Detroit is now home to the country’s first chunk of road that can wirelessly charge an electric vehicle (EV), whether it’s parked or moving.
Why it matters: Wireless charging on an electrified roadway could remove one of the biggest hassles of owning an EV: the need to stop and plug in regularly.
Trains are amazing for small countries, or between cities. The problem comes when you take into consideration how spread out the US is. You will always have cases where a car is needed, it’s unavoidable.
EVs are not a perfect solution, by a long shot. And ideally we would move away from cars being ubiquitous in America, but that is many, many years off. It’s better to work towards that slowly than it is to say “well it’s not perfect so let’s just not.”
You will always have cases where a car is needed, it’s unavoidable. That’s because it’s designed for cars. We have huge parking lots designed for cars but nothing for public transport. Whenever I travel to NYC or Chicago, I can go anywhere in trains and buses. In my city, I can’t even get milk without driving to a store.
Because your store probably doesn’t serve thousands of people to validate the cost of the infrastructure. My city has busses, but it also has corn fields and open lots and a lot of spread. It’s just not viable to walk all your groceries a mile to and from the bus stop both ways for a bus that comes every hour. It’s different when every train and bus is full and the need is well met.
Ask for more taxes and more spending on this infrastructure, or use your car.
The infrastructure is developed around cars so obviously using cars makes sense. We could have smaller grocery stores and have it closer to neighborhoods so people can walk to it but we have buses which only come once an hour which takes 30 minutes to drive 2 miles and your grocery trip will take 3 hours so you are better off just buying a car!
I don’t think you understand how spread out rural America is. A lot of areas have tiny grocery stores to support a small population spread over a wide area.
The town I grew up in had no grocery stores, there was one small store a 20-min drive away that served all the surrounding towns. There was no work from home and if you had a job you had to have a car to get there.
The population was too small and too spread out to support any public transit. They now have a bus that goes from the center of town to the previously-mentioned grocery store, once a week on Sunday at 7am and then back at noon.
Still, getting to the center of town is quite the hike for many residents so I imagine for most a car is still essential.
And before anyone mentions the “infrastructure” being built for cars: this town was founded before cars were a thing. It was built for horses.
Rural areas can keep their cars. 80% of America’s population is urban, not rural. We do not need to hold back fixing things in cities just because rural America needs cars.
But still that’s not the point.
It has been decided to build infrastructure for cars into the smallest furthest villages and not to build infrastructure for trains into the smallest same villages.
That’s why it is like it is.
Some other countries have made better decisions.
Oh pish posh. China is exactly as big as the US and you can get pretty much everywhere for a few bucks in high speed trains.
Trains are fantastic and the US should definitely be investing in them, it’s a huge disadvantage and a national embarrassment that we don’t have affordable and effective mass transportation.
China does a lot of stupid things, but their train network is admirable.
Truth
“Everywhere” as long as you’re just trying to get to the south-east, sure.
Nope, everywhere.
That ain’t everywhere.
Certainly more than the US though.
That is everywhere that Chinese people live in that country. They consolidated their flyover zones to the left side of the country.
Most of that region is mountains, tundra, and desert. Nobody lives there for a reason.
Exactly
96 percent of Chinese people live on the east half of the country.
Yes, so the trains make sense in certain areas. The US has a similar problem, with the majority of the population in a few specific areas which are already served well by trains. But you then have extremely sparse population spread out through the rest of the country. Trains just don’t work there.
US cities are definitively not already served well by trains. Trains are prohibitively expensive, literally falling apart and very rare, even in larger population centers in the US.
Trains would work very well in this country as they work in literally every country that invests in transportation infrastructure.
You can’t even get high speed rail between LA and San Fransisco (yet). US cities in dense areas are not well served by trains.
isn’t that exactly what trains were designed for and are best at?
You are correct. I can only assume that person got trains and trams mixed up.
You have a train that takes you directly to your house? O.o
Are you implying other countries don’t have train stations? They just stop at each individual houses because it’s a small country?
