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Comment by apostacy | Hacker News Reader

It's ludicrous that we in this country can't have modern infrastructure.

One thing that bothers me, is that there is this narrative that high speed rail just somehow cannot work, and is a pipe dream, and not right for America.

We cannot afford /not/ to have high speed rail. We're already heavily subsidizing airlines to schedule flights to nowhere. And as of last time I researched it, a few years ago, there wasn't an HSR line in existence that didn't net revenue for the state.

Not building this line because of some NIMBY rich people in California is the sign of a crumbling civilization, where the elites are too concerned about their own comfort to prevent us from being left behind, technologically.

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The USA is an extremely expensive place to build infrastructure. [0] Building subways and high speed rail costs about ten times as much as it does in first world countries with the best constructions practices, particularly Spain and Korea.

And HSR at 10x the market price is never going to be a viable transportation option for California. It's best either to accept that HSR will never work there or to try to change the procurement and construction culture on smaller projects before trying to build.

The reasons for high prices in the USA are myriad and complicated. Spain and Korea have high wages for workers and stronger labor unions. Neither country is known for particularly effective anti-corruption practices. The simple answers people reach for first are not the key drivers of cost difference.

Instead, at every level of operation the USA system fails to use its resources wisely and there is no responsible party that drives efficient construction and operation. Agencies and governments work at cross purposes impeding each other's progress and everyone with authority in the system uses it to extract concessions by blocking the others instead of cooperating. Until that changes, trying to build HSR in the USA is foolhardy.

[0] https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/category/transp...

"last time I researched it, a few years ago, there wasn't an HSR line in existence that didn't net revenue for the state". The linked article says that only 3 of the 111 systems worldwide run without subsidies. That claim comes from the construction company which benefits if HSR goes forward.

How many highways run without subsidies?

High speed rail cannot come close to replacing highways though. It deals with a fraction of the overall traffic that the highway system supports without near the flexibility. This is why even the countries that are making extensive use of high speed rail still have extensive highway systems.

Please note, I am in no way trying to imply that our current highway system works well, but that is a far different discussion.

Fair point in the first paragraph. It's the "far different discussion" I'm more interested in though. Starting with the loss of life caused by driving.

The proposed high speed line north from London is supposedly the alternative to building a new motorway.

The high speed live won't carry freight, but it will free up space on the slower railway, and the motorway.

I was not stating an opinion on whether it is reasonable to subsidize HSR; rather I was just pointing out the discrepancy between the claim in the comment here versus the multiply-sourced claims in the article.

Additionally, the HSR proposal explicitly promised not to require ongoing subsidies. I think that was foolish: HSR would have passed without making silly promises.

I haven’t looked at those numbers, but I would expect a rail system to increase revenue from activities near the stations.

Especially since we really do need to transition to a post-carbon future. Effective transit would allow us to increase housing density and commercial activity while decreasing per-capita use of fuel, water, and other resources. Leading to higher revenue from income tax, property tax, and sales tax, that does not show up on the train’s own profit/loss statement.

We just have to be realistic about it. A problem of the California HSR is that the officials have been coy with the actual numbers. Perhaps they are spooked by the disaster that has been Amtrak: Slow, expensive to ride, yet still losing money. We need to recognize that a good rail system can be subsidized, and still give a net benefit to the community and the government.

I think high speed rail is a bad investment for most of America. Instead, we should focus on accelerating the development of self-driving car fast lanes. Autonomous cars could easily form convoys that go 120 mph or more, drastically cutting down commute times while costing only a tiny fraction of what high speed rail costs. Yes, it would be significantly slower than high speed rail, but it would still be a lot faster than currently available transportation.

This would encourage sprawl-y and inefficient land use.

the problem is that's already the case and the reason why HSR won't work that well in the first place.

imagine though that there's a fleet of self-driving cars ready to take you to HSR stops. best of both worlds?

Fair enough. Ultimately, HSR has far higher bandwidth than self-driving cars - density could be achieved either by efficient land use or by a feeder network (local transit or self-driving cars).

Presenting self-driving cars and HSR as mutually exclusive is a false dichotomy.

I imagine light rail that with smart cars that can combine/merge/release so that they can run on a web rather than a mere lines.

It would only be twice as fast as current transportation, and if it succeeds it'll still get stuck in traffic, because a 5 person car with 1 person in it is a total waste of space.

Exactly. HSR was a great idea for the second half of the 20th century in relatively dense countries like Japan, France, and Germany that already had good local rail infrastructure. It fills a gap for travel between dense population areas 100-500km(?) away, where road travel is too slow and air has too much overhead with last mile. The benefit was that train stations could be built directly in population centers and connected to local rail, cutting down on last mile travel times of air.

