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.
MPLS-Chicago has never really resonated with me, but there are some straight north south lines that I think make a lot of sense ...
Duluth-MPLS-DesMoines-KCMO would make a lot of sense.
Cheyenne-FortCollins-Denver-ColoSprings-Pueblo ... that would make a lot of sense.
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.
And again, for this fantastical train, we're earning the privilege of doing in 12 hours what a plane will do in 6.
If you factor in all this extra stuff, it looks more like 9-10 hours.
You go to the train station, which is in the city centre. You use a subway, tram or bicycle to get there. You walk in, go to your platform and enter the train. You place your luggage in the luggage rack and take your seat. When the train arrives at your destination or interchange point, you grab your stuff and leave. Sometime in between, staff will walk the train and check your ticket.
No long transit to/from the station. No check-in, no security screening, no baggage drop-off/pickup. It's a train, not rocket science.
Add to this the commute to and from the airports and you are looking at 12 hours.
Practically you would require a top speed of ~250mph, and current current generation of conventional rail trains max out at about 190-210mph. But they could easily do NYC to SFO in 13-14 hours.
The Shanghai Maglev Train reaches a top speed of 268mph (during it's short 7min trip to the airport), so it could do the trip in less than 12 hours. But I'm not sure it's theoretically practical over distances that long.
And who is gonna pay for this magical high speed railroad that never breaks down and is never delayed?
High speed rail in California is costing around $90 million per mile. A perfectly straight line from NYC-SF is 2,572 miles. That's nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars. All to allow costal elites to increase their travel time? Sure.
NYC to SFO in 12 hours is an average speed of 215mph
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.
It's amazing that other countries haven't solved this problem by inventing things like express trains.
Oh wait, they have. It's the literally same technology as a skip list.
"that does half of what you can do in air, at probably not a ton more comfort level at twice+ the length (I've not seen a lot of inexpensive long train trips in the US or Asia that beat domestic coach (let alone domestic first) by enough for me to want to put up with it for two or more times the amount of time), and at the end of the day you haven't solved SEA-NYC, LAX-NYC, etc, which are all already served in the status quo."
And yet, most people aren't traveling cost-to-coast. We don't need to solve SEA-NYC with trains. Solving SEA-LAX or NYC-ATL would be more than good enough.
Otherwise, your comment is completely counterfactual. I just spent a year in Japan. Trains there are cost-competitive with air travel, far better in terms of time and convenience, and vastly more comfortable. The only train segments that are "twice the length" of driving or flying are the segments that don't exist (i.e. you have to take a circuitous route, because the direct line isn't there). No rational person in Japan prefers to fly or drive if they can take a train. Even the local lines are preferable for trips under 4-5 hours.
And Japan is the size of the US west coast, with similar population distribution (a few big cities, with lots of smaller, rural towns between). There's no reason we can't have the same systems in America. We just don't, because we don't invest, and Americans insist on arguing about things they don't understand, based on little more than opinion and ideology.
Come on. You're a smart person. You can do better math than this.
San Francisco to LA: 383 miles. Seattle to Portland: 200 miles. Portland to San Francisco: 636 miles.
That extra 80 miles means it'll clearly never work, I guess. Because obviously, Japanese people would never ride the most heavily used shinkansen line in Japan if it took thirty minutes longer.
(Not incidentally: Tokyo to Kagoshima - 900 miles. Takes 7 hours by train. Costs less than $280. I've done it. Entirely pleasant, and time competitive with airlines, if you include the time you spend waiting, going through security, and so on. Which you must.)
I'm not arguing against west coastal HSR. PDX-SEA makes a lot of sense, if you can get Oregon and Washington to agree on how to fund it, as does SFO-LAX. But find the nearest city to SFO not directly on the west coast that's in the top 10 by population, and see whether HSR makes sense compared to commercial air. Chances are: no.
You keep repeating this "top ten cities" thing, as if it's important. But the only question that matters is: do enough people/things travel between X and Y to justify investment in a rail system at cost $Z? That's an actual debate we can have. Moreover, regardless of what you think of Seattle and Portland, if you don't count SF and Los Angeles (again, 380 miles) as important American cities, I don't know what to say to you.
"The people of Houston, Atlanta, Miami, and Phoenix hardly benefit at all from coastal HSR --- which is already happening anyways."
Atlanta to Miami: 662 miles. Houston to Dallas: 239 miles. Dallas to Denver: 800 miles. There are many, many regional connections in the US that make economic sense for HSR. Not just coastal lines.
But no, it's not already happening. We have a few projects that look increasingly likely to die. Because literally every time the subject comes up, naysayers are there to argue that the USA is just fundamentally exceptional to every similar place where HSR is working well.
This comment explains it pretty well:
Well, as long as you're being specific...
That comment says nothing new. It repeats the same stuff you've already said across this thread, and provides no evidence to back up the assertions. It does get the basic facts wrong, though: the vast majority of traffic on the "Tokyo to Kyoto" line goes between Tokyo and Osaka. Those cities are big (~9 million people each; Nagoya and Kyoto are comparatively small at ~2 million people each), but they're still only ~14% of Japan's population (17% if you include Kyoto and Nagoya).
Again: the only thing that matters is the number of people traveling between the points on the line. We know these things, and it's clear where high-speed rail would work. We don't need to have nebulous debates about "economic value". And arguing that "people don't buy Eurail passes" is absurd on its face. They certainly would, if Eurail actually existed.
Good luck.
We (WA) just had our 3rd special session and although we finally passed our $43bn state budget, our (admittedly smaller) capital budget is still up in the air because of water rights issues.
OR doesn't look much better right now—it's 8 days until sine die and it appears there's a chance they'll run into special sessions, too.
WA just pumped a massive amount of money ($8bn) into K-12 education because of the McCleary decision, and there's not much other money to go around. The Dems are wary about pitching an actual state income tax (this year they tried pitching a cap gains tax as an "excise tax" :-) because it's constantly been rejected by both the voters and state supreme court. The GOP just had to push a state-wide property tax and had to agree to a paid family leave act as part of budget negotiations, so I doubt they'll be down for any new taxes. Plus, ST3 was recently approved which jacks up taxes in the RTA zone, which includes big city centers like Seattle and Tacoma.
Long story short, I really, really doubt there will be any big infrastructure pushes in the near future. There's just not much money and outside of Seattle property it's not politically viable to run on "more taxes!" especially when the east side of the state will go berserk if they're forced to pay for more west side infrastructure.
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.
shanghai - beijing HST is 819 miles/5 hours @ 220 mph with stops and carries 130 million a year and is insensitive to weather unlike planes.
its not easier to scale up planes. Have you tried building a new 777 capable airport in SF or LA lately?
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/42.3649312,-70.997063/North+...
and this couldn't be done even though no houses need to go. in comparison the big dig tunnels under downtown boston were constructed just fine (slow and over budget but done)
Inside the cities rail use existing Rights of Way or build tunnels. Much easier to build a tunnel under a city than demolish 10 sq mi of cbd.