European Urbanism and High-Speed Rail
pedestrianobservations.com
pedestrianobservations.com
Caltrain electrification is an attempt at this in a very small scope but really shows just how slow and terrible we are at this kind of thing. And again thanks to CAHSRs not invented here attitude stuck with weird decisions like needing to support the worlds highest platform height. (I’m only barely surprised CAHSR didn’t decide to invent a new track gauge.)
We can do traditional catenary, but there's a risk of the high cost of US infrastructure eating up the budget.
Might be worth considering a hybrid system where you electrify the most busy corridors and then use battery-electric trains for much of the rest (but charged using a sort of overhead catenary), allowing you to reduce the amount of infrastructure significantly (but with locomotive capital costs to consider... including battery cars).
And yeah, once we have more experience with overhead high voltage heavy rail in the US, with upgraded commuter rail, we can then do HSR with some sort of rationality.
Because you only really need HSR between cities. In a city, you want good, electrified rail. HSR doesn't really do anything for city traffic (and could make it worse, actually, if not done at the same time as conventional rail upgrades).
In fact, Amtrak is not even necessarily better than flying. Amtrak gets like 56mpg per passenger, but airliners can easily get much better than that (particularly if you fly economy class): https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704901104575423... (and this article is using 2009 data... newer airplanes can get much better)
(This would be surprising unless you noted that Amtrak has low occupancy compared to airlines and has to maintain a lot of routes to underserved places and that trains have to carry a lot more weight per person because, in part, the trips are a lot longer... it's a bit better for short commuter trips)
So rail isn't even better for the environment than modern planes unless we electrify rail. (Which we need to do anyways, as we move lots of our cargo cheaply by rail.)
It's the same with the wsj, they are comparing a 100% occupancy rate of the plane with a 20% for the car (a single passenger)
Assuming the consumption of a train doesn't change much based on how many passengers, you can travel by train for carbon free, as the 56 mpg won't change if you are in the train or not
Of course trains should be electrified, but take the train today already, the higher the occupancy rate, the better the averaged mpg will be
And who knows, it might change how the fret trains seems to always have the priority over passengers ones and finally make it a pleasant experience
Apparently it’s the norm to separate design from construction in Europe, which cuts down on such chicanery.
Not only this freight corridor has been setup simultaneously and roads built at amazing pace, all this infrastructure has self funded itself.
Interested in learning more about this. What does self-funding mean here? Where is the funding coming from?
Long-distance intercity rail is for the incidental traveler who travels occasionally, and this traveler has many competing choices for their journey.
Meanwhile, the typical commuter rail passenger will ride day after day, both ways, and often their only alternative is an arduous commute in a car -- or moving closer to their job, where their cost of housing would be higher.
Most commuter rail systems in the US suffer from the lack of agency-owned dedicated passenger tracks, and from poor integration into the metropolitan area's cohesive transportation fabric (of which both personal cars and downtown public transit are an inseparable part).
Much success could be achieved by (1) increasing the average speed of commuter transit, (2) investing in reliability, predictability, and frequency of service, (3) investing in Park-and-Ride hubs near certain stations, (4) looking for synergy with freeways and exits, (5) promoting transit-oriented development by both developer incentives and by land purchase and direct investment. The resulting changes would create a culture of transit use for commuting, which will go on to enable the eventual connection of the rail transit networks of neighboring city-pairs.
As for California, an Altamont Pass segment to their High Speed Rail project ought to have been one of first things built. A faster 'Altamont Corridor Express' would have created a ~1-hour link between Stockton and the Bay, integrating the corridor's economy further beyond its current role as an overlong exurban commute. It would've also provided for an alternate rail routing between Sacramento and the Bay that'd be competitive with the Capitol Corridor.
