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German Rail website showing environmental impact

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[quote user="DwightBranch"]   <blockquote> <div><img src="/TRCCS/Themes/trc/images/icon-quote.gif" /> Sam1:</div> <div>   At the end of the day, however, whether trains are more environmentally benign than cars, planes, buses or horses is irrelevant. People in this part of the world want to travel by car. <div style="clear:both;"></div>   </div> </blockquote>     You offer this assertion as a statement of fact, as though Americans are somehow a different species. This kind of statement presupposes the "why" and ignores the question entirely. Wants are not determined in a vacuum, when you examine why individual people are doing things it often turns out that they are doing things because... everyone else is doing the same thing. When the choices one faces are constrained to only one way of doing things that becomes what people do. In order to understand how the choices became confined to car transportation we would need  to discuss the entire history of transportation in the US, including trivial facts like how Gen. Dwight Eisenhower  liked to transport his tanks and troops down the German autobahn. But the reality is that the "wants" of people here are in no way self-created, they are a result of the experiences of people and their interaction with others. Had Eisenhower transported his troops on the ICE we might have people today saying that Americans are congenitally disinclined to drive cars. Had he decided that only horses were appropriate transportation, someone would be telling us that Americans are congenitally disinclined to use machinery. Quackery! And empirically, over and over the predictions of (especially conservative) commentators that Americans will not ride mass transit because they are "individualists" (and cars somehow, in some always asserted but unproven way, reflect this individualism) falls short.  I recall when Denver built the first leg of their light rail system conservative commentator Jon Caldera arguing that no one in Denver would ride trains because they were individuals, the initial ridership projections were ten times too low. The same thing with the T-Rex line to Parker Road, once people discovered that they could get from say the Parker development to downtown Denver in half the time during rush hour, not be forced to pay for parking, etc. the line by far exceeded ridership projections.. In sum, the sort of behavior you see by people in a static setting is not indicative of how they would behave if given other options in a dynamic setting, no matter what the question you are considering, and so arguing that Americans are one way or the other is misleading. [/quote] By this part of the world I mean Texas.  To be more specific, I mean DFW and central Texas, since these are the ares of the Lone Star State where I have lived for 36 years. I offered the view as an opinion.  I did not state it as a fact, although as noted below I am familiar with several studies performed in north central and central Texas that appear to support the view that most people in Texas prefer cars over public transit. No, I am not going to dig them out. I worked in Dallas for a very large company for 31 years.  We had approximately 18,000 employees.  And approximately 700 executives and managers.  Of the 700 managers, I was one of six in DFW who rode public transit to work.  The other managers, all of whom could afford to drive, did so.  In fact, they thought that I was a bit odd in my preference for public transit. Clearly, opportunities shape behavior.  That was a major driver supporting the decision to build the Dallas light rail system and the Trinity Railway Express.  If we build it people will come was the argument.    I was a member of the Dallas Transit System Citizen's Advisory Board and played an active roll, thanks to the support of my employer, in getting the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) initiative passed, which ultimately led to the building of the light rail system and HOV lanes.  Area taxpayers have paid billions in sales tax dollars to build the most extensive light rail system in the Southwest.  And one of the most extensive light rail systems in the United State. The number of people using the system has exceeded budgeted expectations, in large part because the number of estimated riders was low balled.  It is a trick that budget folks use all the time.  As a senior manager in a Fortune 250 corporation I understand the importance of effective budgeting techniques. So what has been the outcome? Approximately 4.8% of the people in the DFW metroplex use public transit.  To attract even this percentage of riders requires a system average subsidy of $2.98 per passenger trip and $4.87 per passenger trip on the light rail system.  Many of the riders on the light rail trains are fed in my bus routes that were switched to load up the trains.   According to an article in the Dallas Morning News, ridership on the light rail system has been declining for a variety of reasons.  Moreover, numerous surveys have shown that a majority of Texans don't want public transit. They want better highways. My analysis of the data furnished to me by DART produced a number of surprises.  For one, I was somewhat surprised to learn that approximately 45 per cent of the bus riders in Dallas ride the bus because it is their only option.  And approximately 22 per cent of the people on the light rail trains have no alternative transport. One seemingly appropriate conclusion from this finding may be that those who have access to a car, as long as they can afford to drive it, will opt for the car.  An excellent history of the development of the federal highway system in the United States can be found in The Big Roads by Earl Swift.  He puts to rest, at least in my mind, many of the myths and misinformation regarding the development of federal highways, including the roll played by President Eisenhower. I have ridden public transit all but two of the more than 40 years that I worked for corporate America.  I was a strong supporter of the light rail system.  Looking back, however, I believe that we were partially mistaken in putting too many eggs in the light rail system.  It proved to be far more costly to build and operate than was anticipated by the planners.  In retrospect, we would probably have been better off developing commuter rail along a number of the existing heavy rail lines, i.e. Trinity Railway Express that had been the Rock Island line between Fort Worth and Dallas, and relying more heavily on buses, especially on the rapid bus technologies that were emerging at the time.  But that is behind us now.  So we have what we have.   Unless the price of gasoline soars and no alternative vehicles emerge, people in this part of the world are not likely to flock to public transport for decades to come.
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