"On the other side of the tracks..." an expression often used until the 1960s to indicate huge social class differences and was particularly true before cars when tracks had to be walked over, under, or above, and when rail yards were in almost every town. Still true on extremely busy lines (current standards where frequencies tend to be low) when tracks are at ground level. Certainly true for high-speed lines that must be isolated or elevated.
It's still that simple here. South of the big railway line = Poor people, almost ghetto like streets where you don't wanna and shouldn't pass through (especially as a woman or discriminated minority) unless necessary, north of the big railway line = affluent or middle class people, nice parks where you like to hang out.
You could say the same for highways though. Basically any big traffic corridor going through a city is going to create that one side vs the other side perception. Providing enough ways to cross it, and making those ways pleasant is key. Obviously the wider it is, the more pronounced the effect is. There's a particularly interesting tunnel under the tracks at London Waterloo, which in the past was dingy and scary. In recent years, it's been turned into a destination by putting a bunch of nightclubs in the arches underneath, lighting the tunnel with bright coloured LEDs and it's become a graffiti art gallery. It sounds shady, but it's honestly not. It feels very safe. There's tons of people there having a good time.
River has same effect too! Thames divides London too and have had effect on development of the city, so should we fill it over and build a park? If the local govt decided to ignore development for certain part of the city, barrier or no barrier it's not gonna matter. At least a rail corridor makes public transport more accessible. I don't think I plan to walk to Birmingham from London to see my sister, so the rail corridor is not preventing my walking.
@@AshrakAhmed I saw a nice video here that explained it pretty well. The wind mostly blows west to east. Industry produced noxious smells. The people who could afford to, lived west, upwind, of these smells. People who couldn't afford to, and who really needed to live close by, got stuck with living on the east side of whatever was making the stink. Likely the place where they, or their neighbor, worked, for not enough pay to realistically think of moving to the other side.
What often gets forgotten: A train or bus enters downtown stops for maybee a minute to let people out and leaves downtown again to get the next group and freeing up the space for the next vehicle incoming. A car stays downtown for as long as the driver works/shops/… in the downtown area. The area of roads for a working car network to work is easily outpassed by the area of parking lots needed for a working car network
I know self driving cars wont solve everything but this is one aspect they might improve upon regular cars. No need to have massive parking near every possible spot.
@@Knightmessenger absolutely this. Why not have autonomous vehicles go to a remote parking area, to be summoned by the user when they leave work, for example? The parking areas dont have to have room for pedestrians. They can be underground or anything suitable. The cars could charge during the day. You summon them with an app and it tells you the pickup point and ETA? No cars parked in the city streets then.
@@Knightmessenger So instead of any hope of decreasing traffic you now increase traffic by increasing the number of trips a car makes ... ? We're lucky that self-driving cars aren't happening this century anyway.
@@Knightmessenger If the vehicles are all networked, then the traffic will be routed to the appropriate roads and the congestion is calculated and controlled. There is no road rage and nobody is jumping lights or cutting people off. The dangerous part of a car is the driver.
@@Knightmessenger Instead they'll just "circulate". Or drive even MORE miles to go park themselves at the one spot they don't have to pay for parking at; your driveway, dozens of miles from where you work/shop/play. What's worse, because they're So Much More Convenient than driving yourself, they'll exacerbate the sprawl problem, as suddenly living another 10-15 miles away from the center of the action isn't all that big of an inconvenience. Even an extra 30 minutes out just means you watch your favorite TH-camr on the commute, and not when you get home from the office. Just make sure the car has plenty of cupholders, and charging ports for your personal electronics. They'll ALSO exacerbate the solo-occupant problem, because now so many more activities that the kids were frozen out of, (because neither of the parents could make time to take them), are available. So, now the kids are "driving" to soccer/dance/gymnastics/cub scouts/little league.
On the subject of barriers: If you put concrete pillars between the train tracks, which is possible because of the tracks, you can simply build an area on top that offers space for pedestrians. Imagine the concrete pillars between the car lanes just for a moment on a freeway.
I'm imagining a half-asleep lorry driver accidentally driving an 18 wheeler directly into one of those pillars and the entire drive way and whatever above it having to be put on alert while a safety crew checks it all over.
@@DoomsdayR3sistance This has happened a few times in the Seattle area over the years. There was an incident years ago when an oversize load went under a too low overpass along I-5 and actually took out the supports of the overpass. Thankfully the truck itself was holding up the bridge but it took them a good long while to clear that up. And that's not even getting into pillars in the lanes.
Well, the deck doesn't have to have pillars between every single lane. It's enough to have them (or a wall) in the median and on both sides of the highway. It's also safer to have a motorway go under a deck than it is to have a railway. After all, a derailing train can easily have several hundred tons of burning stuff, all connected to each other. A truck or even a few simply never do, and one truck doesn't take out all the others following it.. .
Another thing that I really like about rail corridors in cities is when they're built on arches like in London and Berlin and have small buisnesses in the arches. Really adds to the character of a neighbourhood.
I spent 2.5 weeks in Japan in 2018, mostly in central Japan, so Tokyo, Kyoto, Nagoya, and Osaka. Something that was very interesting to me, coming from the US, was how little the train lines and highways disturbed local walkability. There were three major reasons that this appeared to be the case: First, all rail corridors and highways were elevated or sunken. For highways they had very small, at least by US standards, on and off ramps that prioritized pedestrians and cyclists to be able to cross them. Second, if the infrastructure was below ground then stuff was built on top of it and it was narrow. Some stuff had parks, buildings, etc. Most of it was not just a scar. Because it was narrow you did not have to walk a quarter to half mile across an otherwise naked bridge. And when you were on a bridge they generally decorated it so you would not have to see the highway. If the infrastructure was elevate they built under it. Under any wide infrastructure there were shops and restaurants and things you would want to interact with. It was not just concrete supports. It was built in what I like to refer to as "human scale". Third, there were very frequent pedestrian and bike crossings. If you were on foot you had very regular crossings under or over the infrastructure so that it did not impede your navigation of the city. All of these combined meant that I really did not mind the presence of major infrastructure while I was in the city. Essentially they spent the time to design and build it so that it was minimally disruptive to the people in the city. Put differently... In the US it is very common that the city is torn up by large interchanges and spaces ceded purely to moving cars that are uncomfortable and frequently not safe for the pedestrian or cyclist. This is because things are built to the scale of cars and sacrifice the urban dweller's experience in favor of making life easy for the car to drive in and then drive out of the urban core. My experience in Japan was the opposite. The cities were built with the city dweller in mind and the infrastructure was a necessary part of it but was not built in a way so as to disregard the needs of the people in the city. This makes a world of difference.
In Europe rail corridors tend to be heavily grade separated in urban areas at least, meaning you just sort of get used to where the railways are and you forget they're even there half the time.
Indeed. And we also prefer putting railways on earthen embankments instead of continuous bridges here, which adds a little green space either side of the railway for noise insulation and solves that pesky problem of what to do with the space under the bridge, which in the US so often seems to become either needless parking space or an unofficial public garbage dump.
Wandering around London's South Bank, you are often oblivious to the rat's nest of railway viaducts that criss-cross the area. You only really notice their existence when a train trundles through at low speed. Look at the satellite view and you see just how many tracks there are. And half the hip restaurants and cafes are located in the arches under the viaducts too.
I recently had my first ride on my local train. The station is literally a 5 minute walk from the closest bus stop, which I pass almost every single day. I didn't even know where the station was before I purposfully went there.
I always remind people that public transit just doesn’t have the negative externalities of cars and trucks. In Montreal, some people have argued that the elevated portions of the REM are similar to highways. But in reality, they’re just not comparable. The viaducts that have currently been built for the REM are several times narrower than a highway, they don’t have the on & off ramps that highways do, and they will have zero-emissions electric light metro trains running on them. Despite this, some urban planners in Montreal insist that elevated rail needs to be avoided because they claim it would necessarily create a scar in the urban fabric similar to a highway. This position is dangerous given the high construction costs in Canada-if all grade-separated transit needs to be underground, not a lot of grade-separated transit is going to built because it’s so expensive to tunnel.
Absolutely, it’s important to acknowledge that structures are structures and not fundamentally different. But the size is fundamentally different and highways need a lot more!
@@RMTransit not to mention, trains only make noise when a train is passing, whereas highways always make noise. And when using high quality tracks, trains can get pretty quiet. Certainly quieter than a ten lane highway.
This. This needs to be said more. The REM de l'est is struggling because of that. A project that people from the east and north of Montreal would benefit so much..
@@dez7800 There was recently a new (unofficial) REM de l’Est proposition by the SDA which fixes most of the valid flaws of the initial design. Nimbies (or is it Nimbi ?) are once again rejecting the proposition because “duh there’s elevated section, and elevated bad”. They’re basically asking the government to build a costly tunnel below an existing railway ROW in an low density neighbourhood. Also, they’re complaining about the cost of the project while ironically asking for the system to be built underground.
@@binoutech I know, it’s quite frustrating. I get the sense these NIMBYs are really asking for the project to be cancelled and replaced with an on-street tramway. Of course, that would provide a worse (slower and less frequent) service for people living in outer neighbourhoods such as Pointe-aux-Trembles and Montréal-Nord, but opponents of the project in areas like Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve don’t really care because they live in an area that’s already served by the green line of the metro.
One clever solution to this what I saw in Utrecht in the Netherlands: the Centraal Station building isn't placed parallel next to the tracks, it was built above them, crossing all tracks. It looks like a gigantic shopping mall, so no space is wasted by the station, you can easily cross it and you can simply use the escalators or lifts to access the platforms beneath it.
Birmingham New Street in the UK not only looks like a shopping centre but it actually has one over the top of it. Tracks are bellow ground, station concourse on the ground level and the shopping centre above that. Just goes to show that you don't need to lose the space allocated to the station at all if you want to. In fact that is going to be prime real estate for any kind of retail development since those gravitate towards major transportation connections as they need to get lots of shoppers in and out to stay in business. There are a lot of things you can do with rail like that which are not so easy with highways though. Sticking columns between the tracks to build stuff on top is not as much of a problem as it would be doing the same between the lanes of a highway, road vehicles depart from their lane with too much frequency to make that safe. Thus why making a wide road corridor bellow ground is such a problem you would need more supports which would then mean making separate carriageways to provide the room for barriers to keep vehicles from striking said supports which would definitely be very fatal at highway speeds and for heavy vehicles like a truck at that speed it is likely to collapse the structure above too. Not to mention the whole issue of cars and trucks poisoning the air especially in enclosed spaces making them deadly without a lot of ventilation to vent the poison gas and that is when they are not going wrong and setting themselves on fire which is not unheard of with all the flammable fuel they carry.
Berlin Central Station might further optimize this. A office building on top of the east west corridor on top a shopping center on top of the underground north south corridor.
Also good to know that Utrecht Centraal is the busiest railway station in the Netherlands, serving over 200k travellers per day, and serves as a massive national interchange. Most train trips over any appreciable distance that don't have a direct connection, have only 1 connection at Utrecht.
I never understood how roads have become a lesser barrier than railway corridors. Like the chances of being hit when crossing big roads is pretty big, whereas rail corridors are empty tracks most of the time. Even in countries like the Netherlands where trains sometimes run per 15 minutes.
The main difference is that roads are smooth while railway tracks aren't and in a few places; passing over the latter is thus much more difficult than the former and when it's electrified by a third rail (not very common in open systems outside of SE England, Berlin, Hamburg but still), crossing is all but impossible. I certainly prefer to cross a road with one car every 30 seconds over rails with a train every five minutes. That being said, I would never cross a quite busy road without traffic control, especially when there are multiple lanes and no isle in the middle.
@@MarioFanGamer659 Rails can be flat, you can build them flush to the ground, normally this leave a gap for the wheels but this can be solved by a flexible cover.
@@Lancasterlaw1175 Okay, I forgot grade crossings, though in case of them, it's easy to assume that at least here in Europe, they're protected and they're similar to traffic lights on roads (and of course, it's also the only legal option and doing it anywhere else is jaywalking/trespassing). Of course, unprotected crossings also exist but they should only exist in remote places with only few trains per hour and with enough clearance, not much different to two crossing roads in some obscure location at which point I'd call them equally dangerous.
@@MarioFanGamer659 One train every 5 minutes carries a LOT more people, provided it's a passenger train, than one car every 30 seconds. 2 cars a minute, over 5 minutes, is 10 cars. Probably single-occupancy, but let's be generous and call it 15 people. 1 train every 5 minutes, even if it's a short, 2-car, DMU, exceeds the carrying capacity of a bus. Even at 10% occupancy, that's about 15-16 people. (I'm using the Nippon_Sharyo_DMU stats that I found on Wikipedia for an example.) If you're in an area that can benefit from a passenger train every 5 minutes, you're probably in a pretty urban area already, or perhaps in the greenbelt between 2 urban areas. Granted, automobile roads are inherently smoother, as the car needs them to be smoother, whereas a train track only needs to be smooth for about an inch or two, in two places, about 54 inches apart.
@@MarioFanGamer659 In dense urban centers, it's often best to use grade separated railway tracks, which makes crossing them a lot safer since you won't actually have to cross the track. Meanwhile, grade separating pedestrians from roads is much more expensive and generally brings about a lot of undesirable side effects. Not to mention, grade separating roads doesn't work for local connectivity. Grade separating pedestrians from car traffic also isn't so much for the benefit of the pedestrians, it's to move those pesky peds out of the way of car traffic and keep car traffic moving. Roads and rail function differently on a fundamental level. And it all has to do because all modes of transport can play nice with each other, except cars. They're the playground bully.
Chicago's decking of part of the commuter rail corridor leading into Millennium Station has resulted in Millennium Park, one of the crown jewels of Chicago's park system and one of its most popular. It's a great place always full of people. Most of the time when I hear people talking rail corridors acting as barriers, separating neighborhoods, and being very noisy, they're talking about rapid transit elevated rail lines. Most of the time their only references are Chicago's L and NYC's elevated subway lines which are a century or more old or industrial rail lines in the industrial side of cities which are loud w mile long trains and very dirty and undesirable places to be around. New rapid transit lines are much less noisy and quieter than road overpasses, even Chicago's famously loud L lines don't separate neighborhoods at all. In fact, the stations tend to act as unifiers for both sides of the neighborhood attracting businesses and services and others are small residential stations that just blend in. Elevated rapid transit lines are much smaller and less imposing than freeways or even many road overpasses, so they don't have the same effect. New rapid transit elevated lines tend to be "lighter" than elevated roads (or those old elevated lines in Brooklyn, etc), even when running in the center of a road median. I often refer to Vancouver as an example of modern elevated lines that blend into neighborhoods quite well.
There’s a reason why much of Tokyo’s rail corridors are all elevated: they allow people to move under them. Ground level corridors were usually there long before urban development, for example the JR East Chūō Main Line west of Tachikawa Station.
