Reply #13: I did some quick calculations today based on [View All]

[Lydia Leftcoast]

Japan's "bullet train" Shinkansen.

There are four lines radiating from Tokyo. The oldest line, the one from Tokyo to Osaka, runs every 5 minutes, 16 hours a day, carrying 300-500 passengers on each train (and that's with everyone having a reserved seat). The Tokyo-Osaka line could therefore carry 3600-6000 people per hour, or from 48,000 to 98,000 per day. I don't recall the frequency of the other three lines--it's less--but let's just say (at a very conservative estimate), that they run four times an hour. With three lines, the other lines combined could carry the same as the Tokyo-Osaka line (at the very least), for another 48,000-98,000 per day. At that rate, using just regularly scheduled trains, you could keep as many as 294,000 people off the road over three days at a minimum.

Those figures do not include the dozens of conventional train lines radiating from the city or the thousands of buses. They run so frequently that I couldn't begin to calculate how many people they could carry, again, running on their normal schedules.

Since all the train lines I've seen have parallel inbound and outbound tracks, empty trains could be quickly sent back to pick up more people.

In real life, cities that have train systems find that they're heavily used in non-emergency situations, even by people who wouldn't be caught dead on a bus. As the system expands, it becomes useful to more and more people, and my experience was that while, for example, the Portland light rail system didn't take any traffic off the highways (traffic expands to fill the space for it), it gave people a CHOICE to avoid the traffic.

As far as bottlenecks go, I'm sure that horrific bus explosion today slowed traffic quite a bit. Heavens, I see infuriating bottlenecks just during normal commuting hours in Minneapolis, which has a mediocre bus system, and I'd hate to see what would happen if the city ever had to be evacuated. Indeed, if I had to evacuate Minneapolis, I'd be inclined to load up a backpack and cycle out into the country on one of the trails.