Rails of Glory: Why Trains Will Always Leave Cars at the Station

More capacity, less carbon, and fewer SUVs trying to turn you into a statistic.

The Case for Rail

Picture this: a single train with eight carriages transports 1,000 people with ease. To achieve the same with cars, you'd need anywhere from 250 to 1,000 vehicles clogging up roads and belching emissions. Add to that the required space—over a hectare for parking in city centres alone—and you start to realise why building more rail infrastructure is a no-brainer.

A highway lane tops out at 2,500 people per hour, while a railway can move a staggering 50,000 people over the same period. You could pave paradise and build six freeways, or—you know—just put down some tracks.

Cars Are Bigger (and Heavier) Hypocrites

Modern vehicles, especially SUVs and EVs, have ballooned in size and weight in the past few years. Electric vehicles (EVs) get an eco-gold star for being "clean," but a closer look reveals a murky reality. The batteries needed to haul these 2.5-ton giants require rare earth minerals like cobalt and lithium, often extracted under exploitative conditions in places you wouldn’t dare to be posting on Instagram. Worse still, manufacturing a shiny new EV creates far more emissions than simply keeping a current combustion car running for years.

By contrast, trains are built to last—some freight locomotives trundle on for half a century before retirement. Cars? You’re lucky to get 15 years before it’s a heap of rust and regret.

Safety First, Or at Least It Should Be

Every year, road traffic claims around 1.3 million lives globally—roughly the population of Adelaide, Australia being wiped out annually.

Yet, as a society, we've accepted these deaths as an unfortunate price of mobility. Rail travel, on the other hand, is exponentially safer.

Urban trains, for instance, are seven times safer than cars per passenger kilometre. Add fewer road-raging lunatics, no distracted drivers scrolling TikTok, and you’re left with a form of transport that prioritises getting you home alive.

The Environmental Trump Card

Rail is the undisputed green king of motorised transport. Per passenger kilometre, a train produces up to five times fewer greenhouse gas emissions than a car and twenty times fewer than a short-haul flight. Plus, while EVs are busy sucking power from grids that in most places are still often powered by coal, modern trains are increasingly electric, efficient, and regenerative. Not only do they brake smarter (literally feeding power back into the grid), but they run on infrastructure that’s already built to outlive multiple generations of Teslas.

And let’s not forget: unlike roads, train tracks don’t crumble under the weight of absurdly large SUVs. With modern vehicles tipping scales heavier than ever, road infrastructure repair costs are skyrocketing globally. Ever wonder why your local council’s pothole game is so weak? Blame the 2.7-ton family “urban adventure” vehicle and bus sized pick-up truck / Ute’s that are tearing up asphalt faster than tax dollars can fix.

Trains Are Long-Term Thinking; Cars Are Short-Term Coping

Building rail is an investment—not just in convenience, but in resilience. Trains have a far longer lifecycle, lower maintenance costs, and significantly higher capacity than individual cars or buses. Countries that prioritise rail, like Japan and much of Europe, enjoy faster, cleaner commutes and less road congestion. In contrast, car-dependent nations are locked in a cycle of endlessly widening highways—a short-term solution that only leads to more cars and more jams. It’s like fighting obesity by buying a bigger belt.

The Human Factor

Trains also restore something we’ve lost: sanity. Instead of white-knuckling your steering wheel in gridlock, you can read a book, sip a coffee, or nap without risking death. Imagine arriving at work calm, rested, and blissfully unaware of Karen's parking "skills."

But before I wrap this up I want to talk about one idea that whilst even I found exciting in concept, when I really dug deeper, it quickly became a completely illogical pipe dream in terms of it’s practicality. Yes, I’m talking about Elon Musk’s shiny, vacuum-sealed supersonic drainpipe — part sci-fi utopia, part Bond villain infrastructure project, the Hyperloop.

On paper, it’s the ultimate solution to all our transportation woes: sleek pods rocketing through frictionless tubes at Mach-1 speeds, ferrying you from city to city faster than you can say ‘Isn’t this a rebranded pneumatic mail system from the 1800s?’ But the glossy concept begins to crumble when you apply basic practicality — much like Musk’s promises of colonising Mars by lunchtime.

Let’s talk capacity. Hyperloop pods, even with perfect, dystopian precision, are expected to carry around 28 passengers at a time. To hit the ambitious ‘one pod every 30 seconds’ mark — required for theoretical maximum capacity — you’d need to overcome safety spacing between pods hurtling at 700mph. For context: current high-capacity trains, like London’s Victoria Line (part of the London Underground network and built as its name suggests, in the Victorian era), it moves 36,000 passengers per hour, a feat that would take Hyperloop pods an unachievable 1,300 launches an hour. Which raises the question: is it transport, or just a dystopian theme park ride?

Passenger boarding times are another cosmic oversight. Anyone who’s waited for a flight knows that loading 28 people onto a moving tube in under 30 seconds is pure fantasy. Even the hyper-efficient Tokyo train system takes minutes to load at rush hour. And good luck building these sprawling Hyperloop stations — you’d need vast, flat expanses of land, just like airports, which we know aren’t exactly slotting into dense urban centres on the cheap.

The cherry on this vacuum-sealed cake? Motives. The Hyperloop isn’t really about solving transit problems; it’s about selling a sleek, futuristic distraction while continuing to quietly sideline proven solutions like high-speed rail. Building an actual Hyperloop would cost orders of magnitude more than Musk’s absurd $6 billion estimate, which is about as credible as someone handing you a $6 meal deal and calling it fine dining.

So here we are: we could invest in robust, existing rail networks that move thousands per train, last a century, and don’t require the laws of physics to take a sick day. Or we could chase the shiny allure of the Hyperloop, a billion-dollar vacuum tube that prioritises headlines over practicality. And when Elon Musk’s next brainchild — teleportation by Tesla-branded wormhole — inevitably hits the scene, we’ll once again have to politely pretend not to notice the emperor is wearing no clothes.

The reality is this: normal trains, the types we already have today are proven, practical, and undeniably better. They carry more people, with far less energy, at a fraction of the price. So maybe instead of looking to a sci-fi future where 28 passengers are catapulted across the countryside, we focus on scaling up what already works — because whether you’re on the Orient Express or a Shinkansen, nobody’s ever said ‘you know what would make this better? A tube and a billionaire’s ego.’

In a world facing climate disaster, spiralling congestion, and rising road deaths, clinging to car culture isn’t just wasteful—it’s irrational. Trains are safer, greener, and more efficient, requiring fewer resources to move more people further and for longer.

Replacing cars with better rail infrastructure isn’t just smart; it’s essential. Futuristic transport options are all well and good for those countries that have already built an extensive transportation network, particularly those that have managed to complete high-speed rail. But for the majority of countries that have not yet achieved this, the business case for moving fewer than 30 people at high speed across any kind of network isn’t massively dissimilar to that of private jets. It’s hardly an environmentally sound concept.

So, next time you’re stuck in traffic, staring at a smug SUV idling in front of you, just remember: there’s a better way, and it doesn’t come with leather seats or a massive carbon footprint.