A Case for Rail in the United States

automobiles are one of the leading causes of death for young people in the United States for every million inhabitants 12.9 will die in a motor accident every day that you get behind the wheel of your car there's a non-zero chance that you will never leave it alive while you may be aware of the risk how does it compare to other countries oh looking back at the graph we can see that compared to other developed countries the United States death rate is truly staggering but there has to be a reason that the death rate is so so much higher right firstly Europeans are not just better drivers that I can tell you from first-hand experience but the answer really is simple here in the United States you can get almost nowhere without a car the American system of suburbs allows for people to live far away from their work but it comes at a major cost can't afford our car gas you may have to walk upwards of three miles to get to the nearest grocery store for many getting to school to work without a car is a downright impossibility and even if you live close enough to do so you may have to cross strodes struts are dangerous combinations of streets and Roads that us Americans are intimately familiar with cars go fast oftentimes well over 30 miles an hour but they are often the only way to get to our destinations when hit with the car going 20 miles per hour the average person has a 97 chance of survival however once you get to around 45 miles per hour the survivability drops down to 50 percent in Europe and other developed countries there are more options than just cars firstly the cities aren't just designed better in Vienna the Austrian Capital the entire city is designed with people first not Cars instead of bustling streets with sidewalks designated for people to walk in the entire city is designed to be walked around with ease plan or urban development plan is carefully designed to put people first not cars this is all done to make sure people can live the best lives they possibly can and when you want to go somewhere that's too far for travel by foot well Vienna has some of the best public transportation that you can find in the city Vina linen operates five underground lines 29 tram and 127 bus lines of which 24 are nightlines a single ticket costs 2 Euro 40. for almost half the price of a Big Mac you can go anywhere in the city of Vienna quickly and efficiently other cities in Europe also have robust Transportation Systems which is the biggest factor in the substantially lower death rates by automobile when compared to the United States public transportation is significantly more safe than driving in a car according to the international railway Safety Council Railways provide a safe and sustainable form of Transport worldwide whilst the actual level of safety achieved can vary wildly even with an economically developed areas such as the European Union Railways are typically safer than all other transport modes with the exception of commercial Aviation not only are High-Speed Rail and public transportation safer for the people but they are also substantially safer for the Planet transportation in the United States accounts for 27 percent of the country's total greenhouse gas emissions and in a study done regarding the high-speed rail track between Los Angeles and San Francisco the analysis concludes that the carbon footprint of High-Speed Rail including operation track construction and Rolling Stock construction is about 14 to 16 times less than transport by private car or airplane on top of this the United States and Canada two of the G7 countries have substantially higher amounts of carbon emissions when compared to the rest and this is not just due to the fact that they burn significantly more fossil fuels for power Germany also Burns a significant amount of fossil fuels but they are planning on going carbon neutral by 2045 but Germany's 8.9 tons per capita is still nearly half of the US and Canada electrifying transportation is a requirement if you want to fight climate change and other countries are doing their part and before you get started electric cars are not the solution while they do have zero emissions they still have a massive carbon footprint the batteries and electric cars are made of rare earth metals such as Cobalt not only is the carbon footprint of the extraction substantial but we also just don't have enough of these materials to sustain the current car culture with electric vehicles resource extractivism is often ignored in conversations about the climate crisis particularly in Western narratives broadly defined extractivism is an unsustainable and exploitative extraction of resources from an area by a private or public company extractivism is inextricably linked to excess resource use and a product of a capitalist system of production and consumption for the past several decades Global consumption of resources has become exponentially High the finite nature of these resources required for electrifying Road transportations combined with the oppressive and destructive nature of extraction make for the argument as to why aside from costs we cannot all buy electric cars and alleviate the crisis we simply do not have enough Rare Minerals to power all the electric cars around the world electrified public transportation will help substantially reduce our carbon emissions and that has done so for many other countries in order to avert a potential climate crisis in our near future it is imperative that begin construction on High-Speed Rail and other public transportation throughout the country however this does come at a cost San Francisco Los Angeles high-speed rail track is estimated to cost a grand total of 100 billion dollars upon completion while this is a truly staggering number the money spent on the rail is not money lost when China was entering a recession they worked on High-Speed Rail and it provided thousands upon thousands of jobs the much much smaller San Francisco Los Angeles project created thousands of jobs too in the study conducted by San Jose State University they found that under the most conservative High-Speed Rail spending scenarios over the 15-year period evaluated more than 25 000 full-time equivalent job years are created this amounts to 14 900 jobs per billion real dollars of spending or a cost of approximately 67 200 per job year in China they plan to have enough High-Speed Rail to you get around a city within one hour get around a city cluster within two hours and make a trip between City clusters in three hours in the United States biggest competitor on the global stage China has for now thoroughly beat us in the sectors of public transportation if in only 12 years China was able to construct this much rail imagine how much the United States