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Comment by valuearb | Hacker News Reader

$64B just in startup costs, for a slower trip than flying. Why this infatuation with a technology that hasn't been leading edge since the 1800s?

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Have you ever ridden a train in Europe or Japan? They are far and away the most comfortable way to travel any distance under 500 miles.

They are also much, much cheaper per mile. Something is wrong with construction in the US that makes rail lines dramatically more expensive here.

I'm interested in finding out more about this issue

Some write-ups and musings on this:

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-08/why-u-s-i...

[2] http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/06/how-much-bang-...

[3] https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/us-r...

[4] https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2013/06/03/comp...

[5] http://theweek.com/articles/449646/why-expensive-build-bridg...

Why Trains Suck in America https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbEfzuCLoAQ

Its a hell of a lot easier to fly over the dozens or hundreds of different landowners and jurisdictions than it is to convince each of them to allow you to build a giant railroad through them

The us rail infra was built when this wasn't an issue or could be solved by sending some heavies in or bribing the right people.

The landowner problem was much worse in Japan and Europe, but was overcome with cash and persuasion. The US rail construction problem is much more complicated and costly than that.

And it applies to urban rail where the right of way is entirely public just as much as high speed.

Texas Central is about 1/3 of the way through right of way acquisition on their Houston to Dallas route.

http://www.texascentral.com/alignment-maps/

They're partnering with Japan National Railways and planning on running the N700-I Bullet total system (the international version of the Tokaido Shinkansen).

In Europe it's usually much cheaper to get a low cost flight than the train.

Infrastructure is expensive. For example, the project to upgrade state route 99 in California, which parallels the High Speed Rail tracks for about 130 miles, to Interstate standards was projected to cost $22 billion ten years ago [1]. A lot of the huge costs are from the infrastructure debt of refusing to pay for a rail network, and for destroying a lot of the network that was in place. The HSR system will give a lot of benefits for a substantial amount of the state in terms of giving a modern transit backbone.

[1] https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/planning/economic_development/studi...

Not really. Tokyo-Osaka is going to be a bit under $200 whichever way you might choose. Maybe rail is $30 cheaper but it's a 15% difference rather than say 50%+.

The Shinkansen is great but it's fairly expensive unless you buy a visitor rail pass overseas.

That's a pretty common pattern (except for maybe China). HSR may be a nice option but it not infrequently costs more than flying.

And the fastest if you take into consideration the fact that you can come to the train station less than 30 minutes in advance just hop in the train and travel downtown to downtown.

30 minutes in advance for a train? Sometimes I arrive a minutes in advance and just enter the train before it is continuing its journey. Happens when my connecting train had a delay.

In Switzerland, where the train schedule is stunningly efficient, you can do this very reliably. Check in and security procedures make this impossible with airports. Unfortunately, this is also an issue with international high speed trains (TGV) where there are queues and checks.

Fortunately there are still a few hassle free international high speed trains in Europe. Travel between France and Germany isn't subject to any special security measures. You just get on the train. Sometimes the train stops at the border for a really quick check and that's it.

In Germany the issue is, there is enough money to plan and build motorways but not for train routes. Consequence is, that many routes are over capacity and cargo, local, and long distance trains share one track. The result is that one delayed train creates a wave of delays through the entire network.

That works when it's a commuter train, but you can't plan on just showing up minutes before a high-speed train that assigns seats. Because you can't just hop on the next one.

That's most of the reason why you can't just show up at the gate of your airplane 5 minutes before they shut the doors.

Security is the only big difference. You gotta plan on it possibly taking 30 minutes.

For short distances high-speed rail can be a good option, particularly in connecting neighboring cities (LA-SF, etc).

The problems with all these projects are cost: Simple back of envelope calculations show it to be (a) dubious, or (b) possibly criminal (ie. standard taxpayer ripoff to cronies).

$64B - do the quick math on that. Figure a 30 year return on investment earning 4% per year:

$2.2B payback per year + operating cost of what? So somewhere around $7M per day in revenues minimum?

How many riders per day and what is average ticket price to make $7M per day?

I think you will suddenly find there are cheaper, faster, better options.

It's less wasteful to spend $20 billion building a pointless wall on the Mexican border than the ~$40 billion in losses this rail is going to eat. I'm glad I'm not a California resident.

Well, a flight from SFO to LAX is $70 if you book at least a couple weeks in advance. If you assume parity for the ticket price, you need to sell an average of 100,000 tickers/day. With 100 passengers per car and 10 cars per train, you would need 100 trains/day, full, in order to make the math work.

I agree that seems pretty dubious. Why on earth is infrastructure so expensive in the US?

Why is an apartment so expensive in SF? Why is an acre of land in Napa or Malibu so expensive?

>Why on earth is infrastructure so expensive in the US?

Infrastructure always is, but in the USA it's worse than normal. Nobody is entirely sure why.

Yes but $64 billion more comfortable?

