Tesla Model 3 vs. Amtrak's Acela Express: The Electric Future Acid Test | Hacker News Reader

Tesla Model 3 vs. Amtrak's Acela Express: The Electric Future Acid Test

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39 pointsHBlix67 comments

Meanwhile in the developed world: TGV takes 2 hours from Lyon to Paris, google maps claims a car takes 4 hours.

The French do like their train strikes though. Maybe let's try Japan. Tokyo to Kyoto: 2.5 hours train, 5 hours by car.

Additional advantage: I can walk around, and get a meal (not sure about the Shinkansen, but the TGV does have a restaurant). And read, or work, or daydream.

Japanese trains were lovely. Very comfortable. Great views of Mt. Fuji and the coast along that route. Definitely options for snack and drink. Don’t know about a full dining car, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

Japanese train food culture is all about buying stuff at the station. The packaged food you can buy at stores in Japan is shockingly good, and they're generally clustered at train stations.

(A cultural note: eating on long-distance trains is expected (they have fold-down tables and cup-holders), but eating or drinking (other than water) on local trains is an EXTREME faux pas. Don't do it.)

Here's a great video on this food culture

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l25iRW_-4vI&t=2s

This YouTube video is the best I’ve seen in explaining why things are the way they are in the US - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbEfzuCLoAQ

Really good video, thanks for posting.

I liked it but wish I could read for the information instead of waiting 8 minutes for it to be explained.

Unrelated - Are you teejsound?

Nope!

Note that that video specifically mentions the Northeast corridor and the Acela as an exception. The Northeast is definitely dense enough to support rail.

New York to LA is 4,500 kilometers so comparing to Paris/Lyon might be just a bit apples and oranges.

Paris to Baghdad is about the same distance.

Cities in the US are too far apart for trains to generally make sense. Trains are for freight.

The comparison was Ney York to Boston.

This all is really only true west of the Mississippi. Trains are quite widely used in the densely populated Northeast.

Every thread about high speed rail seems to have this response to an argument no one is making. NY-LA doesn't make sense, but it is nationally embarrassing not to have the BosWash corridor connected.

But it is connected.

By a train that averages 55 mph. That is a national embarrassment.

I found 70MPH, where did you see 55?

I misread the comment as Boston-New York like the route in the article. Boston-New York is slower than the rest of the route. South Station in Boston to Penn Station in New York takes 3:46[1] and those stations are 212 miles apart[2] which is an average of about 55 mph.

[1] https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...

[2] https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Pennsylvania+Station,+New+Yo...

I see. Not that 70MPH is particularly great either.

Good thing there are many major American cities closer to New York than LA, such as nearly every single one.

> Meanwhile in the developed world: TGV takes 2 hours from Lyon to Paris, google maps claims a car takes 4 hours.

Yeah. But try going anywhere around Lyon[0] after the nice TGV trip from Paris[0] and welcome to connection hell.

[0] Or any other TGV connected cities.

> Yeah. But try going anywhere around Lyon[0] after the nice TGV trip from Paris[0] and welcome to connection hell.

Public transportations are often quite good in European cities. When I was in college, it tooked me sligtly more than 3 hours door to door to go from my parents home in a Paris suburb to my University dorm in Lyon. It's not so bad for a trip of nearly 450km.

Really? We got the TER from Lyon to Saint Etienne last year, connecting out of a TGV. It was fine, and more reliable than the jam-prone parallel road.

The central train station sits right on top of a metro station, a tram line (for longer-distance), and several bus lines. "Connection hell" is not how I would describe the process of switching from one to the other in European city centers.

What is the problem? Lyon has a fully developed system of trams and subways. It's directly connected to the TGV train station.

http://www.tcl.fr/var/tcl/storage/original/application/b8cb6...

What about? I’ve made the trip many times. There was nothing hellish about it. Same for Sens, Lille, Montpellier, and Nice.

People, french people.

I love traveling by train, especially in quiet high speed ones such as TGV, Thalys or ICE.

However half the year I am regularly traveling through France for work from one city to another. I love the train, I enjoy it much better than air travel but the time and the stress lost due to running around with a carriage trying to decipher the connections that's going to take me to the tech zoning is... well stressful and time consuming.

I stand by my point: train station to train station is nice but door-to-door ? That's a much less smoother ride.

As a French that has moved to California : wow does transport suck in the USA !!! Both subway and trains are a big step back from what I was used to in France.

I've only seen restaurants in exhibited historic Shinkansens.

Fret not. There is an on board service, which provides from ice cream over sakes and cold beers a variety of up to 3 bento boxes for sale directly at your seat.

The better option is to buy something on a train station, since the variety is much bigger.

