Two-Thirds of Americans Would Utilize High-Speed Rail If It Was Available
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Dozens of people made the case to keep the line. Finally the street car company's lawyer got up and made the business case for discontinuing the line. He concluded by asking the crowd how many of you used our company's street car to get to this meeting? Not a single hand went up.
It's easy to tell a pollster you're for high speed rail but how many will actually buy a ticket? Perhaps they should ask for them to prepay for a ticket?
Depending on the answers, there are two totally different lessons to be drawn there!
I use the MBTA on a fairly frequent basis. I would use it every day if biking didn't half my commute time.
I've also used Megabus to visit New York City, for day trips even, Acela for an interview in New York once, and a short domestic air flight to visit a friend in Washington DC for a weekend. These costed ~$30, ~$200, and $500 for round trips, respectively.
Note that the bus takes almost five hours, the train takes four hours, and the airline flight took about two to three hours. The bus and train were crossing the same distance between the same two cities, and a comparable air trip would have cost $450 for a 1 hour, 15 minute flight.
Why is the transit system structured so that by taking "high-speed" public transit over slower private transit, I reduce my trip by 20% but pay 9x more? Why is it that if I actually want to travel quickly, I have to take a private transit agency (ie: JetBlue), and can quarter the time spent in transit by spending twice as much as the next-fastest option and 15x as much as the slowest option?
In particular, how can we talk about a so-called "high-speed" rail system in which the gap between driving and taking a train is only one hour but the cost gap is multiplication by nine?
But, that aside, Acela is really competing with air. Their bread and butter traveler is traveling on business and they're taking Acela over a plane because they prefer to travel on Acela for a variety of reasons. They don't really care about cost within reason.
Those same travelers won't typically take a bus. If they do, they'll take something like the LimoLiner which is priced in the same ballpark as Amtrak. (I tried it once and didn't like it as much.) However, regular buses are always going to be the cheapest option both because they're typically competing for price-sensitive customers and they can take advantage of a a road network that already exists and that they don't need to maintain (other than whatever taxes they pay).
It's like complaining that fruit trees die when you refuse to water them.
But lots of people take Amtrak in the Northeast Corridor--enough to subsidize the rest of the system. The problem is that there aren't any other areas in the country that are as well-suited for busy inter-city rail as the Boston to DC corridor. Almost everything else is lower density and further apart.
I'm not an expert on transportation cost structures but my observation in most places in the world is that, given a decent highway system, buses are going to beat intercity trains every time when it comes to price.
A lot of money's being pumped into trying a high-speed rail corridor between Los Angeles and San Francisco. And to be honest, I'd think there's at least a moderately good case for running up to Portland, Seattle and possibly even Vancouver. There's an awful lot of tech-industry commuting by air on those routes right now.
But, yes, the West coast corridor is an obvious candidate if the idea can be made to work anywhere in the US. (As is upgrading the Northeast Corridor where demand is already proven.)
Only if you assume that getting to and from the airport, and getting through security, and boarding, are all instant.
Megabus drop and pickup in Manhattan. Acela goes to and from 34th st. Neither require me to play strip tease or watch 45 minutes of idiotic bin-shoving pantomimes.
The nearest airport to Manhattan is LGA, it takes 30-40 minutes depending on traffic. JFK and EWR are 40-60 depending on traffic. None of them have direct subway or rail connections, so you have to either take a car or cobble together various public transportation options (subway then bus, subway then shuttle, subway then taxi, train then monorail) with frequently unsynchronised schedules.
The idea that air travel is more convenient than the Acela train in the NE corridor is just silly.
1. There is a regular train from EWR right into Penn Station
2. Even though the train is more convenient in a number of ways, flying can get me from Boston into Manhattan earlier in the day than the train. Usually doesn't matter, but it may if you have a morning meeting and can't come down the previous night.
3. Although I've taken it, the Acela all the way from Boston to DC starts to not make sense vs. flying--and tends to cost more as well.
There is, but it runs relatively infrequently and you have to switch to the monorail, which is only faster than walking because it has a right of way.
> 3. Although I've taken it, the Acela all the way from Boston to DC starts to not make sense vs. flying--and tends to cost more as well.
