Trains. The word summons up an image powered by some of America’s favorite mystiques: our childhood infatuation with the little engine that could and Thomas the tank engine; nostalgia for the age of steam and manifest destiny; and the promise of a sleek, techno future with trains levitating to destinations at rocket speed. (As a character from the Dick Tracy comic strip once said, "He who controls magnetism, controls the world!") In an era of climate change and sprawl, trains deserve much of this good will. But railroads also have a history that is problematic in part, and, in some of their operations, a cloudy present. I wanted to write a bit about rail good and bad. I hope to follow it up with a post on how to improve good rail: a kind of trains plus agenda.
Good rail
Trains are ecologically efficient. They move people and freight with less pollution than cars and trucks. Freight moved on trains uses between 2 to 5 times less diesel fuel than an equivalent load moved by trucks – resulting in an equivalently smaller release of greenhouse gases. Shifting people from driving alone in cars to dozens or hundreds riding a single train can bring even greater environmental savings. The prospects of high speed rail linking cities within state or regions brings the potential to further reduce the need for driving and also supplanting some short to medium distance air travel, which is a heavy emitter of greenhouse gases.
Trains let cities be cities. With a majority of the world’s populations living in cities for the first time in human history, shaping livable urban places is crucial. Rail can move more people than cars along a narrow corridor. And trains require less space for storage and service than do passenger automobiles, which swallow up huge swathes of land for roads and parking lots.
If you took all of the parking spaces in the Los Angeles CBD and spread them horizontallyin a surface lot, they would cover 81 percent of the CBD’s land area. We call this ratio—of parking area to total land area—the "parking coverage rate," and it is higher in downtown LA than in any other downtown on earth. Manville and Shoup, People, Parking and Cities.
For a mirror-image to this, a glimpse of what Manhattan might look like without a subway, check out the scary map at the Frumination blog. With the right zoning, train stations can also become hubs for dense, walkable neighborhoods, because people living close to transit do not need as many cars and a mix of residential and commercial buildings can circle a station. For these reasons, trains are compatible with cities in a way that cars are not.
Bad rail
Railroad companies abuse their power. For all their real and potential benefits, trains aren’t always managed in a way that helps people and the planet. Railroad company’s special relationship with government as beneficiaries of land grants and the economic chokehold their lines had on commerce for much of the 19th and early 20th century have made them an imperious industry. Here in California, rail tycoons and lobbyists long had a reputation as owning the state legislature and ruining little people who got in the way of the expansion of what Frank Norris called ‘the octopus.’ Some of this arrogance remains in the modern railroad industry, which is highly concentrated, with just two companies – Union Pacific and BNSF – dominating the railroad sector in the western United States.
Pollution from trains kill far more people than train accidents. The companies also enjoy exemptions from some local and state regulations under courts’ interpretation of the commerce clause of the federal constitution. This lack of local accountability can make railroads, and rail yards in particular, bad neighbors. Diesel pollution from locomotives and yard equipment at rail yards is a significant health risk to people living near these yards. Tests near major rail yards in California found that five of these locations (all in Southern California near the city of Commerce and in the Inland Empire) created a very high cancer risk of between 500-3,300 chances per million, well beyond the 1 in a million level EPA considers acceptable. 2100 early deaths in the Los Angeles region every year are linked to diesel from idling trains.
The South Coast Air Quality Management District had created regulations to reduce pollution from trains, but a court just overturned the regs based on commerce clause exemption. We’re currently left with voluntary agreements between the state and two major railroad companies to reduce emissions at the most toxic rail yards, but community members have observed the companies moving clean equipment between yards rather than investing in cleaner technology for all sites.
Trains are not always the best mobility solution. It’s too simplistic to say that public transit is always good, with privately owned freight rail companies providing all the villainy. Transit is often managed timidly, without a goal of getting people out of their cars. And due to high capital costs, more trains and new lines alone are not always the most cost effective way to change mobility options. Walking, cycling and bus infrastructure can bring more immediate change.
In sum, trains deserve much of their good rep, but can do better. Trains plus land use changes near stations, plus bike lanes, plus connectivity to buses and walkable streets, plus open source data, plus healthy food vending at stations, plus low passenger fares, plus cleaner power sources, can be great.