As the U.S. fantasizes, the world builds high speed rail
thetransportpolitic.com
thetransportpolitic.com
It's not completely implausible that, 30 years from now, most of Europe and Asia are connected by hyperloops while the US has built nothing and Internet commentators are arguing that hyperloop is old news compared to yet-unproven teleportation technology, and anyways the population density of the US doesn't support hyperloops.
Also as an aside. Japan is this weird example of a country with a good education system, hard workers, excellent infrastructure, and yet a totally stagnant economy. I mean I understand a lot of the reasons, but it's still weird.
That isn't the real kind of growth that makes peoples lives better. Look at per-capita instead. Since the 08 recession Japan has had consistent 1-2% per-capita growth, despite their population shrinking. They have problems, but none of the end of the world nonsense economists have been throwing around since the 80s in response to Japan not continuing the global fiction that we can just keep adding more people to fake growth numbers like that is guaranteed to lead to real quality of life improvements, especially in the information age when it is much more important to have the resources to educate and maximize the potential of the people you do have rather than try to spread resources out over more people who can possibly outright lose access to the higher degrees of technical knowledge needed to truly advance society at this point.
Totally explainable by the fact that Japan has the world's fastest aging (and now shrinking) population. [1]
1950: 84 million
1975: 112 million
2000: 127 million
2025: 124 million
2050: 110 million
[1] http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/worldageing195...
TBH virtually all developed economies have slowed down over the past 10+ years, I often wonder if this is the real reason, more than just the financial criss. The only spurts of growth seem to be either sudden windfalls from resource extraction booms or big credit runups that tend to leave a big hangover.
Compared to the US military spending for example? For a country that's geographically so remote and already so powerful that no other country even thinks of ever attacking?
immigrants are not being allowed in
A lot of rail commuters find that their commute is an unusually productive time. You've got all the resources you need to work but relatively few distractions, especially in the quiet carriage. It's a little slice of time that's entirely your own. It's like working in a cafe, except you're travelling at 125mph.
Here in the UK, the railways are too successful for their own good - passenger volume has doubled in 20 years, so the infrastructure is creaking under the sheer weight of passengers. We're building a new cross-country high-speed route, two major commuter routes across London, upgrading vast swathes of the network and it's still not nearly enough to keep up with demand.
Have you been to Japan?
so all these people either secretly prefer driving cars, or just have no other choice?
you know, you're talking about me among others[1], and the arrogance of your "I don't think so" is just... annoying.
[1] i haven't commented on this thread before, but i do commute to work by train, ~80km each way. i've been doing that for over a decade, and my employers have let me count the time spent on the train toward my on-clock time because i can and do work on the train. driving a car would mean wasting my time, and it would cost me more. not to mention that public transport is way safer than individual automotive transport.
Mostly because businesses demand every minute of it.
Time is ample if you're not stressed to the point of collapse all the time.
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170613-striking-photos-sh...
"Wolf ... visited a publisher in Tokyo with a portfolio of the images. “He just flicked through them in about 30 seconds, and he said ‘so what?’,”... “I said ‘what do you mean “so what?” – it’s a nightmare, don’t you see that?’ He said: ‘what do you mean it’s a nightmare, I’ve been doing this for 40 years of my life every day – it’s normal.’”
Plenty of videos available https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=japan+train+pus...
"Next train, buddy..."
Notice developing economies are going wireless/fiber and skipping the "legacy" generation, the US should be doing the same with MagLev/hyperloop.
The issue is we spend our money policing the world/blowing up countries then paying to rebuild them. If we weren't so hell-bent on global hegemony we could spend more on infrastructure at home.
A 25% cut in the US military would leave around 165bn for infrastructure and they'd still be spending more than the next 4 countries.
I happen to agree with slashing the US military, however your premise is incorrect. It's also worth noting that China aggressively lies about their military spending - under counting - and has been doing that for decades. The US is also now spending less than Russia per dollar of GDP.
Further, the $165 billion wouldn't accomplish anything in terms of infrastructure, or healthcare, or anything else. For example, take a look at the estimate that California Democrats recently ended up with for their single-payer system (it's so expensive to do in the US, it'd instantly bankrupt California; not even a small, somewhat well run state like Vermont can pull it off). You can't even fix California's infrastructure problems for $165 billion per year. Right now, with the US budget what it is, you'd need more like a $400 billion cut to the military to even scratch the surface (we have nukes, it'd realistically be feasible, but we'd have to dramatically disengage from dealing with Russia in Europe and China in Asia, requiring those regions to significantly lift their military spending).
In what way is hyperloop better than high-speed rail? I've never seen any credible study or report that argues it. Hyperloop also has massive unsolved (and potentially unsolvable) technical issues - like building a vacuum chamber of unprecedented size.
The Swiss did study something similar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swissmetro) but their proposal looks a lot more expensive and is entirely in-tunnel.
Opponents of HSL will not only rally against it, but also kill it by promoting a more expensive solution via another channel. The US isn't going to cut military spending so it can build hyperloop instead of HSL.
I'd like to see a study thay analyses whether tge whole train-in-Europe vs airports-in-USA might even be explained by this sole ability of US landowners to defend themselves.
However, remains one question: If Europeans can travel by train without being searched, isn't the USA violating the freedom of movement by using planes instead of trains, then imposing the TSA and other no-fly-list laws?
When the alternative is nothing, as is the case in 99% of the US today, I'd still call that a win.
I'd personally be completely overjoyed if the US "only" got 200mph train lines between all major cities.
George W. Bush was elected on a platform of no more nation building (and secured his second term in an atmosphere of fear and war), as was Donald Trump. It's very clear that the majority of Americans do not want more war & nation building (the only ones that do, are a contingent of conservatives like McCain and even fewer similar hawks on the other side).
The globalists + military industrial complex go ahead and do what they want anyway, against the wishes of the American public. They've been doing so for a long, long time now. Vietnam was not a very popular war, they did it anyway. The notion of no longer blowing up the Middle East and treating Russia as a villain, was impossible for them to stomach re Trump, so the CIA & fellow globalists (aka the deep state, media, etc) immediately went on hyper attack (oh the consequences of going against the machine).
It was extremely popular when LBJ started the war. Less than 25% of the public thought sending troops to Vietnam was a mistake. Similarly, only 23% of Americans thought sending troops to Iraq was a mistake at the outset of that war. Popular opinion overwhelmingly supported both of those wars. The notion that "it's very clear that the majority of Americans do not want more war & nation building" and "the globalists + military industrial complex go ahead and do what they want anyway" isn't just misleading, it's false -- if not an outright lie.
>The notion of no longer blowing up the Middle East and treating Russia as a villain, was impossible for them to stomach re Trump,
Ah, yes, which is why he's threatening North Korea, attacking airfields in Syria, selling weapons to Saudi Arabia (which is currently in a war with Yemen), bombing in Afghanistan, in his own words giving the military "total authorization", authorized a raid in Yemen, and the list goes on.
You were _sold_ no more nation building, by a man who has interests in having his fingers everywhere in the globe. That you bought it hook, line and sinker is yet another problem.
In the same way, the Vietnam war was reasonably popular at first. It was barely around 67 and after countless deaths that the opinion was overwhelmingly negative, forcing the US to go back tail between its legs.
Maybe Americans no longer want war. Every single leader they are electing certainly doesn't share that opinion though. So, either they actually quite enjoy playing world police, or they're quite frankly so manipulable it becomes scary. But go on ahead and blame "the globalists" and "the deep state" (which, intended or not, is very much an InfoWars term, not exactly a reputable source), I am certain that'll do a lot of good.
