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Comment by geogra4 | Hacker News Reader

As fast as a jetliner, and way more efficient. Can be powered without fossil fuels. This is the future.

Where is America on HSR?

Not fundamentally more efficient, UNLESS in a Hyperloop-like vacuum tube (as this one is). Let’s consider at near sea level.

At near sea level, the drag at those speeds is absolutely brutal. Airplanes win, although they’re harder to electrify.

If you extrapolate current Maglev designs to 1000km/h, for energy consumption per passenger mile is about 0.5kWh/(passenger-mile).

Airplanes are on the order of 100mpg/passenger, or 0.33kWh/(passenger-mile) even with the relatively low conversion of chemical energy to mechanical in a jet engine. An electric aircraft could get about 0.1-0.2kWh/(passenger-mile) with the same airframe if the battery chemistry is appropriate for that flight length. Improve the airframe, and <0.05kWh/(passenger-mile) is possible.

Length of electric flight is limited, but 1000km is possible with current chemistries. America’s near-term HSR routes are on the order of 500km, so electric flight is feasible.

This is why “Hyperloop” (or vacuum trains generally) are and were a good idea at the high end for high speed rail, in spite of all the mocking that Elon Musk incurred for the idea (which he/SpaceX popularized and funded student competitions for, although the idea is an old one). Otherwise airplanes win on efficiency.

The problem with planes is that they have to carry all their fuel/energy and to carry it costs more fuel/energy.

Most high-speed trains don't carry all their fuel with them. They get it from the network.

This will all change as battery technology improves but at the moment I cannot see it getting better trains.

That being said I expect that the 1000km/h speed will be like the Shanghai to Beijing track that got up to maximum speed a few times for the record and has since been reduced to make it more economical.

Even if this does happen and the train reaches 1,000 for a single trip and then drops back to a safer and more profitable speed of 600km/h or 800km/h it is still faster than what we have now and is a massive improvement.

American here. Public transportation is seen as inconvenient and for lower class people, so large transit projects like this get no traction. You will never see executives or politicians taking trains to work like you do in European countries. Except in NYC.

Other, and actually main, reason is that good public transport decreases cost of land, it is basically designed to do so: it makes more places liveable/jobs reachable, so there is effectively more land for the same amount of people. So everyone will vote against or they lose their pensions.

Want to fix this? Sure, easy, just scrap the democracy and just don't ask people, send those who object, to "re-education" camps. Or scrap market economy: if all land is government-owned, it won't be an issue at all.

More and better public transport in EU? For same reasons: less democracy and less market economy. More government-owner land, larger fraction of renters who just want cheaper rents (and public transport gives it to them), and they vote in the right direction, less legal opportunities for NIMBYsm.

“Want to fix this? Sure, easy, just scrap the democracy and just don't ask people, send those who object, to "re-education" camps. Or scrap market economy: if all land is government-owned, it won't be an issue at all.“

Ever been to Japan?

Very interesting conclusion there, "all countries with good infrastructure are not democratic" , it also contradicts the fact that you have public roads, you logic applies perfectly for that too.

I'm not convinced that, as you say, decreasing cost of land is the main reason. A simple counterexample would be London which has great public transport and ridiculous prices of land. On the contrary, public transport projects like Crossrail actually increase prices of land and property in affected areas.

Now try to force Americans survive in the abysmal living conditions of the average Londoner. That city is absurdly overregulated, and expensive as hell.

> Now try to force Americans survive in the abysmal living conditions of the average Londoner. That city is absurdly overregulated, and expensive as hell.

I assume you don't live in San Francisco?

Public transportation has a complex relationship with land value, but saying it decreases it across the board is blatantly false.

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2016/04/transit-stati...

Er, no. Public transport usually increases the price of land, and the rest of your post is just a bizarre totalitarian rant.

> Want to fix this? Sure, easy, just scrap the democracy and just don't ask people, send those who object, to "re-education" camps. Or scrap market economy: if all land is government-owned, it won't be an issue at all.

I'm just going to assume that you've never been to major Asian cities.

A lot of executives and politicians take the train between DC and NYC/Boston. The reason they do it is because the trains in the NE Corridor don't suck. This whole thing is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy: build crappy trains, people hate them. Build nice ones, people like them.

The NE corridor doesn't suck compared to the rest of the US but it's pretty dismal compared to the EU and EA.

A favorite experience of mine was waiting at South Station and watching the train get delayed 5 minutes at a time for two and a half hours.

>Public transportation is seen as inconvenient and for lower class people, so large transit projects like this get no traction. You will never see executives or politicians taking trains to work like you do in European countries. Except in NYC.

I disagree. This is a chicken-or-egg problem. Nobody is inherently against public transit. Having commuted in a few cities in North America, it's far more comfortable than sitting in traffic. If you have a good system, i think people would use it. The GO Train in the Greater Toronto Area is a good example; it's filled to the brim with white-collar city workers.

> Nobody is inherently against public transit.

I knew plenty of people in the suburbs of Dallas who were against public transportation and any expansion of DART out to their towns. It was usually accompanied by talk of "that element" coming up from the city to rob their houses. It was fucking ridiculous, but unfortunately these people exist and need to be dealt with in order to get transit projects through.

Option seems simple, don't give them a choice in the matter. Say we're building X, it will be done to improve public transit.

The problem is DART needs the outlying towns to join it in order to run anything there. The NIMBYs simply pressured the town into not agreeing to join, so there was no way to do this.

This is a common misconception. Overall US transit riders earn about the same as drivers. In metro areas like Chicago, SFBA, or Washington DC, the median income of transit users is significantly higher than drivers.