The US is more spread out, tilting in favor of air, and local rail is less abundant + our interstate highway system is more mature + gas is much cheaper, tilting in favor of cars. The value of rail is squeezed from both sides.

Now comes along a great technology that can bootstrap off existing infrastructure (road), offers the same benefit of time not wasted focusing on the road, whose cost burden is shouldered by those that use it (purchasing cars), and can incrementally be improved over time (higher speeds, drafting, separate lanes, etc). That further puts the squeeze on travel between shorter distances, which can make the promised SF-LA trip in <6 hours (instead of 4* via air) that can be reduced to 4 over time with faster speeds.

Driverless tech doesn't even need to work in places outside the controlled environment of a highway for these benefits to appear. Politicians could make it happen a few years sooner by making it more appealing (much as they did with hybrid carpool stickers) by creating a special driverless car lane on highways, separated by cement barriers. Although I think that's not as elegant as just bootstrapping on carpool lanes, it is possible now and would definitely spur car companies to upgrade their driverless systems to whatever requirements would be needed for that environment.

Certain parts of the US (east coast corridor) seem to me to be the only places in the US that could actually benefit from the HSR equation, but they have big right-of-way issues and there's a lot of political coordination that needs to happen. Amtrak's been trying for decades.

* Air calculation: 1.5h pre-flight, 1.5h flight, 1h post-flight

> HSR was a great idea for the second half of the 20th century in relatively dense countries… The US is more spread out, tilting in favor of air…

The US shouldn’t be so spread out.

These rail projects are for the long term. In the long term, we should be looking at increasingly dense urbanization, some day decreasing ability to use debt financing to build and maintain infrastructure, and the end of large-scale use of petroleum fuel. We need to make less stuff work for more people.

I don’t see why I would want to be in an isolated cocoon for hours with no room to stand and no bathroom when there is a viable alternative.

However, it’s still possible that the California HSR project is a terrible plan. It’s not that fast for how much it costs, and everybody’s saying it’s going to be even more expensive than the leaders are letting on. We really should be making airports less difficult to use. The terrorists won 9/11.

Driverless cars are a cool tech demo, with the possibility of decreasing the awful death toll of driving private automobiles and the tragic misuse of life in traffic, but it’s not a great long-distance option. The average car trip, with no carpoolers, takes too much space per capita. The normal commute should not involve lots of driving.

Self driving car lanes still means rubber wheels on a blacktop car lane.

Blacktop does not last. The maintenance costs for our road system far outstrip our commitment to maintain them even today.

HSR, though expensive to install, has an advantage in longevity.

We're paying for it anyway though. It's not like we would get rid of our highways just because we add HSR.

You're paying for SOME of it. Some highways area already being (in effect) written off by neglect. And the more load we take off the highways, for example, by diverting people onto tracks, the less you have to pay for highway upkeep

The article and data flatly contradict what you're saying. HSR often loses money. In this case, any reasonable belief that it will run without subdies has completely vanished. The data say it will not be used, it will cost too much, and is a waste of everyone's money. You want to pay 68 billion dollars for some symbolic money pits just because you want to beat Japan and China? This isn't about elites beating down everyone else. Elites, like the HN crew here, are the people who care the most about regularly traveling back and forth between SF and LA. Everyone else would just be subsidizing them.

Yeah, this makes me super upset. I honestly have no problem subsidizing it with my tax dollars. I would honestly use the LA <-> SF route, even though that wouldn't be built until I'm middle-aged.

It's also ridiculous that we never built out BART to the original plans, since that could have done so much to improve the traffic situation, the housing situation, and increase property values. I never understood why wealthy land owners don't want trains; in every case I've seen, land by a train station goes up hugely in value.

Trains allow more people from a more diverse spectrum of socio-economic conditions to work or live in and around an area. If you're a keen isolationist, whether for more or less discriminatory reasons, you almost certainly will vote to avoid useful public transport.

Besides, wealthy land owners have drivers on staff. Or don't have to commute to work on a schedule, so an occasional small ferry is good enough (cough... Marin).

It's all pretty awful, but not that hard to understand once you look at the more tacit end of public behavior.

My problem with this project is:

1 - if you want to spend $80B on public transport infrastructure, there are productive places in CA to do that. This project is not in the top 20. You could, alternatively, build out bart/muni/caltrain/vta/LA metro. I'm sure San Diego also has transit projects available.