Generally the passenger rail proposals are illegal because they fail some now 100+ year old laws on cost/benefit analysis originally enacted to throttle bankrupting the US from building water projects to make the deserts bloom when the US had lots of blooming land not in deserts. If you own some desert and can talk the Federal Government into a big water project to make the desert bloom, then you can get rich, but the US could go broke doing that.
Well, continually, any honest cost/benefit analysis dooms any Federal subsidies for passenger rail.
There was a big example in Baltimore: They built a subway. Big subsidies. The system was done but not quite carrying passengers yet. I went to a lecture on the economics. The cost/benefit solution, even counting the construction cost as $0.00? Sure: Brick up the openings of the subway and just f'get about it. Why? No way could ticket prices pay even for routine operating costs.
Urban centers are more productive than suburban sprawl due to network effects. Effective passenger rail allows higher density, resulting in a productivity dividend to everyone in the area.[1]
Economic analyses along these lines are often used to sell highway expansion -- since of course highways don't pay for themselves directly -- but research does not support claims that adding highway capacity has any significant economic impact.[2]
Research in this area:
[1] Transit service, physical agglomeration and productivity in US metropolitan areas [2014] Paper: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0042098013494426 with 38 citations: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1548440332983701258...
[2] Highways and economic productivity [1997]: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0885412297011004... with 110 citations: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=4909135167466840847
To me, not focusing on ticket prices looks in conflict with the law on cost/benefit analysis, inviting waste, and shortsighted.
For US cost/benefit analysis 101 (at one time I was forced to take a grad course in that and still have the text) the main idea was to add all the (A) costs, capital, operating, etc. and (B) benefits "to whosoever they may accrue". Then the benefits had to exceed the costs. Amazing concept.
So, if are building a national park in Wyoming, then the main benefits are to the visitors to the park. Tough to say that I get a benefit if I live in NY and never visit the park. For the benefit of the people who do visit the park, add up ticket revenue or, if want park admission to be free, estimate what the ticket revenue would be worth.
Then according to the law, the benefits have to exceed the costs. That was aimed first at water resource projects but was also applied to public parks and maybe dams, highways, etc.
For the Baltimore subway, the obvious benefits went to the riders. Then the obvious way to measure the benefit was to add up revenue from ticket sales. If want the subway to be free or run at a loss, then okay, but still have to add up the benefits and they have to exceed the costs. Well, IIRC for that subway, no way could benefits to the riders pay even for the on-going operating costs. So, the optimal cost/benefit solution was to brick up the entrances and shut down the project. The capital expense? Wasted money.
Saying that the subway would have a benefit because some employers could get some workers for less money, there would be fewer cars on the roads, etc. IIRC was far-fetched and didn't count.
Yes, we could do the dreamy analysis: Just imagine a really, secure, productive, beautiful city with lots of happy people with beautiful art, statues, vistas, boulevards, walking trails, nature walks, roof top organic vegetable gardens, pet friendly, free dial-a-ride transportation, free bicycles, fast, quiet, clean, safe subways, lakes, parks, free concerts at noon, dinner time, and evening, fireworks each Saturday night, all carbon-free, renewable energy, phosphate free detergents, CFC free air conditioning, "top of the line, totally non-polluting" electric taxis, group singing Kumbaya every afternoon, a norm of group hugs all the time, full gender equality, fluidity, and ambiguity, sidewalk cafes with no paper products, sidewalk artists, farmers' markets in the streets Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, an open air theater, a music and arts school, a performing arts center, lots of art galleries, free 24 x 7 walk-in medical clinics, etc. Just add up the benefits. Clearly they would be astronomical, beyond any costs. So, any and all cost/benefit analyses have already been passed! Let's get to work and pick the hand-formed, artisanal, multi-colored pastel paving stones for the sidewalks!
Long ago I got a strong impression that people who have that dream city in mind, in particular a lot of people in NYC, really hate private cars.
I live 70 miles north of Wall Street out in the sticks, deer in the backyard, etc., and I was torqued and pissed when for my car registration I had to pay a sur-tax to support the MTA, that is, some trains to NYC. I never ride those trains. If the trains need more money, then they should raise the ticket prices, that is, have the people who benefit from the trains pay what the trains cost, at least the on-going operating costs. It's far-feteched and wildly indirect to say that I get a benefit when I don't ride those trains.
But some people really like trains and other public transportation and really hate cars and private transportation. There are a lot of people like that in NYC.
I don't think that Kumbaya city is what the cost/benefit analysis had in mind, but I do get the strong sense that it is what a lot of people looking for Federal subsidies have in mind.
A highway and gas taxes? Sure, if gas taxes can pay for a highway, then the benefits clearly, necessarily do exceed the costs: People liked the driving enough to pay for the gas and the gas taxes, so no question.
The public transportation lovers, the train lovers, and the subsidy takers are all coming out of the woodwork again. I smell a fad, a bubble. IMHO, this too, will pass. We're not going to have a lot Federal subsidies for a lot of new passenger trains or Kumbaya cities springing up.
It's really simple: Anything like passenger trains mostly just do not work. Sure, NYC is built on top of a lot of subway lines, and they are now crucial to that city. So, that's NYC. So be it.
Why NYC? A good seaport between (A) the US Midwest, the Great Lakes, the Erie Canal, and the Hudson River and (B) much of the rest of the world, especially the US east coast and Europe. So, it was geography.
But, back to trains. The people have lots of origin-destination pairs so try to have lots of stops. Then on average at each stop usually take on or let off only a few people and for those few people have everyone else on the train wait and have the many tons of the train itself slow down, stop, and accelerate again. Bummer.
So, really, don't want so many little stops and, then, come up short on origin-destination pairs. E.g., my car is downstairs, under my family room, just off the basement. It's just a few steps to the car, and when I get back with groceries, etc., it's just a few steps to move the stuff from my car, an SUV, to my appropriate storage shelves for that stuff. When I start, accelerate, and stop my car, that's about 4000 pounds, not 100 tons, and only my time is involved, not also the time of hundreds of other people. Indeed, if I have much stuff, I back the SUV into the garage to save a few steps hauling the stuff. A train? To replace my SUV? A really bad joke. There is no way a train can stop close to all the houses in my neighborhood. That is, again, a train is very short on origin-destination pairs.
That's an old and very obvious and clear story: About 100 years ago, the US had passenger train service to essentially every cross-roads or larger in the whole country. But as soon as private cars were available, to heck with the horse drawn buckboard from the house to the train station, and to heck with the passenger trains. That is still the case.
Even if the trains were infinitely fast, to do well serving lots of origin-destination pairs, the delays for all the needed stops and connections would take too long.
The fact of life is that in nearly all the land area of the US, and for nearly everyone in the US not in one of the top 10 largest cities, the main means of people transportation is their private car, yes, on highways funded by gas taxes.
I know; I know; the Kumbaya city people want Federal subsidies to get rid of private cars, gasoline, suburbs, highways for private cars, etc. and have everyone in their own 500 square foot per person flat in a high rise in Kumbaya city with lots of trains and, soon, self-driving taxis, food delivery via drones, ordered by talking into a friendly AI appliance, etc. That fad, bubble will also soon go away.
Gee, and remember, we will need really good train service to Woodstock, NY!
