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Comment by michaelleslie | Hacker News Reader

That's a good point.

I know Penn is a major bottleneck (we have Christie to thank for that after killing ARC), and there's the added problem of delays conflicting with Metro North/NJT schedules.

We need infrastructure investment in dense corridors if we're to get anywhere remotely near European or Asian standards.

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It's not clear to me we even have "dense corridors" like in Europe. I was in Munich, and driving in from the airport what struck me is that the city just ends. The city is 1.5 million people. Then there is another million or so people in the metro area, and 30 minutes outside of downtown its farms. Contrast Philadelphia, which is at the center of the U.S. "northeast megalopolis." It's also 1.5 million people, but there are another 4.5 million people in the surrounding sprawl. You can go an hour outside Philly in almost any direction and still be in suburban sprawl. That totally changes the transit equation. You build high-speed rail to Munich, and you're serving more than half the population of the metro area. You build high-speed rail to Philly, and you serve just a quarter of the population (while the other three quarters is stuck paying for something they have to drive to get to anyway).

This is true at multiple levels of scale. Compare Ulm, Germany to Richmond, VA. Both are about 100-200k people. Aside from a few appendages, you hit farms 2-3 miles outside Ulm in most directions. Richmond, by contrast, is surrounded for 8-10 miles in all directions by suburbs, which have another million people. When it comes to voting for things like transit or train service, the people in the city that might benefit from it are totally outnumbered by all the people in the suburbs who can't.

US cuts through our city-centers with interstate. Other countries do not do this.

I think this is a good observation. The USA is just too spread out for rail travel to really work well. Most European countries are no bigger than a medium sized US state, and the cities are denser and smaller than American cities. It's easier to run a rail route between two European cities and realistically serve most of the people in those cities. And the cities aren't so far apart that flying becomes a really time-saving option.

You are deeply wrong and need to look at proper maps.

Europe is 33% larger than the USA (contiguous 48).

[added] Note sure why this fact would be down-voted. We don't include Greenland or e.g. French Polynesian dependencies in the European total. Sweden is slightly larger than California, with 1/4 the population. Et caetera. Really, you should look at maps, population facts, as well as the extent and quality of railroads.

And quit pretending that there is no rail connection across Europe. [1] America is failing when it comes to 21st century pubic transportation. Angrily lagging behind European, Japanese [2], or Chinese [3] railroads is not a healthy path.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Europe

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China

Define "Europe." "Europe" doesn't have high speed rail. Germany, France, etc., do, and those countries are a lot denser than the U.S. and most U.S. states. Moreover, U.S. cities are shaped very differently from Western European ones. Take the ratio of (city population) / (metro area population) and compare the U.S. state capitals to European capitals. In Europe, it's common for the majority of a metro area to live within city limits, even in small cities. In the U.S., the only major city that gets close to that benchmark is New York.

The arbitrary government boundaries are not really relevant.

Given that the governments fund the passenger trains, those boundaries are extremely relevant.

Not really, the city government works with the county government, which works with the state government, which works with the federal government.

The Port Authority of NY and NJ is just such a agency.

> The USA is just too spread out for rail travel to really work well

Not true.

Chicago to Detroit: 282 miles (4.5h via car) 5hours via train TODAY. (It should really be 2 hours with a train going ~180mph)

Chicago to St. Louis 311 miles (5h via car) 5.5 hours via train (With proper investment: 2.2 hours via HSR train)

Sure end to end may be long; but even then not as long as most people realize.

http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/12/26/china-opens-worlds-longe...

> China launched services Wednesday on the world’s longest high-speed rail route, linking the nation’s capital in Beijing all the way to the country’s southeastern hub of Guangzhou.

> Averaging speeds of up to 186 m.p.h. (300 km/h), the 1,425-mile (2,293 km) route now takes eight hours to complete;

New York to Los Angeles : 2775 miles. Or double the above line. 16 HOURS via High-Speed train. 16 HOURS.

As a point of reference flight time is 6 hours. (Not counting being at the airport 2 hours early, etc.) - so lets just say ~9 hours for a plane. So a plane is twice as fast; but with significantly less capacity.

Acela already exists. It's not very high speed at all, it's consistently higher priced than other competing options like planes or buses, yet it manages to fill seats to the brim. Even at its slower speed, it manages to be preferable to slogging it to an airport, dealing with the security theater, either the mad rush to the plane or the endless waiting, and then doing the whole process in reverse once you land at your destination.

In fact, high speed rail could also be transformative for international travel; airlines could bundle a high speed rail ticket with a much cheaper transatlantic flight from Philly, as opposed to paying out the nose for a flight out of EWR or JFK.

Acela is a great example of why high speed rail in the U.S. is a stupid idea. It's primarily used by business travelers between Boston and DC (and points in-between). Even if Amtrak didn't have to support money-losing long distance routes, Amtrak could not operate Acela without Congress footing the bill for capital expenditures. (Acela runs an operating profit, but that's ignoring the fact that Congress pays for the tracks and trains.) Why the heck should the other 80% of the country pay tax money for a service that's only useful to well-off travelers in the northeast?

I think your observation is correct but there is a bit of a chicken and egg problem here.

Does Europe have more and better trains because it has denser cities or does it have denser cities because it has more and better trains?

Probably a little bit of both.

A tiny amount of both and a whole heaping scoop of most places being older than both cars and trains.

Richmond is a great example of the problem. I actually took an Amtrak train to Richmond last weekend, and I was struck by how annoying it is to be there for even a short period of time without a car. I stayed in a hotel downtown that had a couple restaurants within walking distance, but for everything else I ended up taking Ubers. Amenities like gyms, shops, and even pharmacies are spread out enough that almost everyone drives everywhere, even in the neighborhoods within the urban core.

This is probably a major factor that makes Amtrak less preferable than driving even when it’s available - once you get to almost any place in the US, you’d prefer to have your car. Amtrak stations also don’t generally have convenient car rental locations with extended hours like airports do, so that’s not even an option to deal with it.

> We need infrastructure investment

I don’t see why we need to subsidise passenger rail. Autonomous helis and passenger planes seem like a better bet.

Capacity. Rail is pretty much unbeatable in terms of pure people per hour. The Tokaido Shinkansen carried 143M people in 2012; the busiest air route in the world, Seoul-Jeju, carried 11 million people in 2015.

From the (admittedly not great) source of CAHSR:

> Providing the equivalent new capacity on the state’s highways and airports would cost more than double the investment required to develop a high-speed rail system between San Francisco and Los Angeles. If it was even possible, that would mean building 4,300 new highway lane miles, 115 additional airport gates, and four new airport runways at an estimated cost of $158 billion. [...] Caltrans estimates operations and maintenance costs on those new highway lanes at $132.8 billion for over 50 years.

Planes are terribly polluting, and unlike trains, there's no expectation that can be changed anytime soon. If you properly accounted for that externality, trains might be profitable after all.

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