2 - the ridership numbers for this project are created in what can only be described as a crack-aided manner. It's already $80/pp, up from $50/pp. By the time it's actually built, I'd guess tickets will be well over $100/pp. If you have even two people, you may as well drive. How many people need to commute between LA and SF? The HSR estimates are between 18m and 31m passengers annually [1] which seems unlikely. Also note the $86 far comes to about 20c/mi, while amtrak on the east coast charges 50c/mi and most european long haul trains charge 45+c/mi [1]. Which should make you suspicious that tickets will cost far more than $86, or the ridership numbers are farcical.

3 - when these projects are sold with transparently fake numbers, it poisons public support for all transport infrastructure projects. Currently the part of the project under construction is pure bait and switch rail construction for amtrak, which will use the track until at some unnamed date HSR starts using it.

4 - the local transit projects in sfbay, san jose, LA, or probably san diego have much less risk: we can reasonably project usage.

[1] http://www.latimes.com/local/politics/la-me-adv-bullet-fares...

Spot on. Local travel is where majority of need is, and in most places in CA it's sorely lacking and could benefit a great deal from state funds. Time waste there FAR exceeds that between HSR stops. HSR is a bet on people commuting more between city centers, which - if true - would only increase the local transport problem that city centers have today (as people arrive sans cars), and if false, would remain underutilized. Isn't a win either way.

On #1, part of the HSR program of making improvements to local and regional mass transit networks connecting to HSR. They aren't competing alternatives.

Of course they are. Every dollar wasted on building high speed rail on, eg, merced to bakersfield could be used to build public transport lots of people will regularly use, in population centers of California.

we have the best roads in the world. go to any other country, you will not find 4, 5, 6+ lane freeways that are free, have excellent signage, interconnect without stoplights or city streets, that extend for thousands of miles. i can drive to any region in the country for free on uninterrupted highway. if i drive to go skiing, i know the roads will be plowed, i can even check on the status before i drive. our roads have dividers in the middle, we have shoulders on the side, we have lines and botts dots between lanes. many larger freeways in cities now have lights.

this country has modern infrastructure

The quality of our roads is quite low compared to those in Europe.

Was just coming here to post that, there was an article recently about the new MB E-Class'(I think) lane keeping that wouldn't work on the majority of US roads since it was trained on better European roads.

The road builders there know how to paint straight lines and place the reflectors on the lines, unlike ours, who seem to have been drunk on the job.

> The quality of our roads is quite low compared to those in Europe.

That's incorrect. You mean a select few countries in Europe (Germany, Sweden and Switzerland != Europe). You're very clearly ignoring that Europe also consists of Russia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Moldova, Serbia, Macedonia, Ukraine, Albania, Hungary, Poland etc. 3/4 of Europe has a lower living standard than the poorest US states do and they have terrible infrastructure to go along with it. Greek and Italian infrastructure is piss poor as well.

The Eurozone for example is now spending significantly less on infrastructure than the US (how long will those roads hold up as infrastructure spending continues to decline?):

"Infrastructure spending in the euro zone has dropped to an average of 2.7 percent of gross domestic product, compared with 3.4 percent of GDP for the U.S. and 3.6 percent for Japan."

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-11-27/europe-ha...

And:

"The dilapidated state of infrastructure in Belgium, home to the European Union’s main institutions, has become emblematic of a lack of investment that blights the whole continent and, according to the EU itself, is creating 'lasting bottlenecks that undermine productivity growth.'"

"Anyone taking even a short trip to Brussels would see evidence of this. Due to lack of maintenance over the last 20 years, all the city’s major tunnels have been closed on public safety grounds, creating the biggest traffic jams the city has ever experienced."

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-11/europe-ne...

With low internet speeds, lack of underground power lines, lack of public transportation, lack of walkable neighborhoods, and roads that have a lot more potholes/bumps than roads in other rich countries this makes me think we don't have modern infrastructure. We do have 6+ lane highways but....

Well, they have six lanes but since it's accepted here to overtake on the right we all the time have a few slew cars blocking the road for everyone else our you end up constantly changing lanes to make your way through. I always like to compare it to having extremely good cables but using a terrible network protocol. Freeways I Europe have fewer lanes but you can go much faster if you want because shore cars are pretty reliably on the right and fast cars in the left.

German here, what did you just say?!/s

They said thousands of miles, not hundreds of kilometers.

The problem with roads is induced demand. The increasing trend towards urban density requires moving more people around increasingly denser urban areas. Freeways were great in the 50s and 60s but have proven their limitations in sprawled, urbanized areas like Atlanta, DC, and Southern California.