Speak for yourself. In Chicago, we've got the metra [0] which goes to the far out suburbs (L goes to close ones [1]) and there are plenty of upper class people that ride it for their daily commute.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metra#/media/File:Metra-System...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_%22L%22

> American here. Public transportation is seen as inconvenient and for lower class people, so large transit projects like this get no traction.

American here. I do not think your class argument is correct with regards to commuter rail (though it probably is true for bus transit).

Working as hard as it can to find excuses not to build any

The Texas Central Railway project will be the first true high speed rail in the country, using Shinkansen tech.

You can gauge the insincerity of the project by the mendacity of the title. There is an area of Texas known universally as "Central Texas". The "Texas Central" project goes nowhere near it.

It's a rail line from Houston to Dallas. It's not going to happen, unless the legislature goes full bore socialize-the-losses and subsidizes it.

>> You can gauge the insincerity of the project by the mendacity of the title. There is an area of Texas known universally as "Central Texas". The "Texas Central" project goes nowhere near it.

This is an incredibly bizarre criticism. Perhaps you are bitter that the project will not benefit you immediately? I live in Austin, and I am a bit disappointed about that myself, so I sympathize.

It may seem a bizarre take to you, however after decades of reading titles of legislative bills and "projects" it's a simple test whose results stand up over time. I use it all the time.

One of the many state/public attempts to bring HSR to Texas was built on a "Texas T" route (or "Texas T-Bone", some branding like that) that would have lines from San Antonio, Houston, and Dallas all meet at Austin, so that if you wanted to go from Houston to Dallas, or Houston to San Antonio, it would go through Austin. Unfortunately as I recall (memory fuzzy, very open to correction) this was most recently attempted in the era of Republican Governors saying "F U" to any Obama administration money, even if it would help their state...

It is understandably harder for a private group to start off with a three-line rail network than a one-line rail network, than it would be for a group working with the federal government. Hence when Texas Central Railways that took up the banner, they settled on Houston to Dallas as the most profitable pairing of cities. This is evidenced partly by, at least in the past, that city pairing being the most profitable airline route operated by Southwest.

I followed some of the original proposals for routes, and some of them went through College Station directly, versus the chosen route, which goes through Grimes County stop with a rapid bus to College Station. I would have loved to see those happen, but it turns out they would have had many multiples more eminent domain issues. The current route minimizes private land issues by hugging an existing utility corridor as much as it can, while also balancing land that is easy to build on, and having lower environmental impact.

that seems very unlikely to happen in texas, right? socialized public transit doesnt seem like a distinctly texan thing to do.

Please see here for project financing info: https://www.texascentral.com/rumors-vs-reality/project-finan...

You can never say never, the Texas Leg. is notoriously susceptible to political influence by monied or powerful individual. But I doubt it.

It will also take support of several powerful people within the leg (the speaker, and Lt. Governor), as well as the Governor to get the eminent domain condemnations done without interference.

But land developers get local governments (most often), and sometimes the Texas government to use public funds to build roads to increase the value of land to be "developed" all the time. It's the main way that new roads get built around here. Then they use a "private utility district" (authorized by the friendly leg.) with taxing authority to fund the installation of streets and sewer, etc. and voila, now they can make billions selling houses. All without risking a dime. It's a nice gig using tax dollars to funnel money to millionaires, if you've got the right friends.

NIMBYs would block any of the eminent domain needed to build it. Not to mention infrastructure construction in this country is rife with corruption and incompetence. This results in HSR having massive price tags and taxpayers not wanting to foot the bill.

I assume there are already tracks between the major cities, probably used today mostly for materials and not people, so can't you put a new track near the existing one, this land would already have low value since trains are already passing there.

Those tracks you reference are owned by the freight companies, not the gov. Even a good chunk of the rail lines that Amtrak uses are merely being rented from the freight companies. The Northeast regional line that connects Boston -> NYC -> DC is one of the few lines in which Amtrak themselves own it.

Thanks, I did not know this fact. So the only hope would be then that the private companies would invest into improving the tracks or the government nationalize the tracks(buy them most probably).

The problem is that the freight operators habitually defer maintenance. Most trackage and crossings are in a poor state of repair. Updates would require fixing the backlog.

This feed should give you some indication:

https://twitter.com/metronorth

We're struggling with rain and leaves.

Here's a better one:

https://twitter.com/FuckNjTransit

About 25 years ago in Jr High school we watched a brief propaganda video about maglev trains touting The Future. Corny music coupled with bold narration. It was as comical and sad then as America's progress on high speed rail since then.

If they really push it to 1000 km/h, that will be faster than jetliners (with typical cruising speeds around 800-850 km/h).

Busy with environmental impact statements and lawsuits.

Isn't Tesla working on Ultra-Fast 'Hyperloop' Trains?

Isn't it Elon, not Tesla?

You're absolutely right.

Hyperloop will be a cheaper, better option.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JDoll8OEFE

Please, I urge you to watch this. It explains thoroughly why the situation for railroads is very different between China and America.

tl;dw: America is more spread out, has better airline control, and less of a political incentive to expand public transport, than China.

Isn't the density a bad excuse since you can add the infrastructure only in regions with large density like California?

Yeah - this is why I find that argument very specious. Florida has a higher population density than France but there's no TGV equivalent running from Jacksonville to Miami

It's only one of the arguments. Florida has neither the political incentive nor the restrictions on air traffic to put pressure on government to build these things.

But the excuse is wrongly used, nobody is expecting bullet trains in Alaska or low populated places. So mostly people/politics are to blame and not terrain or density.

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