People who primarily "need a car" to go on vacation don't need to own a car, they need to maintain a driver's license and to be able to rent a car for the vacation. If it really comes down to being in a position to ditch the fixed costs of car ownership ~ car loan payments, insurance payments, registration ~ that covers quite a lot of car rental or share care use with money to spare. If the operating and fixed costs also included all of the present subsidies to driving, which in the worst cases directly increase the cost of alternatives to driving, the financial incentive to ditch the metal anchor would be even higher.

And from that, people who "need" a car for 5 mile trips and also to go on vacation actually either need a car, or else need a driver's license and a neighborhood electric vehicle or longtail ebike.

The strategic role of Express HSR in this is that the in the 0.5 mile to 5 mile trip radius there are multiple already established and mature transport modes available that can be sustainably if we start cutting back on the policy of forcing people to drive. In the 10 to 50 mile trip radius there are fewer but still a variety. In the 200 mile to 500 mile radius, the existing established means of transport that can be sustainably powered drop away to electric rail. And operating that electric rail at Rapid Rail and/or Express HSR speeds increases the farebox recovery, so that on a very large number of corridors presently with subsidized slow passenger rail service or with no passenger rail service at all, the higher speed rail service can operate at a surplus, freeing it from the threat of withdrawal of its operating subsidy in political counter-attacks from the heavily subsidy dependent private motor vehicle support industries.

The leverage of effective local "commuter" rail corridor development really comes when the day long park and ride suburban station parking lot is places an eighth of a mile from the station and the eighth of a mile around the station is higher density mixed use development. That reorganizes the five miles of surrounding suburb from an inchoate mass into the hinterland of a suburban village core, and start collecting the dispersed suburban employment into employment clusters in walking distance to a train station. Ditto if its a park and ride express stop on a trolleybus line.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.