the richest country in the world could do taking on this challenge would be an expensive one but as we worked it would get cheaper when you are constantly working on a project you become more efficient over time America's High-Speed Rail construction must not stop in California and instead be built throughout the country while the cost of rail is staggering in 50 years time when it's all been rolled out people won't remember how much it costed five decades ago they will only know the convenience of being able to get around the country quickly and with little interference I know this because the very thing happens in this country here today the Federal Highway Act was signed by President Eisenhower in 1956 and it costed around a trillion dollars in today's money yet no one complains about it the very same is true of Japan's shinkansen system on average 6.81 million people use Tokyo's Metro System every day the Metro allows for people to get where they want to be on time every day the system is excellently run with safety checks being performed often and the stations being kept clean on top of all this the rail system is cheaper than driving a car while rail prices can be expensive they're often less so than an automobile for a one month three month and six month unlimited use Rail Pass in Tokyo it costs 17 300 49 310 and 93 420 again respectively this converts to roughly 130 360 and 680 dollars as of April 2023 the Energy Information Administration estimated the average household spending for gasoline in the United States for 2017 to be roughly 1977 or more than what it would cost to get unlimited use to Tokyo's Metro Network for one and a half years with the current crisis in Ukraine gas prices have increased dramatically and the average person's need to use the automobile remaining the same due to the lack of public transportation projects and continued development of suburban housing far away from where people work it is reasonable to assume that the costs have only gone up in the six years since the estimate was made and this is without even considering the price of buying a car Japan's Metro does not make nearly as much money as cars do here but that's by Design Japan Germany Austria and most other countries all heavily subsidize their rail making sure that it is Affordable for all its citizens privatization is often proposed as a solution to the problem of costs but this just wouldn't work as Continental Europe invests in High-Speed Rail building new lines Great Britain's Railways are a mess there's our Rising fares services are poorer and there's been a fallen passenger numbers for the first time in two decades privatization of British Rail was disastrous when compared to the rest of Europe less people could afford to get around and those who could have got poorer service in order for the companies to keep spending low and profits high in America public roads are entirely paid for by the government if all of a sudden the highway you used to get to work required a total to use it would only stand or lose in order to have an efficient public transportation system to not rival but to even begin to compete with the rest of the world we need to heavily subsidize our public transportation now for the big question how are you going to pay for it well there are two options one we could raise taxes there is a very little chance of this happening in the modern United States two reallocate funds from somewhere else in the federal budget well this is a very controversial opinion to many in the United States we do have a perfect source of funds that being the United States military the U.S spends a truly staggering amount of money on its military if we were to allocate 100 billion dollars or more for the military budget to the construction of High-Speed Rail throughout the country we could fund multiple projects simultaneously the California High-Speed Rail track between Los Angeles and San Francisco is estimated to cost 100 billion dollars total over the course of over a decade if we allocated 100 billion dollars per year to the development of High-Speed Rail we could still outspend China India the UK Russia France Germany and Saudi Arabia combined the difference in the amount of High-Speed Rail between the Us and other countries is truly staggering the United States has the highest GDP out of any country on Earth and yet we don't even have a rail line between LA and Las Vegas yet currently if you wish to travel distance is too far for a car you have to take a plane however once again this is terrible for the climate building rail would largely replace these short range flights having a set track for trains to run on is much more efficient than flying a plane such short distances in countries like Japan or China you can easily get around by train the same goes for almost the entire European continent in the United States we are decades behind the rest of the world of course it wouldn't make sense to connect every city with High-Speed Rail the population density just isn't high enough for that however we could instead use a system similar to what we already have with airports places like Idaho don't have international airports but they do have airports that connect to places that do instead of having High-Speed Rail throughout the entire country as some people think people are proposing places like Boise the capital of Idaho could connect to places like Salt Lake City the capital of Utah which would then connect to places like Los Angeles Seattle Etc this is just one proposed map for the future of High-Speed Rail in the United States this country is a laughing stock for the rest of the world what citizens of every other major country take for granted we don't even have it is imperative that the United States invests in High-Speed Rail to keep up with the rest of the develop World by climate change and increase the quality of life for its citizens there is so much I could still talk about but in the interests of keeping this essay somewhat brief I've left some stuff out if you're interested in Reading More such as the topic of induced demand or building more Lanes on a freeway actually increases the traffic or about how five percent of all Urban Land in the United States is dedicated to parking lots then you can find stuff like that and some more in the description of this video including the full paper I wrote on the subject if you live in the United States and agree that our country needs to develop High-Speed Rail infrastructure then what you need to do is really simple in the next election cycle vote for the politicians that are public transport friendly [Music]

Channel: HozeFish

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Length: 13min 51sec (831 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 17 2023