Trains: To Your Home

A photo of our dogs, Sky and Dug, enjoying the view from the train in Switzerland.

This is part of my series on how I want our country to be better than Switzerland.

I mentioned before that I want to see a high-quality train system across the country. There is one problem that makes this more challenging than in Switzerland. Many of us live far away from a town center. Switzerland is organized into towns and cities in which people live very close, within a few minutes walk, of the center of town or a train station. That is much more difficult in the US because we are much more spread out.

So one of the first challenges is how do you deal with this problem in the US? This is a case where we don’t have to have the solution right away, but we can define some goals.

5 to 10 Minutes to Town

We want to make it possible for people to get to their local station within 5-10 minutes. People should be able to get from their home to the local train station easily, without their own transport, within 5-10 minutes.

Local Self-Driving Electric Cars

Maybe could have some sort of small self-driven battery-powered cars that would come to people’s homes.

This may raise a few questions, such as, if we have self-driving electric cars, why do we need trains at all? Maybe each household could have its own car?

The cars could be scheduled to come to people’s homes. The cars could recharge themselves at a central station when not in use.

Plus, because the cars are local, it is easier for them to learn and navigate. Towns can build their own local navigation options when the AI can’t handle the task, such as guide posts and wires around town.

In bad weather, these cars could be better suited or designed to handle the conditions.