Folks, again, follow the money: The people who want the subsidies want to give you a lot of dreamy stuff and then get your money and put a lot of it in their pockets. They want to have you dream about 100% all-natural, carbon-free, CFC-free, phosphate-free, anxiety-free, totally free, organic, pure, renewable, with no harm to the 100% all-natural, pure, pristine, delicate, sensitive, environment, the climate, the coral reefs, the whales, the birds, Antarctica, etc., or was that the last such scam? Uh, and the birds, well, there has been some compromise there!
Here is one: On the Great Lakes, have a nice paddle wheel boat. Big enough for several hundred people. Pick people up at some ports and take them on a beautiful, scenic evening cruise with all the best people.
Here's another idea: Notice that a lot of people want to have a private boat of 40 feet or so, say, on the Great Lakes. As everyone knows, to own such a boat usually has a cost per hour actually on the water too high to believe. So, have some such boats and rent them. Do a really nice job. E.g., have the boats in top condition and squeaky clean. Have very helpful staff of young people, usually college students off for the summer, in nice, crisp uniforms.
These ideas sound good, right? Make lots of money, right? Would be candidates for Federal subsidies based on cost/benefit analysis? Right?
Wrong! The ideas flopped. They lost money. Actually, the first idea, the cruise ship, did work for some years about 100 years ago and then trailed off. For whatever reason, those ideas didn't work.
For the free enterprise system, people learn that (A) there are lots of really nice products which, however, cost so much too few people can afford them and (B) lots of cheap products lots of people can afford except nearly no one wants them. Free enterprise has to make money in this world of (A) and (B). Public projects? With just cost/benefit analysis done in some dreamy ways, we're looking at a lot of projects that wouldn't work in free enterprise. I.e., the projects are losers in that charging what the real costs are, too few people would buy. It's their choice to buy or not, and too often they would not. But, with a public project, they have to pay for the thing whether they want to or not!
I have an idea: Why don't we get back to rationality and reality, wise up, and stop the scams and their waste and ripoffs? Remember Solyndra?
Or are we so rich we can ignore reality and rationality and indulge ourselves in goofy nonsense and dream of smoking funny stuff?
But for the NY and NYC MTA, they don't care because NYC needs the trains. For the rest of the country, they should and do care.
If you want my tax money for your new dreamy trains, then I will tell my representatives to vote no.
HSR is more of a more efficient airplane - spacious & can walk around & get a drink.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_density#/media/File...
(Or if you prefer something more recent, have a look at: http://www.newgeography.com/content/002808-world-urban-areas...)
Pretty obvious which areas are ripe for HSR. Except for the mid-Atlantic corridor and arguably coastal California, nothing in the US really is.
It's the same thing when people go abroad then come back and complain how backwards cell phone service is here. People really don't appreciate how underpopulated the U.S. is relative to the rest of the world. (Conversely, it's also why we could accommodate practically an unlimited # of refugees compared to Europe, if we really cared to.)
Much as I love HSR and curse its absence when in the USA the economics are not quite as clear. Air routes are more flexible than rail routes.
Of course that flexibility isn't necessarily desired by all; the stations on a rail network provide hysteresis which can keep otherwise unprofitable cities alive and even vibrant. New York beat out Boston because the Hudson was more navigable than the Charles, Boston Harbor's benefits notwithstanding. Chicago grew because it was at a confluence (literally!) of cheap transshipment points near farmland. Both cities do well even though their original reasons for existing are lost (neither are major freight hubs but have a lot of other transit links).
And rail, even underground rail, can be abandoned.
Except for having to build an, uh, entire airport.
Of course, the technology itself is still way more unproven than that of high-speed rail, but that is its promise at least.
Even with the best available rail technology, trips between them would take over 12 hours by rail.
All of these trips are currently frequently taken by car because flying is a nuisance and takes a lot longer than just the flight duration itself.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14679127
I don't dispute that there are pockets of the US that would be well-served by rail. Maybe SEA-PDX is one of them! Note, though, that neither Seattle nor Portland are in the top 10 economically most important US cities.
I'm not anti-train. I love HSR. I wish we had more of it. But I think there's a solid reason that we don't.
Any conversations of car-vs-train have to account for the linear scaling cost compared to loading up 4+ people and/or a bunch of stuff in a car.
https://www.eurail.com/en/europe-by-train/night-trains
For America, the overwhelming shortcoming is ordinary commuter rail networks. Park-and-ride is a well-proven concept that can massively reduce traffic and local air pollution, while still serving very large areas of suburban sprawl. Many American cities could be completely transformed with a handful of well-planned commuter rail routes.
And a good nights rest, trying to sleep on those things is almost impossible for me and I have no sleep problems normally.
New York-San Francisco (for example) in 12 hours by train could be great: leave at 7pm, eat dinner, get a full night's sleep, wake up the next morning and you're there.
The night on the train shouldn't cost more than an extra night in a hotel room would've cost, and you've gone city center to city center and avoided the nightmare of air travel.
Sign me up.
As a historical timing thing, most of the US leapfrogged the need for urban density and big train networks with air travel and automobiles, and neither of them are expensive enough relative to national wealth now to make it easy to justify investing more in alternatives currently. Especially with self-driving electric cars and alternative energy sources potentially around the corner to plow through the biggest pain points we've encountered around our car-centric urban design so far.
Lastly it's far easier to scale up with planes. You can't add more trains to one high speed track if another train is already on it heading towards you at high speed.
http://www.economist.com/news/china/21714383-and-theres-lot-...
In the Bay Area, the Caltrain commuter train runs from San Jose to San Francisco, through the downtown areas of most major cities in between. It is currently so popular that it is significantly over capacity every day. Yet it is still a constant political battle to get funding to improve the system, even though the Bay Area is one of the most educated and politically liberal parts of the country, where support for public transit is higher than many other places.
Sometimes I think we would have much more transit funding overall if we set aside part of the transit budget to send Americans to other countries on vacation, so they will return knowing how good public transit can actually be.
Where HSR is feasible and built out in the US, it gets used. The problem is, HSR isn't feasible for the most economically important routes in the US.
You can get from London to Paris in 3 hours on a train, and from Paris to Frankfurt in about 5. Almost as a rule, the most economically central European cities are closer to each other by rail than the most important American cities are --- excepting the Eastern Seaboard, where we have rail --- by air.
Having driven that route many times over taking the train I can tell you this is false. The prices of Acela is more then double what is normal in Europe for similar length train routes and better service. It is cheaper to rent a car and drive even for a single person and if you have 2 or more people it is significantly cheaper.
Where is this ? Epcot center ? I don't know of any actual high speed rail in the United States.
Acela most certainly isn't ...
What? You think people don't want to take train that goes ~200 mp/h ?
Riding the bullet train in China when I was there in 1998 was awesome!
Doing the same though air travel would add at least a total of 2-3 hours for the whole thing. Don't know about the cost comparison but the user satisfaction is there.
Happened in France, fortunately with no casualties...
Not taking this into account is immoral, because those resources could potentially be spent saving peoples lives in more efficient ways. Terrorism is extremely rare way of dying.
I'm extremely skeptical that this accounting will even show a benefit for airport security, but I don't think airport security is mainly about stopping terrorists. It's about controlling what people bring on board the plane, as there's a lot of things that could inadvertantly cause trouble on a plane. The same can not be said for trains to the same degree.
Also, planes themselves can be used as effective weapons if taken over. Don't think that goes for trains, especially where they're electrified.
It continues to be cool for the thousands of other trips that day and the millions of other trips afterwards where that doesn't happen.
