Total land area is a problem to be solved in the US for train travel, and we only have Russia and China to compare to.
City to city comparison makes much more sense
So why is there no comparable railway network in those largeish US states that are comparable to EU countries? Or in the many (almost all of them) states that are smaller than France and Japan?
The reason why we have such shitty HSR on the NEC boils down to two reasons: one, the corridor is too congested with commuter rail (particularly in Connecticut), and two, the route was rebuilt to "modern" standards in the 1930s. Rebuilding it again to truly modern 220 mph HSR standards involves needing to find virgin right-of-way in Connecticut, which is neither easy nor cheap.
The Northeast US has a similar statistical density as areas of Europe but looks so much physically different. Take some time on Google Earth and check it out. There is a nonstop blob of suburbs that go almost all the way from DC to Boston. In a proposed train network, most of the population has a long trip to the central station before they can take the train to the other city. They still need a car, and need somewhere to park it. In Europe or Asia cities are more concentrated, and the countrysides are less populated.
Building a center-city to center-city train network in the US is not impossible, but it simply wouldn't be as efficient as it would be in Europe or Asia because of the way the cities are designed.
I very much agree we need a new approach to planning an zoning. We need to focus on that first. It could take longer than a generation to transition away from the suburban model.
Many Americans prefer the freedom of being able to go A to B at any time without needing to wait at a bus/subway stop or hoping the transportation system is still running for the day. The amount of money it would cost to get the entire country walk able or reachable by public transit would be astronomical.
That's probably true (modulo taxis, even if you rule out public transport), but it's just as true when you fly from Kansas City to Houston. Which is why airports always come with car rental, and it works out for those who want a car. If a car is really needed at the destination, arrangements could and should be made to have car rentals available at the train station.
I mean... the shitty high speed rail we have (Acela) does it in an hour and 8 minutes. Making it 55 minutes probably won't change travel patterns substantially. (Although route upgrades to support that is the medium term plan)
And SD - SF should be less than 4 hours, making it faster than a flight (if you count all the time wasted at the airports).
Or, better yet, you use (now non-existing) public transportation to go around.
For people living to Syracuse, tons of times. Equally many times with any EU train that connects e.g. Paris to a city within 50 or 100 or 200 miles.
>And if you built a train to Syracuse, what would you do once you got there (without a car)? The city is the centerpiece of a region with a million people, less than 1/6 of whom live inside the city?
If it's "a million people" it should be able to afford its own public transport connected to the train station, which answers the question "what to do there without a car".
It's not like there aren't places in Europe, Asia etc that are exactly like this...
What shocked me about my recent trips abroad (to Munich and Tokyo) was that those cities were completely different. You drive a bit out of Munich and the city just ends and becomea farm land. Even with Tokyo there ia farmland between the city and Narita. In the US, it’a sprawl in every direction, and most of the population lives in that sprawl, and not in the city.
Well, not quite: "At the 2010 census, the city population was 145,252, and its metropolitan area had a population of 662,577". There are places like that in Europe.
In Greece Athens has a population of 600,000 people and the surrounding metropolitan area is 4 million -- of continuous sprawl in every direction.
Far more often than you'd think. If such a system existed people would use it all the time.
Look at the metra lines that go from Chicago to the suburbs in the north/northwest. People take those all the time because living in those areas is significantly cheaper.
People would be able to visit families long distance without needing to own a car or cough up for a plane ticket. That land in the US is vast is not really a good excuse.
Being able to conveniently take the train from Chicago -> Iowa would be great, especially if the route went further.
Yes, Amtrak runs from DC, Baltimore, Philly, NYC, and Boston. But, it’s not high speed (except a few sections on the Acela train). And the subways and neighborhood lines are lacking.
Take DC for example... the Metro single tracks and stops at every station. No express route across town. And trains only run every 20 minutes off-peak (and that’s assuming they haven’t shut the whole thing down because it’s caught on fire again). So, getting from Tyson’s Corner or Bethesda to Union Station is not fast.
An regular train from the inner business centers to Union Ststion, plus a proper bullet train to NYC would make a suitable substitute for flying. Right now, rail just isn’t a workable option for many business travelers.
From Washington Dulles airport, approximately 265k passengers per year fly to Boston. Another 715k fly DCA-BOS. DCA-LGA accounts for 318k. DCA-JFK, IAD-LGA and IAD-JFK do not crack top-ten lists of busiest domestic routes for their origins.
To get a feel for just Acela (which is not the only Northeast Corridor train service), it's slightly less than the annual passenger volume by air SFO-LAX, SFO-JFK and SFO-BOS combined.
The entire Northeast Corridor carries approximately 12M passengers per year. If it were operated by air, it would be the second-busiest route in the world by passenger volume, slotting between CJU-GMP in Korea (13M/year) and MEL-SYD in Australia (9M/year).
In 2012, the New York Times reported that 75 percent of travelers between New York and Washington used one of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor trains (Acela isn't the only one), and between New York and Boston 54 percent used a train:
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/16/business/hassles-of-air-t...