Yep and in other cities there are projects going on to elevate various lines so there are no grade crossings which makes it much easier to move underneath the lines.
From a pedestrian/cyclists view the situational difference is at best marginal. If you can't cross, it doesn't matter whether you can't cross 40m of high capacity rail or 80m of noisy traffic-choking highway. You aren't getting to the other side either way. The solutions are effectively similar, too: overpasses, underpasses, any sort of elevated or underground building. Level crossings are theoretically possible but frowned upon in both cases. On foot, this can make some real frustrating trips. Anecdotally, I once was on a hike where it turned out that a pedestrian bridge over an autobahn was closed for construction. I had to detour a good eight kilometers to get across at the next opportunity (and that was a semi-flooded underpass). Similarly, in Munich, the average distance between rail crossings for the main corridor is a good 1,5 to 2km. That's nothing for a car and not much on a bike, but a real nuisance on foot. So, yeah, obviously we can make all sorts of arguments about railway corridors and they are all true, but for the question of "can railway corridors cut cities or neighborhoods in half?" the answer very clearly is "absolutely yes".
On the other hand since you need fewer of them and they aren't as wide and don't need as much ventilation it is certainly easier to have regular safe crossings on a few rail corridors than on every street in a city.
Yeah, that seemed to be the crux of the initial comment which spawned this entire video and it didn't even get a mention until about 10:49 when he went into that 'decking-over' spiel. The rest was about rail lines space efficiency both in straights and interchanging but that was all basically irrelevant to the point, which you thankfully pointed out, that both highways and train corridors cut through cities and neighborhoods often without easy and time efficient ways across for pedestrians. For rail it's obviously a shorter distance and thus more opportunities for crossings, but that was barely discussed. This means that in my opinion, this is one of Reese's weaker videos conceptually excecated wise due to him bringing up that initial comment. That comment was something that was always in the back of my head when watching that ended up not being addressed in a well enough way.
I've had similar experiences as a cyclist and pedestrian. I feel that we could generally up our game when it comes to distance between rail crossings. Maybe even more importantly, we could really use some way of making the crossings more accessible for people using wheelchairs or people using bikes. Many of the crossings near my house are completely inaccessible by wheelchair and nearly unusable with a bike loaded up with groceries.
@@aidankeys8534 From my humble point of view it was a big mistake to build the first train tracks in cities on huge dam-like constructions. Easy to say from the future but I think cities that develop mass transit in large scale shouldnt make that same mistake (for urban planning reasons) and dig a ditch right from the start.
That's why I'm glad that in most major cities here in the Netherlands, the railways sit on an elevated embankment, so it's possible to interrupt the embankment for a short bridge at very low cost wherever you want, even decades after the railway line was built. That's resulted in roads crossing under the railway every few hundred meters in my city, and cycling/pedestrian paths even more frequently.
The answer to your question is, "Yes, they are barriers, but they are much smaller and less offensive than highways, and they are much more space-efficient." One of the other differences is that the rail corridors were mostly constructed over 100 years ago, and the neighborhoods grew up around them. The highways, on the other hand, were built more recently and blasted through neighborhoods, often destroying them.
Problem is if you're planning to improve train connections in North America you're going to need to build new rail corridors. And there you'll run into the same issue as with new highways, because the stations they lead to will need to be somewhat central to fulfill their purpose. A lot of cities just completely lack that. Both something that can serve as a modern central station as well as the corridors to serve it. So you'll still have to cut communities in half. Unless the plan's gonna be to just repurpose the corridors of existing highways, which will be a tough sell in most places. Even tougher than public transport in general already is.
@@TheRobidog I understand the problems. We made the mistake of giving up a lot of rail corridors, and acquiring new ones will be expensive and unpopular. Near the city centers we can run the lines underground - also expensive - though some rail can be run in highway medians. But as energy costs increase, we'll come to appreciate that the most fuel-efficient means of travel is by rail.
@Bobrogers99 You also need to modify that underground plan, in areas where the geography and water tables would make it impossible. Former swampland (FL) for instance.
I think distinction needs to be made between passenger and freight, especially without grade separation. Takes a whole lot longer to wait for a mile + long freight train than a couple hundred meter long passenger train.
That could be solved by, oh, I don't know, limiting crossing blockages to no more than 1 minute, tops, between the hours of 6AM and 11PM. Apparently Oklahoma recently tried something like that, but the Supreme Court struck it down.
Uhhhh... does the freight rail need to go DOWNTOWN? I think not. The freight rail goes to the industrial district, out of the way of people trying to get to the supermarket. (Of course this runs into problems when the intermodal freight depot and the passenger rail station are easy walking distance.. which Seattle solved by stuffing both *under* the city and providing a dedicated pedestrian bridge over the freight rails... not super optimal but it works well enough.)
if you include fences and ditches then train corridors can be more of an obstacle to pass (without overhead walkways). But disregarding those you're way more likely to be hit by a car crossing the street than hit by a train crossing tracks.
@@techtutorvideos well I live in NY at the moment behind LIRR tracks. I’ve seen one person jump the rails. I believe New Yorkers respect the trains more, but it’s also because we’ve had them since 1830s. And I’m actually an American lol I just love British history.
Although I ofcourse agree that railroad tracks are less of barrier than those horrible innercity highways, i think that permeability of rail corridors hasn't been on the high agenda of most rail activities either.. especially if you look at high speed corridors.. So improvement is possib;e.., (and there are great buried highway parts, just look at maastricht's king willem alexander tunnel
It's interesting to realize that even if rail corridors do pose a similar obstruction as highways, the stations ("interchanges") themselves are fundamentally designed for humans. The trains are stopped or moving slowly, and lots of people walking around allow the possibility of businesses and public space. Whereas highway interchanges and ramps have the exact opposite effect; high volume and speed of traffic are unpleasant to be around and also require lots of road to get dispersed into city streets.
Great discussion on the topic. Other things to consider is rail corridors in cities are typically long existing often dating to 1800s within cities, newer commuter lines tend to account for access. Another issue with adding tunnels for vehicular traffic is all the buried utilities and building foundations in a very limited space and providing ventilation.
A freeway or turnpike and some arterial roads is a far bigger barrier to pedestrians than any railway corridor can ever be. Just look at the 401 or more extreme examples in Edmonton in the form of the Wytemud or worse yet the radically widened Fort Road running through northeast Edmonton. Yes you often end up waiting longer for the lights to change then the nearby trains to clear the crossing and even if you have the right of way to walk across you are taking a serious risk of getting hit by any left hand turning car. It's not joke, when when an arterial road ends up being over 180 feet wide and you have only 3 seconds to run across it before the light changes.
Highways are not only a great barrier for pedestrians and people who do not use them, but also a great barrier for all living beings and nature itself. In my region, this is being taken very seriously when new highways have been planned, trying to at least build a green viaduct every few km to minimize the impact on the environment where they are needed or where it is crucial to minimize the impact, to be crossed by the fauna itself and even trees have been planted on them to prolong the forest. Still, it's not the perfect solution (since it's still a funnel) but at least we didn't split the woods in half with an impassable trench.
Another great video! This is something that doesn't get a lot of attention, so I'm glad you're addressing it! Also there are other solutions as well, like the S-Bahn model where suburban trains run underground through the city centre.
Rail is better than road not because rail corridors are less imposing than highways, but because they can carry an order of magnitude more people with the same amount of space. While some space being taken up by "dead zone" right of ways are nessicray to enable rapid movement in cities, rail allows you to minimize the size/ impact of the scar.
My 3 cents: 1) A 2 track railway occupies the same space as a 2 lane road, but has the carrying capacity of a 6 lane freeway. 2) Rail corridors can be interlined with slower suburban and relatively faster express trains operating on the same corridor, and the same corridor could be used to move freight overnight (Example is the UK Southern Railways Mainline). It's much more sprawling to do that with highways (Example is the New Jersey Turnpike). 3) Highway speeds are highly variable and Maximum possible speed is around 80 MPH in rural areas. Passenger trains can easily go faster that that. The Southern Railways Mainline can support track speeds of 125 mph, and this isn't even high speed rail.
on top of decking, there are rail lines that partially go underground like the French RER or the English Crossrail projects (with Elizabeth line being operational now and crossrail2 in planning phase). But I'd go further and say while the rail corridors are large, train stations and metro stations themselves actually make things more walkable, immediately around them tends to be good spots for commercial areas, shops and offices while slightly further away but still in easy walking distance tends to make good medium or high density residence space. These walksheds make good living areas and make good spots for setting up businesses. This is because people will walk or cycle to a train station, and means there is a greater chance of them going into shops closer to the train station. When you have a good mass transit system, cars go from being a necessity to a "luxury", where that luxury is perhaps not as luxurious as some people believe.
Also in London HS1 and HS2 are mostly underground and mostly under other railways but because its a tunnel it doesn't follow the old railway above exactly taking there own curves and stations
@@hens0w In London, indeed, HS1 was primarily for the Eurostar, and going across London to Kings Cross St. Pancras would be painful overground! HS2 goes underground in many places including to avoid excessive deforestation of an ancient forest along the way, it is quiet interesting the lengths they are going too, obviously they can't avoid any deforestation at all but it's very much trying to be as carbon neutral as possible.
Good point that train stations make things more walkable. It's much in the same way that highways lead to strip malls with large parking lots, because they make thing more drivable.
That's insightful. When people leave a train line, they're at least initially pedestrians, for whom shopping is convenient, whereas people leave a freeway in their cars, which are a barrier for shopping.
I dream of the day when we'll view cars the same way we view horses and carriages now: an antiquated form of transportation that was historically widespread, but has since been relegated to sport and recreational use.
This kind of reminds me of the railroad corridor in Salt Lake City where I am most familiar with that acts as a barrier as well. There is a citizen proposal to move the tracks underground and restore services to a historic train station but I don't know if that will happen.
It's interesting seeing how Taiwan is handling this as well. While railway corridors don't divide cities like highways do, they are still there and level crossings are a pain point, especially in a city. The TRA lines through Taipei were buried back in the 90s, with some sections elevated in New Taipei City, notably portions of the corridor going to Keelung. Taoyuan is looking to bury the rail lines through the center of the city there (while building elevated metro lines). Taichung finished elevating the rail lines through the city about two or three years ago. Kaohsiung is putting the finishing touches on burying the railway down there. And there's plans to elevate portions of the line between Taichung and Tainan, including through Chaiyi City. I'm not aware of any plans to do the same on the east coast, but things there are not as busy or well populated.
It doesn’t have to be a barrier, as long as you have pedestrian access points at regular intervals. Or you could “hide” the rails, but you’d have to add in the costs to dig the line underground, or put a cap over the rails and add in park space. Edit: also, the Seattle tunnel actually removed several highway exits, it would have been way more expensive to replace the old elevated highway AND all of it’s exit ramps, but all underground. It’s basically an underground express lane around Downtown Seattle.
Anything you build has a footprint to it; visiting Shinjuku Station years ago, I was impressed by just how unappealing it was to walk through and around. It is a major transit hub, one of the biggest in the world, but you don't really see anything resembling a landmark, just a maze of corridors, escalators, and fare gates. Likewise, the exterior is an imposing concrete block, and while there is some development over and around the station, it's a significant walk to really get into the surrounding neighborhood. So while it's true that it takes up less space than a highway, it's still basically a lot of land allocated just to moving around people. It's thoughts like these that have me more interested in ways of downsizing the traffic - while still providing urban mobility - than to embrace any large transit build on principle, because the likelihood of impacting neighborhoods in an unequal fashion goes way up as you start adding scale and speed.
In Scotland, our biggest city, Glasgow, is pretty small, but the rail corridors coming in and out are well implimented, they cause very limited disruption for how useful they are, their are a few places south-east or north where they may reach the surface, but most of the lines going in or out are either elevated or under the ground- certainly in the city center, a railway NEVER impeded your travel as there are plenty of places to easily go under, if they aren't below your feet where you might occasionally feel a train rumbling past below you you barely even notice the railways when you aren't using them in most places- roads on the other hand- the M* totally divides the west end from the center after barreling through the eastend cutting it in half- Charing Cross is a horrible part of the city to walk through even with the motorway sunk into the ground because of all the intersections and the wide streets full of cars, it straddles to busy shopping areas, but it is baron itself apart from the odd hotel chain or office- you'd rarely want to go there, most people going from the city center to the west end get the subway as the layout makes going from the short distance from the city center to the main shopping street in the west end an unpleasant experience, a case of easily bikable or walkable distance, but nobody is biking or walking if they don't have to!
If you look at South London, where there is a lot less London Underground, we have quite a lot of viaducts, raised up humps and cuttings, that kind of divide south London up into a number of triangles and other polygons. That funnels traffic onto specific roads, is great, if you want to reduce pollution in the bits of the polygons that butt up to railways, but because we don't have large numbers of crossing points for bikes and pedestrians, we are not routing non-car users over the railways and they all end up funnelled into the gaps that are totally chugged up with cars. So, folks who potentially gain health benefits from living alongside a barrier to car movement, end up loosing those benefits, as the footpaths and cycle routes (if they even exist) push them into breathing tons of car fumes per year. Our way to solve this, is to divert road-building budgets into building crossings over the railways. On a railway that has viaducts that have arches, some of the rented out arches should be taken back and turned into crossing points for cycle paths and footpaths. On a railway that is built on a humped up bit of ground, a tunnel would actually have to be dug under the railway. This sort of thing should be budgeted for and scheduled to happen at the same time as engineering works. Where we have stations built onto the siide of a rail corridor, and there not a road that crosses the railway, we should rebuild the stations to bridge the railway (instead of sitting on one side) and have a footpath through the station). The Crossrail upgrade to Whitechappel did this. But, I think we should go further than Whitechappel and build small shopping complexes, that have a station at one end and a cycle route and footpath at the other end, across rail sites that cut two communities apart. This will increase the footfall at those stations and also put those stations at the heart of the new combined community. It will take money, for this sort of thing to happen. And it might take the sort of money, that is normally spent on a road bypass scheme. But, if we do start doing this sort of scheme, we can build in walkability around stations, without ever building in car-crossing points, that would threaten that walkability, if a politician decided to try to favour car lobbyists.
While rail corridors are obviously a lot more effective than highways, I find them barely better when it comes to barriers within cities. If you’re not able to cross it, it doesn’t matter how small or efficient it is, you still can’t cross it
I live in Eindhoven, and the elevated train tracks really split the city in 2. The university campus and the city centre are pretty close together, but it feels like they are in completely different parts of the city
Is that because of the tracks of CS , or because of the fact that the campus is surrounded by 2x2 roads on four sides ? The campus is seperated from the tracks by the 2x2 prof Dorgolaan and some office parking lots. And they are about as wide as the CS tracks .. And the campus it self is built will all boxy 6-10 story buildings. So that all combined will definitely give a different atmosphere ...