After the initial push towards a 'Super ACE', Altamont lost in the planning to Pacheco Pass; this increased linearity and reduced distance in the SF-SJ-Fresno axis, but in my opinion it was the wrong move. Fresno's accession to the economic continuum of the Bay is far less likely than that of Stockton or Modesto, and the increased linearity doesn't confer a meaningful benefit. Travelers are far more likely to travel between SJ and SF than between SJ and Fresno (or any point further south), so there's little operational benefit to having both SJ and Fresno accessible from San Francisco with no transfers from the same Fresno-bound train. The choice of the Pacheco Pass route is one of the several facepalm-worthy decisions made by CAHSR or by others early on in the process, like an extremely sweeping curve on a long, expensive viaduct just outside of Fresno station [1], or the barely-realistic journey times written into legislation that drive up cost.
US domestic air travel is growing at 5% a year, compound that over a decade or two and it's hardly "incidental" travellers anymore, it's everyone flying whenever they can. It is a major contributor to greenhouse emissions and is not easily replaced.
https://www.bts.dot.gov/newsroom/2018-traffic-data-us-airlin...
LA to SF is one of the most travelled corridors in the country and rail can legitimately compete with air here. the decision to put it through the central valley was politically motivated rather than utilitarian. the coastal route up through san jose and silicon valley would have been more utilitarian (which is not to say that serving the central valley is unworthy, just less utilitarian).
The commuter rail operates on the scale of the primary city's own metropolitan area, encouraging activity nodes around those stations that are better placed than others. The idealized role of commuter rail is to provide reliability, predictability, and throughput, so that travelers want to concentrate their trips to the same transportation modes and nodes.
Meanwhile, intercity rail must balance its need to compete with air travel [3] with its desire to serve larger towns along the line. If it opts to serve fewer intermediate stops, it can deliver a better value proposition for long-distance city-to-city travelers, assuming there's transit or car rental options on the other end, like airports have today.
But if it opts to serve more stops along the route, those towns may turn into far-flung exurbs themselves, since they offer quick access to much larger job market. If that happens, you will get sprawl anyway [4]-- the spread of low-rise development on greenfield land as a "cheaper now, don't think about later" response to increased housing demand -- but you'll get the kind of sprawl that's typical of a bedroom community, instead of the kind typical of a mixed-used edge city. This is because the rail will out-range the reach of personal cars from the commuting zone, so the economic integration of the town into the adjacent metropolitan area will be be partial and asymmetric.
In California, the decision to route the SF-LA high speed rail through the Central Valley was a sensible one, because the terrain in the Central Valley is more conducive to high speed rail than up the coast through Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo, and the Valley has significantly larger metropolitan areas than the locales along the coast. Both options require multiple challenging mountain range crossings. It's the SF-LA link itself that's tenuous to justify, because there's perfectly fine airports available today to anyone who wants to hop between the two.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_city
[2] The approximate distance of Chicago-Detroit, Chicago-St Louis, Chicago-Cincinnati.
[3] Air travel is the most direct competitor of intercity rail, because both will discharge you at your destination with no car, and compared to a commuter scenario, the intended destinations of passengers will vary greatly within the broader geographical area.
[4] Sprawl spreads because cheap greenfield land exists at the momentary edge of all but the most geographically-constrained areas, many developers prefer these these cheap-to-build sites, and many people do prefer low-rise single-family homes with yards. Sprawl will always spread if housing demand outpaces supply unless you forbid it by law or ordinance, because new construction on greenfield land confers tangible benefits to those who can afford it.
availability of land is a lesser factor for sprawl compared to reach. practically no one lives in suburban lands (like intraurban mountainscapes) unserviced by roads. sprawl is directly correlated to where we put roads, and less so to where there is open land. further, roads (and other infrastructure) are heavily subsidized, both directly and due to uninternalized externalities.
internalize all those externalities and we'd have much less debate on this topic. folks could simply choose what they prefer relative to actual costs.
Some numbers to put this into perspective:
The interstate highway system is 44k miles of roadway.
The current estimate for upgrading one mainline railway in the UK (HS2) is about 400m dollars a mile.
US defence spending is < 1t dollars.
So it would take a defence scale budget for 20 years to build out a high speed rail network to cover the same routes as the interstate highway network.
One is that we, in the UK, are especially incompetent when it comes to almost all forms of capital spending. Our IT projects, property development, transport projects etc all suffer from this. HS2 is no different.
