Country folk tend to like the independence offered by their cars, so how do you get them to use public transit? The Monocab system may be the answer, as it utilizes individual on-demand pods that travel on existing abandoned railways.
Trains suck if you don’t have frequency, and because of the population density with a good frequency more than half of the trains will be completely empty and the rest almost empty.
If you out half the funding from car infrastructure instead into train and bus infrastructure this would not be a problem. Induced demand works both ways.
Even with unlimited funding, you want to scale the size of the train to the population that could potentially ride on it.
A P42 locomotive pulling 7 Amtrak superliner cars is 700 tons of steel getting 0.4 miles per gallon of diesel. That’s a crapton of mining and drilling and CO2, and it would be incredibly wasteful if it ended up carrying, like, two people at a time.
Just fund trains.
Trains suck if you don’t have frequency, and because of the population density with a good frequency more than half of the trains will be completely empty and the rest almost empty.
If you out half the funding from car infrastructure instead into train and bus infrastructure this would not be a problem. Induced demand works both ways.
Even with unlimited funding, you want to scale the size of the train to the population that could potentially ride on it.
A P42 locomotive pulling 7 Amtrak superliner cars is 700 tons of steel getting 0.4 miles per gallon of diesel. That’s a crapton of mining and drilling and CO2, and it would be incredibly wasteful if it ended up carrying, like, two people at a time.