@@allws9683 true, but still, the southern part of Woensel and the the rest of the city is separated by the train tracks which are only traversable at 5ish points, making it a real barrier in the middle of the city
@@frontrowviews Yeah, probably. But isn't that also the nature of prof Dorgolaan? South of town centre is Boutenslaan, part of the inner circular road (without tracks), is a similar barrier. it splits the Tongelreep park and has also about 5 bike/foot underpasses. What else should you do?. digging the track underground is expensive. And unlike in a town like Almelo before, here it does not have level crossing problems. Nor does it split an old neighbourhood as in Delft. Around the track is the Uni Campus, Philips stadium and the post-industrial neighbourhood De StrijpS. So it is not interrupting residential neigbhourhoods really. The Villapark neighbourhood will problably relish its isolation. What should be done is improve (make more pleasant/safe) the underpasses for bikes and pedestrians, cause they are dark and ugly. The biycle gutter at the 2x3 lane Insulindelaan underpass is really unacceptable to Dutch standards! Just as the gutters at Boschdijk and Philitelaan... Eindhoven makes p.r. with the floating bike roundabout and more bike bridges, but here you see why the city always had the image of 'the City of (traffic) Lights' !!
While I understand your points, I do sympathize with the original question. I live near an overground railway line, and it is a considerable barrier when going on recreational walks, since so many routes are funneled onto the few crossings spaced hundreds of meters apart. But of course the usefulness of this railway for transport far outweighs the inconvenience of lengthening a walk to get past it, so I don't really mind.
“The wrong side of the tracks” phrase had to come from somewhere. Its obviously been an issue of division for awhile, but, do the pros outweigh the cons? I'd say yes, as long as care is taken to prevent it from becoming a socioeconomic division, with one side lacking access to necessary public and community services.
One thing to note about electric trains and their emissions is that you're shunting the issue one step back from the vehicle itself to where they get their grid power from, for instance in NZ the vast majority of the national grid is renewable energy with 82% of it being renewable whereas less fortunate nations such as Australia use only 32.5% and thus their electric trains on average "emit" far more on average than ours would but even at such a low amount electric trains are still worth it.
Thing is rail corridors don’t even need to be on ground level; here in Singapore virtually all of the MRT metro tracks are either underground (particularly in the city centre) or elevated off the ground. In an underground situation the tracks are effectively invisible from ground level, and you could easily be standing in a spot that would be surrounded by MRT tracks had they not be underground and not even realise it; for example, the North-South and East-West Lines’ total of 4 tracks weave among themselves while running between City Hall and Raffles Place stations, right through several historical landmarks and across the Singapore River into a forest of skyscrapers at the Raffles Place end, but that is all underground - on the surface level you would be hard-pressed to believe that four busy metro tracks run through the area unless you are shown a map of the area with the MRT tunnels superimposed on it. Things are visually more busy in an elevated situation, but even then, because the tracks are lifted off the ground pedestrian and vehicular circulation is still possible underneath the tracks. For example, along the elevated sections of the North-South Line, one can often find a linear park build along and underneath the MRT viaducts; these form part of the so-called Park Connector Network spanning the whole of Singapore, functioning as a network of recreational cycling and pedestrian paths linking various parks, nature reserves, and residential neighbourhoods together. And along the East-West Line (particularly on the western section west of Redhill station), the line mostly runs along a road median, maximising space efficiency and effectively turning the corridor into a multi-modal one capable of carrying both railway and road traffic. There’s even one recently-constructed section - between Gul Circle and Tuas West Road stations - that is designed as a triple-decked traffic corridor: local road traffic on the ground level, express road traffic on a road viaduct on the second level (intended to allow road traffic from the future Tuas Port to bypass local traffic in the area), and the MRT viaduct on the third level. By stacking road and rail traffic along a single corridor, land space use is maximised, and traffic throughput along the now multi-modal corridor is greatly increased. Many sections of the upcoming Jurong Region Line - which will be fully elevated - will also be built right over existing and future road corridors as well.
This video was bloody FANTASTIC. I have some notes, but this argument was digestibly dissected and preneted in a clear and entertaining way. Well done.
Another excellent video. I have thought about how rail lines can create a scar through downtowns. However, many great points were made in the video that I had not considered. RM's point about freeway on/off ramps is an important one. When grade separated, freeways still have these ugly ramps dropping fast moving cars into downtown, while railways don't.
One other point: there can be a benefit to a city having some structure/constraints from its transport corridors, waterways, parks, etc. These can create distinct neighbourhoods, encouraging dense development and local services. A major highway does this, but probably the worst of any of these barriers because of the impact beyond the corridor itself -- junctions, traffic on local streets, etc.
The Brightline passenger train in South Florida runs through densely populated areas, but with simple grade crossings so it doesn't create a much of a barrier between neighborhoods on either side. With few overpasses, it's much cheaper to construct, which makes up for all of the fatal collisions along the corridor when vehicles ignore the crossing signals.
It would honestly create less of a barrier if it were fully grade separated. But that would cost money and the whole Brightline project was built as cheap as humanly possible.
@@davidty2006 it's a shame the drivers have to pay with their mental health. And I'm not sure about the states, but in many countries, train drivers are no longer allowed to drive if they're involved in a certain number of fatal events.
Most points in this video might apply to Toronto but not Montreal. Contrary to Montreal, rail corridors in Toronto center are mostly passengers because there is no port close to downtown and rail yards are up north. Huge opportunity for more and better transit. Here in Montreal, nearly all rail corridors are primary used for freight to serve the various port terminals and rail yards. Thus the situation is very different on an eventual electrification, noise, safety (derailment..), connectivity (at-grade crossing very difficult on freight, bridging over / tunneling under very complex and costly), adding passenger capacity & stations, etc.
It’s so frustrating to see how nothing is being done in Montreal to improve commuter/regional rail service. It certainly has something to do with freight operations, but I think there’s also just a lack of political will. The St-Jérôme line could easily be bought by the government, electrified, double-tracked where necessary, and have 15 minute all-day service. And would it really be impossible to have hourly off-peak service on the Mont-Saint-Hilaire line, even if that involved building some more track? Seeing everything that they’re doing in greater Toronto for GO Expansion, it’s honesty shameful that the ARTM seems to think that the current commuter rail service in Montreal is sufficient.
@@ethandanielburg6356 There isn't much that local political will can do against class 1 railroads. They tried to force CP to grant at-grade pedestrian crossing, this went to court and the City lost on most aspects. It is not in railroad interests to share their network. The St-Jerome line as very little freight traffic so could be a candidate for electrification, faster and more frequent speed. but doubling of tracks would be very costly as the current corridor runs of lots of narrow viaducs that would need to be enlarged. Would be costly but feasible. The St-Hilaire line is doomed as it runs alongside the CN main line which funnel all traffic from eastern Canada/Quebec and port facilities on south shore. Then onto the Victoria bridge and complex locks system. Considering there is the yellow line metro to the north and upcoming REM to the south, the St-Hilaire line will most probably stays the way it is for the foreseeable future. On the west end, the Vaudreuil line could be electrified with fast and frequent service, as the right of way is probably sufficient to double/triple tracks and avoid conflicts with freight. But considering the upcoming REM will partly feed from the same user base, I doubt this line will get much attention.
@@dannymongrain4788 That’s too bad for the Mont-St-Hilaire line. Its currently schedule is really bad outside of rush hour. As for the St-Jérôme line, I imagine gradual improvements could be made, similar to what GO has been doing in greater Toronto. Perhaps significant sections could even be left single-tracked (with some double-track being added in strategic places) and you could maybe still have a train every half-hour or so. Having no trains for several hours during the middle of the day is not good.
@@ethandanielburg6356 I seem to recall there is very little freight traffic on the St-Jerome line and only on the Montreal side as the north shore is owned by Exo and is 100% passenger. I wonder if they could do like the Otrain line 2 in Ottawa (ex Trillium), where a few freight train may circulate but only at night? Dedicated way during the day, coupled with double track only at stations (for passing), full electrification with DMU, new infill stations at L'Acadie, Canora, Décarie... we could get a very decent RER-style service.
@@dannymongrain4788 That would be amazing! My preference would for using electric trains rather than diesel multiple units (I seem to recall that the Kitchener ION light rail, which is electric, is still able to have freight trains go over it at night). But even if we were to use DMUs or even diesel locomotives, having frequent all-day service would be such a game changer. Given that there’s a provincial election coming up, this could totally be a proposal that different parties could support.
since most tend to be 2-4 tracks at worst they are the switching network for major yards and stations. VS a 6 lane highway plus on and off ramps and shoulder.
I agree with this in principle, but it's important to realise that rail corridors can exacerbate poor connectivity caused by car-centric planning, which is made clear with the desire path at Dundas St and Cawthra Ave in Mississauga, crossing the CP Galt Sub/GO Milton Line. In that case the lack of other pedestrian connectivity options does leave the rail line as a genuine barrier, and people have lost their lives trying to cross it to get to their destination faster
I’ve thought about this a lot. Calgary has almost entirely overground rail. Building walking/wheeling permeability is a must. But it’s also a must when building massive highways through the city… 🤷♂️
Rail corridors can indeed be barriers, but there are a variety of ways that this can be solved for- Older rail lines in the UK are often on viaducts, rather than at grade, which allows for tunnelling the street grid under them, and using the space under the line as commercial premises- lots of small businesses are situated in railway arches. Sometimes, it's just another argument for putting the rail line in a tunnel for the densest section of the route- like the video says, this is a lot more viable than for highways.
I'm pretty sure the problem is not the noise or the width of the railway but the division it creates in the cities. It's pretty much the same as highways do. It segments and isolates neighborhoods and facilitates decay, unsafe streets, lower value buildings and lower income inhabitants. Even in rich cities you can notice sone ridges created by infrastructure.
The argument that railway corridors are OK because they are better than road corridors isn't logical. Heavy railway corridors are usually a very large scar on a city, not just for the width of the corridor but often for some distance either side for reasons that an Urban Planner can explain better than me, but in a nutshell, they work against the walkability of a city. Of course, this needs to be offset against the value that the railway corridor delivers. There are exceptions, notably in cities where the street network was built after the railway. I live in a city where the heavy railway formed a barrier between the city and the harbour with very little permeability between the two. After 30 years of debate, the railway was removed and replaced with parks, walkways, plazas and road links to restablish the original city grid. The results have been dramatically positive, and nobody would suggest reinstating the heavy railway at that point.
It's true, that the railway corridor in my Hometown Zurich is a big divider, it's kinda hard to cross from one side to the other and there is only one newly build tram line going over it and just 3 bus corridors crossing it, and it is pretty wide there aren't any footbridges for like a kilometre and it's average width is like 100-200m, and it isn't really easy to cover or tunnel it all, it will stay as a divider for a long time
I think something that can be done is to put the line in a trench, like at Summit in New Jersey, so that the line cuts across the municipality, but also doesn’t if you catch my drift. Something that could be done as well is tunneling a large portion of it, and covering up the space that was left behind into various buildings, parks, and allow the community, let’s say Toronto, to better access the waterfront, as an example
Regarding space required on a rail corridor versus a highway, I’m reminded of an in-car ad the LIRR ran a few years ago: “Without the L-I-R-R, the L-I-E would be W-I-D-E-R.” It emphasized the fact that the Long Island Expressway would need 16 lanes to move the same number of people the LIRR moves on 2 tracks.
The NYC area has several huge corridors for commuter rail which at times beats traffic on the highways though the one that goes between NY and NJ needs major expansion (and could’ve been expanded/open by now if the previous governor of NJ never cancelled the ARC Tunnel back in 2010). Hopefully you’ll take a ride to the new Grand Central Madison station (aka East Side Access) when it opens.
Its much better for the trains to be underground or elevated. Being on ground level disrupts a lot of the street level life and causes disturbances for pedestrians and traffic .
Here in Melbourne we have a pretty chunky rail corridor which runs just east of the Flinders St Station, it fans out to about 160m where the Hurstbridge and Mernda lines branch off. That whole branch could really be served well by a cap of some sorts.
I'm living in Germany, so I'm familiar with pretty good railway infrastructure. On the other hand, inner city highways are fairly rare here. In my hometown, there's an east-west railline, clearly deviding the town into a northern and a southern half. There are three bridges within the city limits, plus a pedestrian overbridge. And you can clearly see the railline does work as a barrier. Not only are the houses immediately next to the rails in a pretty bad shape, very cheap and only inhabited by very low income demographics, but there's also a clearly visible difference in social status of people living north and south of the railline. Today, I'm living in Berlin. Now, here the inner city raillines are mostly either elevated (east-west) or underground (north-south). So they don't create such a barrier in the center of the city. An exception would be the area just south of the innermost area, where the north-south line emerges from the tunnel and immediately creates a huge barrier between Schöneber on the western and Kreuzberg on the eastern side of it. However, that's nothing compared to the barrier formed by the Ringbahn, the circular line surrounding the inner part of Berlin. It is partially elevated, but nonetheless forms a clear destinction between the more attractive, more sought after, more expensive inner part and the more run down, way less popular and (somewhat) cheaper outer parts. My girlfriends apartment is just a couple dozen meters from the elevated east-west corridor. And I have to say, I can't agree with the statement that trains are smooth and quite. Absolutely not. All trains going there are electrified, so the commotion doesn't stem from the engines. It stems firstly from the brakes, and secondly from the steel wheels on the steel rails, which are quite loud, especially in curves. And the line is pretty much only curves, no straights, being adapted to the city's layout. And trains are running there 24/7, so there's rarely a minute when no train is running by. At night, it's a bit less frequent, but still: You can't think of sleeping with the window open. Which was terrible in the heat of this summer. Where I grew up, there was a motorway about a kilometer away. So I was used to sleeping with a constant hissing of the motorway. It's almost like the waves at the beach for me.
Boston has a great juxtaposition of rail and highway capacity where I-90 parallels the Northeast Corridor and the T's Orange Line. The highway here is noticeably louder and wider, while the tracks manage to carry four MBTA commuter rail lines, Amtrak's various NEC services, the Lakeshore Limited, and the Orange Line. There's a reason that the Orange Line was built along the Southwest Corridor instead of a new highway!
Hey Reese, thanks for the video ! I would like to know your opinion on a simple corridor elevation, e.g. Berlin's Stadtbahn. It is a corridor within the city, but I would argue that it does not hinder the city's walkability, but even creates lively places on its sides ^^ (Shops and bars underneath, plazas, etc.) London also does it well, Paris used to have one (today's Coulée Verte) I love them and wonder why we don't see them build anymore !
In my home town, the east coast mainline cuts right through the town, but because its raised and on bridges in some areas, or recessed and underneath overpass in other areas, it doesn't really make a divide
Another problem with cars underground is not just the engine exhaust, but also the tire particles. You can do something about the engine exhaust if you manage to get battery electric (or for that matter fuel-cell-electric) vehicles or even vehicles using overhead trolley wire(*) into general use, but that doesn't fix the tire particle problem. (*)Not just electric trolleybuses, but somewhere around here is a video of some electric trucks being tested in Germany -- they have dual pantographs to contact the wires when they are staying in one lane, and then when they can't do that, they run on battery power (also recharged while they are under the wire). Still going to make plenty of tire particle pollution, though.