But more importantly to that cost is the land which has to be bought. Yes, there are lots of expensive consultants to pay because HSR is relatively complicated, but the cost of land in London and the South East of England is exorbitant. I don't have a number, but would expect this to constitute half the cost of the first phase of building.
I've been increasing thinking this is a negative effect of fictionalization and the resulting explosion in property prices. If the government needs to buy some land it competes with investors with access to free money from the central banks.
I don't think anybody is particularly good. China is better at building HSR largely by dint of having more practice, not because they're better at capital expenditure.
IT projects are corruption, I think. There's no way Accenture would survive in a properly competitive market for IT were it not for the UK government contracts having legal requirements only they and a few other large consulting companies can meet.
In any case, the interstate system is way overbuilt. Duplicating its footprint with rail would not be a good idea.
I live in a European city where transit systems except old busses and trams were absent until a few years ago, and where a metro system has been built and expanded over the last decade or so. When a new metro station is about to open, office buildings and high-rises are built in its vicinity.
Nobody is suddenly selling their McMansion to move to an apartment near a metro station, but their kids might, divorced people might, people moving in from other cities might etc. It's a slow process but let's not forget that urbanization from villages to cities happened in a few decades and a lot of "densification" from suburbs to cities could happen in a few decades as well.
Take highways. The main ones usually have 3 lanes in each direction. One lane could be retrofitted with rails, and used to on-ramp special "wagons" that could transport cars (one each). At the main entry points you would have a "station" for cars to hop in or out, and you could have these wagons move autonomously. They could have much less drag, powered by electric engines, and use small batteries that could be recharged or swapped after each trip.
This way cars could "drive" faster on highways, pollute less, while retaining their ability to go anywhere once to hop off.
Yes, you would need to build the infrastructure... But a back-of-the-napkin calculation would quickly show that this would provide a great ROI, as well as reduce dependence from oil, which is always a geopolitical issue.
Alternatively, you could try to "reform" trains. Instead of long ones that depart every several minutes, why not single, lighter wagons that depart when you need them?
I think that would be a pain to manage and would lower throughput by a wide margin.
As someone living in Paris, which supposedly has great public transportation (according to the local transit authority), what we need is more throughput.
The main issue I see is there not being enough trains, even on the automated lines. They practically come one after the other during rush hour. I don't have the actual numbers, but as an onlooker, it seems as if as soon as one train has left the station, the next comes in. I think this is the best throughput they can get for the given station length.
And yet, there are a few stations (mainly the "small ones") where you'll have to wait for up to ten minutes to be able to board a train, and even then you'll be squished by other passengers. That's because basically no one gets off the train at those stations, so no space frees up.
I think the issue is clearly around getting on and off the train. So now that we have automatic trains with automated gates, they could have different kinds of trains for rush hour. For example, there could be much less or no seats at all and the train doors could open upwards. So instead of the people having to squish through small openings, they could get on and off through practically the whole length of the train.
Note I'm specifically talking about the metro inside of the city of Paris proper and some of its immediate suburbs. That's roughly a circle of say 20 km diameter. The "suburban trains" we have around here (the RER and a buch of similar other lines with a different name) do not run as often, even during peak rush hour. But they also get filled to the brim with people, except on those travel time is more around 1h instead of 10 minutes, so you get to really enjoy getting pressed together. Bonus points for there being no ventilation whatsoever (and I mean ventilation, as in moving air, not specifically air conditioning, which of course, hasn't reached these parts).
There are only 4 doors per carraige on most trains, which means physically getting people in an out when it is entirely full is difficult.
I've often thought that a train with no seats would be great, or ones where the entire side of the carriage just lifts up or rolls-up like a roller shutter would be a great timesaver and make everyone's lives a lot easier
I don't quite see what automation has to do with this, though?
Granted, with fully automated operation it's a little easier to shuffle trains around without having to worry about how that impacts the rosters of the humans operating the trains, but the main problem here is that it'd be extremely inefficient to keep a completely duplicate set of trains (and more) around just for rush hour.
