this post was submitted on 17 May 2024
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Just fund trains.
Trains suck if you don't have frequency, and because of the population density with a good frequency more than half of the trains will be completely empty and the rest almost empty.
If you out half the funding from car infrastructure instead into train and bus infrastructure this would not be a problem. Induced demand works both ways.
The population in rural areas is so low that no matter how you induce demand, it won't work.
Look up "interurban railways". Most towns east of the Mississippi used to have frequent rail service with whistle stops at every farm and crossroads. In addition to passengers these railroads also transported the harvest, Sears purchases, kit houses, even hearses!
This almost certainly wouldn't work in the United States but it does in Europe because Europe has loads of these tiny abandoned rail lines (often single track) that were built in the 1800s and then abandoned. They don't go anywhere particularly densely populated, you know because of the industrial Revolution causing everyone to move to the cities, so there isn't the demand for a full rail service. Meaning they're not going to spend the money upgrading the infrastructure to modern standards.
This means they can be used at relatively cheap cost. As long as the tracks are still physically present all they need to do is cut some weeds down and put these things on the line and they're good to go. It's a cheap project that a local municipal authority can handle without having to involve wider government.
Even with unlimited funding, you want to scale the size of the train to the population that could potentially ride on it.
A P42 locomotive pulling 7 Amtrak superliner cars is 700 tons of steel getting 0.4 miles per gallon of diesel. That's a crapton of mining and drilling and CO2, and it would be incredibly wasteful if it ended up carrying, like, two people at a time.
Cars suck always.