I think the issue is more obvious in some European cities. Here in Munich (Germany) for example, a relatively wide stripe of rail connections going to the terminal station (right next to the historic inner city), flanked by rail service facilities, logistics and industrial areas, basically cut the western part of the city in half. You really feel that disconnect between the city districts north and south of the tracks, although it gets better as the old industry areas next to them are replaced by (mostly) housing and more and better ways to cross the tracks are built (like bridges and tunnels for pedestrians and bikes only). We also do have some kind of highway ring with a LOT of traffic around the inner city, but after decades of digging, large parts of it are now underground, which also does a great job in reducing the disconnect between the neighborhoods on each side of the ring street.
Montréal chose to put a park on top of its mont and run a tunnel through it. I've seen architectural concepts shown for Mont Royal town and they show greenspace on top of the shopping area and there is rail access nearby. I don't think they're going to build a Mont Royal though.
I wish that project were on the books. We need to build more track along the 407, and the Mississauga Missing Link, to allow at least 3 frieght lines so that we can push frieght off the line. And ideally two tracks for a circulating GO line to allow suburb to suburb trips.
Could you do a video on how north American cities could make use of freight rail corridors? Could a state owned freight rail corridor be converted to be useful for passenger rail? Would an elevated metro above the freight corridor make more sense, to still make use of the right of way?
@@techtutorvideos I think the real issue is the freight line owners don't really want to play the generous host, and they're really not incentivized to do so. They're good enough for the thing that makes them the most money.
There have been proposals to move the Gardiner to the rail corridor. There have also been proposals to move it to a tunnel under the lake. Mostly, there have just been proposals to tear it down without any replacement at all. I find it funny that when I talk to people who want to get rid of the Gardiner and get rid of the rail corridor what they point to as the problem is always Lakeshore Boulevard.
In London , historically , railways were not allowed to go through the centre which is why you have a ring of termini around the edge , the underground , Thameslink and now Crossrail , all underground , now allow passengers to cross with ease and en masse with ease and not creating barriers !
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I think this is a it depends a lot kinda question. Where I live rail lines are quite noisy, and often don't have sound barriers at all unlike bigger roads and motor ways. And the sound gets worse at night when there are more freight trains. When it comes to the separation effect of rail lines it's very noticeable. Here all of them run at ground level or on dirt embankments, which have less underpasses. But this can also be a benefit. There's a neighborhood which is surrounded by rail on 3 sides and thus has much less traffic going through it.
I live in Vaughan, and the rail corridor between Jane and Keele is a huge barrier when it comes to traffic. Getting to the other side of those tracks is a nightmare at most parts of the day. But that can also be blamed on lack of big enough roads to handle the traffic on them nowadays. For those who know the area, I have spent over an hour a number of times on different routes to get from Jane to Keele. If it's taking HWY 7, rutherford, or going as far north as Major Mack to get to the other side.
Barcelona had a rail corridor, they put a box around it, and now it's a very long elevated park that vibrates every few minutes, it would have been nicer if they'd moved it underground, but that would have disrupted traffic for longer
God YES they are barriers. In Portland, there's a MASSIVE industrial rail line cutting right through the middle of a super busy part of Southeast. It moves SO slowly it sometimes makes people late by 30-50 minutes to work.
I am quite jealous of Toronto’s mainline railways. My city is quite land constrained and has nothing that compares in infrastructure potential IMO. The BNSF mainline between Tacomadome and Seattle King Station has decent right of way potential, especially if capacity and service upgrades are made But the mainline between Seattle King Station and Everett Station is terrible, hugging the very curvy coastline that is prone to mudslides for its entire route and serving very few riders. Even the highway express commuter buses are faster than the commuter train between Seattle and Everett
I think one downfall for rail, at least in some North American cities, is that it functions as a barrier to some neighborhoods without providing a direct benefit. I lived within walking distance of Kipling Station in Toronto for 7 years, and never once used GO - headed downtown would be no more convenient but considerably more expensive than TTC, and headed the other way would just drop me in a handful of commuter parking lots not near anything. It just functioned as something that meant I couldn't get south of it without crossing a few unpleasant crossings (also, that everything on our balcony would get quickly covered in diesel exhaust or brake dust from the CP line). Meanwhile, while the 427 nearby would also be unpleasant to live by, but at least you're a lot more likely to get use out of it living in Etobicoke, because you've probably committed to owning a car. Admittedly, Toronto's major highways also almost function as a ring road and aren't expanding, while multiple rail lines bisect the core of the city. I'm southwest of the coming Mount Dennis Station now, so I'm now cut off from the city by two rail lines, but hopefully all the neighbourhood improvements will include the railpath coming this far north (in addition to the eventual transit coming).
I would say it's true, rail corridors really often are a barrier in (and out of) the cities. But there are many ways (such as those you cited) to make them less of a barrier. Underpasses, overpasses, either for pedestrians and bikes only, or also for buses, trams, and cars. Outside cities also for wild animals. All of this is possible, if there is will. And the remaining barrier, when good measures to allow safe grade separated crossinga are in place, is totally worth the much needed capacity of the rail corridors.
One cool project is the Hudson Yards development in NYC which was built over a subway rail yard, even though it's a millionaire's playground. In London developers are eyeing the space over traintracks to build apartments and some already have.
Lots of rail tunnels through the cores of Swedish cities. So much easier to work with than highways. (And then Denmark with their on street intercity trains…)
Living next to a rail corridor also means living with track maintenance which necessarily happens at unsocial hours. Incredibly noisy and warrants, ironically, noise barriers comparable to those on motorways.
The only thing I've noticed about rail corridors is specifically in smaller cities they result in the expansion of industry into inner city urban fabric. In Saint Louis (my home city) for example, historical maps show blocks being built up with houses very close to the tracks while now however all of these track adjacent areas have been filled up with industry. It seems similar to the effect of car dependent businesses being built up around highway exits. However I think both of these are more issues with city zoning as opposed to rail corridors themselves. Also in Saint Louis at least the main central rail corridor bisects the city in a valley which requires bridges to cross, most of these bridges are incredibly car focused with narrow or non existent bike and pedestrian infrastructure effectively making it very uncomfortable to cross these traintracks without a car. It basically functions to cut the city into 2 divided pieces of urban fabric. Again however, this can be an issue with the bridges themselves and not the railroads. This is just my perspective coming from a smaller city.
Thanks for the video Reese. I agree that it's super important to fully comprehend the full spectrum of benefits before making a comparison between the two modes of transportation. More rail = more livable, pedestrian friendly streets, and that's fine by me.
In the low countries, cycling "highways" are often placed next to rail tracks because of how quiet, green, and safe they are. Try cycling next to a highway. Not a fun experience.
Just want to say, I agree with you that burying highways doesn’t work, you’re just moving the traffic underground, but LA is a pretty vulnerable place to earthquakes so putting the highway underground probably wouldn’t get past an environmental review
@@giokun100 I’m not disagreeing with you, I’m just saying that’s the argument that would be put forth as the reason for opposition. Americans love a weak excuse to impede progress lol
It doesn't even need to be whole city sections: Even light rail (including tramways) can became barriers as seen by the Eschersheimer Landstraße in Frankfurt where the U-Bahn tracks makes it impossible to cross the street, allowing crossing only on few specific places (underground passages as well the stops).
My city has a heavy rail freight system that has few crossings often fair distances by walking or even driving from eachother, City 110k urban area has 8 crossing: 1 under pass 1 level crossing and 6 bridges Edit: 11 crossings 7 bridges Plus 2 pedestrian crossings, however 1 in under a bridge mentioned above And the other is only accessible by trespassing on private lands from 1 side
One issue that stands out is the number of Unios Station tracks that remain empty. Younger viewers may not be seare that, before CN built the northwrn detour freight trains ran along the "downtown" tracks too. Given the number of VIA trains (or lack of VIS trains) could the Union Station corridor actually be narrowed? Frankly the CP freight corridor through midtown is both a blot on the city but also a potential additional passenger corridor-like it was a long time ago (although the Peterborough branch has been allowed to deteriorate like the rail line here on the island. But try to convince CP.
I mean no one likes barriers, unless they're helping you personally. But, so long as transit is a way bigger benefit than the barrier is a drawback, it's probably okay. And if possible, mitigation options exist. Hopefully there's a will and a way to help with the issue that can be crossing tracks.
the main difference between highways and railroads in my opinion is most of the time there is atleast a 10 minute gap between trains at worst, but on a highway it’s a 10 *second* gap at best.
I like this topic. Carlsbad California benefits from the Coaster, San Diego's coastal regional (heavy) rail, with two stations. However, when you are walking and cycling around Carlsbad you realize that this railroad disallows easily crossing it, so you may have to go a miles out of your way to get from A to B. This is true all along the line in all of the beach cities. Big rail proponent here, but realizing that car centered design ignores the need for more direct routing over some rail.
Might I point out - that much of the 401 - is 12 lanes and in some sections -more, including the 401 - 400 intersection in your map (2 sets of 3 lanes in each direction). Yes- the sad part is- that means a mere 12k/hr- in each direction normally As GO is - 12 car trains- one every 5 minutes - is 24k - per rail (not quite subway) per rail.... twice the entire 401 - in a single track per direction.
In Stockholm, there are apparent plans of decking over our central rail corridor, effectively tying together the city center with brand new housing and commerce
Such a transit area moves so many more people, it is worth building wide underground passes and even overhead, if need be. Bridges can also be done. A thing i noticed: Small token "sewer tunnels" for pedestrians under a large street otherwise cutting through neighbourhoods seem apparently perfectly fine... Great. I also see how disadvantaged mobility scooters and wheelchair users are with current road design, a rail corridor is not the enemy.
Any time you build a bridge or a tunnel you add 20X to 50x the cost of putting in a road. This is why so many cities don't bother installing pedestrian friendly overpasses. If your city is run by penny pinching pound foolish conservatives the issue is a lot more noticeable
@@ph11p3540 Doesn't have to. Because cyclist and pedestrian infrastructure can be so much smaller than car infrastructure, you don't have to dig very deep (usually only about 3.5m to 4m) for an underpass, and it can also be significantly narrower, so it's easy to dig up an underpass using a basic digger. If you then construct the underpass and the road deck covering it from prefabricated standard parts, as we do here in the Netherlands, it actually becomes very affordable and quick to add underpasses to any road. It's even possible (it happened with a new motorway underpass here a while ago) to do it overnight.
@@rjfaber1991 Great to hear that your country is lucky to have sensible road management. Here in the U.K. ours have settled on the excuse for not building expensive pedestrian tunnels under roads ~ albeit installing traffic light controlled crossings ~ that underpasses create opportunities for muggers and people are scared of them. This has been the state of play for a couple of decades now and nobody has successfully challenged it yet.
@@JP_TaVeryMuch As a Dutchman with a profound interest in British culture (who even described himself as an Anglophile prior to Brexit), I can't disagree. When it comes to irrational scaremongering in politics, Britain unfortunately takes the crown. Of course, if there is a problem with muggers in underpasses (not that I for one second believe there is in most of Britain), the problem is with the muggers, not the underpasses. Perhaps the people using that argument should focus their attention on the socio-economic issues that drove these muggers into crime instead of taking it out on the infrastructure.
@@rjfaber1991 Oh dear you're not going to like this but I voted to leave. Reason being that we Brits don't like being told what to do and on a personal level, I was looking forward to being able to use the Airport Duty Free again after forty-odd years.
few aspects I want to point out: 1) rail corridors leading towards a downtown station tend to be wide as well, without providing any platforms where passengers can get on, off or change onto another train. Let's take Munich Central Station in Germany as an example. At the 8 km long rail corridor the narrowest points (which are under road bridges crossing over the rail corridor) it is 140m, 180m and 250m wide. In comparison to that: the widest stretch of highway in the city, counting 10 driving lanes + hard shoulder + median, is less than 50 m wide 2) While turns at highway interchanges take up a lot of space, so do tracks leaving the main rail corridor to the left or right, leading onto a different track / corridor. Often the space in between a railroad track triangle is so large that a neighborhood or commercial district fits into it, which however seems more space efficient than the unused space in between the ramps and loops of a highway interchange 3) both train stations, rail corridors and especially rail tunnels require well thought-out emergency access paths alongside the tracks, while emergency vehicles can simply drive on the road to an incident in a road tunnel
I can't see Toronto fully eliminating the Gardener expressway anytime soon, since it's one of the only high-ish speed connectors across the Toronto waterfront and in many ways justifies the existence of the lower portion of the DVP. What I could see though is the elimination of the center lane in favor of elevated light rail along a good portion of it's length. Though the forthcoming 'Ontario line' or line 7 of the TTC network may well render a plan like that redundant.
So, I live in Sitges in Spain, and the rail line crosses the city at grade to the North-East, and then exits it on a viaduct to the South-West. The at-grade crossing has a couple of underpasses for both pedestrians (directly next to the station) and veehickles (about equidistant between the station and the portals to the mountain tunnels). The rail corridor definitely doesn't have an effect on the city, though. I feel like they've done it right here.
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"On the other side of the tracks..." an expression often used until the 1960s to indicate huge social class differences and was particularly true before cars when tracks had to be walked over, under, or above, and when rail yards were in almost every town. Still true on extremely busy lines (current standards where frequencies tend to be low) when tracks are at ground level. Certainly true for high-speed lines that must be isolated or elevated.
Yep for sure, bridging (or going under) and major barrier is important, tracks can certainly be one.
It's still that simple here. South of the big railway line = Poor people, almost ghetto like streets where you don't wanna and shouldn't pass through (especially as a woman or discriminated minority) unless necessary, north of the big railway line = affluent or middle class people, nice parks where you like to hang out.
You could say the same for highways though. Basically any big traffic corridor going through a city is going to create that one side vs the other side perception. Providing enough ways to cross it, and making those ways pleasant is key. Obviously the wider it is, the more pronounced the effect is. There's a particularly interesting tunnel under the tracks at London Waterloo, which in the past was dingy and scary. In recent years, it's been turned into a destination by putting a bunch of nightclubs in the arches underneath, lighting the tunnel with bright coloured LEDs and it's become a graffiti art gallery. It sounds shady, but it's honestly not. It feels very safe. There's tons of people there having a good time.
River has same effect too!
Thames divides London too and have had effect on development of the city, so should we fill it over and build a park?
If the local govt decided to ignore development for certain part of the city, barrier or no barrier it's not gonna matter.
At least a rail corridor makes public transport more accessible.
I don't think I plan to walk to Birmingham from London to see my sister, so the rail corridor is not preventing my walking.
