The Ideal Combination: The Traditional City & Modern Railways

What is not evident in this comparison, however, is that in a Traditional City with trains, you make a lot more trips on foot -- to school, to the store, to work. Everything is much closer -- in walking distance, which is sort of the point. We saw that you could have a city of as many as 200,000 where you could literally walk everywhere, and not need a bike, train, or automobile at all. Second, the distances are much smaller. You don't commute 15 or 20 miles, you commute maybe five miles, which seems like a long way because there is "so much there there," to paraphrase Gertrude Stein. If your city is all Place and no NoPlace, there is a tremendous amount of stuff in five miles of travel. For example, Manhattan from the southern tip of the island to the northern edge of Central Park is about seven miles. Just think of all the stuff in that distance. So, I would also say that intracity trips would tend to be shorter than is the case for driving around Suburban Hell. If you make fewer trips (because many are walking), and the trips are shorter (Traditional City vs. Suburban Hell), and the train is 10x more efficient per passenger-km, then the true energy efficiency of the Traditional City/train combo is probably 20x-30x better than Suburban Hell/personal autos. - Nathan Lewis

Suburban Hell at Gjøvik, Norway