Tokyo (station) is famous for the shop that sells ~ 200 different bentos from the whole country. A short stop makes a delightful train ride even more delightful.

The nice thing in Japan is that eating some fermented fish out of a bento box is completely acceptable, while yakking away on your cell phone is not (you can move out of the carriage if you must make a call).

As for timings. The most impressive for me was 85 minutes from Brussels to Paris, city to city. You must be pretty stupid to use a plane for that.

It’s not a bullet train. NYC to Boston is about 220 miles. If it takes 4 hours...

Try driving from New York to Boston at a normal hour with regular traffic. We flew to Providence over Labor Dat weekend to avoid the crazy traffic.

Beijing to Shanghai is 800 miles and takes 4.5 hours. That’s a bullet train.

Indeed. Real high-speed trains (up to 220mph) will arrive for the first time in the US in 2021.

I assume you are referring to the Avelia Libery[1] the replacement for the acela express. Unfortunately until track and signal upgrades happen (no date on when they will happen) the train is limited to 160mph. It's better than acela but not much.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avelia_Liberty

Does this have in-cab signalling? Britain built 140 mph capable trains, but experience showed the existing 125 mph was the maximum at which a human looking out of a window at coloured light signals is truly effective and so they're operated at only 125 mph.

(Trains on High Speed 1 from London to the Channel have signals displayed inside the cab like a TGV so it's safe to go faster)

The UK is actually unusual insofar as we allow trains as fast as 125mph (201km/h) without in-cab signalling; most other places in Europe require in-cab signalling at lower speeds (some as low as half of that!).

It is a high speed train though. It got up to 150 mph. So if it was able to go at its top speed the whole way it could have easily done it in under 2 hours.

The southern (DC-NYC) section of the Acela is significantly faster: It travels ~225ish miles in 3 hours, for an average speed (including stops) of ~75 mph.

There are two major factors that slow down the Acela north of NYC: geography, and conflicts with Metro-North. There are several sharp curves that keep the Acela trains from running at full speed, and the current Acela rolling stock doesn't accelerate very quickly even after passing through these bottlenecks. In the stretch between NYC and New Haven, trains are limited to a 90 mph top speed by Metro-North, and often have to go slower than that.

The curves are pretty hard to fix without buying up some of the most expensive real estate in the country, and dealing with the political battles that come with that. Fixing the conflicts with Metro-North is theoretically possible with just a bit of extra track to allow trains to pass, but operating that way would probably require more cooperation than either railroad has recently shown itself capable of.

This blog post has a good overview (which includes issues south of NYC): https://pedestrianobservations.com/2012/07/01/plan-b-for-hsr...

This one has a deep dive on how to fix one of the curves, which might give you a sense for how difficult these issues are: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2018/01/12/high-speed-rai...

This is a truly dumb article and I'm sorry I wasted time reading it.

Anyone who's familiar with the NYC->BOS Acela route will tell you that both the tracks and artificial speed limitations when going through Westchester suck. When you ride on the train, you can be productive the whole time.

Absolutely. Even though it takes a bit longer, I prefer it to flying precisely because I can work the whole time rather than wait in long lines for TSA pageantry.

> Anyone who's familiar with the NYC->BOS Acela route will tell you that both the tracks and artificial speed limitations when going through Westchester suck.

If you're from the rest of the world and aren't familiar, maybe this would be a helpful article?

Starting in the 1940s, the USA stopped using passenger transport on trains in favor of automobiles. In the 1950s, a huge highway system was constructed/upgraded in order to make military mobilization effective. No similar program was ever executed for rail systems.

Today, all long-route passenger service is handled by Amtrak, a for-profit corporation which is both a monopoly and subsidized by the Federal government. The only electrified Amtrak rails are in the northeast, running from Washington DC past NYC to New Haven, Connecticut, and then a different electrification scheme from New Haven to Boston, plus a route across half of Pennsylvania. Everywhere else across the country, long-haul rail is strictly diesel.

The person you quoted is talking about the portion of the NYC - Boston route just north of NYC, going through a fairly expensive area called Westchester. It is noted for high incomes and high property taxes. The train tracks are not in good repair and there are too many at-grade road crossings. The result is that Amtrak is chronically late.

> Anyone who's familiar with the NYC->BOS Acela route

And that is literally like almost nobody. I bet less then 1% of anyone living in NYC or Boston metropolitan area have ever ridden on Amtrak, let alone the Acela.

Amtrak is extremely popular in the Northeast Corridor. The Acela has 3,442,188 yearly riders. 10 million Amtrak passengers pass through Penn Station every year. The Northeast Corridor line has 12 million yearly riders.

- https://media.amtrak.com/2017/11/amtrak-sets-ridership-reven...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_Amtrak_station...

