Well, yeah, automatic train control is extremely common. More within the confines of metro systems though, where lines are fully fenced off or in tunnels.
Not to me. Railroads cover only so much area, leaving the last (hundred) miles to cars.
So it is not an either or question and should be stopped treated as such ( in certain circles). Germany has a quite good railroad system, but you really won't get far outside the cities, unless you live close to a train station (like I do intentionally) and have your target close to a train station. And buses to a remote village from the last train station? Check your calendar and not your watch for the next one.
This is so much bullshit. Just because your government refuses to build passenger railways and push car centric infra doesnt mean "Railways cover only so much area". Very difficuly to reach regions like islands/mountaineous terrains ? Then maybe.
Not many high mountains, but lots of high enough mountains and valleys, that you need lots of expensive bridges to pass. I happen to live right next to a big one, that was build 1850 and is now getting renovated. They are already working on it since 2 years and plan to be finished maybe next year. All this, for one already existing bridge.
There is no way you can cover even half the villages by train.
And before you declare incompetence, well first, you have to work with what you have and secondly, you have to work without stopping the existing trains too much as it is in use and alternative routes very long. (so they work mostly at night and don't care how many babies try to sleep)
Edit:
Also, do you expect that all lines get served all the time? Or do you declare that no one has any reason to go anywhere in the middle of the night?
Cars are somewhat more flexible in that regard. Also, do you know what happens if one train breaks down?
It cannot just be pulled to the side, like a car can. It will block the whole line. So even if you radicalize everything and use lots of autonomous small trains that can react flexible to passengers request(something that should be worked on today), it would not solve everything. Flexibility is very valuable. A train can only go where there are tracks. A car anywhere, where it is flat enough. Solve that, if you want to completely get rid of cars.
Sure and this is what is being done and makes sense (and could be improved a lot). But parent poster seemed to imply you can replace roads with train tracks.
How many buses? For busses to be a viable alternative they have to run at least every 30-60 minutes for basically the whole day. For many smaller villages this will effectively mean that many of the busses will be running empty much of the time. Or you scale back to once or twice a day to match demand and then busses are no longer a viable alternative, so people don't use them.
As someone who lived quite a long time in rural austria and heavily used buses: You kinda tend to structure your way around the bus schedule, or drive/bike a relatively short distance to the nearest bus "hub". It really isn't a problem in practice.
I agree, and I think this should not be underestimated: people who don't believe in public transportation often (usually?) don't use them.
I have never owned a car, I used public transportation my whole life. Trains, buses, publicly-available bikes/scooters, whatever. Occasionally I rent a car. And I am fine, I have just learned to organize around the public transport. Instead of being free to leave or arrive "whenever I want", I know exactly the time (so I'm usually not 20 minutes late because I had a train, where car owners are easily stuck in traffic or left 20 minutes late).
Yes, many times it is longer. But I learned to use the time I spend in public transportation: I read, I listen to podcasts, I work. When a car owner loses 2h30 in traffic, I work for 4h in my train. They lost 2h30, I... well if I can count those 4h as work, I didn't lose anything. I find that even reading is a better use of my time than driving.
But all my life, car owners around me (friends/family) have had trouble understanding that I am fine with public transportation. "Wait, take my car, it will be much longer by train!" or "Do you want me (to drive 30min) to come pick you up so that you don't have to come by bus (which takes 45min)?".
Sometimes it's longer, sometimes it's more annoying, sometimes it's more expensive. Many times it's better, too. It's just different, I just learned the public transportation way. The fact, though, is that it's better for the planet.
Before I had a family, I also did not have a car. But in rural areas, it is really, really hard without one.
For example one train line in a village close by down in a valley is currently not active for whatever reason. But there are buses as a replacement - except that they do not go down in that valley, so people wanting to use that bus, just have to walk 2 km steep uphill. Then it happens, that the last train was late, you miss the connection - and are just stranded somewhere and they don't give a shit, even though they told you before, the other train will wait.
What else? Well, trains that just don't come and no more information avaiable, except that they officially are on time. So you stand there and wonder if it just came too early and left before the timetablr (also happened to me).