At most, you could try building the extra trains that only run doing peak hours to a separate design, but that still makes maintenance more complicated and means that only a relatively small fraction of trains (I don't have numbers for Paris at hand, but on the Underground in London it'd be e.g. 20 - 25 % at most) will actually be of the "super high" capacity design.
So in my opinion the only really sensible thing if you want to go down that path would be to do what I've seen with some Japanese lines, namely use foldable longitudinal seating that can be remotely locked in the upright position and then unlocked again after the peak.
As for
> and the train doors could open upwards. So instead of the people having to squish through small openings, they could get on and off through practically the whole length of the train
I don't know, that'd seem at least a bit dubious in terms of structural integrity, wouldn't it?
Florida has a higher population density than France and could be served quite well by a hsr line from Jacksonville to Miami with a spur to Orlando/tampa
Otherwise I generally take the train rather than fly as it shaves about an hour off the trip from Boston to NYC. Acela charges the same as a plane ticket for this route.
“To be” assumes it will ever actually happen.
To call it "express" is some kind of sick joke. Its an 8+ hour ride.
There is a large section thru Connecticut where the train must slow down significantly (40 mph iirc) because the route on which the tracks laid down is 100 years old. The curves, etc are simply not rated for anything faster. Getting rights of way adjusted to fix that for HSR use would require an act of God or Congress since there must be dozens of jurisdictions involv
It's a great example of why building new rail is not that common in either Europe or the US.
In general even modest amounts of rail tend to cost billions to put in place. E.g. recent subway line extensions in Amsterdam, Berlin, New York, etc. cost billions each. It's so expensive that it is typically big news when it happens. And it doesn't happen a lot. Rail in Europe is used very intensively but there is very little added to that network at this point. Most of what is there, has been there for a long time. Munich and Berlin gained a new high speed rail connection just a few years ago. That was big news. Planning for that started shortly after the wall fell, 30 years ago. That's how long it takes.
So, for the US to start building rail now, it would likely be stupendously expensive, take decades to complete, and have probably very questionable value relative to other solutions. Even just figuring out where to put it would take a very long time and involve fighting local land owners throughout the US.
There are other things the US could do, including a few new solutions that are changing the economics of transport (and thus remove arguments for investing in rails).
Basically, the premise of rail is that using it is cheaper than burning a lot of fuel to drive (or fly) people around. Except we are switching to electrical cars now which cost typically about at least 5 times less to operate with likely further improvements over time. And they can use sustainable sources of energy. Electrical buses are already a thing. Several Chinese cities use them exclusively by the tens of thousands each. And cities world wide are starting to deploy them.
And even electrical planes are being considered (hybrid and battery) and likely to be a thing before any significant amount of new rail would be ready for use.
That changes things. Flying is dirty, not that expensive, but convenient. The US has a lot of domestic flights for that reason. A few decades from now that could be a lot cheaper, clean, less noisy, and even more convenient. Guilt free, cheap, clean transport is becoming a thing.
And that's before you consider autonomous vehicles. Drivers and pilots need salaries. So that raises the operational cost. Self driving buses might become a thing pretty soon. You don't even need level 5 autonomy for that because they drive fixed routes and schedules. Many cities even have dedicated bus lanes. So, self driving, electrical buses could be a cheap and viable way to ferry people around. Autonomous flying electrical vehicle startups are already flying some prototypes around. Waymo already has driverless vehicles on roads in the US. So, it's more a question of when than if that will happen. The cost for autonomous vehicles is going to drop over time as well.
And it doesn't require a massive investment in infrastructure. And you can flexibly create routes to just about anywhere it makes sense to have them. And you can take self driving taxise everywhere else.
So why build rail when we can do and scale all of that in the time that it takes to build a lot of new rail that is only usable exactly where you build it?
Intracity (or realy intra-metropolitan region) rail however is extremely important and we should do far more of it in all major cities, depopulating the surburbs except where they are made dense around stations. There are far more commutes than inter-city trips, and the increased density that this rails allows makes for further growth that cars could never achieve.
Do cut and cover subways for cost. The disruption also incentives hurrying up and getting the damn thing done.