There certainly are things that could be improved. But Amtrak's operations in the northeast are not some hypothetical potential maybe-someday competitor to air travel. They are and for years have been a real and significant competitor to air travel.
And for what it's worth, Amtrak also has a farebox recovery ratio for its entire nationwide network that hovers around 95%, second in the US only to BART Oakland Airport Connector (96%).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaregions_of_the_United_Stat...
If the trip could be two hours instead of 3.5+ that would be great but as it is it is barely justifiable over flight (being dropped off midtown is a big bonus tho).
The benefits for even longer travel just don't exist. Once you start getting into the 4+ hours on a train it's almost always better to find a flight.
This doesn't even cover the new maglev trains that are expected to go into service sometime in the late 2020s in Japan, which have a maximum speed of 550km/h, expanding the range of that 4 hour "maximum" significantly.
The major problem with the Acela is that it mainly runs on older infrastructure that wasn't designed with HS trains in mind. This severely limits its speed on most of its route. Most HS systems in other places around the world are on newly developed HS lines that were built up specifically to support the much faster speeds and requirements of these trains, and are completely separate from the regular rail lines (which might be running in parallel nearby).
Not that old tired chessnut again.
First, all of Europe is connected by trains. You can go from any country to any country in EU by train -- if you wish so. That's equally large to the US (and the train lines even continue down to Moscow and further down to Beijing).
Second, it's not like you need to hook up all of the US or nothing. Where is a comparable and equally nice metro/train solution within a single small state (dozens of which are smaller than most European countries) or even within a city?
Even Chicago or Manhattan are worse than anything shown train/subway wise.
Surely you mean "continental Europe" unless there's a tunnel to Ireland
> That's equally large to the US
Uh, no. The southwestern tip of Portugal to the northeastern tip of Estonia is around 3300 km. The mainland US equivalent is 4400 km. Moreover, unlike Europe, the population centers are mostly along opposite sides.
I don't know for this place, but it's fairly likely that the ferry schedule aligns with the train schedule.
Train+ferry connections used to be very common in Europe. Sometimes the train was loaded onto the ferry (still happens between Germany and Denmark). Some have been replaced by bridges, others are defunct, but where they still exist it's usually possible to buy an ordinary train ticket which includes travel across the ferry. Interrail/Eurail passes include the use of these ferries.
Surely that's a pedantic objection, when you can get to 95% of EU (or more population wise) by train, and when you can just take the ferry off of Scotland (and France and UK are of course connected by train)...
That's a difference of 25%, and not the machine scale difference implied at first with the US vs France comparison.
Second, that's off too. Trains continue way past Estonia, (Sweden and Finland go even further north, part of Russia is in Europe etc). Furthermore train connections continue all the way to China (e.g. with the trans-siberian-express) and even Korea and across the sea from Japan.
>Uh, no. The southwestern tip of Portugal to the northeastern tip of Estonia is around 3300 km. The mainland US equivalent is 4400 km. Moreover, unlike Europe, the population centers are mostly along opposite sides.
Besides the fact that the rest of the US is still 150 million strong (and thus could very well have some good lines connecting it), this just makes it even easier to have a great train system in those populous cities in the opposite sides -- one in East and one in the West coast for example.
Heck, the US doesn't have a good train and subway system anywhere (e.g. not even within a single state), so the logistics to have one throughout the continent is a red herring.
To take the analogy over the top, Greenland is a part of Denmark, I don't hear them saying that because of that, they should start investing only in freeways for cars in Copenhagen?
Only Texas and Alaska are larger than France. I give you Alaska, due to the geography and low population, but Texas is just slightly larger and has half the population of France - not a massive difference.
I think it could be reasonably fair to compare countries to single states at least?
Compare Texas, lots of open space and historical reasons necessitates car travel except for major urban to urban transport which could be done by train but why bother? As in the UK, the acceptance that cars be supported for some journeys means that on balance, they are better to use for most others. Even for me, the coach runs direct from my town to Heathrow airport in a similar time to a car and pretty cheap but it won't always run when I need it so why not drive (or get a lift)?
As a Londoner (have lived both centrally and in the suburbs) I think you're right that it's one or the other.
If you design for cars (e.g. M25, UK motorway network and roads, towns like Swindon and MK) then cars are the uncontested king.
In an area like London, it almost becomes an emergent phenomenon. The suburbs have car use because they're not very dense and it still beats sporadic bus routes.
In the centre there's just no space. Forget parking, Uber might be slower than the tube in a no-congestion scenario simply due to traffic lights and giving way.
Having traveled many times from Boston to NYC via car, which is about 5x cheaper than Amtrak and yes actually comparable in cost to the bus, depending on your MPG, it's kind of ridiculous to me that we don't have a better version of Amtrak by now.
Of course not representative, but you can definitely see the influence of the automobile in how these cities have grown. Compare to say, Moscow - another major urban city in a fairly sparse city - New York City has only added a few km of subway lines in the past 20 years compared to 150+km.