Then of course there are villages where the train passes through and they have a train station, but the train never stops there. And if you live a bit away from the trains, then you are lucky if one bus is coming on the weekend.
So good luck convincing those people, that they don't need cars. Not with that state of public transport.
I also simply cannot imagine, how you can run regular bus lines in low populated areas in an economic way.
The best compromise I know are buses on demand, meaning you call one hour before and then they will come. But this also only works with subsidies.
You know what Switzerland has a lot of? And yet they have an incredibly fine-grained train network. Almost every mountain has a tunnel through it or a train to the top. And they all go on time, except for the trains coming from Germany. Swiss trains don't go every 10 minutes like in some countries, but they're very reliable and a great way to visit even fairly remote parts of the country, some of which are inaccessible by car.
Of course not every tiny village has a train station, and the ones that do tend to be very touristy, but you can cover a lot with a mix of trains and buses.
"but you can cover a lot with a mix of trains and buses."
Sure and I never debated that and I like Switzerland. But as far as I know, they also have a lot of cars.
So both is needed, not either or. And yes please, wherever something from a car can be put on a train, it should be done. Every car less on the road, makes it more attractive for (e-) bikes and people walking.
Well I never meant "either or". But we should invest much more into public transportation and much less into cars (and planes). And for those who do need a car (because when you live in the countryside, you may need a car indeed), we need to transition to small electric vehicles (which Teslas are not).
It's not pushing car-centric infra. Roads mean cars, bikes, motorbikes, vans, lorries, and emergency services vehicles can all get around with very little coordination.
Train tracks work for...trains. One at a time, going at a time and in a direction someone somewhere else decided might be a good idea. It's a performance optimisation, where there is enough demand to make a highly parallel transportation method worth installing (or less painful than the more bottom-up alternative).
Obviously you need a healthy mix. Trains are great for some situations, not for others. Same with every other mode of transportation. For best results, make sure you use them all for the situation they're best at.
> This thread was about replacing cars with trains
Was it? My opinion is that we should invest much more into public transportation and much less into individual cars. Those who really need an individual car should get a small electric vehicle, not a Tesla.
It's hard to have threads about topics when people just push their own other things into it.
I made a comment countering the idea that roads are from some sort of carspiracy, when they are just exceptionally useful, general-purpose ways of getting people and goods around, and have been for over 2000 years.
You then straw-manned that into only 5-lane highways. I can't see a good reason for you doing that, so I am assuming you're forcing the conversation into an argument of your own making that you can then feel justified in venting in. I could be wrong, but it doesn't really matter. I just wanted to make my point and not steer the conversation into any personal catharsis.
Sorry, maybe sarcasm was not the best way to convey my idea. I just visited the US and was absolutely shocked by the size of their roads and the surface covered by parking lots :-).
Anyway, my point was that roads are useful, but you certainly don't need 5 lanes for emergency vehicles, just one. Still, the tendency everywhere is to add road not for emergency vehicles and bikes, but because there are more and more cars out there.
Instead we should invest in public transportation and push for fewer cars. Not everyone needs a big car, and therefore we would not need 5-lanes roads if most people were taking the train.
I am not saying that we should remove roads. But maybe we should stop adding more of them (or making them bigger or faster) and instead invest in trains.
Some of my wife's family lives in a mid sized village in eastern Germany, and getting from the nearest international airport to their house with public transport is literally a 6 hour affair (followed by a 4ish km walk) and if you miss any of the connections, you're not making it there that day. By car it's a 90 minute drive on nice roads.
Germany follows the standard pattern of mostly urban population. 78% of people are in cities. And I'm not sure what percentage of that remaining 22% are in "remote villages".
It's not irony, it's infrastructure. People are routinely transported by rail, sea, and air. Even cars are routinely transported by rail, sea, and air.
These trains run on diesel so if Telsa wants to be more serious they'll put hydrogen fuel cell or BEV trains into service:
Electrifying a line isn't as easy as simply pulling a cable.
You need more space above the train for the power line, which means all bridges and tunnels have to be adapted, thus rebuilt. You need space in the side to place the masts, which may mean acquiring land or some complex engineering in close (hilly?) areas.