- https://www.railpassengers.org/all-aboard/tools-info/ridersh...

> The Acela has 3,442,188 yearly riders.

Divided by about 200 workdays a year and you end up with about 17,000. Even tripling that as you adjust for things and you probably have less than 25,000 semi-regular riders or better.

That's an odd accounting. Acela isn't commuter rail. I'm sure some people use it for regular commuting, but your numbers seem to suggest that's its primary use. It's not.

Just to put that in perspective :

Shinjuku station in Tokyo (the world's busiest train station by passenger count) serves 3.64 million passengers per day.

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

Your numbers for that station include inter-city rail, commuter rail, and subway lines. My numbers were only for Amtrak (inter-city rail). If everything is included, then Penn Station serves about 600k passengers per day.

If you took the set of people in DC, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston who had salaries at $100K+ and who also had long-term business/job interests in one of those cities besides their home city (that is, had business travel), I bet ~50% of them have taken the Acela. The people who take the Acela basically run the country, and you can witness the country being run on any given Acela train.

-ENOACCESS [0], failure at implementing GDPR...

[0]: https://geoscripts.meredith.services/public/html/no-access.h...

So weird to see mph used. It makes it difficult to compare to the rest of the world.

How does the Tesla compare against a real high speed train like the HSR in Taiwan? That's a real test.

Kyoto - Tokyo: By car 5 hours plus breaks. By Shinkansen 3:20. A Tesla won't help you.

Berlin - Munich: By car 5.5 hours plus breaks. With the ICE 4.5 hours.

5 hours seems optimistic by car, 4.5 by train as well given DB, German railways, track record. The big issue in Hermany is that supposed higj speed trains have simply too many stops. As a result the ICEs last generation emphasizes acceleration instead of speed.

France has it some how easier with dedicated higj speed tracks and basically no stops. Just as example, the one stop before Munichs central station is adding almost 10 minutes.

I've done Berlin-Munich by car many times, maybe I managed that under 5 hours once, in the dead of night. But the usual is a couple (5 or so) construction zones which totally kill your average. 6.5 hours is fairly typical if you need to gas up once and take appropriate rests.

The sprinter can do Berlin-Munich in (barely) under 4 hours.

https://www.bahn.com/en/view/trains/long-distance/vde8.shtml

The rest of the world? The US is not the only place that uses mph...

Canada, UK, US and US territories use miles instead of kilometers [1]. So in a boolean sense you are right, but it doesn't really change the overall situation.

Large version of the meme on that Page: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/dd/ac/10/ddac1053fc9560decbfdd5b29...

[1]: https://www.quora.com/The-U-S-uses-mph-What-about-the-rest-o...

Canada has some imperial remnants (e.g. people commonly measure their colloquial "weight" in lb), but miles isn't one of those remnants.

It's kind of annoying for cars – when the CAD is doing well, there are often significant savings available by purchasing a car in the US and importing it, but the savings have never been enough for me to deal with the unpleasantness of having my car's instruments read in miles.

Every car I've seen in America made in the last 20 years has dual scales on the speedometer. I guess the odometer is often and only in miles, but some cars have an option to switch units..

You’d be surprised. I rented a car in the US recently and the digital gauges changed to kilometers when I connected my phone to bluetooth (my phone is in European)

All analog dials I’ve ever seen are dual mph/kph

Yes, digital often have the option of switching, but that filters the number of vehicles.

My car has several digital measurements (fuel efficiency, range until empty, odometer) with no option to change units.

> All analog dials I’ve ever seen are dual mph/kph

Yes, but one is usually much more prominent. Again using my car as an example, the km/h markings are white on black, with clear marking every 10/20 km on the gauge. The mph font is about half the size, dark red on black, and doesn't match up with the gauge markings.

Canada uses km.

https://www.authentikcanada.com/holidays/highway-code-canada

Canada does not use mph, at least not Ontario which is the only part I've driven in.

Canada doesn't, but many Canadians do.

150mph on rails = 240km/h

70mph on the road = 110km/h

Not really in an English language publication especially an American one even in English speaking countries imperial units as are still used in day to day speech even if engineering has gone metric.

It’s really a shame that I could not finish reading the article because some spammy ad redirected me to a shitty lottery page.

If everybody hopped in their Teslas instead of taking trains there’d be far more traffic on the roads, and slower commutes. But good to know that NY-Boston can be done on a single charge.

Yep. Both of these systems change as usage changes. More cars makes traffic worse. More public transit increases crowding, but it also allows more times and services to become profitable.

This experiment doesn't tell us anything except that we're not currently in equilibrium. It doesn't tell us what any equilibrium is, or how many there are, or how many are stable.

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