Europe or Japan were nice, but China was amazing. No pre-paid ticket, no planning just show up at the Shenzen train station the morning, arrive in Beijing in the evening on the other size of the country.[1]

Imagine freedom, the innovation, the improvement in quality of life if we could hop on a train in the morning NYC and arrive in SF at night for ~$100. I found the trains so much more comfortable than even flying first class. Seeing the countryside fly by at 350km/hr is worth the price alone. Americans have no idea what they're missing.

http://www.beijingchina.net.cn/transportation/train/train-fr...

I get your point, but that's a slightly inconvenient comparison. Shenzhen - Beijing is ~1200 miles, SF - NY is ~2600 miles. At the highest passenger rail speeds out there, the trip would probably end up being 12-18 hours.

I'd take an 18-hour train ride from SF to NY. Hell yeah. That sounds amazing. Much better than driving it.

There are several hundred miles of very tall mountains in the way. Unless someone is contemplating a century long project to dig a tunnel, those miles will be taken at a crawl.

Heck, even the geography between NYC and Chicago--which would be potentially interesting based on crow flies distance and amount of travel--almost certainly makes HSR not viable.

As a tourist, that trip can be nice, but burning and entire day to travel for business?

Imagine the improvement in quality of life if we could get on a supersonic airplane and be in NYC from SFO in two hours.

So I save 4 hours out of a 10ish hour door to door trip for me. Nice, sure. But hardly a dramatic quality of life improvement.

It depends on the routing especially as you get to traveling over borders in Europe. It does seem to be steadily improving though. Just a few years ago, I was going from Dusseldorf to Paris and I was rather surprised that train really wasn't a very good option.

Today, as I go to whip that out as a counterexample, I see that Thalys would make a whole lot of sense vs. flying for me (though I don't know how door-to-door costs would compare).

The Marseille/Avignon area to Geneva, Frankfurt or pretty much anywhere in Germany is surprisingly frustrating. I can fly from Marseille to Frankfurt in barely an hour -- a train ends up eating most of the day.

The only time I take the train over flying in Europe is typically Avignon-Paris. Everywhere closer and it's faster to drive, anywhere further and it's faster to fly.

It will be much faster than flying for door-to-door downtown-to-downtown trips.

The Bay Area and Southern California are incredibly huge areas - The vast majority of travelers between the two are not going 'downtown-to-downtown'.

They will be much more likely to walk 10 minutes from the train to something interesting than to do the same thing in the same distance from and airplane.

Flying has lots of externalised costs - noise, pollution, requires use of fossil fuels etc.

Ever lived near a busy level crossing? Passing trains may simply make the floors shake; train horns are deafening. You don't just hear them, you feel them in the core of your body. If you building is not well soundproofed, or you have any windows open for ventilation, you have no hope of sleeping through the night. Passing airplanes are background noise, passing trains refuse to be ignored.

Long/slow trains create an impermeable partition in the area, causing huge disruptions to local transportation (even pedestrians). Train tracks are also dangerous, requiring extra supervision of children and claiming the lives of the suicidal/oblivious/reckless every now and then.

If I asked to build something which

- Makes a huge amount of noise as it passes through residential areas at night.

- Disrupts all pedestrian, bicycle, and automobile traffic while it passes.

- Has no hope of stopping for the hazards that can trivially enter its path.

- Will obliterate anything it hits, 100% of the time.

You'd look at me like I was crazy, unless you grew up viewing trains as just part of the landscape.

All the same, I think we should build more of them. But trains are much worse for externalizing costs than airplanes.

Should be noted all your points are also true about airplanes, except the transport disruption. Having lived near an airport they are EXTREMELY loud and take up a truely titanic amount of space.

Most of these points don't apply as much to purpose-build high-speed passenger rail lines (which is part of why they are so expensive: you don't just throw a level crossing through a street, they require extensive building to isolate them to mitigate these things, and if you already have a street grid that isn't prepared for it everything gets even more complicated)

I've lived less than 50 m from one for quite a while, and cars on the road inbetween were worse than passing high-speed trains. Freight trains or old, slow trains were another thing.

All those problems are solved by grade separation. If railways are fully grade separated there is no need for trains to use their horns. Since rail needs shallower gradients than road it often makes sense to sink it below street level, drainage allowing.

I have a train line ca. 1km away where the ICE high-speed train from Hamburg to Berlin passes. It's not driving there with full speed though. The train is basically not to notice. Though I hear the freight-trains or sometime the local trains (S-Bahn). Of course the ICE train is very silent and sure uses no horns - why should it - there are no level crossings. The tracks are placed higher and crossings are under bridges. The track is just next to other tracks for local trains, which then also have no level crossings inside the city.

What disturbs me slightly more are the planes.

Why are trains required to blow their horns? This is what guarded crossings are for.

I my country, trains are required to travel at lover speed at night time near to a town or city. Horn is forbidden at night too.

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