Message #174394

[Donald]

...yup..time to cut our losses ...and get out of the kiwi rail work scheme🙄


Why rail is a Dead Duck

Rail is a dead duck. It doesn’t matter whether it is ‘high speed’, ‘light’, ‘lite’ or ‘commuter’. Its all a dead duck.

Within 20 to 30 years, rail lines around the world will either be abandoned or torn out and replaced by new roads.

That’s a bold call you may say, but the proponents of rail continue to look backwards and have not realised that we are on the verge of a transport revolution that will result in rail becoming as antiquated as the horse and cart.


Rail has been an efficient way of transporting large numbers of people from point A to point B for the last century, where Point A is approximately where people live and Point B is approximately where people work. You still have to get from your home to Point A and you still have to get from Point B to your work or airport or wherever your destination is. This takes time and is frustrating, especially in a sprawling city like Auckland that was never designed for rail.

Cars are an effective means of transporting people from where they live to their destination skipping the need to interchange through hubs. There is no intermediate steps. You get into your car in your garage and you step out of it at your office or destination. This is much more convenient and is why we love cars. The problem is that when many people all want this convenience, the roads quickly become congested and all of a sudden, cars become slow, inefficient and frustrating. Welcome to gridlock and the 1 hour commute.

For years, proponents of rail said that the answer was to sacrifice some of this convenience and build fast, light rail systems connecting suburbs and cities. This was a perfectly valid solution in the absence of any solution to the car congestion problem and cities around the world began building complex and efficient subway systems that transport millions of commuters every day. Its easy to look at these systems and think that they are the answer. However, as anyone who has travelled in New York, Sydney or London knows, the roads remain just as congested.

Times are a changing and the proponents of rail are failing to look forward at how the technology revolution that is currently occurring in the background will drastically change our futures.

The major issue with cars on roads is the human factor, humans are slow to react, erratic and selfish. When you put thousands of humans behind the wheels of cars, all trying to get to different places on narrow roads, you end up with gridlock.

To understand why we should be investing in roads not rail, imagine this future… Its a future that may seem as foreign to you now as putting a device in your pocket that can look up all the information in the world by speaking to it and instantly video calling the other side of the world did 20 years ago.

Its a future that is coming at us though, and it’s a future that is not a matter of if it will happen, but when.

In the future, very few people will need to own a car. A fleet of private and public electric vehicles will roam our streets with no drivers. When you want to go somewhere, you will simply tell the fleet where you are and where you want to go (using whatever seemingly magical device we use to communicate with in the future) and one of these cars will arrive at your location. You get in and the car begins driving you to your destination.

Each vehicle constantly communicates with every other vehicle. There are no traffic lights, the cars can whizz between each other avoiding a collision by centimetres at intersections seemingly by magic. They do not slow down at intersections, because each vehicle perfectly times its arrival and position to avoid collisions. They can safely travel at vastly higher speeds than our current cars because there is no human reaction time to consider.

If a car breaks down blocking the road, the entire fleet instantly re-routes around the problem so as not to cause congestion or bottlenecks.

This future has convenience and efficiency and does not have the constraints of only going between two specific hubs. It allows high utilisation of a vehicle fleet because you do not have to park the vehicles all day. This future allows rapid expansion of suburbs without needing major investments in infrastructure.

This future instantly adapts to demands and changes without the infrastructure meltdowns we currently experience when un-forecast demand exceeds our ability to supply capacity.

This future allows you to courier goods across town using the same infrastructure (have you ever tried couriering a package via a train).

This future is coming whether we like it or not and when it arrives, it will make rail irrelevant and antiquated.

Some say that this future cannot happen because some people will still want to drive their own cars. They will be constrained to “driver lanes” that only allow human drivers, they will struggle at intersections without lights and their high insurance premiums will quickly make them convert to the driverless future. In the end, it will just be too frustrating to drive manually and we will give it up to a technology that is much better at driving a car than we are. There will still be a time and a place for driving manualy, but increasingly it will be constrained to the race track and car antique fairs (yes one day your Toyota Corolla will be in an antique car fair and you will be reminiscing about the ‘good old days’ while wearing jeans and a faded Pink Floyd T-Shirt).

We should not be investing in major rail projects now and instead should be preparing for this future by building more roads. Roads that can cater to our current technology of choice (cars with drivers) while putting in place the infrastructure to allow future technology to roll out.

This future is coming fast and that is why, Rail is a dead duck.

C slater