Even your autonoumous buses are far less good than rail (though better than electric cars). The lack of grade separation means everything is sluggish and prune to delays. Streets are for public life, rails are for public transport.
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Honestly it's a shame Europe is so nativist, because with tons of immigration and alternative urban cores not stunted to preserve historical buildings (so lots more La Défense), they would easily whoop our asses with much better infrastructure foundation for prosperity.
Instead it's just Asia that's doing the big buildings and big trains among developed countries, but just having all the good growth in such a hot political situation doesn't seem to bode well...
The reason that Asia is building so much rail is that it is growing so fast. China has literally been designing and building cities from scratch and moving millions of people in to them. E.g. Shenzen grew from less than a million people to 12 million people in roughly the time it took Germany to figure out a rail connection between Berlin and Munich. China has built more sub way lines for new cities in recent decades than exist outside of China. Building rail is a lot easier and cheaper when you have a green field approach to city building like that and a state that can just tell people to shut up and move somewhere else because they need to build a railway where their house is. Much of European and American rail was built when the world population was a lot smaller than it is today. Having about 7x more people complicates things. Ironically, the US used a lot of Chinese labor for this at the time.
Nothing ironic about this. Rails is as natural an economy as they come. All networks are, but non-packet-based (cars, today's computer networks) ones all the more so.
(And comparing the faux-fluid dynamics and encapsulation overhead explains why computer network packets are mostly good, while cars are atrocious).
You said it yourself. If Germany was down with waves of Syrians and Turks or whoever, just as China promotes urbanization from the hinterland, they would see the growth too.
Then there is Korea which isn't growing but is still building out Seoul, because intensive urbanization is still the form of development that makes the most sense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=belm4kDAHgM&ab_channel=TheB1...
Now, it could be that we would like the results if we did this with cars, and not like it if we did it with doctors. But you haven't given any reason why that would be the case.
Most people, I would assume, want government policy to cause more doctors to exist rather than fewer. Whereas I am arguing for policies that would cause fewer cars to exist, rather than more. The direction of change is reversed in the two examples.
If there were a plague of hypochondria wasting physicians' time and costing society, then perhaps we would want to raise the price of medical care.
As for cars, making them (or their fuel) more expensive would have many advantages.
Reduced CO2 emissions and traffic congestion are obvious examples.
Road infrastructure is also an implicit subsidy to big-box businesses that destroy small shop-owners. A world with fewer cars shifts the balance towards smaller local retail businesses.
Children would also not be so dependent on parents to shuttle them around, which would help both parents and children.
Traffic fatalities would be reduced.
People would get more exercise.
There would be less noise.
Even wildlife would do better. There would be less roadkill.
I also assert that car-culture has contributed to the atomization of society. The car encourages geographic centralization and destroys horizontal ties. This leaves people disconnected and disoriented. And the resulting, more centralized societies are then vulnerable to power-grabs of various kinds.
But rail is unpopular in US for political reasons, not practical ones.
You could call that tribal, or you could just call it “voting for your interests”. It feels slightly different from the tribal issues I see more frequently (policing, healthcare, schooling), but maybe I’m fooling myself.
To add an extra lane to help the load of roughly 20% of Colorado Springs residents (~50k people) that commute between the cities, costs $350 million. To build an HSR would be around $1.8 billion. There was a push to put in a rail as this seemed like a perfect use case (spoiler alert, it showed how niche HSR actually is and how it was a bad idea for lots of places) Even if you charged $10 for a day pass and you had a 100% usage rate by those commuters on every work day (22 workdays a month) that's an income of $132 million a year for the HSR. Hopefully energy, labor, insurance, repair, and upgrades for the rail will be free for the lifetime as well. That's just a constant sink for the public for hair thin marginal benefit. If you make that trip often, you get a fuel efficient car at around 30mpg (what I did). That's about $10 in gas a day. Why would I pay to wait and be on someone else's time? Most commuter rails have narrow commuter hour windows. Not like you can hang out in the city. Worse when you need to travel around the spanse of the city quickly throughout the day. As in, on your time, not on someone else's. Btw, that 50k population ground that commutes, a lot are contractors. As in, they use vans and trucks to carry tools, equipment and materials... so, the practical number of regular users is going to be less.