This then often means that regulation treats it as a major change, thus the whole signaling system and other aspects have to be adapted to current standards.
And then you need all the side infrastructure like substations etc.
In the end it's almost as expensive as building a new line.
It's 3 miles, no hills or tunnels, and I can see from the Google maps arial and street view photos that the overhead wires are already present, at least until the last bit that branches off away from the main line and skirts around the edge of the Tesla site.
Trains have been electric for a few decades, you don't need super high tech batteries for that.
I suspect the person you are replying to finds it ironic because Tesla is largely competing with the rebirth of good public transports in the west. Musk hates them and regularly says so.
What we need is good public transports for most people, and EVs as small as possible for the rest. That's not what Musk (and Tesla) offer.
Yes, that's the market they are biting into because the status quo is cars everywhere.
Tesla is competing against that if we look at where we allocate our funds, our governments seem to prefer to subsidise big electric cars and new roads more than cycle lanes and railways...
"EVs aren't here to save the climate, they are here to save cars"
Well, cars are useful. A less polluting version of a useful thing is good in and of itself, if you step outside of any "us vs them" thinking. A train is a performance optimisation, just as how, a car filled with hard disks is higher bandwidth than a packet-switched network. But it isn't going to replace packet-switched networks.
VW opened a car factory / exhibition space in the city center of Dresden 20 years ago [0]. It was already connected with tram tracks, so they built a freight tram that would run through the city to deliver parts to the factory [1]. It was always quite a sight to behold when they passed in front of the baroque architecture of the Zwinger.
“I think public transport is painful. It sucks. Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people, that doesn’t leave where you want it to leave, doesn’t start where you want it to start, doesn’t end where you want it to end? And it doesn’t go all the time.”
“It’s a pain in the ass,” he continued. “That’s why everyone doesn’t like it. And there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer, OK, great. And so that’s why people like individualized transport, that goes where you want, when you want.”
When the audience member responded that public transportation seemed to work in Japan, Musk shot back, “What, where they cram people in the subway? That doesn’t sound great.”
No. Pre 1999 he cane from a wealthy family but he raised his own money and paid hs own way through university, with hare-brained schemes and internships. In 1999, the company he and his brother founded got aquired for a large sum of money.
Make no mistake. The hyperloop concept was put forward when California came close to building public transport infrastructure. It was intended to provide arguments against by putting into question if large investments in rail really is future proof. It could be aruged that it is indefensible to build rails at great cost if we might get flying trains tomorrow. And it did indeed work out as intended, at almost no cost.
I'm not familiar. Is there any coverage of this that goes over all of it in a neutral way? I'd hope California wouldn't have done this for no reason, unless they're far more bungling than I realised.
California's High Speed Rail project does not need political activism to fail, it's doing a good job of it on its own, thanks to America's stunning inability to build non-military infrastructure projects on anything like a reasonable time frame and budget when European peers manage to do so for 1/10 the price.
He's either being deliberately quite dishonest or is genuinely naive in suggesting that "individualized transport" is an alternative to public transportation. At this point I honestly do not know, he's shown himself at times to be both.
I'd be curious what he thinks traffic in Tokyo would look like if even half of the commuters on the subway (~80k pph for each train) drove cars around the city instead. I suspect he'd then suggest that a network of new roads be built underground to alleviate this additional traffic, which may work but at that point you'd probably just be better of building some more capacity in the subway network ...
He is rich. He can't really have a clue about how the world actually works. That's why he is either dishonest or naive. We should just not listen to him, IMHO.
Yep I'm with you. But sadly there are plenty of true believers who will always listen to him and will generally nod along in agreement. In this case they'd hold up a picture of a packed subway car and say "wouldn't you rather be cruising along an air-conditioned Tesla?" without really suggesting about how that would work at any scale.
I didn't say it doesn't make sense. I said he's either dishonest (he's just saying this sort of thing as pro-Car/Tesla PR) or he is naive (he genuinely thinks he can "fix" urban transportation).