@@AshrakAhmed I saw a nice video here that explained it pretty well. The wind mostly blows west to east. Industry produced noxious smells. The people who could afford to, lived west, upwind, of these smells. People who couldn't afford to, and who really needed to live close by, got stuck with living on the east side of whatever was making the stink. Likely the place where they, or their neighbor, worked, for not enough pay to realistically think of moving to the other side.
What often gets forgotten:
A train or bus enters downtown stops for maybee a minute to let people out and leaves downtown again to get the next group and freeing up the space for the next vehicle incoming.
A car stays downtown for as long as the driver works/shops/… in the downtown area.
The area of roads for a working car network to work is easily outpassed by the area of parking lots needed for a working car network
I know self driving cars wont solve everything but this is one aspect they might improve upon regular cars. No need to have massive parking near every possible spot.
@@Knightmessenger absolutely this. Why not have autonomous vehicles go to a remote parking area, to be summoned by the user when they leave work, for example? The parking areas dont have to have room for pedestrians. They can be underground or anything suitable. The cars could charge during the day.
You summon them with an app and it tells you the pickup point and ETA? No cars parked in the city streets then.
@@Knightmessenger So instead of any hope of decreasing traffic you now increase traffic by increasing the number of trips a car makes ... ?
We're lucky that self-driving cars aren't happening this century anyway.
@@Knightmessenger If the vehicles are all networked, then the traffic will be routed to the appropriate roads and the congestion is calculated and controlled. There is no road rage and nobody is jumping lights or cutting people off. The dangerous part of a car is the driver.
@@Knightmessenger Instead they'll just "circulate". Or drive even MORE miles to go park themselves at the one spot they don't have to pay for parking at; your driveway, dozens of miles from where you work/shop/play.
What's worse, because they're So Much More Convenient than driving yourself, they'll exacerbate the sprawl problem, as suddenly living another 10-15 miles away from the center of the action isn't all that big of an inconvenience. Even an extra 30 minutes out just means you watch your favorite TH-camr on the commute, and not when you get home from the office. Just make sure the car has plenty of cupholders, and charging ports for your personal electronics.
They'll ALSO exacerbate the solo-occupant problem, because now so many more activities that the kids were frozen out of, (because neither of the parents could make time to take them), are available. So, now the kids are "driving" to soccer/dance/gymnastics/cub scouts/little league.
On the subject of barriers: If you put concrete pillars between the train tracks, which is possible because of the tracks, you can simply build an area on top that offers space for pedestrians. Imagine the concrete pillars between the car lanes just for a moment on a freeway.
I'm imagining a half-asleep lorry driver accidentally driving an 18 wheeler directly into one of those pillars and the entire drive way and whatever above it having to be put on alert while a safety crew checks it all over.
For sure, this is why I mention decking as much more viable on rail corridors and why underground highways tend to be narrow.
@@DoomsdayR3sistance This has happened a few times in the Seattle area over the years. There was an incident years ago when an oversize load went under a too low overpass along I-5 and actually took out the supports of the overpass. Thankfully the truck itself was holding up the bridge but it took them a good long while to clear that up. And that's not even getting into pillars in the lanes.
Well, the deck doesn't have to have pillars between every single lane. It's enough to have them (or a wall) in the median and on both sides of the highway. It's also safer to have a motorway go under a deck than it is to have a railway. After all, a derailing train can easily have several hundred tons of burning stuff, all connected to each other. A truck or even a few simply never do, and one truck doesn't take out all the others following it..
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this only really works when the railway is in a trough tho, but it is a great idea nevertheless, e.g. building a park on top.
Another thing that I really like about rail corridors in cities is when they're built on arches like in London and Berlin and have small buisnesses in the arches. Really adds to the character of a neighbourhood.
I spent 2.5 weeks in Japan in 2018, mostly in central Japan, so Tokyo, Kyoto, Nagoya, and Osaka.
Something that was very interesting to me, coming from the US, was how little the train lines and highways disturbed local walkability.
There were three major reasons that this appeared to be the case:
First, all rail corridors and highways were elevated or sunken. For highways they had very small, at least by US standards, on and off ramps that prioritized pedestrians and cyclists to be able to cross them.
Second, if the infrastructure was below ground then stuff was built on top of it and it was narrow. Some stuff had parks, buildings, etc. Most of it was not just a scar. Because it was narrow you did not have to walk a quarter to half mile across an otherwise naked bridge. And when you were on a bridge they generally decorated it so you would not have to see the highway.
If the infrastructure was elevate they built under it. Under any wide infrastructure there were shops and restaurants and things you would want to interact with. It was not just concrete supports. It was built in what I like to refer to as "human scale".
Third, there were very frequent pedestrian and bike crossings. If you were on foot you had very regular crossings under or over the infrastructure so that it did not impede your navigation of the city.
All of these combined meant that I really did not mind the presence of major infrastructure while I was in the city. Essentially they spent the time to design and build it so that it was minimally disruptive to the people in the city.
Put differently...
In the US it is very common that the city is torn up by large interchanges and spaces ceded purely to moving cars that are uncomfortable and frequently not safe for the pedestrian or cyclist. This is because things are built to the scale of cars and sacrifice the urban dweller's experience in favor of making life easy for the car to drive in and then drive out of the urban core.
My experience in Japan was the opposite. The cities were built with the city dweller in mind and the infrastructure was a necessary part of it but was not built in a way so as to disregard the needs of the people in the city.
This makes a world of difference.
In Europe rail corridors tend to be heavily grade separated in urban areas at least, meaning you just sort of get used to where the railways are and you forget they're even there half the time.
Indeed. And we also prefer putting railways on earthen embankments instead of continuous bridges here, which adds a little green space either side of the railway for noise insulation and solves that pesky problem of what to do with the space under the bridge, which in the US so often seems to become either needless parking space or an unofficial public garbage dump.
Wandering around London's South Bank, you are often oblivious to the rat's nest of railway viaducts that criss-cross the area. You only really notice their existence when a train trundles through at low speed. Look at the satellite view and you see just how many tracks there are.
And half the hip restaurants and cafes are located in the arches under the viaducts too.
I recently had my first ride on my local train. The station is literally a 5 minute walk from the closest bus stop, which I pass almost every single day. I didn't even know where the station was before I purposfully went there.
I always remind people that public transit just doesn’t have the negative externalities of cars and trucks.
In Montreal, some people have argued that the elevated portions of the REM are similar to highways. But in reality, they’re just not comparable. The viaducts that have currently been built for the REM are several times narrower than a highway, they don’t have the on & off ramps that highways do, and they will have zero-emissions electric light metro trains running on them. Despite this, some urban planners in Montreal insist that elevated rail needs to be avoided because they claim it would necessarily create a scar in the urban fabric similar to a highway. This position is dangerous given the high construction costs in Canada-if all grade-separated transit needs to be underground, not a lot of grade-separated transit is going to built because it’s so expensive to tunnel.
Absolutely, it’s important to acknowledge that structures are structures and not fundamentally different. But the size is fundamentally different and highways need a lot more!
@@RMTransit not to mention, trains only make noise when a train is passing, whereas highways always make noise. And when using high quality tracks, trains can get pretty quiet. Certainly quieter than a ten lane highway.
This. This needs to be said more. The REM de l'est is struggling because of that. A project that people from the east and north of Montreal would benefit so much..
@@dez7800 There was recently a new (unofficial) REM de l’Est proposition by the SDA which fixes most of the valid flaws of the initial design. Nimbies (or is it Nimbi ?) are once again rejecting the proposition because “duh there’s elevated section, and elevated bad”. They’re basically asking the government to build a costly tunnel below an existing railway ROW in an low density neighbourhood. Also, they’re complaining about the cost of the project while ironically asking for the system to be built underground.
@@binoutech I know, it’s quite frustrating. I get the sense these NIMBYs are really asking for the project to be cancelled and replaced with an on-street tramway. Of course, that would provide a worse (slower and less frequent) service for people living in outer neighbourhoods such as Pointe-aux-Trembles and Montréal-Nord, but opponents of the project in areas like Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve don’t really care because they live in an area that’s already served by the green line of the metro.
One clever solution to this what I saw in Utrecht in the Netherlands: the Centraal Station building isn't placed parallel next to the tracks, it was built above them, crossing all tracks. It looks like a gigantic shopping mall, so no space is wasted by the station, you can easily cross it and you can simply use the escalators or lifts to access the platforms beneath it.
Birmingham New Street in the UK not only looks like a shopping centre but it actually has one over the top of it. Tracks are bellow ground, station concourse on the ground level and the shopping centre above that. Just goes to show that you don't need to lose the space allocated to the station at all if you want to. In fact that is going to be prime real estate for any kind of retail development since those gravitate towards major transportation connections as they need to get lots of shoppers in and out to stay in business. There are a lot of things you can do with rail like that which are not so easy with highways though. Sticking columns between the tracks to build stuff on top is not as much of a problem as it would be doing the same between the lanes of a highway, road vehicles depart from their lane with too much frequency to make that safe. Thus why making a wide road corridor bellow ground is such a problem you would need more supports which would then mean making separate carriageways to provide the room for barriers to keep vehicles from striking said supports which would definitely be very fatal at highway speeds and for heavy vehicles like a truck at that speed it is likely to collapse the structure above too. Not to mention the whole issue of cars and trucks poisoning the air especially in enclosed spaces making them deadly without a lot of ventilation to vent the poison gas and that is when they are not going wrong and setting themselves on fire which is not unheard of with all the flammable fuel they carry.
Berlin Central Station might further optimize this. A office building on top of the east west corridor on top a shopping center on top of the underground north south corridor.
Also good to know that Utrecht Centraal is the busiest railway station in the Netherlands, serving over 200k travellers per day, and serves as a massive national interchange. Most train trips over any appreciable distance that don't have a direct connection, have only 1 connection at Utrecht.
I never understood how roads have become a lesser barrier than railway corridors.
Like the chances of being hit when crossing big roads is pretty big, whereas rail corridors are empty tracks most of the time. Even in countries like the Netherlands where trains sometimes run per 15 minutes.
The main difference is that roads are smooth while railway tracks aren't and in a few places; passing over the latter is thus much more difficult than the former and when it's electrified by a third rail (not very common in open systems outside of SE England, Berlin, Hamburg but still), crossing is all but impossible. I certainly prefer to cross a road with one car every 30 seconds over rails with a train every five minutes.
That being said, I would never cross a quite busy road without traffic control, especially when there are multiple lanes and no isle in the middle.
@@MarioFanGamer659 Rails can be flat, you can build them flush to the ground, normally this leave a gap for the wheels but this can be solved by a flexible cover.
@@Lancasterlaw1175 Okay, I forgot grade crossings, though in case of them, it's easy to assume that at least here in Europe, they're protected and they're similar to traffic lights on roads (and of course, it's also the only legal option and doing it anywhere else is jaywalking/trespassing).
Of course, unprotected crossings also exist but they should only exist in remote places with only few trains per hour and with enough clearance, not much different to two crossing roads in some obscure location at which point I'd call them equally dangerous.
@@MarioFanGamer659 One train every 5 minutes carries a LOT more people, provided it's a passenger train, than one car every 30 seconds.
2 cars a minute, over 5 minutes, is 10 cars. Probably single-occupancy, but let's be generous and call it 15 people.
1 train every 5 minutes, even if it's a short, 2-car, DMU, exceeds the carrying capacity of a bus. Even at 10% occupancy, that's about 15-16 people. (I'm using the Nippon_Sharyo_DMU stats that I found on Wikipedia for an example.)
If you're in an area that can benefit from a passenger train every 5 minutes, you're probably in a pretty urban area already, or perhaps in the greenbelt between 2 urban areas.
Granted, automobile roads are inherently smoother, as the car needs them to be smoother, whereas a train track only needs to be smooth for about an inch or two, in two places, about 54 inches apart.
@@MarioFanGamer659 In dense urban centers, it's often best to use grade separated railway tracks, which makes crossing them a lot safer since you won't actually have to cross the track. Meanwhile, grade separating pedestrians from roads is much more expensive and generally brings about a lot of undesirable side effects. Not to mention, grade separating roads doesn't work for local connectivity. Grade separating pedestrians from car traffic also isn't so much for the benefit of the pedestrians, it's to move those pesky peds out of the way of car traffic and keep car traffic moving.
Roads and rail function differently on a fundamental level. And it all has to do because all modes of transport can play nice with each other, except cars. They're the playground bully.
Chicago's decking of part of the commuter rail corridor leading into Millennium Station has resulted in Millennium Park, one of the crown jewels of Chicago's park system and one of its most popular. It's a great place always full of people.
Most of the time when I hear people talking rail corridors acting as barriers, separating neighborhoods, and being very noisy, they're talking about rapid transit elevated rail lines. Most of the time their only references are Chicago's L and NYC's elevated subway lines which are a century or more old or industrial rail lines in the industrial side of cities which are loud w mile long trains and very dirty and undesirable places to be around.
New rapid transit lines are much less noisy and quieter than road overpasses, even Chicago's famously loud L lines don't separate neighborhoods at all. In fact, the stations tend to act as unifiers for both sides of the neighborhood attracting businesses and services and others are small residential stations that just blend in. Elevated rapid transit lines are much smaller and less imposing than freeways or even many road overpasses, so they don't have the same effect. New rapid transit elevated lines tend to be "lighter" than elevated roads (or those old elevated lines in Brooklyn, etc), even when running in the center of a road median.
I often refer to Vancouver as an example of modern elevated lines that blend into neighborhoods quite well.
There’s a reason why much of Tokyo’s rail corridors are all elevated: they allow people to move under them. Ground level corridors were usually there long before urban development, for example the JR East Chūō Main Line west of Tachikawa Station.
Yep and in other cities there are projects going on to elevate various lines so there are no grade crossings which makes it much easier to move underneath the lines.
From a pedestrian/cyclists view the situational difference is at best marginal. If you can't cross, it doesn't matter whether you can't cross 40m of high capacity rail or 80m of noisy traffic-choking highway. You aren't getting to the other side either way. The solutions are effectively similar, too: overpasses, underpasses, any sort of elevated or underground building. Level crossings are theoretically possible but frowned upon in both cases.
On foot, this can make some real frustrating trips. Anecdotally, I once was on a hike where it turned out that a pedestrian bridge over an autobahn was closed for construction. I had to detour a good eight kilometers to get across at the next opportunity (and that was a semi-flooded underpass). Similarly, in Munich, the average distance between rail crossings for the main corridor is a good 1,5 to 2km. That's nothing for a car and not much on a bike, but a real nuisance on foot.
So, yeah, obviously we can make all sorts of arguments about railway corridors and they are all true, but for the question of "can railway corridors cut cities or neighborhoods in half?" the answer very clearly is "absolutely yes".
On the other hand since you need fewer of them and they aren't as wide and don't need as much ventilation it is certainly easier to have regular safe crossings on a few rail corridors than on every street in a city.