Sure. I cheat by being the smug git in the middle.
But I'd still rather take the train, honestly, from Boston to DC. I hate flying with a radiant intensity that could launch a thousand astronomy PhDs.
It depends on the time of day. Between 15 and 45 minutes, in my experience.
That said, I find getting to EWR to be much easier than getting out of EWR.
Acela averages less than 70MPH. In a proper high-speed system that would be more like 180MPH. Boston to DC would be 2.5 hours, vastly faster than flying once you account for airport nonsense.
The current record for highest average speed on a rail line is China's 176mph average Shijiazhuang-Zhengzhou. Prior record holder was 173mph on the Champagne-Ardenne to Lorraine run on the LGV Est corridor of the TGV.
All high-speed rail systems have stretches where they go faster than that, but average speeds are nowhere near what you're proposing. Unless, of course, your argument is that no "proper high-speed system" exists anywhere in the world today.
Even if we go with the higher of those numbers, that's still around a 13% minimum difference in average speed between what's accepted and what you're proposing.
(for non-Americans, what I'm arguing with here is the idea that ~290kph would be the minimum average speed to call something "high speed rail")
My actual point is that Acela is painfully slow and proper high-speed rail is much, much faster. A 13% difference in the numbers is not really relevant, especially when I took pains to indicate that it was approximate, and never said that was some sort of minimum.
2013: http://reason.com/archives/2013/08/08/tsa-to-ruin-train-trav...
2015: http://www.infowars.com/tsa-airport-style-searches-on-all-am...
Yeah, 'Amtrak police' are now also doing their own 'random' inspections and swabs, etc. Last few times I took the Amtrak from Penn Station they were doing this.
Yet another reason for me to take the bus (which is 80% cheaper, as long as they're not sold out).
https://www.amtrak.com/ccurl/214/393/A-Vision-for-High-Speed...
Remember to allow time for getting to/from the airports (which typically are a bit of a trek from downtown areas), allowing time to check in and clear security.
Much better approach (for society) is to launch it with a super low discounted price until its gained some mindshare and people had a chance to evaluate it in the context of their routines.
Like... SF and environs, where the rail-based transit systems are basically all running hobbled all the time due to being way over capacity and way past expected lifetime of equipment. Caltrain just reported weekday ridership is now around 62,000, for example, but is struggling to replace 25-year-old equipment that breaks down on an almost weekly basis.
Compare LA and SF to NYC and MTL.
It won't be long before much smaller, short-distance, rentable systems come out -- self-balancing cycles that convert to cycle-trains, and so forth.
As autonomous vehicles makes roads much safer, two-wheel systems that are currently too dangerous will become much safer, and much more desirable.
As people are less inclined to own their own vehicle, and as delivery systems are more common, there will be less incentive to own a large car. People will rent two-wheel autonomous bikes instead of four-wheel autonomous cars, if its going to cost half as much.
The profit motive alone will solve these issues.
Autonomous vehicles would mean valet parking for everyone, which in turn means that we don't need to surround every business with vast fields of parking spaces. Yeah, the parking needs to still go somewhere, but at least you can put it off in a corner somewhere and most of it can be walkable.
The primary factor I can think of in terms of risk, are wild animals crossing and vehicle malfunction (eg tire rupture). Censors/radar, both in the vehicle and along the perimeter, should take care of the animal threat. On the mechanical side, well, the goal would be to get the rate of death down to perhaps airline-like numbers.
I wonder if anyone has done a paper on how fast / how dense you can drive automated cars while maintaining a decent safety margin.
Also, different makes of automated cars are going to be a pain in the butt for the system. I'm sure the Kia and Ferrari are going to want to go different speeds.
That will happen. What's going to be difficult is the high speed rail to compete against the airlines. I would really prefer an alternative to air travel myself. I hate it and the type of people that seem to be in airports from security to passengers.
I'd even prefer slower rail to my car, because I can read on the train, and I don't have to spend 5-10 min parking.
That's asking the wrong question, though. The issue is not so much whether people would, in the abstract, have an interest in using high-speed rail as a hypothetical means of transportation. The first challenge is figuring out where to place the rail - trains can only travel on tracks, so the train routes need to connect highly-trafficked (source, dest) pairs in order to be useful. And the second challenge is figuring out how to do this for a price that justifies the costs. (Even if the project is taxpayer funded, the costs include the opportunity cost - what other projects that tax money could have been spent on).
