During low-use off-peak transit systems are awful because of costs. This need not be the case. Peak transit is also a nightmare because of costs.

With most legacy technology there gets to be a point where it costs too much to use any more and should be replaced by newer, better methods. This is the situation of transportation today.

The costs are too low. The risks are too small not to start the changeover.

Small, light, hybrid human-electric technology promises cost savings, levels of resilience, convenience, practicality, and comfort that will far outstrip initial development investments within an extremely short time.

This is not accurate. Look at the map of the French rail network http://www.bonjourlafrance.net/france-map/france-train-maps.htm

Marseille Paris by TGV departure 8:20 Paris Gare de Lyon, arrival 11:20 Marseille, 783 km (489 miles)
Exactly 3 hours!
Check http://bonjourlafrance.net/france-trains/tgv-mediterranean/schedules/paris-ile-de-france-aix-en-provence-marseille-toulon.htm

3 hours for 489 miles! Wouldn't you say this an ideal distance?
And by plane?
If you take everything, trips to and from airports, security checkings, delays (it happens all the time) and all kinds of waiting, it will take longer.

Maybe Amtrak needs to play the same game. Issue two sets of annual reports, one of which is engineered to show a profit. Then dare the naysayers to shut down the "profitable" operations half by refusing to fund the loss-making infrastructure half. I know the information is already in their annual report, but nobody looks at it. If you issue two sets of reports, you can recreate the European situation and change the terms of debate.

People are creatures of misconception. They want a sound-bite takeaway, not a nuanced explanation of just why Amtrak makes a loss. So give them what they want to hear -- give them a "profitable" Amtrak.

Late at night you have to walk to the train, wait for train, and walk home.

With the vehicle discussed you use the vehicle to get to the transit system and immediately get on it. The the vehicle would automatically travel on the system to the point closest to your destination and get off.

You then use it to go the final stretch home.

Does NYC transit practice really make sense?

A lot of times people -- large inflexible institutions -- get used to doing things the difficult way and stick with it out of habit.

But gecko has a point. What kind of journeys are all the metros and buses geared at? Over 50 per cent of subway journeys in central London are quicker on foot. How many are faster by bicycle? Probably lots!
http://www.london.gov.uk/view_press_release.jsp?releaseid=15612

This is a problem. One way to approach it is to raise the price of monthly passes and lower the price of punch cards. This gives people an incentive to cycle or walk to work once a week, for instance.

A non-elite athlete on Optibike using a 600-Watt electric motor did about 100 miles in 4 hours during the 2005 Tour de Sol in Albany so, that is starting to get there.

Elite athletes on faired recumbent bicycles and human power only, have achieved speeds greater than 80 miles per hour for distances of about 200 feet and it seems that a 1500-watt (2 horsepower) motor is probably scaled to produce the necessary power.

So . . .

For it to start getting practical some fairly simple things could be done such as using a larger motor and a recumbent style bicycle which can be a lot more comfortable with a real seat and more streamlined.

Other adaptations addressing practicality would include safety and weather considerations and probably involve Kevlar, carbon fiber, or other special materials and even on-demand inflatable armoring (airbags) and adaptable enclosures.

Riding on conventional highways might not be practical and there is at least one option to this which would also address the increased storage requirements of larger motors. In fact there are rail systems that serve as a type of motor called linear induction motors (LIM) and a small vehicle on the scale of your bicycle could be adapted to travel on and off small pallets moving on LIM rail systems.

An inexpensive maglev capability using permanent magnet Halbach arrays could greatly reduce moving parts and especially, the wear-and-tear and stresses at higher speeds.

This is the direction that things could go to develop a practical vehicle that would take you up to Albany.

Going across country would require systems and vehicles capable of higher speeds.

Notice those old, grand stations were all built by private companies. Even in smaller cities (look at New Haven's gorgeous station) the companies built palaces to their private empires. Of course it's indicative of the problem; the government did pretty much nothing for those companies except allowing them to ravage the resources of the country and later actively built a system that forced private passenger rail carriers into existence.

Rail has never been funded by our government. We lost Penn Station to this and almost lost Grand Central for the same reason. And unfortunately urban politicians have never held in modern times truly powerful positions in government in order to funnel funding to rail projects. Instead we're stuck with rural or suburban politicians, especially outside the northeast, who naturally gravitate away from rail (except those in Montana who know rail is the only wait out). Obama being from Chicago has seemed to inflict his mind with some reason, but who knows for sure.

Folks, we're talking about really high vehicle weights per person ratios on the order of 1.8 times optimum when these things run at capacity, transporting people pack-style, with massive power plants, with some improvements in energy savings compared to the worst of all travel methods: cars with even higher and wasteful vehicle weights per person overpowered to ridiculousness.

These behemoths are so large and unwieldy, Mohammed must go to the mountain, wait for them to arrive, pile in with all others, etc., etc., etc. . . . .

Bicycles with fractional vehicle weights per person and vehicles of similar scale -- completely capable of ubiquitous distribution always close for use on-demand with no wait times and the potential of high speeds -- provide transport to a comparatively Edenesque future with ludicrously easy here-and-now technology.

Rough numbers
A 50-pound bicycle or human-scale vehicle carrying a 200-pound person has a vehicle weight per person of 50 pounds divided by 200 pounds that equals 0.25: with 50 pounds as a weight easily carried in a backpack though probably not advised for people with bad backs.

A 67,800-pound subway car that has a 188-person capacity transports about 361 pounds of steel, glass, plastic, etc. per 200-pound person with a vehicle weight per person of 1.8 (for R142A cabless subway cars): the 361 pounds being a weight easily carried by an industrial pallet truck.

reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R142A_%28New_York_City_Subway_car%29

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/4301

• Excessive Oil Consumption by the USA, much higher than OECD average
• Economic, Energy, and Environmental costs with related National Security issues that result from excessive oil consumption
• No Real Plan to Significantly Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions
• Lack of Non-Oil Transportation: there are no alternatives for essential transportation that don’t use oil
• Inadequate Railroad Capacity
• Speed and reliability of today’s Rail Freight cannot compete with Truck Freight for many cargoes
• Weak Electrical Grid with limited inter-regional transmission and stability problems
• Lack of markets and transmission capacity for remote Prime Wind Farm Sites
• Chronic Under-investment in long lived, beneficial infrastructure

QUICK FIX:

• Electrify 36,000 miles of mainline railroads
• Expand Railroad capacity and speed by adding double tracks, better signals and more grade separation
• New 110 mph tracks for passengers and freight added to existing rail ROWs as a second step
• In many, but not all cases, use the railroad ROW as new electrical transmission line corridors
• Promote the use of rail lines, usually spur lines, as wind turbine sites with rail transported cranes and materials
• Take advantage of the lower marginal economic costs of railroads, where the more we use it, the less it costs per unit. A diffuse economic benefit for many sectors of the economy.