So, will a politician like to try to convince a population for tax raises for $350 million or for something that's 5 times more expensive? Spoiler again, when it comes to you having to pay for it, you're going to be economical. People were cool with the slight tax hikes for the widening of I25. Not for the major hike that the HSR would need. Doesn't seem political to me. Ain't get more practical than that there good buddy. Let that marinate.
Source, I lived there when this was going on. It's all easy to research since it was a well reported issue. Also, I made that commute somewhat often. HSR wouldn't have worked for me since I was an IT contractor for different companies in the city and needed to move nimbly throughout Denver.
US highways do pay for themselves (http://www.bts.gov/publications/federal_subsidies_to_passeng...) (non-PDF version: http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub...), and help pay for other modes of transportation. Transit receives the biggest subsidy per passenger-mile, with rail and airlines in between.
(For those wishing more detail: From the executive summary (http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub...):
>*Highways*
>* Users of the highway passenger transportation system paid significantly greater amounts of money to the federal government than their allocated costs in 1994-2000.(http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub...) This was a result of the increase in the deficit reduction motor fuel tax rates between October 1993 and September 1997, and the increase in Highway Trust Fund fuel tax rates starting in October 1997.
>* School and transit buses received positive net federal subsidies over the 1990-2002 period, but autos, motorcycles, pickups and vans, and intercity buses paid more than their allocated cost to the federal government.
>* On average, highway users paid $1.91 per thousand passenger-miles to the federal government over their highway allocated cost during 1990-2002.)
https://www.bts.gov/archive/publications/federal_subsidies_t...
Local gov don't get to treat money like the fed. They ultimately do have to act like a business with profit and loss ratios. While their profits are to be used for expanse of civil and social programs, they can't operate at losses indefinitely. Detroit is a fantastic example of what happens when a city doesn't do responsible fiscal planning. Just because it isn't directly "your money" doesn't mean you can dumpster fire it on super sexy ideas. HSR is all about the dick measuring of, "Look what we have. It doesn't do much, but we have it. We're just like Japan and Europe. We so cool." It's like that $700 Juicero, over engineered, wifi enabled juicer that squeezed pre-juiced drinks into a glass. Packets of juice that could be squeezed by hand or just cut open with $5 scissors and poured into a glass. Fuck, you had to provide your own drinking vessel to that Silicon Valley stupidity. At least Bolthouse drinks don't require anything more than unscrewing the cap. Just because something is cool, popular and sexy doesn't mean it's the right solution.
It makes more sense to expand the highway and just fully subsidize the Mustang service between the two cities for poor commuters. It'll be far cheaper on the tax payers and still provide the benefits for the local community. This is the point. Why spend $1.8b on something when there's a more effective $350m solution?
And these things don't need to be payed for by the local governments, it can be nationalized and payed for by the fed like other countries do. The fed has demonstrated that it can print 5 trillion dollars in a year but it won't invest anything infrastructure. There is no excuse
How would HSR differ from traditional rail infrastructure in the modern age? Rail was phenomenal pre-affordable automobiles. I get that it was the cornerstone of America's rise to power in the 19th century. But even back in its heyday, it crumbled, pre-automobile. The over development of rail was a massive problem for the American economy due to its limitations. It's expensive to lay rail. It's expensive to maintain. It can't go in all the places roads can. Rail is niche in transportation and does what it does well, mass heavy cargo transpo to far distances, like 1k mile distances. Shorter than that, it's not really that economical. This is why you see lumber, coal, gypsum and other raw materials normally moved on rail. Or slow container goods from coast to coast. It's not used for as many goods as people think. If we, as an economy, dropped just-in-time-inventory practices, yes, rail would come back. Absolutely. But we moved to lean/just-in-time-inventory styles of production. That requires nimble transpo on accessible and prevalent paths to final destinations. Unloading train cars isn't efficient whether it's conexed or binned in small quantities. You better have ordered a few train cars worth of materials in one go to make it worth it. There's a good reason why in many industrial areas the rails are overgrown and decayed. No one uses them anymore because a semi-truck takes it straight to the commercial customer without extra logistical steps of coordination.