Also, the biggest city in the US is set up on a giant train system (Im referring to New York’s subways).
No, obviously not. But they also don’t have stations in rural areas where there are houses with many, many miles between them.
That’s nice. It’s a small percentage of the population, and getting smaller. They can keep using cars if they want. We don’t need to hold back all other progress on their account.
Cool, of course that has nothing to do with the original argument….
To be honest, I do see where you are coming from. If we had public transportation as good as our network of roads, people would have incentives to cluster up in the first place.
Shape defines function and function defines form. In this case that means the public transit would be built near the denser populations which will then cause people to move closer to the transport I on for ease of moving goods. It’s why these other countries look the way they do, they didn’t plan these out 3000 years in advance.
… you’ve never heard of bikes, or legs, or car sharing if you need to transport stuff? you don’t need to own a car, it’s unnecessarily expensive and bad for literally everything
the only reason one would need to own a car is if it’s tied to their job
even if you disagree with this assessment, the technology in this post would almost certainly only be applied in cities, it would likely be restricted to a portion of where trains would be except be far less useful, while taking up tax money that could be used for actually important things
also the US has a higher percentage of the population in urban areas than Europe (82% vs 74%) – the US has a lot less small & isolated villages/towns and historically immigrants to the US always came to large urban areas – and US states are comparable in size, population, economy, and arguably self-governing capacity to European countries (the EU can practically be treated as a soveirgn state itself, in most cases), it’s reasonable to say that something that can be implemented in Europe can usually be implemented in the US with a similar level of success, in theory.
Just north of the us is a mainly freight railway system that spans the width of the continent…
Then there is this image in an article about that on Wikipedia
The spread out reasoning just seems silly to me on the basis of that literally being what trains were even for in the first place, going distances not suitable for horses. If it connects cities, that is also a start that shouldn’t be passed on for being imperfect.
The only reason a car would be needed at all in north America is because of all the poorly designed car centric infrastructure that ends up not even being good for cars as demonstrated by the absolutely heinous traffic that only seems to get worse with every road “upgrade” I have ever seen the before and after of.
I’m confused, are you trying to say cars are not needed because there’s a railway every 100+ miles north or south of any point? Should people walk 100 miles to the rail station on their way to work?
The US/North America is huge, it’s not like just providing public transit for all of Europe or something, covering all of America would be an orders of magnitude larger project
No I’m saying the us being too big for trains is a dumb statement because there already are trains all over north America.
Cars are only needed because the infrastructure is designed that way. It also features idiotic setups like 4-6 lanes on the main road and single lane when parked up side streets that are a bitch to make a left from because the lights never line up to give a break in the traffic. I hate these and they shouldn’t exist because they are bad for literally everyone. There are so many road setups that aren’t even good for cars, yet cause them to be necessary, which just worsens traffic guaranteed.
I don’t understand your Europe comparison. It’s not like a blanket needs to cover the entire country. You only need transportation where people live to where they work. Anything else can come later if it turns out to be needed. Do people daily commute across the whole country or something? If they do there is way more necessary work reform than I could have imagined.
Realistically though if the us can send money to Ukraine and Israel yet still not rebuild hawaii, the country is fucked.
Trains have their bigger advantages on long distances. You get tired in a car, you can’t go pp or take a nap. Your costs rises proportionally with the distance etc.
Trains famously bad at traveling long distances.
No, trains famously bad at “last mile” travel, except that in America it can be “last dozen miles” between a city big enough to have a station, and the place the person is going.
This is again a problem of America not investing in its transportation infrastructure, not a fault of trains.
There are many benefits to trains, but when you have 100 people in a 1000 square mile area, is anyone, including government, going to be willing to run the rail, build the station, and send trains there multiple times a day? I highly doubt it.
Your doubt has no bearing on all of the stops in which that is a reality in every country that has proper transportation infrastructure.
