Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think you pick Amtrak to arrive somewhere on time. You bring some books, read them, relax, stare out the window, chat with people in the dining car, and eventually reach your destination. Chilling out on the train is part of your vacation. (I rode the California Zephyr from Chicago to Oakland when I was like 10, and still remember most of the trip. It was amazing, even for an easily-bored 10 year old.)

The reality is, intercity trains are not an efficient way to travel in the United States. Most of the important cities are far apart, because it's a very large country with a lot of empty space. If you need to be somewhere, book a flight. It's less expensive and if you give yourself a day of leeway you will probably never be late to your thing, barring some sort of natural disaster.

I am a huge railfan but I have accepted that the geography of the US doesn't make train travel as viable as say, Japan. Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka are the three largest cities and are comparable in distance between each other like Chicago, Springfield, and St. Louis. If New York was where Chicago is, Chicago was where Springfield is, and LA was where St. Louis is, high speed rail would be enormously popular in the US. But New York and LA are 2500 miles apart, 10% around the world from each other.

I even question California High Speed Rail. San Francisco / Silicon Valley and LA are both big metro areas with a lot of money, but SF/LA are 41% farther apart than Tokyo and Osaka. Japan got very lucky that its two largest cities are actually very close to each other. Building the Shinkansen was an enormous engineering challenge, but one that was very clearly profitable. It's so profitable they're building another Shinkansen between the two cities, taking a shorter route and using faster trains. In the US... such a city pair does not exist.

OK this is going very off-topic from your exact comment... but it's something I wanted to talk about. Sorry.

Your entire geography argument goes out the window if you look at China's high-speed rail system instead of Japan's.

E.g. Shanghai - Kunming is more than 2200 km and takes between 10-12 hours[1]. At that speed LA-SF would take around 3 hours. For context the flight time is an hour and a half, so when you account for airport overhead, taxiing etc. the train would take around around the same time, and be a more pleasant mode of transport.

The density argument also goes both ways. A country like Japan is going to find it much harder to find empty space to place rail than somewhere like the US.

There's a lot of reasons for why the US isn't doing what China's doing with high-speed rail, but those reasons are mainly political, not geographical.

1. https://www.travelchinaguide.com/china-trains/shanghai-kunmi...

> E.g. Shanghai - Kunming is more than 2200 km and takes between 10-12 hours[1].

Note that it could be even faster without the ~50 stops in the middle.

China isn’t a good example to point to because we have no idea whether China is making intelligent trade offs about how to use its resources. It’s an authoritarian economy. It could end up that in 50 years the whole thing collapses from its own weight.

Europe is a better example because it least the government must be somewhat accountable for its guns versus butter trade offs. And if you look at things like Macron trying to privatize SNCF (with its massive unsustainable debt levels), that should give us pause about the long term viability of rail even in dense places like France.

From a cursory glance it seems to me that SNCF's debts are due to them financing all of their infrastructure instead of the French state paying for it (directly, it of course is indirectly), and then the argument goes back to the current top comment here: The real value of a good transport network is the add-on economic effects.

Also from a security perspective, you can't hijack a train and crash it into some building (it has to stay on the tracks), so that's a plus for trains.

Finally a domestic train causes about 41 g/km of CO2 emissions, while a domestic flight causes about 254 g/km (accounting for altitude) [0]

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49349566

Except the US is still much larger than China is, at least in terms of practical geography.

You can fit most of China's population in a box about 1300×1100 mi, with the most distant route being about 1700 mi. In the US, the equivalent box is about 800×2500 mi, with the most distant route being about 2700 mi. (All numbers as the crow flies).

The US's geographical issue is that its major population centers--California and the Northeast--are separated by ~1200 mi of empty land, and ~700 mi of rural land. The only other countries to have that sort of major gap between population distributions are Canada, Australia, and Russia, although in each of those cases, the population distribution is more "there's one major city far away from everybody else" (that said, the Trans-Siberian Railroad cities of Omsk, Novosibirsk, and Krasnoyarsk are pretty big cities that are relatively distant, although only 2200mi at the long axis rather than the 2700mi of the US).

So why not build two rail systems — in the NE and in California? A lot of people in the thread are arguing the impossibility of even that.

Nobody takes passenger trains across the continent — any continent.

We absolutely deserve much better HSR in the North-East Corridor, and medium-speed rail is probably viable throughout the rest of the Northeast and maybe a few routes around Chicago.

California is trickier for two reasons. First, the layout of cities is somewhat unfortunate. In terms of a linear service, Sacramento, the Bay Area, LA, and San Diego are all more or less in a line, but scheduling a linear service requires detouring over the mountains twice to reach the Bay Area and boring an underwater tunnel to head north from SF. And SF being one of the two first-tier cities in CA means that you don't want to service it on a spur.

The second issue is the geography. Going from LA to the Bay Area requires crossing at least two sets of mountain ranges. River valleys don't really help you here, and the minimum viable HSR pretty much requires connecting LA to the Bay Area. This means there's strong political pressure to kill the project as too expensive before it can show any benefits whatsoever.

> I don't think you pick Amtrak to arrive somewhere on time.

You’re really making the case for defunding at least everything outside the NEC. We shouldn’t be spending public money on something that’s only good for leisure travel.

Why? We have national parks.

We also heavily subsidize air travel (Essential Air Service, ATC, etc.) and highways. Moving people around, even if for leisure, is a valuable activity for the government to participate in. People need something to do on their downtime.

Agreed.

The train from SLC <-> SF is 18 hours and about the price of flying, while driving takes ~10 hours. That's stupid, it should take less time by train than car, and flying should cost more since it uses more resources (or at least it seems like it should...).

Any leisurely lines should be separate from regular travel. A train doesn't have to run 120mph+, it just needs to be able to for commuters. I think making "cruise" trains makes a ton of sense, but that's not the only thing that makes sense for trains.

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