At that, there's the drawbacks to HSR. You only achieve those speeds on long, straight stretches. If you've road tripped the USA or worked as a truck driver for a while (I did for 7 months OTR), there are these things called mountains. It's cheaper to go around or over, not through. HSR currently can't be fully utilized at it's desired speeds with too many bends or severe changes in elevations. Semi trucks and cars do far better in these aspects. HSR would have to slow down to conventional speeds too often to see much for benefit. Trains need long braking distances in miles, not feet. As a practical example, this is the problem with the north east HSR. There are only a few stretches where it's fully utilized, giving marginal benefit to regular rail. I think it was some 20% of the length is actually "high speed".
Like, this is my big problem with people who have never worked in logistics. The articles written about HSR are best case scenarios in places that it happens to work in. Then, the general public gets a hard-on for HSR when they don't understand a single thing about the process. It's survivorship bias and dunning kruger. Hell, I know I'm barely scratching the surface of the issue at that. Yes, it works in places where the ground is flat, the population density is high and the country's gov can take land without paying for it. One of those applies decently to a decent portion to the US, but then population density there is extremely low. Then, eminent domain is an extremely touchy subject in the USA.
I'm not a fan of the angle of, "It'll improve people's lives" as some blanket concept. Not only has Silicon Valley abused the hell of the concept, "Making the world a better place through xyz", if you can't point exactly how, it's not a real argument. Which seriously, you've just been keyword dropping, not giving hard facts of benefits. You saying that makes it seem you're assuming I want to harm the general American public. Yea, I want all American's lives to improve. I completely believe HSR will not achieve any betterment. I actually think it'll harm more. You saying, "it'll help people" doesn't make all the problems of HSR okay. How does HSR improve lives more? Faster commutes, to where? No one WANTS to commute. People don't want to commute 10 minutes to work. Now it's cool to wait at a station for 10-15 minutes to get on a train, for 20-40 minutes of the commute, to then walk/taxi to their work? Then do it all over again the other direction? Hopefully you don't want to hang out with your coworkers in whatever town you commute to. Commuter rails aren't 24/7. They operate only during rush hours. People want to work in-town as much as possible. That's a better investment strategy for a city to optimize. At that, low-income jobs should not require high commute times. That's what's worth tackling, not trying to increase that distance. There have been many programs trying to transpo low-income workers to farther distances. It has always locked those people into those jobs because of the time sink of those commutes. HSR isn't going to magically fix that.
If you take Japan as an example, their HSR didn't fix commute times: https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/average-work-commu... Over time, jobs get displaced to more centralized areas. Better paying jobs that would be in smaller cities, get sent to other cities and congregate there. Just like you have Silicon Valley and New York. Industries like to mingle with each other closely if possible. Now, you force more people to travel farther than needed. Economic competition is just going to snowball it more. If HSR is going to give us Japanese 1 hour plus commute times, no. Just plain no. It defeats the whole damn purpose.
Also, the fed doesn't just "print" money. That's a youtube cartoon understanding of how the financial system works. It's covered by bonds. Essentially loans with a few extra steps. This creates debt, which yes, is a problem. But this isn't "money printer go brrr".
Amtrak is pretty much nationalized and is a giant clusterfuck. Nationalize all the things isn't the best strategy.
And yes, this topic peeves me. It's a Haliburton like scheme for certain firms to make a ton of money off of taxpayers in the disguise of, "It's all about helping the poor people. If you hate HSR, you hate poor people." No.
I never said roads are a bad investment, I just think they shouldn't be our only investment. Roads are critical and I wish ours were better maintained.
I don't think that saying there are ripple effects that improve people's lives from building new infrastructure is vaporware or controversial. It happened when we first build railroads, transcontinental roads, and airports. I think it is safe to assume that this trend will extend to HSR as well. Just because the effects of HSR will manifest in ways that arent clear right now, doesn't mean that they won't happen. You seem to think that these effects will have a negative impact on society but I disagree. When you give people more options, people will take advantage of them, resulting in economic growth, which will improve people's lives.