Yeah, that seemed to be the crux of the initial comment which spawned this entire video and it didn't even get a mention until about 10:49 when he went into that 'decking-over' spiel. The rest was about rail lines space efficiency both in straights and interchanging but that was all basically irrelevant to the point, which you thankfully pointed out, that both highways and train corridors cut through cities and neighborhoods often without easy and time efficient ways across for pedestrians.
For rail it's obviously a shorter distance and thus more opportunities for crossings, but that was barely discussed. This means that in my opinion, this is one of Reese's weaker videos conceptually excecated wise due to him bringing up that initial comment. That comment was something that was always in the back of my head when watching that ended up not being addressed in a well enough way.
I've had similar experiences as a cyclist and pedestrian. I feel that we could generally up our game when it comes to distance between rail crossings. Maybe even more importantly, we could really use some way of making the crossings more accessible for people using wheelchairs or people using bikes. Many of the crossings near my house are completely inaccessible by wheelchair and nearly unusable with a bike loaded up with groceries.
@@aidankeys8534 From my humble point of view it was a big mistake to build the first train tracks in cities on huge dam-like constructions. Easy to say from the future but I think cities that develop mass transit in large scale shouldnt make that same mistake (for urban planning reasons) and dig a ditch right from the start.
That's why I'm glad that in most major cities here in the Netherlands, the railways sit on an elevated embankment, so it's possible to interrupt the embankment for a short bridge at very low cost wherever you want, even decades after the railway line was built. That's resulted in roads crossing under the railway every few hundred meters in my city, and cycling/pedestrian paths even more frequently.
The answer to your question is, "Yes, they are barriers, but they are much smaller and less offensive than highways, and they are much more space-efficient." One of the other differences is that the rail corridors were mostly constructed over 100 years ago, and the neighborhoods grew up around them. The highways, on the other hand, were built more recently and blasted through neighborhoods, often destroying them.
Problem is if you're planning to improve train connections in North America you're going to need to build new rail corridors. And there you'll run into the same issue as with new highways, because the stations they lead to will need to be somewhat central to fulfill their purpose. A lot of cities just completely lack that. Both something that can serve as a modern central station as well as the corridors to serve it. So you'll still have to cut communities in half. Unless the plan's gonna be to just repurpose the corridors of existing highways, which will be a tough sell in most places. Even tougher than public transport in general already is.
@@TheRobidog I understand the problems. We made the mistake of giving up a lot of rail corridors, and acquiring new ones will be expensive and unpopular. Near the city centers we can run the lines underground - also expensive - though some rail can be run in highway medians. But as energy costs increase, we'll come to appreciate that the most fuel-efficient means of travel is by rail.
@Bobrogers99 You also need to modify that underground plan, in areas where the geography and water tables would make it impossible. Former swampland (FL) for instance.
@@darklelouchg8505 That would be more challenging and more expensive. On the other hand, cities in The Netherlands have managed it.
@@Bobrogers99 Better to adapt to the local topography and geography then try to fight it in many cases.
I think distinction needs to be made between passenger and freight, especially without grade separation. Takes a whole lot longer to wait for a mile + long freight train than a couple hundred meter long passenger train.
That could be solved by, oh, I don't know, limiting crossing blockages to no more than 1 minute, tops, between the hours of 6AM and 11PM.
Apparently Oklahoma recently tried something like that, but the Supreme Court struck it down.
Uhhhh... does the freight rail need to go DOWNTOWN? I think not. The freight rail goes to the industrial district, out of the way of people trying to get to the supermarket.
(Of course this runs into problems when the intermodal freight depot and the passenger rail station are easy walking distance.. which Seattle solved by stuffing both *under* the city and providing a dedicated pedestrian bridge over the freight rails... not super optimal but it works well enough.)
if you include fences and ditches then train corridors can be more of an obstacle to pass (without overhead walkways). But disregarding those you're way more likely to be hit by a car crossing the street than hit by a train crossing tracks.
Unless you are american xdxdxd
@@edwardcardozo8325 what?
@@edwardcardozo8325 🤡
@@Force05289 ....yeah they don't have rail
@@techtutorvideos well I live in NY at the moment behind LIRR tracks. I’ve seen one person jump the rails. I believe New Yorkers respect the trains more, but it’s also because we’ve had them since 1830s. And I’m actually an American lol I just love British history.
Although I ofcourse agree that railroad tracks are less of barrier than those horrible innercity highways, i think that permeability of rail corridors hasn't been on the high agenda of most rail activities either.. especially if you look at high speed corridors.. So improvement is possib;e.., (and there are great buried highway parts, just look at maastricht's king willem alexander tunnel
It's interesting to realize that even if rail corridors do pose a similar obstruction as highways, the stations ("interchanges") themselves are fundamentally designed for humans. The trains are stopped or moving slowly, and lots of people walking around allow the possibility of businesses and public space. Whereas highway interchanges and ramps have the exact opposite effect; high volume and speed of traffic are unpleasant to be around and also require lots of road to get dispersed into city streets.
Great discussion on the topic.
Other things to consider is rail corridors in cities are typically long existing often dating to 1800s within cities, newer commuter lines tend to account for access. Another issue with adding tunnels for vehicular traffic is all the buried utilities and building foundations in a very limited space and providing ventilation.
A freeway or turnpike and some arterial roads is a far bigger barrier to pedestrians than any railway corridor can ever be. Just look at the 401 or more extreme examples in Edmonton in the form of the Wytemud or worse yet the radically widened Fort Road running through northeast Edmonton. Yes you often end up waiting longer for the lights to change then the nearby trains to clear the crossing and even if you have the right of way to walk across you are taking a serious risk of getting hit by any left hand turning car. It's not joke, when when an arterial road ends up being over 180 feet wide and you have only 3 seconds to run across it before the light changes.
It is definitely harder to cross any freeway or even busy stroad like Calgary Trail than it is to cross an LRT track
Highways are not only a great barrier for pedestrians and people who do not use them, but also a great barrier for all living beings and nature itself. In my region, this is being taken very seriously when new highways have been planned, trying to at least build a green viaduct every few km to minimize the impact on the environment where they are needed or where it is crucial to minimize the impact, to be crossed by the fauna itself and even trees have been planted on them to prolong the forest. Still, it's not the perfect solution (since it's still a funnel) but at least we didn't split the woods in half with an impassable trench.
Another great video! This is something that doesn't get a lot of attention, so I'm glad you're addressing it! Also there are other solutions as well, like the S-Bahn model where suburban trains run underground through the city centre.
Rail is better than road not because rail corridors are less imposing than highways, but because they can carry an order of magnitude more people with the same amount of space. While some space being taken up by "dead zone" right of ways are nessicray to enable rapid movement in cities, rail allows you to minimize the size/ impact of the scar.
My 3 cents:
1) A 2 track railway occupies the same space as a 2 lane road, but has the carrying capacity of a 6 lane freeway.
2) Rail corridors can be interlined with slower suburban and relatively faster express trains operating on the same corridor, and the same corridor could be used to move freight overnight (Example is the UK Southern Railways Mainline). It's much more sprawling to do that with highways (Example is the New Jersey Turnpike).
3) Highway speeds are highly variable and Maximum possible speed is around 80 MPH in rural areas. Passenger trains can easily go faster that that. The Southern Railways Mainline can support track speeds of 125 mph, and this isn't even high speed rail.
on top of decking, there are rail lines that partially go underground like the French RER or the English Crossrail projects (with Elizabeth line being operational now and crossrail2 in planning phase). But I'd go further and say while the rail corridors are large, train stations and metro stations themselves actually make things more walkable, immediately around them tends to be good spots for commercial areas, shops and offices while slightly further away but still in easy walking distance tends to make good medium or high density residence space.
These walksheds make good living areas and make good spots for setting up businesses. This is because people will walk or cycle to a train station, and means there is a greater chance of them going into shops closer to the train station. When you have a good mass transit system, cars go from being a necessity to a "luxury", where that luxury is perhaps not as luxurious as some people believe.
Also in London HS1 and HS2 are mostly underground and mostly under other railways but because its a tunnel it doesn't follow the old railway above exactly taking there own curves and stations
@@hens0w In London, indeed, HS1 was primarily for the Eurostar, and going across London to Kings Cross St. Pancras would be painful overground!
HS2 goes underground in many places including to avoid excessive deforestation of an ancient forest along the way, it is quiet interesting the lengths they are going too, obviously they can't avoid any deforestation at all but it's very much trying to be as carbon neutral as possible.
Good point that train stations make things more walkable. It's much in the same way that highways lead to strip malls with large parking lots, because they make thing more drivable.
That's insightful. When people leave a train line, they're at least initially pedestrians, for whom shopping is convenient, whereas people leave a freeway in their cars, which are a barrier for shopping.
I dream of the day when we'll view cars the same way we view horses and carriages now: an antiquated form of transportation that was historically widespread, but has since been relegated to sport and recreational use.
This kind of reminds me of the railroad corridor in Salt Lake City where I am most familiar with that acts as a barrier as well. There is a citizen proposal to move the tracks underground and restore services to a historic train station but I don't know if that will happen.
I found the argument you are arguing against compelling. Thank you for taking the time to discuss it!
It's interesting seeing how Taiwan is handling this as well. While railway corridors don't divide cities like highways do, they are still there and level crossings are a pain point, especially in a city. The TRA lines through Taipei were buried back in the 90s, with some sections elevated in New Taipei City, notably portions of the corridor going to Keelung. Taoyuan is looking to bury the rail lines through the center of the city there (while building elevated metro lines). Taichung finished elevating the rail lines through the city about two or three years ago. Kaohsiung is putting the finishing touches on burying the railway down there. And there's plans to elevate portions of the line between Taichung and Tainan, including through Chaiyi City. I'm not aware of any plans to do the same on the east coast, but things there are not as busy or well populated.
Surprisingly fascinating video, RMTransit you made this so interesting and relevant! Fantastic!
Danke!
Thank you!
It doesn’t have to be a barrier, as long as you have pedestrian access points at regular intervals. Or you could “hide” the rails, but you’d have to add in the costs to dig the line underground, or put a cap over the rails and add in park space.
Edit: also, the Seattle tunnel actually removed several highway exits, it would have been way more expensive to replace the old elevated highway AND all of it’s exit ramps, but all underground. It’s basically an underground express lane around Downtown Seattle.
Anything you build has a footprint to it; visiting Shinjuku Station years ago, I was impressed by just how unappealing it was to walk through and around. It is a major transit hub, one of the biggest in the world, but you don't really see anything resembling a landmark, just a maze of corridors, escalators, and fare gates. Likewise, the exterior is an imposing concrete block, and while there is some development over and around the station, it's a significant walk to really get into the surrounding neighborhood. So while it's true that it takes up less space than a highway, it's still basically a lot of land allocated just to moving around people.
It's thoughts like these that have me more interested in ways of downsizing the traffic - while still providing urban mobility - than to embrace any large transit build on principle, because the likelihood of impacting neighborhoods in an unequal fashion goes way up as you start adding scale and speed.
In Scotland, our biggest city, Glasgow, is pretty small, but the rail corridors coming in and out are well implimented, they cause very limited disruption for how useful they are, their are a few places south-east or north where they may reach the surface, but most of the lines going in or out are either elevated or under the ground- certainly in the city center, a railway NEVER impeded your travel as there are plenty of places to easily go under, if they aren't below your feet where you might occasionally feel a train rumbling past below you you barely even notice the railways when you aren't using them in most places- roads on the other hand- the M* totally divides the west end from the center after barreling through the eastend cutting it in half- Charing Cross is a horrible part of the city to walk through even with the motorway sunk into the ground because of all the intersections and the wide streets full of cars, it straddles to busy shopping areas, but it is baron itself apart from the odd hotel chain or office- you'd rarely want to go there, most people going from the city center to the west end get the subway as the layout makes going from the short distance from the city center to the main shopping street in the west end an unpleasant experience, a case of easily bikable or walkable distance, but nobody is biking or walking if they don't have to!
If you look at South London, where there is a lot less London Underground, we have quite a lot of viaducts, raised up humps and cuttings, that kind of divide south London up into a number of triangles and other polygons.
That funnels traffic onto specific roads, is great, if you want to reduce pollution in the bits of the polygons that butt up to railways, but because we don't have large numbers of crossing points for bikes and pedestrians, we are not routing non-car users over the railways and they all end up funnelled into the gaps that are totally chugged up with cars.
So, folks who potentially gain health benefits from living alongside a barrier to car movement, end up loosing those benefits, as the footpaths and cycle routes (if they even exist) push them into breathing tons of car fumes per year.
Our way to solve this, is to divert road-building budgets into building crossings over the railways.
On a railway that has viaducts that have arches, some of the rented out arches should be taken back and turned into crossing points for cycle paths and footpaths.
On a railway that is built on a humped up bit of ground, a tunnel would actually have to be dug under the railway. This sort of thing should be budgeted for and scheduled to happen at the same time as engineering works.
Where we have stations built onto the siide of a rail corridor, and there not a road that crosses the railway, we should rebuild the stations to bridge the railway (instead of sitting on one side) and have a footpath through the station). The Crossrail upgrade to Whitechappel did this.
But, I think we should go further than Whitechappel and build small shopping complexes, that have a station at one end and a cycle route and footpath at the other end, across rail sites that cut two communities apart. This will increase the footfall at those stations and also put those stations at the heart of the new combined community.
It will take money, for this sort of thing to happen. And it might take the sort of money, that is normally spent on a road bypass scheme.
But, if we do start doing this sort of scheme, we can build in walkability around stations, without ever building in car-crossing points, that would threaten that walkability, if a politician decided to try to favour car lobbyists.
While rail corridors are obviously a lot more effective than highways, I find them barely better when it comes to barriers within cities. If you’re not able to cross it, it doesn’t matter how small or efficient it is, you still can’t cross it
Absolutely
We have phases like “the wrong side of the tracks” that indicate socioeconomic separation of communities served by rail lines.
The borough market in Southwark London is built entirely under a railway bridge
But the borough thrives and is a incredibly lovely place to walk
I live in Eindhoven, and the elevated train tracks really split the city in 2. The university campus and the city centre are pretty close together, but it feels like they are in completely different parts of the city
Is that because of the tracks of CS , or because of the fact that the campus is surrounded by 2x2 roads on four sides ? The campus is seperated from the tracks by the 2x2 prof Dorgolaan and some office parking lots. And they are about as wide as the CS tracks .. And the campus it self is built will all boxy 6-10 story buildings.
So that all combined will definitely give a different atmosphere ...
@@allws9683 true, but still, the southern part of Woensel and the the rest of the city is separated by the train tracks which are only traversable at 5ish points, making it a real barrier in the middle of the city
@@frontrowviews Yeah, probably. But isn't that also the nature of prof Dorgolaan? South of town centre is Boutenslaan, part of the inner circular road (without tracks), is a similar barrier. it splits the Tongelreep park and has also about 5 bike/foot underpasses.