I mean if the car company's owner had publicly tried to undermine ships and said everyone should have an individual yacht or plane instead then, yeah that would be a little amusing sure.
Oxford has an old railway line to serve the Mini plant. It's going to be invested in to make another rail route out of Oxford for passengers[0], which is fun!
Train stations dedicated to bring workers to car factories are a common thing in Germany. Opel has one (Rüsselsheim Opelwerk), so does Audi (Ingolstadt Audi), and probably many more.
Yes, this is just a short branch to service their factory. Not what people usually mean when they say 'railway line' (which would usually have more than one station).
Not many details in the article but it says they built a station, which probably means the trains they have contracted come from a station on the main line (not owned by Tesla), branch off and run to the Telsa station and then go back.
I don't see the problem. They could make a bunch of tunnels and put cars in them. Think about how efficient it would be! Hundreds of passengers per hour!
I think it can appear good on the surface and initially (cheaper tickets wow!) but then for example here in the UK you have newer train operators with special statuses, who have different compensation schemes, who choose to interpret legislation in different ways etc.
eg LNER (an older much larger rail brand) often refuse to carry passengers with a Grand Central (a newer low cost operator) ticket when there is disruption because of internal disagreements between the two companies and different interpretation of the law/contract. This is confusing, annoying and often very expensive for passengers when they board an LNER train (as it’s the next one) and get told they have to buy new tickets
It reminds me of low cost airlines and look at the state of flying these days. Everyone is “low cost” but often without the low cost part. Ie it dragged the bar down so low
It looks like it can work if you do everything right, but it can also go very wrong. I think you will always need a central party to coordinate stuff, because letting a bunch of profit-driven railroads arrange this amongst themselves sounds like a recipe for disaster. But that central organisation needs to be run very well, or you still get disaster. Having everything in the hands of a single party has obvious advantages, but also obvious disadvantages. Competition clearly works well enough in some countries, and not so well in others.
I think a thorough analysis of where it works and where it doesn't, and why, would be really interesting.
Problem with FlixTrain is that they have "low priority". This means if there are delays caused by Deutsche Bahn (Which is basically always) FlixTrain must always give way to Deutsche Bahn trains to allow them to catch up.
Competition in this situation usually IS a bad thing. Private companies snag the financially viable and lucrative lines, leaving the essential yet money-sink lines for public companies.
Resulting in the collapse of the public one or, at best, cutting costs and reducing commuter lines from smaller towns/villages.
A friend of mine works there and commutes daily from Berlin. She said the train won't change that much. Before that, they had a shuttle bus service.
The more annoying thing is that the fast commuter trains mentioned in the article run in irregular intervals throughout the day.
How in the world it is OK, that is such integral part of sovereign country infrastructure is sold to another country on a different continent ? This is a way to shoot yourself in the foot, and seems like Germany is sold by pieces to U.S.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadThe engineer is just observing the systems and acting in unforseen situations.
So it is not an either or question and should be stopped treated as such ( in certain circles). Germany has a quite good railroad system, but you really won't get far outside the cities, unless you live close to a train station (like I do intentionally) and have your target close to a train station. And buses to a remote village from the last train station? Check your calendar and not your watch for the next one.
Not many high mountains, but lots of high enough mountains and valleys, that you need lots of expensive bridges to pass. I happen to live right next to a big one, that was build 1850 and is now getting renovated. They are already working on it since 2 years and plan to be finished maybe next year. All this, for one already existing bridge.
There is no way you can cover even half the villages by train.
And before you declare incompetence, well first, you have to work with what you have and secondly, you have to work without stopping the existing trains too much as it is in use and alternative routes very long. (so they work mostly at night and don't care how many babies try to sleep)
Edit:
Also, do you expect that all lines get served all the time? Or do you declare that no one has any reason to go anywhere in the middle of the night? Cars are somewhat more flexible in that regard. Also, do you know what happens if one train breaks down? It cannot just be pulled to the side, like a car can. It will block the whole line. So even if you radicalize everything and use lots of autonomous small trains that can react flexible to passengers request(something that should be worked on today), it would not solve everything. Flexibility is very valuable. A train can only go where there are tracks. A car anywhere, where it is flat enough. Solve that, if you want to completely get rid of cars.