Better to build a society that doesn't create people who feel the need to mow down a train car full of people than to treat everyone else like a criminal a priori.
This is the case for any crowded public space. It is unavoidable.
A simple metal detector would've caught a long gun, even with incompetent security personnel. By only allowing small "carry on" bags in the passenger carriages (storing larger "checked" bags in a separate freight car) the attack space is limited to what can fit in a handbag or backpack. It won't catch everything, but wrt terrorist attacks trains are safer than airplanes.
You don't need to go full TSA and make grandma take off her shoes or racially profile people to have decent security.
But last time we talked about this, it seemed to me that if you looked into the details, it was clear why we don't have HSR in the US. Even assuming we built a network that operated at Shanghai Maglev speeds, at the distances the network would need to operate, air travel would remain significantly more economical.
In a thread 3 years ago, I made a list of the top US cities by GDP, and then broke out the crow-flies ground distances between them:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8713324
Of the 55 edges on this graph, only 6 were 700 miles apart or less. Several of those are already served by the Acela.
There's a definite advantage to rail over air, in that rail can deposit you right in the middle of the city you're heading to. But that advantage can't make up for the fact that no train is going to compete with a plane for trips between the largest US cities.
First, with stops factored in, the Acela makes about 75 mph. This is competitive with driving, not flying. There's a lot of room for improvement right there.
Second, I'm not sure that distance between the biggest cities matters. Is there actually a ton of traffic between Philly and Los Angles, for example? You could easily imagine several unconnected networks (SF-LA-SD, for example, along with an upgraded Boston-DC route, or something between Austin, Houston, and Dallas).
In a similar vein, you could imagine connecting one major city to a bunch of somewhat smaller ones. For example, Chicago to Madison, Milwaukee, or even Minneapolis. This wouldn't necessarily replace air travel, but it would integrate those cities more tightly and might replace a lot of driving. Madison to Chicago even becomes a (somewhat) reasonable commute!
I think the reason a hsr line like this does not exist for these routes is simply because the monetary demand/value isn't there.
Going from Tokyo to Kyoto and back is probably the single most used rail line on the planet in terms of value. That one line is enough to drive an impressive chunk of the entire nation of Japan's economy. And along the way on that route, there are tons of other slightly-smaller cities that make the route extremely efficient.
But Chicago to Madison, Chicago to Milwaukee? There just isn't enough value there. Anyone who WANTS to get from Chicago to any of those places on rare occasion can just drive (the US beats probably everyone else, certainly Japan, at that). Anyone who NEEDS to get from Chicago to those places can fly or take the slow train. And that route is not powering a significant portion of the US economy, like the Kyoto-Tokyo route. And besides some suburbs, there's really nothing along those lines to make them efficient. It would be billions of dollars invested to get people from Chicago to a cities that aren't very important to Chicago. And if any of those cities start to fail, that line is basically useless now, since there's nothing else along it, it only goes to one place.
The problem is in the layout, really -- the economy is powered by New York to Chicago, Chicago to LA, Dallas to Seattle, etc. And these are distances where a plane is going to give you advantages over high speed rail -- ESPECIALLY considering there is basically a whole bunch of nothing between the cities, as opposed to the unending line of coastal cities that live along the Kyoto-Tokyo line.
One look at a population density map shows exactly why Japan's rail line is so highly efficient: http://www.mappi.net/japon_densite.gif
You could draw a straight line that goes through 99% of Japan's population. And that's exactly what they did, but with a railway.
I know I didn't talk about Europe here, but I don't know much about Europe. Though my rough understanding of European geography tells me that it is also more efficiently organized than the US, and therefore also more suited for HSR.
On the other hand, we also barely have high-speed rail between New York and Boston or DC, and those cities (and travel between them) do drive a huge chunk of the US economy.
Chicago-Madison is interesting because they're too far apart to commute between: the drive is ~150 miles/2.5 hrs each way and train is, inexplicably, much slower. If it instead took an hour or less to get between city centers, it's suddenly doable. Similar arguments might apply to Boston-Manchester and other pairs of big-medium cities. Someone would have to run the numbers, but I think HSR has the potential to create demand, rather than just shift it from cars and planes.
On the list I provided, where do you see major opportunities for us to build out rail? I know that there are some! I just don't think there are many, or that it will ever make sense for us to have a densely connected HSR network like Europe.
I think aiming for a comprehensive network right out of the gate is bad idea. Instead, build it now where it makes sense now...and build more later where/when/if it makes sense later. You could even add some fairly short routes. If someone can get Boston to Providence/Wooster/Manchester down to ~20-30 minutes, it'd be a huge win for that entire metro area. People already do those commutes but they're on the longish side.
And what is the door to door time? 1.5 hours to fly + how much waiting in line, going through the tsa bs, having to go from the airport to downtown...
For those cities in France, the time travel from city center to city center is about 3 hours and half by train, with 2 stops on the way. It beats both car and air travel, since you can just to show up at the station 5 minutes before the train departs, and don't need to go through security.
Also, the cheap tickets cost less than 50 euro, and you can get between 25% and 50% discount if you are less than 25 years old.
The French train system is expensive and too centralized. You'll find many examples of how great French trains are but everyone only ever talks about traveling to or from Paris. And sure, it's great and convenient for Parisians.
But when you want to connect two mid-size, non-Paris cities that are more than ~500 km apart, travel by train becomes a time-consuming and expensive affair. For instance, taking the train from Nancy to Grenoble costs about 120€ if you're lucky; it forces you to take a massive detour through Paris and change train stations there. Changing stations in Paris is stressful and takes at least half an hour - since there are no shuttles, you must take the subway (and change subway lines too!)
All in all, what should have been a 3 hour journey becomes a costly 7-8 hour ordeal, thanks to the extreme centralization of the French rail network. Many people are getting fed up with this -- carpooling across long distances is becoming popular because it can often be faster and much cheaper than rail!
None of the proposed routes have been that. Many of them have included detouring through cities like Rochester, MN (home of the Mayo Clinic), and taking other weird routes.
That's really not a useful analysis, you could make the same sort of list of London, Berlin, Madrid, Turin, Istanbul, Dublin, Athens, Moscow, Budapest etc, and demonstrate that a high speed network is useless in Europe, but nevertheless it exists. You need to do the same with the 100 biggest cities, that's where the system is most effective. Of course, just as in Europe, most of the journeys will be better done by plane, that's not the point, high speed rail is just another option which is particularly useful for particular circumstances. It would be substantially less useful in the US than in Europe, because as you say the distances are greater, but it definitely seems like it should exist more than it does.
I agree with this sentiment. However, I don't think that connecting large cities together is the most interesting thing we can do with rail ... rather, we can find corridors of opportunity that open up a lot of movement and economic activity that is hindered by being just a bit too far to commute ...
For instance: Duluth->MPLS->DesMoines->KCMO
For instance: Cheyenne->FtCollins->Denver->CoSprings->Pueblo[1]
In each of those instances there is only one large metro area but there are "junior" areas that could benefit greatly by gaining the ability to commute ...
You really can't commute from Duluth (where people need jobs) to Minneapolis (where jobs are) ... or from Pueblo to Denver ... but things change if it's just a 40 minute train ride away ...
[1] With the admission that Denver->CoSprings is logistically difficult due to elevation change on the route ...
So, yes, it's a great system for the people who use it, and I like the fact that we have such a thing, but it's actually supported by taxes and not that used by the general population.
My perception is that it's a huge money pit for something that's quite frankly inferior to our current infrastructure. We would be much better off improving our current insterstate system.