Two-thirds of Americans would use high-speed rail if it connected their home city with their most frequently-visited destination city. But that's not the same as saying that two-thirds would use high-speed rail if it connected, say, LA and SF, or NYC and DC. The question is, would enough people use those routes in order for the project to justify its costs?
The question isn't entirely useless - for example, if only 1% of the country demonstrated an interest in using high-speed rail, we could probably stop there. (Even if it connected NYC and LA, the two largest cities, there's no way the traffic would cover the opportunity cost of the project). But as stated, this survey tells us pretty much nothing new - we already knew that there's an abstract interest in high-speed rail, but what we don't know is how to convince people that we have a cost-effective way of building out the tracks between the most-important destination hubs[0].
[0] We sort of do know what the most-important destination hubs are, because it's not that different from the most-trafficked Amtrak routes and flight routes in a given region. Yes, you can make the argument that high-speed rail rail should serve the areas that aren't currently well-served by other transportation means, but keep in mind that those also tend to be the less-populated areas to begin with, which means that the challenge of recouping the costs of the project is even greater.
I like trains. I rarely travel between Boston and Manhattan any other way. But there just aren't a lot of routes in the US between high traffic city pairs where travel time at realistic high speed rail speeds with appropriate intermediate stops are going to get you to the 4 hour or so range that you have to hit to be viable. Few business travelers are going to take an 8 hour+ train trip when there's a 2 hour flight option.
Some plans have quoted a time from BAL-DC of about 15-20 minutes. That would make it an extremely popular commuting option for people working in DC, but wanting the cheap housing in Baltimore, which would also help Baltimore (although at the cost of probably making it not-so-cheap anymore).
Replacing short-hop flights would also be great for the environment, since most of the fuel is burned getting up to altitude and then back down again.
The only caveat is that, because it's not really high-speed, it works better as north and south segments than as one single line. But because it's NYC in the middle, even that works pretty well.
1. A high speed line down the California coast is totally impractical. Mountains, granite and huge grade changes make for an expensive proposition.
2. The broken links in the midwest between the network in Texas/Oklahoma with that stemming from Chicago is silly. Their are mothballed Rights-of-Way there that are perfect alignments for HSR.
Outside that, I'm still very much interested in a way to make HSR work in a number of areas for the US.
Take the average international-sized airport runway. It can land a 747 every couple minutes. That's hundreds of people every minute. A high-speed rail line cannot take even a fraction of that number. The trains cannot run at speed without significant time/distance between them. That's the limit of one-dimension travel (rail) v the three dimensional world of aircraft. It would take dozens of parallel rail lines to replace even a medium sized airport. While we all might want to use rail for some journeys, I don't see it ever competing with air travel in the US market.
However, one concept is a train that never needs to start and stop. Passengers move onto a separate car that separates from the main train and can decelerate into the station, and then it reaccelerates and attaches to the next train. Conceptually, this allows you to run much larger trains since you don't need to decelerate it every 10 minutes for a stop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIeRrU4_M3Q
This is the original concept. Let's just say I have some doubts about the feasibility of engineering that design in real life, but the concept of detaching cars seems sound to me. Conceptually I do like the idea of the detachable cars being a different type of unit with a higher top speed and better acceleration/deceleration units to assist in the deceleration and overtaking steps.
A simpler implementation would be to have self-propelled carriages that combine motors and passenger space, and have the car accelerate and decelerate on a siding. The main train would have to run at a slower speed than the detached car could achieve in order for it to "catch up" but could then accelerate back to top speed once reattached. This would lead to an "oscillating" pattern of distance between multiple trains on the line.
Also, at the end of the day a runway is still a "one-dimensional" unit of capacity in the same way that a rail line is. You can have multiple multiple runways or rail lines (which I guess is "two-dimensional" in your definition here) but you certainly can't have multiple decks of runways or land multiple airplanes on top of each other. It's actually perfectly feasible to have rail lines running at multiple depths, many subway stations do it.