Thats why you combine them with buses for the remainder.
I have never owned a car, I used public transportation my whole life. Trains, buses, publicly-available bikes/scooters, whatever. Occasionally I rent a car. And I am fine, I have just learned to organize around the public transport. Instead of being free to leave or arrive "whenever I want", I know exactly the time (so I'm usually not 20 minutes late because I had a train, where car owners are easily stuck in traffic or left 20 minutes late).
Yes, many times it is longer. But I learned to use the time I spend in public transportation: I read, I listen to podcasts, I work. When a car owner loses 2h30 in traffic, I work for 4h in my train. They lost 2h30, I... well if I can count those 4h as work, I didn't lose anything. I find that even reading is a better use of my time than driving.
But all my life, car owners around me (friends/family) have had trouble understanding that I am fine with public transportation. "Wait, take my car, it will be much longer by train!" or "Do you want me (to drive 30min) to come pick you up so that you don't have to come by bus (which takes 45min)?".
Sometimes it's longer, sometimes it's more annoying, sometimes it's more expensive. Many times it's better, too. It's just different, I just learned the public transportation way. The fact, though, is that it's better for the planet.
For example one train line in a village close by down in a valley is currently not active for whatever reason. But there are buses as a replacement - except that they do not go down in that valley, so people wanting to use that bus, just have to walk 2 km steep uphill. Then it happens, that the last train was late, you miss the connection - and are just stranded somewhere and they don't give a shit, even though they told you before, the other train will wait.
What else? Well, trains that just don't come and no more information avaiable, except that they officially are on time. So you stand there and wonder if it just came too early and left before the timetablr (also happened to me).
Then of course there are villages where the train passes through and they have a train station, but the train never stops there. And if you live a bit away from the trains, then you are lucky if one bus is coming on the weekend.
So good luck convincing those people, that they don't need cars. Not with that state of public transport.
I also simply cannot imagine, how you can run regular bus lines in low populated areas in an economic way.
The best compromise I know are buses on demand, meaning you call one hour before and then they will come. But this also only works with subsidies.
Of course not every tiny village has a train station, and the ones that do tend to be very touristy, but you can cover a lot with a mix of trains and buses.
Sure and I never debated that and I like Switzerland. But as far as I know, they also have a lot of cars.
So both is needed, not either or. And yes please, wherever something from a car can be put on a train, it should be done. Every car less on the road, makes it more attractive for (e-) bikes and people walking.
Well I never meant "either or". But we should invest much more into public transportation and much less into cars (and planes). And for those who do need a car (because when you live in the countryside, you may need a car indeed), we need to transition to small electric vehicles (which Teslas are not).
I am also a big fan of very light electric vehicles that are a mix of bicycle and car. But not in combination with SUV tanks and aggressive drivers.
Train tracks work for...trains. One at a time, going at a time and in a direction someone somewhere else decided might be a good idea. It's a performance optimisation, where there is enough demand to make a highly parallel transportation method worth installing (or less painful than the more bottom-up alternative).
Right. I guess that's why the US need 5 lanes roads everywhere: for bikes and emergency services vehicles.
Was it? My opinion is that we should invest much more into public transportation and much less into individual cars. Those who really need an individual car should get a small electric vehicle, not a Tesla.
I made a comment countering the idea that roads are from some sort of carspiracy, when they are just exceptionally useful, general-purpose ways of getting people and goods around, and have been for over 2000 years.
You then straw-manned that into only 5-lane highways. I can't see a good reason for you doing that, so I am assuming you're forcing the conversation into an argument of your own making that you can then feel justified in venting in. I could be wrong, but it doesn't really matter. I just wanted to make my point and not steer the conversation into any personal catharsis.
Anyway, my point was that roads are useful, but you certainly don't need 5 lanes for emergency vehicles, just one. Still, the tendency everywhere is to add road not for emergency vehicles and bikes, but because there are more and more cars out there.