What else should you do?. digging the track underground is expensive. And unlike in a town like Almelo before, here it does not have level crossing problems. Nor does it split an old neighbourhood as in Delft. Around the track is the Uni Campus, Philips stadium and the post-industrial neighbourhood De StrijpS. So it is not interrupting residential neigbhourhoods really. The Villapark neighbourhood will problably relish its isolation.
What should be done is improve (make more pleasant/safe) the underpasses for bikes and pedestrians, cause they are dark and ugly. The biycle gutter at the 2x3 lane Insulindelaan underpass is really unacceptable to Dutch standards! Just as the gutters at Boschdijk and Philitelaan... Eindhoven makes p.r. with the floating bike roundabout and more bike bridges, but here you see why the city always had the image of 'the City of (traffic) Lights' !!
While I understand your points, I do sympathize with the original question. I live near an overground railway line, and it is a considerable barrier when going on recreational walks, since so many routes are funneled onto the few crossings spaced hundreds of meters apart. But of course the usefulness of this railway for transport far outweighs the inconvenience of lengthening a walk to get past it, so I don't really mind.
“The wrong side of the tracks” phrase had to come from somewhere. Its obviously been an issue of division for awhile, but, do the pros outweigh the cons? I'd say yes, as long as care is taken to prevent it from becoming a socioeconomic division, with one side lacking access to necessary public and community services.
Wow a fantastic explainer this one. Will save in my urban planning playlist for future reference!
One thing to note about electric trains and their emissions is that you're shunting the issue one step back from the vehicle itself to where they get their grid power from, for instance in NZ the vast majority of the national grid is renewable energy with 82% of it being renewable whereas less fortunate nations such as Australia use only 32.5% and thus their electric trains on average "emit" far more on average than ours would but even at such a low amount electric trains are still worth it.
Thing is rail corridors don’t even need to be on ground level; here in Singapore virtually all of the MRT metro tracks are either underground (particularly in the city centre) or elevated off the ground. In an underground situation the tracks are effectively invisible from ground level, and you could easily be standing in a spot that would be surrounded by MRT tracks had they not be underground and not even realise it; for example, the North-South and East-West Lines’ total of 4 tracks weave among themselves while running between City Hall and Raffles Place stations, right through several historical landmarks and across the Singapore River into a forest of skyscrapers at the Raffles Place end, but that is all underground - on the surface level you would be hard-pressed to believe that four busy metro tracks run through the area unless you are shown a map of the area with the MRT tunnels superimposed on it.
Things are visually more busy in an elevated situation, but even then, because the tracks are lifted off the ground pedestrian and vehicular circulation is still possible underneath the tracks. For example, along the elevated sections of the North-South Line, one can often find a linear park build along and underneath the MRT viaducts; these form part of the so-called Park Connector Network spanning the whole of Singapore, functioning as a network of recreational cycling and pedestrian paths linking various parks, nature reserves, and residential neighbourhoods together. And along the East-West Line (particularly on the western section west of Redhill station), the line mostly runs along a road median, maximising space efficiency and effectively turning the corridor into a multi-modal one capable of carrying both railway and road traffic. There’s even one recently-constructed section - between Gul Circle and Tuas West Road stations - that is designed as a triple-decked traffic corridor: local road traffic on the ground level, express road traffic on a road viaduct on the second level (intended to allow road traffic from the future Tuas Port to bypass local traffic in the area), and the MRT viaduct on the third level. By stacking road and rail traffic along a single corridor, land space use is maximised, and traffic throughput along the now multi-modal corridor is greatly increased. Many sections of the upcoming Jurong Region Line - which will be fully elevated - will also be built right over existing and future road corridors as well.
That’s true, but it gets much more challenging to do that with large intercity and suburban rail systems!
This video was bloody FANTASTIC. I have some notes, but this argument was digestibly dissected and preneted in a clear and entertaining way. Well done.
Thank you for tackling this topic.
Another excellent video. I have thought about how rail lines can create a scar through downtowns. However, many great points were made in the video that I had not considered. RM's point about freeway on/off ramps is an important one. When grade separated, freeways still have these ugly ramps dropping fast moving cars into downtown, while railways don't.
One other point: there can be a benefit to a city having some structure/constraints from its transport corridors, waterways, parks, etc. These can create distinct neighbourhoods, encouraging dense development and local services. A major highway does this, but probably the worst of any of these barriers because of the impact beyond the corridor itself -- junctions, traffic on local streets, etc.
The Brightline passenger train in South Florida runs through densely populated areas, but with simple grade crossings so it doesn't create a much of a barrier between neighborhoods on either side. With few overpasses, it's much cheaper to construct, which makes up for all of the fatal collisions along the corridor when vehicles ignore the crossing signals.
It would honestly create less of a barrier if it were fully grade separated. But that would cost money and the whole Brightline project was built as cheap as humanly possible.
And brightline has been doing quite the big favor of natural selection in the entire state of florida.
@@davidty2006 And we love them for that.
@@davidty2006 I’m waiting for the eventual headline of Florida Man takes over Brightline train and goes on a police chase.
@@davidty2006 it's a shame the drivers have to pay with their mental health. And I'm not sure about the states, but in many countries, train drivers are no longer allowed to drive if they're involved in a certain number of fatal events.
Most points in this video might apply to Toronto but not Montreal. Contrary to Montreal, rail corridors in Toronto center are mostly passengers because there is no port close to downtown and rail yards are up north. Huge opportunity for more and better transit. Here in Montreal, nearly all rail corridors are primary used for freight to serve the various port terminals and rail yards. Thus the situation is very different on an eventual electrification, noise, safety (derailment..), connectivity (at-grade crossing very difficult on freight, bridging over / tunneling under very complex and costly), adding passenger capacity & stations, etc.
It’s so frustrating to see how nothing is being done in Montreal to improve commuter/regional rail service. It certainly has something to do with freight operations, but I think there’s also just a lack of political will. The St-Jérôme line could easily be bought by the government, electrified, double-tracked where necessary, and have 15 minute all-day service. And would it really be impossible to have hourly off-peak service on the Mont-Saint-Hilaire line, even if that involved building some more track? Seeing everything that they’re doing in greater Toronto for GO Expansion, it’s honesty shameful that the ARTM seems to think that the current commuter rail service in Montreal is sufficient.
@@ethandanielburg6356 There isn't much that local political will can do against class 1 railroads. They tried to force CP to grant at-grade pedestrian crossing, this went to court and the City lost on most aspects. It is not in railroad interests to share their network.
The St-Jerome line as very little freight traffic so could be a candidate for electrification, faster and more frequent speed. but doubling of tracks would be very costly as the current corridor runs of lots of narrow viaducs that would need to be enlarged. Would be costly but feasible.
The St-Hilaire line is doomed as it runs alongside the CN main line which funnel all traffic from eastern Canada/Quebec and port facilities on south shore. Then onto the Victoria bridge and complex locks system. Considering there is the yellow line metro to the north and upcoming REM to the south, the St-Hilaire line will most probably stays the way it is for the foreseeable future.
On the west end, the Vaudreuil line could be electrified with fast and frequent service, as the right of way is probably sufficient to double/triple tracks and avoid conflicts with freight. But considering the upcoming REM will partly feed from the same user base, I doubt this line will get much attention.
@@dannymongrain4788 That’s too bad for the Mont-St-Hilaire line. Its currently schedule is really bad outside of rush hour.
As for the St-Jérôme line, I imagine gradual improvements could be made, similar to what GO has been doing in greater Toronto. Perhaps significant sections could even be left single-tracked (with some double-track being added in strategic places) and you could maybe still have a train every half-hour or so. Having no trains for several hours during the middle of the day is not good.
@@ethandanielburg6356 I seem to recall there is very little freight traffic on the St-Jerome line and only on the Montreal side as the north shore is owned by Exo and is 100% passenger. I wonder if they could do like the Otrain line 2 in Ottawa (ex Trillium), where a few freight train may circulate but only at night? Dedicated way during the day, coupled with double track only at stations (for passing), full electrification with DMU, new infill stations at L'Acadie, Canora, Décarie... we could get a very decent RER-style service.
@@dannymongrain4788 That would be amazing! My preference would for using electric trains rather than diesel multiple units (I seem to recall that the Kitchener ION light rail, which is electric, is still able to have freight trains go over it at night). But even if we were to use DMUs or even diesel locomotives, having frequent all-day service would be such a game changer. Given that there’s a provincial election coming up, this could totally be a proposal that different parties could support.
Yes, but not nearly as bad as highways.
since most tend to be 2-4 tracks at worst they are the switching network for major yards and stations.
VS a 6 lane highway plus on and off ramps and shoulder.
Indeed
I agree with this in principle, but it's important to realise that rail corridors can exacerbate poor connectivity caused by car-centric planning, which is made clear with the desire path at Dundas St and Cawthra Ave in Mississauga, crossing the CP Galt Sub/GO Milton Line. In that case the lack of other pedestrian connectivity options does leave the rail line as a genuine barrier, and people have lost their lives trying to cross it to get to their destination faster
I’ve thought about this a lot. Calgary has almost entirely overground rail. Building walking/wheeling permeability is a must. But it’s also a must when building massive highways through the city… 🤷♂️
Rail corridors can indeed be barriers, but there are a variety of ways that this can be solved for-
Older rail lines in the UK are often on viaducts, rather than at grade, which allows for tunnelling the street grid under them, and using the space under the line as commercial premises- lots of small businesses are situated in railway arches.
Sometimes, it's just another argument for putting the rail line in a tunnel for the densest section of the route- like the video says, this is a lot more viable than for highways.
I'm pretty sure the problem is not the noise or the width of the railway but the division it creates in the cities. It's pretty much the same as highways do. It segments and isolates neighborhoods and facilitates decay, unsafe streets, lower value buildings and lower income inhabitants. Even in rich cities you can notice sone ridges created by infrastructure.
It doesn’t have to do these things! But it often does yes
@@RMTransit It would be nice to address this issue in a future video.
Chicago is another example or decking over. Millennium park was built over a train station
The argument that railway corridors are OK because they are better than road corridors isn't logical. Heavy railway corridors are usually a very large scar on a city, not just for the width of the corridor but often for some distance either side for reasons that an Urban Planner can explain better than me, but in a nutshell, they work against the walkability of a city. Of course, this needs to be offset against the value that the railway corridor delivers. There are exceptions, notably in cities where the street network was built after the railway. I live in a city where the heavy railway formed a barrier between the city and the harbour with very little permeability between the two. After 30 years of debate, the railway was removed and replaced with parks, walkways, plazas and road links to restablish the original city grid. The results have been dramatically positive, and nobody would suggest reinstating the heavy railway at that point.
I love trains and can't wait for GO electrification and expansion but I love the Gardiner and I hope they never get rid of it!
I don't want them to get rid of it but it should have congestion tolls.
It's true, that the railway corridor in my Hometown Zurich is a big divider, it's kinda hard to cross from one side to the other and there is only one newly build tram line going over it and just 3 bus corridors crossing it, and it is pretty wide there aren't any footbridges for like a kilometre and it's average width is like 100-200m, and it isn't really easy to cover or tunnel it all, it will stay as a divider for a long time
I think something that can be done is to put the line in a trench, like at Summit in New Jersey, so that the line cuts across the municipality, but also doesn’t if you catch my drift. Something that could be done as well is tunneling a large portion of it, and covering up the space that was left behind into various buildings, parks, and allow the community, let’s say Toronto, to better access the waterfront, as an example
Regarding space required on a rail corridor versus a highway, I’m reminded of an in-car ad the LIRR ran a few years ago:
“Without the L-I-R-R, the L-I-E would be W-I-D-E-R.”
It emphasized the fact that the Long Island Expressway would need 16 lanes to move the same number of people the LIRR moves on 2 tracks.
The NYC area has several huge corridors for commuter rail which at times beats traffic on the highways though the one that goes between NY and NJ needs major expansion (and could’ve been expanded/open by now if the previous governor of NJ never cancelled the ARC Tunnel back in 2010).
Hopefully you’ll take a ride to the new Grand Central Madison station (aka East Side Access) when it opens.
Its much better for the trains to be underground or elevated. Being on ground level disrupts a lot of the street level life and causes disturbances for pedestrians and traffic .
Here in Melbourne we have a pretty chunky rail corridor which runs just east of the Flinders St Station, it fans out to about 160m where the Hurstbridge and Mernda lines branch off. That whole branch could really be served well by a cap of some sorts.
I'm living in Germany, so I'm familiar with pretty good railway infrastructure. On the other hand, inner city highways are fairly rare here. In my hometown, there's an east-west railline, clearly deviding the town into a northern and a southern half. There are three bridges within the city limits, plus a pedestrian overbridge. And you can clearly see the railline does work as a barrier. Not only are the houses immediately next to the rails in a pretty bad shape, very cheap and only inhabited by very low income demographics, but there's also a clearly visible difference in social status of people living north and south of the railline.
Today, I'm living in Berlin. Now, here the inner city raillines are mostly either elevated (east-west) or underground (north-south). So they don't create such a barrier in the center of the city. An exception would be the area just south of the innermost area, where the north-south line emerges from the tunnel and immediately creates a huge barrier between Schöneber on the western and Kreuzberg on the eastern side of it. However, that's nothing compared to the barrier formed by the Ringbahn, the circular line surrounding the inner part of Berlin. It is partially elevated, but nonetheless forms a clear destinction between the more attractive, more sought after, more expensive inner part and the more run down, way less popular and (somewhat) cheaper outer parts.
My girlfriends apartment is just a couple dozen meters from the elevated east-west corridor. And I have to say, I can't agree with the statement that trains are smooth and quite. Absolutely not. All trains going there are electrified, so the commotion doesn't stem from the engines. It stems firstly from the brakes, and secondly from the steel wheels on the steel rails, which are quite loud, especially in curves. And the line is pretty much only curves, no straights, being adapted to the city's layout. And trains are running there 24/7, so there's rarely a minute when no train is running by. At night, it's a bit less frequent, but still: You can't think of sleeping with the window open. Which was terrible in the heat of this summer.
Where I grew up, there was a motorway about a kilometer away. So I was used to sleeping with a constant hissing of the motorway. It's almost like the waves at the beach for me.
Boston has a great juxtaposition of rail and highway capacity where I-90 parallels the Northeast Corridor and the T's Orange Line. The highway here is noticeably louder and wider, while the tracks manage to carry four MBTA commuter rail lines, Amtrak's various NEC services, the Lakeshore Limited, and the Orange Line. There's a reason that the Orange Line was built along the Southwest Corridor instead of a new highway!
The behemoth that is “Sunnyside Yard” in Queens, NY and all of western Queens in general comes to my mind when watching this video. 😕
That may be decked over too like when happened with the rails to Grand Central or Hudson Yards :)
Hey Reese, thanks for the video ! I would like to know your opinion on a simple corridor elevation, e.g. Berlin's Stadtbahn.