Rail moves more people over time than freeways in urban areas, but with less flexibility for destinations. Urban planning should prioritize building transit-oriented development around these rail corridors allowing for more people to live within a reasonable commute time to jobs.

Freeways should not continue to be built and expanded in urban areas. Wrong tool for the job.

Have you ever been to another first world country?

ha, that's exactly what I thought. People think US infrastructure is good... then they go to Germany / Japan / France / Switzerland etc. In these countries, 6 lanes of empty highway is an expensive, inefficient eyesore, not modern infrastructure.

I've also noticed a trend in which people who have not travelled internationally are far more opposed to public transit than people who have.

A lot of America's deficiencies in infrastructure and public services can be attributed to the fact that many Americans don't know how much better those things can be.

I've lived all over the country, have driven it end-to-end several times and up-and-down even more, and I can assure you that many of these things are not anywhere close to universal.

> And as of last time I researched it, a few years ago, there wasn't an HSR line in existence that didn't net revenue for the state.

There are only two HSR lines that are profitable (one line into Tokyo and the Paris - [edit]Cannes line). The rest are all subsidized include the Acela Express (search for all the references on HN throughout the years).

The US decided to build cargo rail which has given us part of an amazing logistic infrastructure. In other words, the US picked cargo over humans.

Paris-Cancun?

must have meant: Paris - Cannes

Autocorrect at least stayed with a resort town theme - thanks

"On that train all graphite and glitter

Undersea by rail

Ninety minutes from New York to Paris"

http://genius.com/Donald-fagen-igy-lyrics

> It's ludicrous that we in this country can't have modern infrastructure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkf2MQdqz-o is a survey of American domestic and foreign policy that goes into this question. The speaker is a distinguished US diplomat of the post-war era, who also served as Nixon's Mandarin interpreter when he first went to China. His short answer is that for interlocking reasons that make it hard to change, military spending is the only kind of stimulus spending that's politically feasible in the US, and infrastructure spending hasn't yet been able to break that lock, though it needs to.

It's ludicrous that it can't be something like Hyperloop, not for hundreds of billions and not take 50 years.

PS: I'm from Silicon Valley, and I've heard about the mythology high-speed rail for over 25 years during the construction of the marginal-utility Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority light rail, which is demonstrably worse and far more inflation-adjusted expensive per mile than the municipal trains of the turn of the century that were ripped up previously.

Tangentially interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

>We're already heavily subsidizing airlines to schedule flights to nowhere.

Can you expound upon this, or give examples of taxpayer dollars subsidizing flights to "nowhere"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Air_Service

Essential Air Service is the usual thing meant here.

In a country with the size/spread/population density of the US, it's generally not possible to have a single-mode transportation network which reaches everybody (or to within reasonable distance of everybody) without subsidizing some routes that would be unprofitable due to low demand.

I'd love if we had some high speed inter-city rail in the US. Acela is a joke and it's the best we have. But building decent intra-city integrated mass transit systems in our major metropolitan areas ought to be a higher priority. Right now we have only one in a country with fifty-three metropolitan areas with more than one million people in them.

Of course one needn't preclude the other, but give that both ends of the mooted HSR line would terminate in cities with terrible and barely mediocre mass transit systems respectively, it is pretty clear that there are higher priority needs which those dollars should be allocated towards.

Improving local and regional mas transit throughout the state, especially around all four of the long term proposed termini (SF, LA, Sacramento, and San Diego.)

In all the world there are only three high speed rail systems which pay for themselves. All the rest are subsidized and some heavily.

with the price of air fares why would you not fly other than for the TSA? it was air travel that did them in the US simply because it started here faster and there weren't borders to worry about for the majority of travelers.

Rail is a romance that too many people never look past the haze to see the truth. Sadly even light rail is a boondoggle and the tens of billions if not a hundred or more in deferred maintenance is going to bite a lot of local transit authorities in the butt (it already smacks the Washington DC Metro)

What is really sad is this warning appeared on cato awhile back about the change to the contract presentation and most places blew it off because of the source

> with the price of air fares why would you not fly other than for the TSA?

1) You can't build airports in downtown cores, which unavoidably adds 30 minutes at each end.

2) Boarding an airplane with one door is intrinsically slower than boarding a train with many doors. Again, that adds time at embark/disembark.

3) Extra weight on an airplane inherently costs a lot of money, which means that trains will always be more spacious and comfortable.

Unfortunately, Amtrak is desperately trying to give away its advantage on point 2. At many stations, passengers are not allowed to just wait on the platform and are instead funneled through a ticket check one at a time. This results in the predictable long lines, though the actual boarding process is still somewhat more efficient than on a plane.

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