- faster (200 Km/h and up)
- much lower accident per passenger mile
- in theory it should be cheaper (it isn't for a variety of reasons, many of those are political)
- it allows you to work while you're in motion (much harder in a car or a plane)
- more land efficient
- connects the centers of cities rather than the outskirts which in many cases removes that last mile problem because the majority of traffic is city-to-city
For the United States the situation is better served anyway by comparing rail and air travel, air travel scales better as the distance increases, is (roughly) comparable in cost per ticket and tends to be faster on longer distances.
I have some friends that have moved to upstate New York from Brooklyn and rent is the same, just with a lot more space. However, you then have to add on $400/month for the commuter rail along with an extra hour per day of commuting, plus owning a car and needing to drive everywhere instead of walking. It actually ends up being more expensive, but the trade off is getting more space (if you care about that for some reason).
I can easily afford a car, but I don't own one because I don't have need for one very frequently, so it's simply cheaper to rent when I need one rather than have to worry about owning one 24/7.
Unless you're talking about the highly possible near future where even the middle class doesn't has cars, but would pay more for a train ticket that's faster.
Rail is heavily subsidised in many European countries. But a well-run and affordable rail service is such an essential motor of economic well-being that subsidies are generally accepted as essential by governments and most of the public.
For an example of what what happens when more and more of the cost of a ticket is shouldered by the commuter, look at the UK. We have some of the highest rail fares in the whole of Europe.
Below is research from the TUC (Trades Union Congress) in the UK who campaign against rail privatisation. Whether or not you agree with their stance on privatisation, the cost of a monthly season ticket in the UK is enormous.
Monthly season ticket comparison: UK vs Europe:
UK: Luton to London St. Pancras (35 miles) £387
UK: Liverpool Lime Street to Manchester Piccadilly (32 miles) £292
Germany: Dusseldorf to Cologne (28 miles) £85
France: Mantes-la-Jolie to Paris (34 miles) £61
Italy: Anzione to Rome (31 miles) £61
Spain: Aranjuez to Madrid (31 miles) £75
Source: https://www.tuc.org.uk/industrial-issues/transport-policy/uk...
One reason those routes are so expensive is that UK rail is in many regions frequently at or over capacity. Supply/demand does its thing until prices hit the caps. This is especially true around London. Price controls always cause shortages and in this case it's a shortage of seats and investment in capacity upgrades. Seems people prefer that to more expensive tickets or higher taxpayer subsidies.
Also the infrastructure is ancient - the steam locomotive was literally invented in the UK - and investment was largely abandoned during the decades of government ownership. The current railways often have infrastructure in them built a century ago.
Finally, some lines actually pay the government money rather than receive subsidies.
I don't think the UK position is wrong. It just means people who choose to use the railways instead of driving or moving pay more of the costs. Seems fair.
From memory, something like 4% of fare revenue ends up as profit going to the TOCs at the end of the year; for many, this isn't enough to buy a single extra train, yet alone anything bigger. The profits these private companies are taking aren't huge in terms of the costs of operating a railway!
That said...
> I don't think the UK position is wrong. It just means people who choose to use the railways instead of driving or moving pay more of the costs. Seems fair.
Surely that same argument should apply to driving? i.e., those using for the roads should pay more of the costs instead of it all coming out of general taxation?
Given that is the case I think it's hard to justify extra subsidy for people who are clearly getting enough utility from the system.
And many shippers will absolutely not use rail freight for a variety of reasons in the USA, including slow delivery time (can't ship produce and other perishables easily), lackluster quality of service from the rail lines (they want coal, oil, large commodity business, not smaller firms), higher chance of damage; as well as not meeting minimum qty/volume for it to be worth it.
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/reports/tswstudy/Vol2-Chapter3.pdf
As for speed, it's interesting to compare trucks with slow steaming.
> Slow steaming refers to the practice of operating transoceanic cargo ships, especially container ships, at significantly less than their maximum speed. An analyst at National Ports and Waterways Institute stated in 2010 that nearly all global shipping lines were using slow steaming to save money on fuel.
And, better than HSR, the same vehicle can go door-to-door.
Actually, there is: energy costs for road traffic go up as the square of the velocity, for rail this is much better because there is only one (very aerodynamic) front section for as many carriages as you want to put behind the loc and steel-on-steel has much better rolling resistance than rubber-on-asphalt or concrete.
With regard to aerodynamics, I am assuming that following distances for advanced autonomous vehicles will be minimal. They could maybe drive bumper-to-bumper as long as all cars in the ... er ... train were similarly capable.
There sorta is. Air resistance and tyre/pavement rolling resistance get mighty expensive at that sort of speed, and the need to carry along energy storage makes this even more problematic.
High-speed rail vehicles amortise, over the whole train, the part of the drag that comes from the frontal area. Automobiles cannot do this.
Once you've created a curve-free, very flat, grade-separated controlled access freeway for your 250kph cars, you've...got most of what you need for high-speed rail anyway. At that point you might as well just build some rails and overhead line and buy some TGV rolling stock.
Even if autonomous cars are smaller than the ones we have now, they still take up too much space. Autonomous cars will expand the amount of drivers as one no longer needs a license, and the amount of cars will increase. This new demand will cause increased road congestion unless an expensive expansion of the road network takes place, an we know from induced demand that road expansion doesn't fix congestion in the long term anyway.
Automobile oriented infrastructure doesn't scale whether the cars are autonomous or not, and it's a bad idea to base the entire transportation system around them.
Then a blown tire will be a deadly accident.
You can bring your devices without worrying about having them inspected
True, hostage-taking is generally not a risk on rail (Pelham 1-2-3 aside), but HSR is just as tempting a target for terrorism.
Imagine a detonation that derails an HSR from elevated rail, at speed, in an urban setting.
When I go from NYC to DC and back, I don't fly, I take the train or bus. It ends up being significantly cheaper and doesn't take any longer, plus there's less annoying switching between modes of transit. Cities less than 400 km apart are already better traveled between using bus or low-speed rail -- now more than double that minimum radius for true high-speed rail and you can see how it would have a big impact on US long-distance travel.
Someone mentioned longer distances in the US. But far as I get most places building rail through the flat nowhere lands is really cheap. And the trains can run at max speed with few stops.
If you built a line from Chicago to Denver, okay 900 miles. But at 220 MPH, four hours. Be better than flying.
Less security, bigger seats, room to move around. The time loss going from New York to Chicago or Seattle to Los Angeles would be minimal if you count the total time spent in transit, and the trip would be much less stressful.
you still have to figure out how to travel tens of miles to where you really want to go.
Same with air travel, except it's easier for trains to end up in city centers instead of airports outside of the city.
as opposed to a continuous stream of people on a freeway
Which is much more environmentally damaging, and requires drivers. When autonomous, electric vehicles are the rule instead of the exception this might not be the case, but for now I'd much rather take a train than drive.
With developed network of local and regional lines it's usually more convenient to travel by train, because you just switch to metro or local train on the same station. E.g. in Germany there are long distance speed trains (ICE), regionals (RE), local trains (S-Bahn), metro (U-Bahn) and very good public transit. I haven't find a place yet, where you will really need a car to get there.
One comment on the website mentions airport-like security checks, saying that they'll slow down the boarding by the same amount of time. Actually, it's not true - just look at "Sapsan" trains between Moscow and St.Petersburg in Russia. There's, in fact, airport-like security check right before the train and it does not make boarding significantly slower.
