Yahoo Autos People Love Cars Because Trains Suck
Cars are good. Trains? Not so much.
There are more than 140,000 miles of railroad track in the United States and none of them go to my house. Or my office. Or the place where I get coffee every morning. Amtrak doesn't schedule itself around my convenience, and I can't leave my stuff aboard a train knowing that it will likely be there for me when I want to go someplace else the next day. Trains are a miracle of 19th-century engineering. But it's not the 19th century.
Here in California, the proposed bullet train from Los Angeles to San Francisco has recently been foreshortened down to a stump that connects Where-You-Don't-Want-to-Be with Where-You-Don't-Want-to-Go. The costs were out of control, no private investment money was getting anywhere near the project, and the people who live along California's central spine objected to giving up their land and quiet. Even Merced and Bakersfield, the towns that will anchor what's left of this scheme, don't seem excited about high-speed rail any more.
The bottom line is that cars are a lot better than trains for most people most of the time.
Two months back, I rode Amtrak's Pacific Surfliner down from my hometown of Santa Barbara to Los Angeles and then boarded the Los Angeles Metro Rail system's light rail at Union Station to roll out to Santa Monica. In their favor, all the trains were clean and comfortable, and Amtrak's Wi-Fi even worked pretty well. But they ate time.
Leaving my house at 4 p.m., my wife took me to Santa Barbara's train station early for the 4:40 southbound departure. It was running on time, and I arrived at Los Angeles Union Station a little more than three hours later. It was just about 8 p.m. when I boarded the Metro's Red Line subway, and a few minutes later I transferred to the new Expo line. The Expo line serendipitously dumped out right in front of the Courtyard by Marriott in Santa Monica about 65 minutes later. That's more than five hours from my house to my hotel room. The same trip by car, with some lucky breaks on traffic, would take about an hour and a half. Even a one-hour traffic delay gets there in half the time of the train trip.
Fortunately, I'm a writer. So my time isn't worth much to anyone but me. Still, it's not just about the clock.
I was traveling light, but it would have been a real burden to lug bags of groceries or a pet or anything, really, from train to train. Kids would have been antsy and a constant challenge. And on the Expo line the public-address system issued warnings against using personal electronics. If there's any time you crave your smartphone, it's when you're on light rail for an hour.
With my job I drive about 200 new cars a year, and it's rare when one isn't equipped with Apple CarPlay and/or Android Auto. In fact, nearly three months into 2019, I haven't driven any cars that weren't equipped with CarPlay. We're at the point now where personal electronics and cars are great complements to one another. Podcasts, for example, are a perfect medium for cars. And the sound system never interrupts to warn you not to use it.
Freight trains are amazingly efficient, and if you have the time to blow, Amtrak's Surfliner between San Diego and Santa Barbara is a great way to learn the Southern California coast. Light rail? I use it when I need it.
But cars, whether powered by internal-combustion engines or electric motors, human piloted or self-driving, are still going to be radically more attractive going forward. No, cars aren't as fuel efficient as rail, but that doesn't matter to most people. Because cars-even with the pain of parking, traffic, and all the other hassles-are vastly more efficient at practically everything else necessary to making human lives better.
Want proof? In many areas of the United States where light rail systems are in operation, ridership is dropping. During 2018, for example, ridership on the system in Phoenix slumped 4.4 percent. The severely troubled Metro system in Washington, D.C., has seen usage practically collapse; ridership levels in 2018 were about 17 percent lower than in 2009. Some systems have seen ridership rise, but there's no indication that Americans have any great appetite for more trains.
Planners and politicians fetishize trains. They sell them as the future when they're relics of the past. Even those who lobby for more trains don't see themselves actually riding them.
Meanwhile, Americans bought 17,274,250 new cars, trucks, and SUVs in 2018. Bought, as in spent their own money or took out really big loans. Interestingly, one UCLA study attributed much of the decrease in the use of light rail in Southern California to increases in car ownership. "A defining attribute of regular transit riders is their relative lack of private-vehicle access," the report states. "But between 2000 and 2015, households in the [Southern California] region, and especially lower-income households, dramatically increased their levels of vehicle ownership. Census data show that from 1990 to 2000 the region added 1.8 million people but only 456,000 household vehicles (or 0.25 vehicles per new resident). From 2000 to 2015, the region added 2.3 million people and 2.1 million household vehicles (or 0.95 vehicles per new resident)." In other words, when people can afford a car, they almost immediately abandon trains.
Right now, the trend in urban planning is to build higher-density housing with restricted parking centered around public-transit hubs in order to encourage residents to give up their cars. Actually, it's more than just a trend. In California, it's the law. And Seattle just changed its zoning to encourage higher-density housing, too.
The result is likely to be high-density housing near mass transit that no one wants to use. Combined with crappy parking.
Laws, rules, regulations, and zoning will affect the future. But they don't determine the future. And what's socially desirable, from whatever ideological perspective, can't simply be imposed. What builds the future is the cumulative effect of millions of decisions made by millions of people every day. And right now, most Americans aren't behaving as if trains are the future.
There are about 4.1 million miles of roads in the United States. They go to almost every place. And all of us can use them whenever we want. That's a lot better than trains.
Cars are the future.
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