Non-stopping trains are interesting, but such a solution would require the multiple parallel lines I mentioned above. And even the non-stopping trains would need some amount of space between them for emergency stopping and speed changes.
I'd have to see the math, but there is also a question as to carbon emissions per-passenger/distance. I believe that on long flights (more time at high altitude) widebody aircraft might be more fuel efficient than high-speed trains stuck on tracks.
Isn't flying the most expensive kind of transportation ? Plus it relies on fossil fuels big-time.
I'd love a high-speed rail from Vancouver BC to Calgary Alberta, or Prince George (both places I go every year). But building such a structure is a monumental task (10s of billions) and a fast train would take a vast amount of energy covering that distance. Imho trains just cannot compete in such markets.
I take the train everyday. For me, travelling by train for < 4h trips to a city sounds like a good deal.
It is generaly a smoother experience than taking a low-cost flight. But, I realize it really depends on how 'car-first' and large your country is. Definately not an universal solution.
In terms of carbon emissions you'd need the flights to be long, and the trains to be pretty inefficient and empty (think current Amtrak trains), and even then there is evidence that the high altitude appears to make the emissions significantly more harmful than the equivalent ground-level emissions
No, that's not how it works.
En route airways are 3d, but approaches are 2d and landings are 1d. Large US airports are already at capacity, and above capacity in poor visibility conditions (like fog at SFO.)
Also, trains can just add more engines and cars.
I like this new map better though - HSR makes the most sense for medium-distant transit. The Mid-Atlantic/New England area is a perfect example of a region where a lot of mid-distance travel happens. The current rail lines are okay but not fantastic and improved lines would be a positive for travelers.
[0]: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/opinion/sunday/a-new-map-f... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11506446
In theory if the train was twice as fast, becoming the same 2 hour ride, I'd be more likely to visit Chicago more for one-day or even a single evening event.
[0] http://www.caltrain.com/projectsplans/CaltrainModernization/...
Seems we could use something like that for revamping Amtrak.
One thing that struck me living in Europe was that flying was much cheaper and easier and I think competition with rail was a big part.
Anyone have any ideas for how to help make it successful? I would love to have better transit options because I have no plans to drive a car ever again.
The big problem with rail in the US, at this point, is you'd have to build out an enormous number of track miles to make the system actually work for people who wanted to use it, and that's going to cost a lot of money and displace a lot of people.
I must know, how do you refute that?
Also, the degree of expedience at which airports function leaves a lot of room for improvement. There is really little reason why it could not get far more efficient. You seem to also miss the fact that even if you establish a route through 1,000 miles of other people's land and have dispossessed them through eminent domain, and you have blasted your way through ecosystems, you are then stuck with specific routes that can only adapt by scaling throughput of that specific route.
Think of it this way, with the pestilence of douchebags overrunning Austin there is no way that rail could have accommodated that growth, let alone even triggered it. What, are you going to build high speed rail infrastructure across multiple states to California to accommodate the flow of douchebags to SXSW and ACL? You'd be lucky to be done before Austin has suffocated itself and the bubble bursts and the next fad has drawn the attention of the pretentious class.
I won't disagree that train travel is more comfortable, but hell, you really need to be because the trip, at best, is going to take you three times as long. Because what you are also missing is that we are talking about high speed rail here, we are not talking about fast rail like Acela, which is quite convenient in the NE corridor, but also only because of the population density. But even that train stops on a regular basis, which is also a function of what makes is even remotely not a horrific idea even though it still loses money. The problem with air travel these days is that the Airline industry has essentially captured regulators and legislators and are raping the public with high prices they are colluding on and ever decreasing service and features, also essentially due to collusion and a lack of real competition.
Don't get me wrong, I realize that train travel has some benefits and is probably more energy efficient and less polluting, but reality is that it is in no way cost effective let alone adaptable and flexible.
The thing that kind of irks me the most about he wide eyed, pie in the sky, rail supporters is that they have absolutely no idea how much it actually costs to provide the kind of level of rail and public transportation infrastructure that you see in Europe. The costs are astronomical both in long term investments and in M&O. There are inklings of how much it really costs, but reality is that no one really have an accurate understanding of its cost because European governments keep that information under lock and key, lest the rabble find out how much their money is squandered.