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Part of the discussion with US rail is that American rail carries some freight service and it would be better environmentally to maintain that service than go all passenger.
For profit companies have shown themselves as being bad at running freight rail, but the solution to public rail needs to include freight.
If anything, we need to double down on freight. Get all the long haul trucks off the highways that we can.
Porque no los dos?
Rabbit hole incoming: If you have to pick one, I suppose it depends on what metric you are trying to maximize. One doublestacked intermodal train car takes two long haul trucks off the road. One Siemens Venture passenger train car takes 74 people, or about 50 cars at 1.5 people per car, off the road. You can generally run longer freight trains than passenger trains, but 25x to normalize for VMT (which could be used as an approximate measure of direct health impacts from driving: crash risk, elevated blood pressure, obesity. It could also be used to approximate societal impacts of car culture: real estate dedicated to surface parking, voting bloc size that supports car-centric planning and development regulations) is probably excessive. On the other hand, if we normalize for emissions (hard to find data here, but as far as I can tell trucks are on the order of 10x as emissive), that gets us down to 5x train length, which is about on par (northeast corridor trains are typically in the 1/6 of a mile range, and median freight train length is somewhere in the 1-1.5 mile range from what I could find), and if we use infrastructure damage/maintenance cost (trucks are about two orders of magnitude worse than even today's SUV saturated passenger car market, I'm assuming without reason or evidence that damage to steel rail infrastructure between a freight and a passenger car scales significantly less harshly for the sake of simplicity), things look downright strongly in favor of freight traffic. At the end of the day, it probably just depends on which use case has more unmet demand on a case by case basis. Of course, both pale when compared to the opportunity that high speed rail gives to take short haul flights out of the sky, but that is another set of analysis and does partially correlate to the elevated infrastructure cost of high speed rail vs conventional rail.