Flying is the most energy- and carbon-intensive mode per passenger-mile. Which as alluded above, is not a meaningful economic factor, yet. (Unfortunately by the time it becomes meaningful enough to be profitable, it might be too late to transition to anything else because the capital won't be there.)
RE highway vs. train - If you can imagine a continuous stream of cars on a highway, why wouldn't you be able to also imagine a continuous stream of trains on a track? A mile of track filled with train cars can hold more people than a mile of highway, easily. And it has one centralized power plant with a much higher efficiency factor (because it's a larger engine and because it uses better fuel for the purpose). It also has far less total wind resistance, since the train has only one front face and one rear face. And if it's high-speed rail, well, it moves faster than cars. But again, efficiency is not currently a meaningful factor.
Traveling the last few miles from the train stop is very much a solved problem. Even if you drive, that beats making the whole journey by car in my book. But those wishing to minimize it can always move closer in near the stop... thereby concentrating land-use in cities again and maybe letting the scourge of suburbia die off like it needs to... in a paroxysm of mold-infested particle-board.
High-speed rail in many non-US countries is vastly cheaper to construct and much faster and reliable than USian high-speed rail.
> You're limited to putting people in a few train cars, as opposed to a continuous stream of people on a freeway.
With off-the-shelf railcars and a well-tested train control system rail can get far higher throughput than freeways. If you do the USian thing and have to get extremely customised/bespoke rolling stock and try to make your own bespoke train control system, well, you indeed do get the disaster you're describing.
> My perception is that it's a huge money pit for something that's quite frankly inferior to our current infrastructure. We would be much better off improving our current insterstate system.
US rail indeed sucks and it needs to be unfucked before more money is dumped into it. None of the suckiness (slowness, high construction cost per mile, high ticket prices) is inherent to high-speed rail, though.
The ticket prices are high because Amtrak is subsidizing the non-profitable routes with the North East Corridor. If it was run as a business they would cut all the trains in the middle of the country and re-invest the profit in the NEC, or lower fares. If it was run as a public good, then there would be more of a subsidy. Right now Amtrak in this place where it's restricted by being beholden to politics but not enjoying the benefit of full throated government support.
If it were an option in my country I'd definitely take it for any trip up to ~1,200km.
When the flight says it's 40 minutes - it's not really 40 minutes, add time for tsa, baggage, landing etc and you get at least 2-3 hours wasted of your day
The vehicle speed is lower but the total travel time (much less inconvenience) of rail vs air is much lower, except for transcontinental trips. And the rail stations are usually more conveniently located compared to airports.
Given that we don't have a high speed rail system in place, I'm not sure where this number is coming from.
> You're limited to putting people in a few train cars, as opposed to a continuous stream of people on a freeway.
My wife, my kid and I flew down to Texas, and are going to be spending about 20 hours doing long-distance drives.
I would absolutely love to be in a few high-speed train cars than stuck in a car, in a continuous stream of people, where one of us has to remain at relatively high alert for hours at a time, while the other one is strapped into a seat, trying to entertain the other other one who is strapped into a smaller seat, but has boundless energy and no concept of patience.
If we had some sort of road-train system where we weren't welded to a gas pedal and a steering wheel, then maybe.
How do people figure out how to get from airports to their final destinations?
How many people can put put in trains? China is going to get 32,000 people per hour in their low-speed maglev:
http://gbtimes.com/china/beijing-launch-first-maglev-line-20...
The throughput is higher in rail than cars. Also, you are trying to make HSR fit as a solution where cars would be better. No one said that trains are best in every situation. And absolutely no one said that we should remove all of our high-ways and replace them with rail.
However, between cities over several hundred thousand people, and within 500-7600 miles, they work out well.
That is a good indication there is demand. Prices can only go down if trains are more frequent and available to all places.
My region is small and would be perfect for a light rail system mainly because it's got few people scattered over a wide area with no direct route.
Bombardier even makes rail cars for many countries so it's a home-grown resource we could use.
I think south eastern Canada and north eastern US could have a great interconnected rail system. I'm only 800 km (~500 miles) from Boston but I may as well be on the dark side of the moon.
Like NY city before its subway system people were crowded in the city but when rail was expanded people could live in the suburbs and work in the city. I think a US and Canadian rail system would open up travel and trade on the eastern coasts of each country. Day trips to cities you'd never even think of visiting now or not even capable doing so now in a day.
That said, where it would make sense, like DC-Boston, we definitely should build it out. Build up the cities as the countryside is absorbed (as seen in Japan, and elsewhere in Asia) and let it become viable. Its deployment would definitely affect how cities and other communities grow and also depopulate, so we'd need to anticipate that and prepare for it.
Three things China has going for is vis a vis the US:
-Pop density
-Command economy (gov't can just move things through with little debate, displace 1MM people, if necessary.)
-Costs (in labor, materials, regulation, etc.)
We gotcha beat in Seattle, where it took 30 years to build the north I5-I405 interchange. It took only 20 years to build the 8th Street I405 overpass. 25 years are projected for the light rail.
Government is promoting cars, spread-out cities, and suburbia because they work so well and people love them so much.
Think about how much housing supply would go away if not for the road network.
Think about the bare-minimum transportation appliance car. With a private, enclosed space, air conditioning, a comfortable seat, and a radio, it's worlds better as a subjective experience than being inside even a relatively luxurious urban train during the commute rush. Now consider how many tens of thousands of dollars people happily spend on a level of comfort and quality far beyond the bare-minimum Craigslist special.
Democratic governments promote and invest in what their citizens like.
It doesn't matter if something is cheaper or more efficient if people don't want to use it.
This is like asking why doesn't everyone use Linux?
Millions of people pass through the NYC rail terminals every year, and the big inter-city one is crippled by infrastructure failures and damaged tunnels that connect to NJ. It seems that the NJ government spent Federal $$ provided to fix it on something else.
We're living in an age of incompetence.
I'm not American, but I doubt it very much. It seems to me, from the outside, so take it with a grain of salt, that the crippled infrastructure thing is politically motivated and working as planned.
As part of its HSR strategic plan, back in '09 the Obama admin identified over half a dozen regions well within HSR densities and distances (the existing north-east corridor, nothern new england linking to canada, southeast along the coast, the chicago area, the gulf coast, south-east central though Texas, the californian coast and the pacific northwest).
Either go big (maglev/hyperloop) and meaningfully compete with airlines or forget about it.
No one said we should blanket the country with HSR, but shouldn't the US have a need for at least 2000 miles? We have basically zero.
You're doing that thing where you try to explain why it won't work in the US by saying that it won't work everywhere.
EDIT: Also, lower labor costs are, to some degree, a function of having a command economy (China missed out on a ton of economic growth in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, that would have had it be much wealthier now, for example, and this command economy of theirs can command lower wages too, in part through financial repression, for example).
According to rail advocates, it's a good idea to hardwire your city's transportation infrastructure to fixed locations and routes that may or may not serve the population effectively and economically for decades to come.
But only if you're building rail. Roads are right out.
Then you travel to the rest of the developed world, and wow, what a difference in infrastructure.
Not having passenger rail was a choice. Automated cars and the potential of Hyperloop might seriously change people's opinion of passenger rail.
German highways are excellent, of course; marginally better than our own (the worst traffic jam I've ever been in was 30 minutes outside of Munich, but, whatever). But the European highway network is sparser than the American network, and once you're off the highway, it's significantly worse (though more scenic, and much more "fun" to drive on.)
