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Comment by shereadsthenews | Hacker News Reader

When you think of an American state with a growing population you can take the existing infrastructure as a given and plan for rail for your new capacity. Unless you are willing to say we're just not going to add transportation capacity for our new citizens, you face a choice of road, rail, or air. Rail is often a good choice.

As for "far apart" this seems irrelevant. Ohio has a greater population density than does Spain, but Columbus, Ohio's principal city, hasn't had a passenger train in 42 years while Cordoba, with half the population, enjoys ten trains per hour service including a high-speed train to Sevilla, Madrid, and Malaga. Anybody could build a Columbus-Dayton-Indianapolis high-speed rail line but we lack the will to do it.

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Where HSR excels is in being able to service several city pairs on a single line. The Northeast Corridor is a great example: you can have a single train service all pairs of {Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, NYC, Boston} at negligible extra expense in time and money. Thus you can add in stops like Providence, which don't generate all that many trips on their own, simply because it is literally on the way to where you're going.

The problem with the US Midwest is that there's a lot of these third-tier cities, but you have to go out of your way to connect them. Who wants to go between Columbus and Indianapolis--the highway between the two cities is pretty empty. Even worse, the few collinear city triples you can come up with all completely miss the primary destination of the entire region, Chicago. If you want to go from Chicago to Columbus, Indianapolis, and especially Dayton, are not on your way.

The requirement for colinearity seems like something you made up. And, you don’t gauge travel demand for one mode based on another. They didn’t build the Golden Gate Bridge because there were many people swimming to Marin. Two well-connected cities with robust economies will enjoy strong travel demand.

There are many things that factor into how likely HSR is to be used. Intercity travel demand is one of the chief metrics, but you also have to consider the quality of intracity public transport. Indianapolis and Columbus as a city pair simply does not score very well on this metric; you'd put the billions of dollars investment to much better use elsewhere.

The point about collinearity is that you can make a strong demand by combining many individually weak demands. And this is the problem in the Midwest: the strong demand is Chicago, and it has a lot of moderate demand endpoints, such as St. Louis, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Detroit. But the real strong city pair is Chicago/NYC, which is already at the extreme margins of acceptable time, which means substantial detours to hook up the lesser demand centers is going to kill ridership.

> Who wants to go between Columbus and Indianapolis--the highway between the two cities is pretty empty.

This strikes me as the main problem with the mindset around HSR. Consider e.g., Madison, Wisconsin.

Milwaukee would have a much more vibrant and dynamic ecosystem if undergrads/PhD students/professors could get to/from meetings with investors in MLK/CHI and be back for afternoon classes. Or continue internships/meetings during the school year.

There are enormous inefficiencies (and corresponding brain drain) caused by the fact that the region's center of innovation is 1+ hours by car away from the region's center of finance.

An MLK <-> CHI <-> Madison rail line would change the dynamics of the entire state's economy. Simply counting cars on the roads between those cities in the present ignores how HSR changes the entire dynamic in a very qualitative way.

It's not that simple or we would have it already.

Rail is expensive to build and maintain, and stations even more so. The lack of freedom of a car means the train must stop where people want to go and this creates a lot of complexity in how routes are connected, the size and number of trains, service hours, total throughput, ticket prices, and most critically having effective last-mile transit so people can actually get to the station to use the train.

Ride sharing may fill that last-mile today but overall the US is too big and spread out both between and within cities to for trains to be as viable as they are in Europe where everything is much closer together.

I took the train from Tucson to New Orleans last week. The train cars are 25 years old and in OK shape, the food was edible but overpriced (even with a vegan option), but all above the luggage racks there were streaks of dirt, where vacuuming had taken place but apparently not a complete job. The train arrived about 5 hours late and I felt compelled to apologize to the British couple seated next to me on behalf of the USA, after asking them if nationalized British Rail was this bad in the seventies.

I'm curious how long Europe's famous rail infrastructure will continue to be cost-effective in the era of Ryanair.

Very. Spain’s high-speed service killed the Barcelona-Madrid air route, which had been the world’s busiest.

And taken the lion's share of London to Paris, which was also huge. But a combination of high-speed day trains and low-cost air has killed off many of the very long distance trains and most of Europe's sleeper services. So it's a bit of a mixed bag.

Fun anecdote here. Just last month my wife and I were in Barcelona and we needed to go to Madrid. She had her company buy a plane ticket and I took the train. We left at the exact same time and I took 100% public transportation and she had a car service on both ends and a plane ticket.

I made it to our destination across the town from the Madrid central 45 minutes before she did.

Yeah, I don't know. I thought about going from Barcelona to Malaga by train because I love trains, but it was 10x more expensive than one of these low-cost flights.

Germany recently finished upgrading a good chunk of the line between Berlin and Munich, dropping travel time from 6+ hours to under 4 on the sprinter.

Train service now has a marketshare of 46-30 vs flying, and widening. I'm certain it was reversed before.

People like fast center-to-center connections.

https://www.rbb24.de/wirtschaft/beitrag/2018/12/vde8-deutsch...

I don't think this era is going to last much longer. Something has to give if we want to make any headway on climate goals, and increasing air travel prices is one of the more obvious steps.

Right now train travel is cheap if you plan ahead and have the right discount cards and some flexibility regarding time. Otherwise, not so much. But then again, this is true for flying as well.

Ryanair rarely flies directly to or from cities, you nearly always need to make additional connections which makes it pretty useless for business travel.

That’s because we’re skipping rail entirely http://www.morpc.org/program-service/hyperloop-midwest-conne...

The Hyperloop idea is over a century old and has never been viable yet, and never will be until construction and energy costs drop by magnitudes. It definitely isn't feasible in any place where a regular railway doesn't already work.

This won't happen. Maglev is a technology that's actually feasible and fast, and has been under research and testing since the 70s. Chuo Shinkansen between Tokyo and Nagoya is currently under construction and they're basically tunneling in a straight line through all the mountains. This is what everyone should be doing instead of unproven Hyperloop tech.

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