Instead we should invest in public transportation and push for fewer cars. Not everyone needs a big car, and therefore we would not need 5-lanes roads if most people were taking the train.
I am not saying that we should remove roads. But maybe we should stop adding more of them (or making them bigger or faster) and instead invest in trains.
But in general replacing roads with train tracks, is not something I think can work.
"So it is not an either or question"
Was my original point.
These trains run on diesel so if Telsa wants to be more serious they'll put hydrogen fuel cell or BEV trains into service:
https://insideevs.com/news/685080/tesla-giga-berlin-train-sh...
(I'm genuinely surprised the train isn't already electric; if I've been on a diesel here, I've not noticed).
Using batteries isn't a goal. It's something we do when there is no alternative.
You need more space above the train for the power line, which means all bridges and tunnels have to be adapted, thus rebuilt. You need space in the side to place the masts, which may mean acquiring land or some complex engineering in close (hilly?) areas.
This then often means that regulation treats it as a major change, thus the whole signaling system and other aspects have to be adapted to current standards.
And then you need all the side infrastructure like substations etc.
In the end it's almost as expensive as building a new line.
I suspect the person you are replying to finds it ironic because Tesla is largely competing with the rebirth of good public transports in the west. Musk hates them and regularly says so.
What we need is good public transports for most people, and EVs as small as possible for the rest. That's not what Musk (and Tesla) offer.
But not all train lines are electrified.
There are now Hydrogen-based trains in Northern Germany for such tracks.
https://www.dw.com/en/german-railway-firm-ushers-in-new-era-...
Precisely. Thanks :-).
> What we need is good public transports for most people, and EVs as small as possible for the rest. That's not what Musk (and Tesla) offer.
Spot on!
Tesla is by a huge margin largely competing with ICE cars.
Tesla is competing against that if we look at where we allocate our funds, our governments seem to prefer to subsidise big electric cars and new roads more than cycle lanes and railways...
"EVs aren't here to save the climate, they are here to save cars"
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparent_Factory
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CarGoTram
It's only ironic because Musk has been so openly hostile towards trains.
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-awkward-dislike-mass-t...
“I think public transport is painful. It sucks. Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people, that doesn’t leave where you want it to leave, doesn’t start where you want it to start, doesn’t end where you want it to end? And it doesn’t go all the time.”
“It’s a pain in the ass,” he continued. “That’s why everyone doesn’t like it. And there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer, OK, great. And so that’s why people like individualized transport, that goes where you want, when you want.”
When the audience member responded that public transportation seemed to work in Japan, Musk shot back, “What, where they cram people in the subway? That doesn’t sound great.”
Well, to public transport. Presumably Tesla employee transport to the Tesla plant will definitely go where they want it to go!
I'd be curious what he thinks traffic in Tokyo would look like if even half of the commuters on the subway (~80k pph for each train) drove cars around the city instead. I suspect he'd then suggest that a network of new roads be built underground to alleviate this additional traffic, which may work but at that point you'd probably just be better of building some more capacity in the subway network ...
I think you'll find more killers in cars. Both intentional and unintentional ones.
[0] https://www.oxford.gov.uk/news/article/2146/oxford_rail_plan...
Emphasis mine.
I was worried but this seems quite irrelevant to the German passenger landscape. Phew!
eg LNER (an older much larger rail brand) often refuse to carry passengers with a Grand Central (a newer low cost operator) ticket when there is disruption because of internal disagreements between the two companies and different interpretation of the law/contract. This is confusing, annoying and often very expensive for passengers when they board an LNER train (as it’s the next one) and get told they have to buy new tickets
It reminds me of low cost airlines and look at the state of flying these days. Everyone is “low cost” but often without the low cost part. Ie it dragged the bar down so low
I think a thorough analysis of where it works and where it doesn't, and why, would be really interesting.
Resulting in the collapse of the public one or, at best, cutting costs and reducing commuter lines from smaller towns/villages.
I swear, I read the most smooth-brained commentary here.
How a Diesel-Electric Locomotive Works -- https://youtu.be/cIQ0yIZgQeE?si=vtvRg8RAXjkRB-za
It's the link from Erkner to the factory.