city, potentially adding customers for both local and regional rail. I get this result with no WW2, no freeways, no suburbs for veterans, no mass culture moving to the car centric ideal. More distressing might be Brown v Board of Education, without it there is less reason for "white flight" and without affordable tract suburbs urban dwellers stay put. I also dampen the baby boom so the "youth culture" is not a huge influence, making the automobile les about American idealism and just a way to get to work. This makes a very different USA, one where private rail does better but it still faces hurdles. An issue is taxation of rail property, it was a serious drag as each locality wanted to lean on the private railroads for revenue. The great terminals are private property, taxed as such, the services are still profit driven. Outside major cities or ones with access problems, e.g. Manhattan and its two rivers, the automobile will erode rail as a good option. And lastly you have trucking. Passenger rail was paid for by freight revenue, it was advertising and PR, so slow the roll on trucking and that too helps rail compete. It takes a flight of butterflies to move America towards a more rail centric mode, doable, but it comes with sweeping changes.
Riain
Banned
The good US train services get their patronage even with cheap fuel, leading me to believe its poor ( read: not convenient for a multitude of reasons ) service that puts or keeps Americans in their cars.
One thing is their low speed, largely driven by FRA rules introduced in 1949. Massaging these rules to increase speeds over the years would increase patronage along the lines of 1 mph increase reaps a 1% increase in patronage.
One thing is their low speed, largely driven by FRA rules introduced in 1949. Massaging these rules to increase speeds over the years would increase patronage along the lines of 1 mph increase reaps a 1% increase in patronage.
Wouldn't it help if railroads also worked on improving tracks instead of just getting flashy rolling stock?
You want to do away with "Brown vs Board of Education"...that's not going to win you any brownie points...all in all, you're proposing a country that doesn't look anything like the USA.
Riain
Banned
Yes it would. The car 'won' in the US because roads and other car infrastructure got all the money and resources while rail, owned by private companies, got none. As a result rail stagnated at best and withered at worst while roads and cars grew from lavish attention.
SsgtC
Banned
This will only work to a point, after which it is likely going to plateau. It would probably have better results in the NEC, between Chicago-Detroit-Milwaukee, Houston-Dallas and San Antonio-Austin-Dallas, Seattle-Portland, San Diego-Los Angeles-San Francisco (that last link will only be really viable with 200mph+ speeds and current levels of security at airports).
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Not going to happen, and here's why:
>Canada created a nationalized railway company back before WWI, called Canadian National Railways (Réseau Canadien National in French; these days known as CN Rail, and since 1995 is a private company whose only statutory constraint leftover from its nationalized days is that by law it must have its HQ in Montréal). CNR was formed to take over various railway companies that had encountered financial difficulties, including the major Grand Trunk Railway network which had operations in the US. The problem here is that CNR never achieved the same amount of prestige and attraction that the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) - itself a creature of the state even though it was a private company) - was able to have. No matter what CNR could do and did do (particularly in terms of new rolling stock), it could never catch up with the CPR on this score.
>During the 1960s, CN Rail tried to make a huge push towards getting more people to take the train while the CPR was dropping trains like crazy, with its crowning achievements being the TurboTrain for Expo '67 (though it arrived late by a year) and the so-called "Red, White, and Blue" fare structure (I kid you not). While it helped stem some of the bleeding, it didn't get rid of it entirely because management was still caught up in the old mentalities surrounding passenger rail. And that would be the core problem for any nationalized railway service within North America, which would be no matter what would be done on the level of building up train service, unless you change the core of passenger rail operations and reorient it so that it would be a viable part of public transit, you're still going to have the old mentality of a huge gulf between long-distance luxury hotels on wheels on one hand and commuter trains run like cattle class of which both would be pushed aside for the freight trains, which would further drive passenger rail into irrelevance. The best case scenario for retaining the old mentality would be CN Rail, and at its worst you'd get British Rail, with high and expensive fares, late and over-crowded trains, furious passengers and arrogant staff, persistent shortages of rolling stock, financial mismanagement, and a perpetual conflict between labor unions on one hand and aloof and distant management on the other.
>Oh, and before I get too carried away - CN Rail, both its predecessor companies and CN Rail itself, tried to do the buildup of inter-city/interstate rail and urban metro systems (in fact, it used to own parts of the Toronto and Montréal commuter rail systems before GO Transit and AMT/Exo, respectively, came along). It did not quite work out as planned. Eventually, one of the last things CN Rail did was to rebrand its entire passenger rail services as "VIA CN", which upon taking on the former CPR passenger rail services became a separate Crown corporation, VIA Rail (now VIA Rail Canada), Canada's equivalent to Amtrak. (CN Rail retained control of its part of the Montréal commuter rail network until the late 1980s/early 1990s, when the City of Montréal and later the Québec government took over the Montréal commuter rail network from both CN Rail and CPR.)
Not necessarily - toll roads were long a feature of US life (we usually called them "turnpikes"), and taxation, licensing, and registration are largely a state matter. Having said that, something like the interstate highways was going to happen anyway - rather than in the current form they have IOTL as a national system, what we'd see instead is something more like Canada, where expressways are largely a state/provincial matter and usually lean towards smaller networks focused around the major cities and state capitals within a state (Quebec's Autoroutes and Ontario's 400-Series Highways are the paradigmatic examples here). As I see it, automobiles are not the problem here - it's the trains themselves that need improvement and modernization.