It is a corridor within the city, but I would argue that it does not hinder the city's walkability, but even creates lively places on its sides ^^
(Shops and bars underneath, plazas, etc.) London also does it well, Paris used to have one (today's Coulée Verte)
I love them and wonder why we don't see them build anymore !
In my home town, the east coast mainline cuts right through the town, but because its raised and on bridges in some areas, or recessed and underneath overpass in other areas, it doesn't really make a divide
Another problem with cars underground is not just the engine exhaust, but also the tire particles. You can do something about the engine exhaust if you manage to get battery electric (or for that matter fuel-cell-electric) vehicles or even vehicles using overhead trolley wire(*) into general use, but that doesn't fix the tire particle problem.
(*)Not just electric trolleybuses, but somewhere around here is a video of some electric trucks being tested in Germany -- they have dual pantographs to contact the wires when they are staying in one lane, and then when they can't do that, they run on battery power (also recharged while they are under the wire). Still going to make plenty of tire particle pollution, though.
I think the issue is more obvious in some European cities. Here in Munich (Germany) for example, a relatively wide stripe of rail connections going to the terminal station (right next to the historic inner city), flanked by rail service facilities, logistics and industrial areas, basically cut the western part of the city in half. You really feel that disconnect between the city districts north and south of the tracks, although it gets better as the old industry areas next to them are replaced by (mostly) housing and more and better ways to cross the tracks are built (like bridges and tunnels for pedestrians and bikes only).
We also do have some kind of highway ring with a LOT of traffic around the inner city, but after decades of digging, large parts of it are now underground, which also does a great job in reducing the disconnect between the neighborhoods on each side of the ring street.
Montréal chose to put a park on top of its mont and run a tunnel through it. I've seen architectural concepts shown for Mont Royal town and they show greenspace on top of the shopping area and there is rail access nearby. I don't think they're going to build a Mont Royal though.
We can use the GO Midtown Corridor for additional movement of people, if they want to bypass downtown.
I wish that project were on the books. We need to build more track along the 407, and the Mississauga Missing Link, to allow at least 3 frieght lines so that we can push frieght off the line. And ideally two tracks for a circulating GO line to allow suburb to suburb trips.
It’s definitely possible, there’s a lot of space for freight AND passengers!
Could you do a video on how north American cities could make use of freight rail corridors? Could a state owned freight rail corridor be converted to be useful for passenger rail? Would an elevated metro above the freight corridor make more sense, to still make use of the right of way?
@@techtutorvideos I think the real issue is the freight line owners don't really want to play the generous host, and they're really not incentivized to do so. They're good enough for the thing that makes them the most money.
@@techtutorvideos Yep. Amtrak doesn't own much of the rails it runs on outside of the northeast part of the US.
For the gardner expressway in downtown Toronto. Have they ever thought about building a new gardner overtop of the rail corridor itself?
Aka making a copy of an apparently already hated highway (is it an actual highway or just a really big street?)
There have been proposals to move the Gardiner to the rail corridor. There have also been proposals to move it to a tunnel under the lake. Mostly, there have just been proposals to tear it down without any replacement at all.
I find it funny that when I talk to people who want to get rid of the Gardiner and get rid of the rail corridor what they point to as the problem is always Lakeshore Boulevard.
I know Toronto needs both the rail and road. People will always complain not matter what. Sometimes just for the sake of complaining.
In London , historically , railways were not allowed to go through the centre which is why you have a ring of termini around the edge , the underground , Thameslink and now Crossrail , all underground , now allow passengers to cross with ease and en masse with ease and not creating barriers !
I think this is a it depends a lot kinda question.
Where I live rail lines are quite noisy, and often don't have sound barriers at all unlike bigger roads and motor ways. And the sound gets worse at night when there are more freight trains.
When it comes to the separation effect of rail lines it's very noticeable. Here all of them run at ground level or on dirt embankments, which have less underpasses.
But this can also be a benefit. There's a neighborhood which is surrounded by rail on 3 sides and thus has much less traffic going through it.
I live in Vaughan, and the rail corridor between Jane and Keele is a huge barrier when it comes to traffic. Getting to the other side of those tracks is a nightmare at most parts of the day. But that can also be blamed on lack of big enough roads to handle the traffic on them nowadays. For those who know the area, I have spent over an hour a number of times on different routes to get from Jane to Keele. If it's taking HWY 7, rutherford, or going as far north as Major Mack to get to the other side.
Barcelona had a rail corridor, they put a box around it, and now it's a very long elevated park that vibrates every few minutes, it would have been nicer if they'd moved it underground, but that would have disrupted traffic for longer
God YES they are barriers. In Portland, there's a MASSIVE industrial rail line cutting right through the middle of a super busy part of Southeast. It moves SO slowly it sometimes makes people late by 30-50 minutes to work.
I am quite jealous of Toronto’s mainline railways.
My city is quite land constrained and has nothing that compares in infrastructure potential IMO.
The BNSF mainline between Tacomadome and Seattle King Station has decent right of way potential, especially if capacity and service upgrades are made
But the mainline between Seattle King Station and Everett Station is terrible, hugging the very curvy coastline that is prone to mudslides for its entire route and serving very few riders. Even the highway express commuter buses are faster than the commuter train between Seattle and Everett
I think one downfall for rail, at least in some North American cities, is that it functions as a barrier to some neighborhoods without providing a direct benefit. I lived within walking distance of Kipling Station in Toronto for 7 years, and never once used GO - headed downtown would be no more convenient but considerably more expensive than TTC, and headed the other way would just drop me in a handful of commuter parking lots not near anything. It just functioned as something that meant I couldn't get south of it without crossing a few unpleasant crossings (also, that everything on our balcony would get quickly covered in diesel exhaust or brake dust from the CP line). Meanwhile, while the 427 nearby would also be unpleasant to live by, but at least you're a lot more likely to get use out of it living in Etobicoke, because you've probably committed to owning a car. Admittedly, Toronto's major highways also almost function as a ring road and aren't expanding, while multiple rail lines bisect the core of the city.
I'm southwest of the coming Mount Dennis Station now, so I'm now cut off from the city by two rail lines, but hopefully all the neighbourhood improvements will include the railpath coming this far north (in addition to the eventual transit coming).
I would say it's true, rail corridors really often are a barrier in (and out of) the cities. But there are many ways (such as those you cited) to make them less of a barrier. Underpasses, overpasses, either for pedestrians and bikes only, or also for buses, trams, and cars. Outside cities also for wild animals. All of this is possible, if there is will. And the remaining barrier, when good measures to allow safe grade separated crossinga are in place, is totally worth the much needed capacity of the rail corridors.
One cool project is the Hudson Yards development in NYC which was built over a subway rail yard, even though it's a millionaire's playground. In London developers are eyeing the space over traintracks to build apartments and some already have.
Lots of rail tunnels through the cores of Swedish cities. So much easier to work with than highways.
(And then Denmark with their on street intercity trains…)
Living next to a rail corridor also means living with track maintenance which necessarily happens at unsocial hours. Incredibly noisy and warrants, ironically, noise barriers comparable to those on motorways.
The only thing I've noticed about rail corridors is specifically in smaller cities they result in the expansion of industry into inner city urban fabric. In Saint Louis (my home city) for example, historical maps show blocks being built up with houses very close to the tracks while now however all of these track adjacent areas have been filled up with industry. It seems similar to the effect of car dependent businesses being built up around highway exits. However I think both of these are more issues with city zoning as opposed to rail corridors themselves. Also in Saint Louis at least the main central rail corridor bisects the city in a valley which requires bridges to cross, most of these bridges are incredibly car focused with narrow or non existent bike and pedestrian infrastructure effectively making it very uncomfortable to cross these traintracks without a car. It basically functions to cut the city into 2 divided pieces of urban fabric. Again however, this can be an issue with the bridges themselves and not the railroads. This is just my perspective coming from a smaller city.
Thanks for the video Reese. I agree that it's super important to fully comprehend the full spectrum of benefits before making a comparison between the two modes of transportation. More rail = more livable, pedestrian friendly streets, and that's fine by me.
In the low countries, cycling "highways" are often placed next to rail tracks because of how quiet, green, and safe they are. Try cycling next to a highway. Not a fun experience.
Just want to say, I agree with you that burying highways doesn’t work, you’re just moving the traffic underground, but LA is a pretty vulnerable place to earthquakes so putting the highway underground probably wouldn’t get past an environmental review
Tokyo wants its earthquake vulnerability back.
@@giokun100 I’m not disagreeing with you, I’m just saying that’s the argument that would be put forth as the reason for opposition. Americans love a weak excuse to impede progress lol
@@devynclaybrooks5338 If that's the argument, only the word ''Tokyo'' is enough. US is technologically advanced enough to do so.
As I understand it, tunnels are SAFER during earthquakes.
It doesn't even need to be whole city sections: Even light rail (including tramways) can became barriers as seen by the Eschersheimer Landstraße in Frankfurt where the U-Bahn tracks makes it impossible to cross the street, allowing crossing only on few specific places (underground passages as well the stops).
My city has a heavy rail freight system that has few crossings often fair distances by walking or even driving from eachother,
City 110k urban area has 8 crossing: 1 under pass 1 level crossing and 6 bridges
Edit: 11 crossings 7 bridges
Plus 2 pedestrian crossings, however 1 in under a bridge mentioned above
And the other is only accessible by trespassing on private lands from 1 side
One issue that stands out is the number of Unios Station tracks that remain empty. Younger viewers may not be seare that, before CN built the northwrn detour freight trains ran along the "downtown" tracks too.
Given the number of VIA trains (or lack of VIS trains) could the Union Station corridor actually be narrowed?
Frankly the CP freight corridor through midtown is both a blot on the city but also a potential additional passenger corridor-like it was a long time ago (although the Peterborough branch has been allowed to deteriorate like the rail line here on the island.
But try to convince CP.
I mean no one likes barriers, unless they're helping you personally. But, so long as transit is a way bigger benefit than the barrier is a drawback, it's probably okay. And if possible, mitigation options exist. Hopefully there's a will and a way to help with the issue that can be crossing tracks.
the main difference between highways and railroads in my opinion is most of the time there is atleast a 10 minute gap between trains at worst, but on a highway it’s a 10 *second* gap at best.
I like this topic. Carlsbad California benefits from the Coaster, San Diego's coastal regional (heavy) rail, with two stations. However, when you are walking and cycling around Carlsbad you realize that this railroad disallows easily crossing it, so you may have to go a miles out of your way to get from A to B. This is true all along the line in all of the beach cities. Big rail proponent here, but realizing that car centered design ignores the need for more direct routing over some rail.
Might I point out - that much of the 401 - is 12 lanes and in some sections -more, including the 401 - 400 intersection in your map (2 sets of 3 lanes in each direction). Yes- the sad part is- that means a mere 12k/hr- in each direction normally
As GO is - 12 car trains- one every 5 minutes - is 24k - per rail (not quite subway) per rail.... twice the entire 401 - in a single track per direction.
In Stockholm, there are apparent plans of decking over our central rail corridor, effectively tying together the city center with brand new housing and commerce
Such a transit area moves so many more people, it is worth building wide underground passes and even overhead, if need be. Bridges can also be done. A thing i noticed: Small token "sewer tunnels" for pedestrians under a large street otherwise cutting through neighbourhoods seem apparently perfectly fine... Great. I also see how disadvantaged mobility scooters and wheelchair users are with current road design, a rail corridor is not the enemy.
Any time you build a bridge or a tunnel you add 20X to 50x the cost of putting in a road. This is why so many cities don't bother installing pedestrian friendly overpasses. If your city is run by penny pinching pound foolish conservatives the issue is a lot more noticeable
@@ph11p3540 Doesn't have to. Because cyclist and pedestrian infrastructure can be so much smaller than car infrastructure, you don't have to dig very deep (usually only about 3.5m to 4m) for an underpass, and it can also be significantly narrower, so it's easy to dig up an underpass using a basic digger. If you then construct the underpass and the road deck covering it from prefabricated standard parts, as we do here in the Netherlands, it actually becomes very affordable and quick to add underpasses to any road. It's even possible (it happened with a new motorway underpass here a while ago) to do it overnight.
@@rjfaber1991 Great to hear that your country is lucky to have sensible road management.
Here in the U.K. ours have settled on the excuse for not building expensive pedestrian tunnels under roads ~ albeit installing traffic light controlled crossings ~ that underpasses create opportunities for muggers and people are scared of them. This has been the state of play for a couple of decades now and nobody has successfully challenged it yet.
@@JP_TaVeryMuch As a Dutchman with a profound interest in British culture (who even described himself as an Anglophile prior to Brexit), I can't disagree. When it comes to irrational scaremongering in politics, Britain unfortunately takes the crown.
Of course, if there is a problem with muggers in underpasses (not that I for one second believe there is in most of Britain), the problem is with the muggers, not the underpasses. Perhaps the people using that argument should focus their attention on the socio-economic issues that drove these muggers into crime instead of taking it out on the infrastructure.
@@rjfaber1991 Oh dear you're not going to like this but I voted to leave. Reason being that we Brits don't like being told what to do and on a personal level, I was looking forward to being able to use the Airport Duty Free again after forty-odd years.
few aspects I want to point out:
1) rail corridors leading towards a downtown station tend to be wide as well, without providing any platforms where passengers can get on, off or change onto another train. Let's take Munich Central Station in Germany as an example. At the 8 km long rail corridor the narrowest points (which are under road bridges crossing over the rail corridor) it is 140m, 180m and 250m wide. In comparison to that: the widest stretch of highway in the city, counting 10 driving lanes + hard shoulder + median, is less than 50 m wide
2) While turns at highway interchanges take up a lot of space, so do tracks leaving the main rail corridor to the left or right, leading onto a different track / corridor. Often the space in between a railroad track triangle is so large that a neighborhood or commercial district fits into it, which however seems more space efficient than the unused space in between the ramps and loops of a highway interchange
3) both train stations, rail corridors and especially rail tunnels require well thought-out emergency access paths alongside the tracks, while emergency vehicles can simply drive on the road to an incident in a road tunnel
In Tokyo, they put a lot of shops and utility facilities under railway corridors, may be they could try it in North America as well
I can't see Toronto fully eliminating the Gardener expressway anytime soon, since it's one of the only high-ish speed connectors across the Toronto waterfront and in many ways justifies the existence of the lower portion of the DVP. What I could see though is the elimination of the center lane in favor of elevated light rail along a good portion of it's length. Though the forthcoming 'Ontario line' or line 7 of the TTC network may well render a plan like that redundant.
So, I live in Sitges in Spain, and the rail line crosses the city at grade to the North-East, and then exits it on a viaduct to the South-West. The at-grade crossing has a couple of underpasses for both pedestrians (directly next to the station) and veehickles (about equidistant between the station and the portals to the mountain tunnels). The rail corridor definitely doesn't have an effect on the city, though. I feel like they've done it right here.
One key, if you have the money, is it's generally cheaper and less of a pain to cap or tunnel a train line than a highway.