The Streetcar/Trolley/Tram/Electric Railway Thread

Stanley Doble said:

Is there no gasoline tax or diesel fuel tax in Michigan? Do you not pay for license plates? Is there no tax on the purchase of a car? No taxes at all on the ownership and use of a motor vehicle?

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Realtively light taxes and registration feed of the sort that you mentioned, but an utterly immense cross-subsidy of the trucking industry. The damage done to our roads by the heavy, often overloaded modern trucks must be seen to be believed.

Setting the Record Right on Rails and Roads

*puts on his best nonprofit-education-group-volunteer voice and coolly explains*:blabla:

I talk about this stuff most weekends anyway, might as well do so here!

To Stanley Doble, you're missing a myriad of factors here, ranging from the underlying physics to the potential for optimizing transport efficiency in the future. But please don't take me as condescending in this long rebuttal. In the times we live in, it takes a lot of reading and years spent considering alternative transportation to even begin to understand it (I'm still beginning!), or even to understand "mainstream" (road) transportation. Rails do, in fact, have concrete advantages over roads, and less tangible ones too.

Firstly, try checking for numbers on your claim that roads pay for themselves. I dug deeper into this topic when Pennsylvania was debating de-funding my college town's only Amtrak train, and I found that roads bleed cash as badly as transit lines. And in some places, like David suggested, they can be far, far worse. But when three people living on a country road that gets washed out a few times a year still expect the residents of their county to pay up to fix what is essentially a private driveway... yeah, that does NOT pay for itself, nor do expensive highways. They're more difficult to construct and repair than one might think. In America, roads are one messed up system, where we proverbial fish cannot objectively consider the state of our water. Rails most certainly are NOT worse in every way.


Rollin' on steel really works.

Anyway, back to the examples. Steel-on-steel, as in rail wheel on rails, has far greater energy efficiency than rubber on road (pick any surface you want) can. The same vehicle on rails will travel far, far greater distance on one tank of gas than it would on rubber tires. Skipping ahead to the not-very-distant future, guided transportation offers many advantages that are now in development, namely, computerized control. As a vehicle operator myself, I was more than skeptical reading that vehicle builders intend to make transit automated! But, after reading Siemens' transportation systems website cover-to-cover, (err, or that phrase's online equivalent), they're onto something. Human error accounts for a lot of energy waste... a LOT, and that can be reduced or eliminated in a few scenarios today. And possibly most scenarios tomorrow.

Speaking of human error, I've become convinced lately that human-steered vehicles will not last forever in everyday transportation use. Computers are put in use for tasks too mundane, dangerous, or repetitive for humans. And if Google put a self-steering minivan on the roads years ago, (try and Google it!), then what are the chances that we'll still be trusted to steer ourselves through traffic? We've already proven ourselves remarkably bad at it on the whole, even when sober (see automobiles' dismal safety rates compared to any other form of transportation.) We regulate and legislate away far less risky activities; I fully expect driving cars will follow that course someday. And the buses will follow the self-steering trend... unless they've already harnessed the proven self-steering technologies of hundreds of years ago, with their modern improvements.


Revolutionary 75 years ago, and still rolling today.

If I can add a few points from personal experience and longtime involvement in these debates, rails have even more advantages here and now.

- People like novelties, and right now, streetcars are a novelty. This was part of their bane during the previous big streetcar wave, but now it's helping them. Yeah, it may well reverese again someday, but with how slowly they're returning compared to their spread in the 1880-1910 period, it'll be long after we're all dead.
- Internal combustion engines vibrate far worse than even ancient electrical equipment. I ride buses at home and operate streetcars on weekends. I know.
- Noise. While natural gas offers some reduced noise levels (they have one CNG bus in my town), internal combustion still loses big in this category regardless of fuel. Transit researchers in the '20s figured out how to use rubber in rail wheels to dampen the worst of streetcar noise (they're called Resilliant Wheels, at least on vintage equipment), and with that taken care of 80 years ago, I doubt any gas/diesel/CNG bus can be as quiet as an electric railcar.
- I don't hate buses either, so plesae don't take this as a rant. I rode two today, one just went by outside, and I rather like the diesel Gillig transits that Williamsport uses, and enjoy my occasional bone-rattling jaunt on one of their old New Flyer buses, too. I do still hope to own a vintage bus someday. But they offer much less in the way of transportation solutions for the years to come.

...but darn, they used to be pretty!

Phew! I'm done now, sorry to go on so long. Does anyone still think that rail transportation has no place in the present or future?

Swing Motorman,
Thanks for your detailed response to the question of rail use vs. paved roads. We, too, in Mifflin County were relieved when Amtrak was given a reprieve and allowed to continue servicing our Lewistown station. I commend you for your passion with trolleys. The younger generation benefits from your enthusiastic presentations, no doubt. Keep up the dedication. Having ridden trolley's in northern NJ as a child(1950's) I would welcome the opportunity to do so again.
PK

Not sure if anyone is interested, but there is a trolley museum in East Haven Connecticut called the Shore Line Trolley Museum. They were founded in 1945, and have many of trolleys.
Here is their website if you are interested. Shore Line Trolley Museum

I went there when I was 3 or 4 years old (I was even interested in the Golden Era back then, but mostly trolleys), and again when I was older (I don't remember how old I was :eusa_doh. I remember finding it interesting, and I remember there being vintage advertisements in the ceiling.

It's not my claim that taxes pay for the roads, it's the governments. They take $20 to $25 in road tax out of every tank of fuel I buy, same as everyone else. That money must go somewhere. They collect license plate fees, driver's license fees, they collect sales taxes on every car sold, even if the same car is resold 10 times during its life, too bad, you pay sales tax every time.

It's not my claim that governments subsidize public transit either, it's a well known fact. Every time you see a campaign for better public transportation it revolves around a public subsidy.

What is wrong with spending public money as efficiently as possible? What would be wrong with electric buses, which we can get easily, instead of light rail, which we might not be able to get at all?

I can name lots of reasons rubber tired vehicles are better than steel tired vehicles. Would like to hear your reasons for believing steel tired vehicles are better than rubber tired vehicles.

For the record, I like streetcars. I am happy Toronto and other places still have them. But I find it hard to believe we can't come up with something better in the 21st century, than what they had in 1832.

Swing Motorman said:

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This picture is so perfect I thought it was a G-scale trolley in the garden posed with a model car.