The TSA severely limits its effectiveness, so it could be tempting to build a rail network just to bypass the TSA, but there's no reason to think the same screening procedures won't apply to HSR after the first incident (or just threat).
How in the world did I miss such an obvious thing?
Congestion absolutely happens on trains. Just look at the New York or San Francisco subways during rush hour. The first and most obvious form is that you'll spend the first few train departures in "line" to get to the edge of the platform, then a couple more for a train you can physically squeeze onto.
The more insidious one is that public transit operators respond to crowding by increasing frequency beyond what their signaling technology can support. Even after you make it onto the train, you'll spend most of the journey stopped on the track waiting for the train in front of you to move.
You can solve congestion in any transportation system by enforcing a low enough number of simultaneous users, forcing the others to not travel, or use some other means. We seem least willing to do this with trains. Transit authorities are seriously thinking about congestion pricing for freeways, airlines raise prices at popular times, but rail systems are working to attract more ridership even as they collapse under the weight of their already-far-too-high ridership.
The best of the best in any subject are likely to be on the rich side of the divide, and they flock to the US.
A large number of people are suffering from changes outside of their control, and they are disconnected from those at the forefront of social and technological progress. Many of these people have lost trust in the system, and even in progress itself (outside of progressions that are accessible and affordable such as games or phones). As a result, there is little enthusiasm for investing in major improvements to systems or building any major infrastructure enabling progress.
"High speed rail? What is in it for me? I work part time and can't afford these medications. I want the life I used to have back."
Perhaps a good place to start is understanding the experience of people who are voting for an imagined retrograde society. This can be difficult for those of us who have had the privilege of a better education, or better opportunities in the cities, or even all of our needs met as we build what we build. The privileged must try, and must succeed in understanding what is happening here. This is because the votes of those within what is essentially a ghetto lead to major consequences, including underfunding high speed rail. The result isn't just ridiculously under-qualified and intellectually isolated politicians that are easy to make fun of.
The underprivileged will keep voting in this way until their concerns are answered (or not).
We at the technological forefront know more about what needs to be done in terms of advancing progress, possibly even to the point of solving half of all social problems. However, we must also pay heed to the immediate, harsh reality of the people left behind. Our environment -- natural, political, or infrastructural -- depends on this.
If the ethical demand to listen and react appropriately to the suffering of others does not convince us to strongly act, watching the destructive results of their votes should.
This retrograde notion is based on a lot of evidence and personal experiences. For example, in a conversation I had with someone a few years ago I asked what is wrong with the way things are. That person told me he wants things to be like the way they were in the 1950s, referring to the sense of community, job opportunities, and social mores.
Melbourne to Sydney is worth doing now, though it's a close thing. But the benefits come as time savings for rich businessmen, and Australia told them that if they really wanted it they could pay for it themselves.
So instead of "what's wrong with the US" we should ask "what went wrong with CA HSR?".
IMHO a high speed railway network is not the start but an evolution of an existing regional rail system/public transportation system that acts as a feeder and communter infrastructure.
The US lacks those public transpotation systems even in mid-size towns. That's a bigger problem IMHO.
I mean, yes the US is sparsely populated (in the middle), but isn't it also because it doesn't have fast and easy transport system?
Wouldn't a high speed line between San Fran and Portland develop the very rural regions of Northern California?
High speed train also means high speed cargo transport, isn't that driving some economical development?
These are not rhetorical questions, i seriously have no idea of the answers, but it would be nice to see what experts think about that.
i have the feeling that this advantage would be lost in the us, where people live in suburbs way more, and so any trip starts at least with a 45 minutes drive ( not to mention the fact that parking in an airport is probably more convenient than in a city center).
It's not insane. Federal money is never "free" it's taken from the people and always comes with strings attached.
Not building and maintaining highways and bridges shouldn't even be an option. While some upper-class, rich people can afford to live in our cities, they are a huge minority and most people rely on cars and highways. Outside of a couple of cities, good city public transportation simply doesn't exist in the US and won't exist anytime soon.
I think we need to be realistic as to what is possible in the US. High speed inter-city rail isn't possible. And even if it is, can it compete with the price of plane tickets? Doubtful. Giving our cities good public transportation isn't possible. It may have been possible in the past, but not the last few decades. Having room inside a city for all who want to live there most certainly isn't possible. Building roads and bridges has now become almost impossible in many places. I have to wonder what is the plan for the US transportation infrastructure. As far as I can see, the plan is to let it deteriorate until it doesn't exist anymore. At least in that sense, it's consistent with education, social programs, and the rest of our crumbling society.
Rail is convenient, but it will never ever be as convenient as having a car take you where you want to be, carry your kids, and carry your stuff around. As soon as self-driving technology eliminates the hassles of parking and clean solar-electric tech eliminates the environmental concerns, ridership is going to tank on all the fixed train lines. It might be 10-15 years out, but I would be shocked if any of the investments made today in rail ever pay off.
Replacing public transportation with point-to-point self-driving technology in a place like Manhattan, would require building out a ridiculously massive amount of road capacity.
In the real world people who can will spend money not to be packed in like sardines with people of questionable hygiene.
Know what happens when the AC is out on your vehicle? You get it fixed.
How about when the AC is out for the 3rd time this month on the bus/train?
"Oh well, that sucks, guess I'm going into work sweaty today"
Mass transit everywhere I've been in the US sucks. It's so bad only the poor us it, because even the middle-middle class finds it disgusting/inconvenient.
Inter-city transportation is a different problem. I think high-speed rail makes a lot of sense. It's energy efficient and land efficient and probably time efficient as well.
The US has enough space for gigantic parking lots and wide roads. They don't have the same problems as in Europe. That's a huge difference that you are missing there.
Anyway, my flawed observation:
Some sort of deadlock where instead of discussing how to improve the situation, the discourse get stuck in debating which is the correct reason for not doing anything, instead of trying to come up with improvements?
Several times arguments are made that a non existent technology will make current investment pointless in the future, so no investment should be made now. Isn't that the argument implied by the title of the article?
Obviously, it could be true that future inventions would make it pointless, but that certainly is not something you can calculate/know off the cuff, if it's even worth speculating about. Building a high speed rail network take long enough time that all those possible avenues can probably be explored in excruciating detail before the first shovel hits the dirt a decade from now if everything moves quickly.
People are sceptical towards hyperloop, which is understandable in many ways. But what if it would work? Wouldn't it be worth investing quite a lot of money simply to figure out if it could work?
Obviously it could potentially only solve a very specific part of the transportation puzzle, but one that could have quite some positive effects.
Positioning cars and aircraft as more-or-less the only viable ways of communication for the foreseeable future sounds like an awfully odd position to me, even for a very sparsely populated country. While, the correct solution might not be high-speed rail, some variation of it it could still be the best solution in several instances.
Maybe someone would come up with something like a tethered electrical ground effect aircraft/train which could take advantage of the sparse population if they knew there were money to be made. Instead of massive resistance and cartloads of red tape ?
Some years ago, for a while I was a prof in Ohio. Well, there was a group all hot on connecting all the Rust Belt cities -- Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Cincinnati, Muncie, Akron, Indianapolis, South Bend, Youngstown, Toledo, etc. with passenger trains. They were really hot.
Look, guys, the US had a very good passenger rail network. Could go by train from one tiny crossroads to any other, all by train. And people did that. But soon that whole thing was killed off by, and may I have have the envelope please? Right, the Model T, etc. Private cars. A lot of the tracks grew up with weeds.