Your example is also immaterial to the benefits of trains public services.
You’re arguing that we shouldn’t build any libraries because a couple people somewhere can’t read.
I’m not at all saying that train infrastructure should not be built out. I’m saying it still requires cars in many parts of the US.
The person I originally replied to however, heavily implied we should be ignoring EVs and focusing on trains instead.
I get that.
I travel a lot, and the US is the only country so far where traveling to different areas is a pain in the ass because they never bothered with transportation infrastructure, so I’m very dedicated to the US catching up with the rest of the world in terms of transportation.
Like you don’t have to plan road trips in China, you just hop on a train or bus and you are there. Wherever you want to go, national parks, mountains, it’s all just taken care of, and there are meals and snacks to buy, sleeper cars, electric charging.
You can decide to take your family to the equivalent of Yellowstone if you lived in California and get in a train to go there without any hassle or planning, and it’ll be within your budget.
But EVs rock too.
There are tons of areas of the US that have the population density to support it, but still have horrible train service. We made deliberate decisions to favor highways over trains, and we can undo those decisions.
Why would highways be less susceptible to the “spread out” effect than trains?
Nationwide, sure. But localized I wish we would do better, given the population densities. California has a population density of ~100 people/km2. Not far off France at ~120/km2. Yet we still are mainly reliant on cars to get around.
California and France aren’t that far off from total area from each other. Most of California’s population is in a hand full of counties. As an example, LA has a population density 3 times that of Paris.
There are places that would be wonderfully served by trains, but just aren’t.
Cars are best in rural areas, but by far the majority of peoole live in cities where cars are the worst, yet we still build them for cars.
“Build them for cars” cities aren’t built anymore. They were built a long time ago. Modifying existing cities for trains would be nearly impossible. Yes it’s a 4:1 ratio of urban to rural areas. But remember the majority of the population lives in like 4-5 counties in the US. That’s a lot of area that is empty.
It’s a good point that cities aren’t built anymore, and that’s part of the problem. Our population has grown drastically, but we don’t build hardly any new infrastructure for them outside of roads. So traffic is terrible despite enormous amounts of money from both government and people.
Cities aren’t supposed to be static, they’re supposed to grow and adapt to the needs of those that live there. There is a large need for non-car transport that is either ignored or sidelined for cars.
I’m not talking about 90% empty land, that’s not where people are.
When the car was invented, governments had little issue buildozing entire neighborhoods for highways, but now that some places are realizing that’s a bad decision, its really hard to undo.
A lot of the world had to rebuild after WW1and WW2 and that allowed for building around newer technologies. The US never had that. We’re expanding and you can’t just build in infrastructure like that.
The newer technology at that time was cars and roads, and many European countries did try the American system of roads and suburbs.
Its just that most of them realized it wad a bad idea around 20 years ago and started rethinking their cities.
Many city centers were even turned into parking lots like American ones.
Again cities arent supposed to be static, and normally they grow denser, rather than sprawling.
The problem with American cities is partly zoning, and partly nimbyism, where people don’t want their places to change.
And sprawl sucks for pretty much everyone. Less arable land for farming, poorer anmeties, longer travel times, and finally huge transportation costs. Cars are by far the most costly method of travel, both personally and for governments.
I mean cool and all… Vote to raise taxes and cut military spending like america loves to do and that will be a reality. - An American in the burbs
The stupid thing is that fixing it isn’t even that hard.
Step one Get rid stupid zoning laws like single family housing and reduce parking minimums.
Step 2 Modify existing roads piece by piece to include alternative transit methods. Add bike lanes, if you can’t slow down roads and people will bike.
Actually run decent buses where peoole want to go, not oversized 50 person buses on 3 routes that nobody uses becasue it doesn’t go anywhere, and has an hour between the next bus.
That’s it, the market will build more housing in areas that need it if its profitable, then use that new tax money to drive transit infrastructure.
There’s a lot of fine details, but we’re bankrupting cities with cars right now.