After WWII, soon, for trips up to 1000 miles, say with the whole family, people would rather just take the family car. Just after WWII, the passenger trains were still running, but, no thanks, people would rather take the family car, e.g., from Florida all the way to Grandma's near Buffalo, NY. As soon as I got married, my wife and I went to her family farm for Christmas, 900 miles, by car, car packed with stuff. Plane? Train? Bus? No thanks.
Gee, guys, now with the TSA, no way will I want to take a car full of luggage, toys, Christmas presents, etc. past the TSA. No way.
For me, for anything like family travel, public mass transportation, no matter how fast, how roomy, how cheap, how safe, due to the TSA and all the luggage handling problems, lack of privacy, being legally under the thumb of a lot of people, rules, bureaucrats, various cases of police, being subject to being forced to wait in my seat for four hours while whatever is going on, etc., the answer is no, no way, never, don't bother to ask again.
There are a lot of people and projects there in the woodwork eager to come out with lots of publicity, reasons, and excuses and eager to scarf up Federal subsidies. A LOT of people/projects. Clearly there is a whole industry of this stuff. They are always back in the woodwork, and as soon as they smell money, and they are good at smelling money, out they come, big publicity drives, etc.
"Americans tend to think that there's no way everyone would use trains unless forced to by lack of alternatives. This is projection because their experience with cars is exactly that: forced to by lack of alternatives. Do you think nobody in Japan drives? The country that gave us Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Subaru, Mitsubishi, Suzuki, etc etc, isn't without a domestic market lmao" (https://twitter.com/380kmh/status/879463196284858369)
It's simply that Americans do that with commercial air, not with rail.
If there's something more "socialistic" than being crammed cheek-to-jowl with other people in the back of an airplane, I don't know what it is.
Are you perhaps confusing the debate about American high-speed rail with the debate about American commuter rail? There are probably cultural reasons why Americans don't use public transportation as much as Europeans, but that's got nothing to do with HSR, which connects large cities, not suburbs.
Well, there's still the "people who can afford exorbitant prices can get much more legroom and service and be separated from those who can't" thing going on there
405 and 10 are a living hell; plenty of folks inching along them would rather not be.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-cm-building-...
I don't match your insipid cultural stereotype at all.
America is smart!
Roads are a much better, cheaper, faster, flexible option. We just need a 10x revolution in: storage density, fast charging, or efficiency.
The Rail Runner was built in 2006 primarily due to Governor Bill Richardson’s efforts. It essentially covers two cities, Albuquerque (~500,000 people) and Santa Fe (the capital, ~70,000 people), which are already connected by Interstate 25.
I love trains; I recently took Amtrak to LA and back. And I love the Rail Runner. It’s my favorite way to get to Santa Fe by far. Once I arrive, being without a car is not too bad: Santa Fe is a fairly walkable city, Albuquerque has a decent bus system, and a bicycle (which I can take on the train) makes things a lot easier.
The big problem with the Rail Runner is its cost.
Richardson originally was very vague about the cost, and initial estimates were (it turns out, a wildly optimistic) sub–$100 million in initial capital. The state took out a loan to pay for construction. The total cost is now estimated to be about $800 million. Currently the state Department of Transportation pays about $25 million a year on the loan; as currently structured, that will slowly increase to $35 million per year until 2025 and 2026, where the payments jump to $110 million (per year!).
New Mexico is currently in a budget crisis (not just due to the Rail Runner). (http://fortune.com/2016/12/04/new-medico-budget-crisis/) There have been special legislative sessions called this year to sort things out, and there’s conflict between all three branches of our state government. I have no idea where the DOT will find $80 million in their budget the next ten years, at least not without serious cuts to our already underfunded highways.
Then there are the operating costs. This is “not so bad.” Revenues only cover about 10% of operating expenses. But at least the rest is covered (at the moment) by county taxes, federal grants, and payments for use of the track by Amtrak and BNSF.
I’ll be cynical: my personal belief is that Richardson intentionally hid the costs and pushed the Rail Runner as a short‐term publicity stunt for his 2008 Presidential run, without a care as to what it would do to the state ten years later. It is very like him. (Don’t even get me started on the spaceport.) https://www.abqjournal.com/news/state/602848nm10-16-07.htm
The legislature sponsored a study to determine the feasibility of selling the Rail Runner (https://lintvkrqe.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/final-hm-127-s...). It concluded that nobody would be willing to buy it due to low revenues, high operating costs, and the plethora of exclusivity agreements that would need to be renegotiated (with BNSF, Amtrak, the pueblos, the federal Department of Transportation…). And selling it wouldn’t help since it wouldn’t absolve us of the requirement to pay off the debt. At this point I don’t foresee a solution other than refinancing the loan (again) to avoid those $100 million cliff payments, at the cost of further interest payments.
Like I said, I love the Rail Runner, and I really want to see it (or passenger rail of some sort) succeed in New Mexico. I do think the way the Rail Runner was handled — intentionally hiding the costs and having no concrete plan to cover operating costs — is completely unconscionable.
Not that it has to operate at a profit; after all, highways lose money too. But the Rail Runner loses so much money, and we’re already a poor state. It is valuable to connect New Mexico’s capital with its largest city. I just feel like there has to have been a better way to do it. I hope the proposed train from Las Cruces, NM to El Paso, TX (http://www.lcsun-news.com/story/news/local/2017/06/28/study-...) will learn from the mistakes made with the Rail Runner.
Whew. After all that, I’m curious: what successful rail projects have you seen, and what makes them successful?
The population of the cities being connected is extremely low, and prices are ridiculously cheap too (2 to 10 dollars?).
100 million was wildly optimistic, French-style light rail was really expensive too, about 600 million per mile - http://www.citymetric.com/transport/rer-or-rer-c-how-paris-t...
The cheapest I can find on Ferropedia for a similar project would be 600 million dollars, so 800 million isn't way over budget. And the fare is 20 euros (more than twice the most expensive fare for the Road Runner).
http://www.ferropedia.es/wiki/Costos_de_construcci%C3%B3n_de...
http://francistapon.com/images/travels/europe/usa/900/TEXAS....
The northeast corridor accounts for 60M(!) people in the United States and yet the rail options are expensive and slow. it still boggles my mind that flying from Boston to NYC was cheaper by flight than train.
While the US is geographically immense, the population is actually concentrated pretty well. Obviously rail doesn't work everywhere but if we had rails serving the Northeast Corridor, Texas (Austin, Dallas, Houston), California Coast (San Diego -> SF) we would have lines serving highly trafficked and dense areas.
That argument is bunk.
Ignoring that for a moment, high speed rail between major cities and population centers is where it would be most beneficial anyway.
A high speed rail line to cover the region from LA to the Bay Area or the Eastern Seabord wouldn't be any less a project than when Japan did it. If anything it would be easier since our land isn't all geologically unstable.
Currently in the UK there is talk of a high speed rail link from London to what Londoner's call 'the North'. Many, many houses will have to be demolished to put this line in. The cost of buying those properties - to demolish them - is fairly cost prohibitive, plus people like their homes so it is politically awkward.
Thus population density/country size cuts both ways.
Furthermore, sometimes it can be advantageous to have a longer journey by train than a shorter journey by plane. When I was working in Glasgow I would take the overnight sleeper train, to arrive for the start of the working day having 'slept' on the train. The alternative taxis and planes and hotel stay was a lot more tiring than the train, even with that stop at Crewe where they change the rolling stock around, waking everyone.