There are plenty of places in the US that are flat enough and have the right density for HSR. The central valley in california, the north east corridor, western texas, and Florida are all good examples. These systems don't necessarily have to be connected to make sense. At a certain distance, flying makes more sense, and that is okay, we don't have to drill tunnels through the rockies to have functional systems.
People don't just travel to commute, they also travel for work, pleasure, to access healthcare, etc. These things will be easier with HSR.
Your argument that it centralizes jobs doesn't really make sense because that is already how it works in the US right now anyway, which you acknowledged. Adding HSR will give people who live farther away more access to these jobs, which I think is a good thing.
Yes the fed doesn't literally print money, but that is effectively what happens, debt or no debt. The government is suggesting a 2 trillion dollar infrastructure investment, which many consider to be me moderate. The US has the credit to invest more, and I believe the investment is worth the debt.
What are the costs to the local community for car ownership, gas, insurance, accidents, pollution and parking?
An HSR is like the Gravina Island Bridge project, aka, Bridge to Nowhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravina_Island_Bridge
A $400m dollar bridge to replace a ferry for a town of 50 people. Yes, the bridge has a better capacity than the ferry. It still isn't useful because of all the costs associated for so few people.
I say that as someone who lived in Europe, loves trains, and wishes badly that we could have a better train network here.
But the problem is the US in the 1950's embarked on the suburban experiment and now the majority of the US population lives in either very low density or with unsafe walking conditions (or both), and you really can't serve those areas with trains effectively.
If you wanted to do rail and have it become useful, you need to actually focus on local rail first. For example, Houston build an original light rail line that - bucking the trend for most car oriented cities - only served a 7mi track through the core urban area. That rail line actually worked really well. Meanwhile the suburbs to downtown transit is just bus lines because there's not enough demand to justify rail.
But if you spent 20 years incrementally reforming land use regulations, redeveloping with better sidewalks and connective safe streets, and gradually better and better local transit to go along with it, then you might end up with a place that was a worthy anchor for regional rail on at least one end.
Honestly I don't think that will happen in very many places, though, or at least not in my lifetime. It requires a long-term vision that is still counter cultural, and decades of land use redevelopment.
Given that a brand new car costs around 500/month in the US it wouldn't take many such excursions to make the car worth it. Once you've purchased a car and incur it's fixed monthly costs you're incentivised to use it for everything rather than incur further incremental transit expenses.
Just for sake of imagination, let’s take Raleigh, NC, a mid-sized city I lived in for some time.
There are about 500,000 people in Raleigh, which makes it sound like a great stop for a train, and in fact it has an Amtrak station. However, these people are spread over 380 square kilometers, for a population density of 1250 per sq km.
It’s about a 30 minute drive from the center to the northern edge of the “city,” and similar on the other directions (though not symmetrical).
Even with Uber, which is much cheaper than a taxi, this ride costs $30-50.
And this is a US state capitol with high rise buildings, a major university, a professional sports team, etc. Most American “cities” are spread over similar land areas but with a fraction the population density - hence most rural Americans would consider Raleigh to be somewhat “dense” and even “crowded,” although from a world perspective that is comically false.
Just being realistic, an average train ride between US cities - outside of the Northeast - would include something like a $35 Uber ride on each end. Oh, plus another $10-20 and a 15-30 minute wait for every other trip you take while visiting (like to go out to dinner or get groceries) while you’re there.
By comparison, a reliable car can be had for somewhere on the order of $250-500/mo all-in (amortized purchase price, plus taxes, insurance, license, and fuel). A motorcycle or scooter is even cheaper.
While that is a lot to spend on transportation, and a horrible burden on America’s poor, the fact is that it is the cost of participation in the economy. Depending on Uber or Transit (where it even exists) crushes you with extraordinary travel times for basic needs (again outside of the urban centers of a few large or sufficiently old cities).
This is frustrating and I would very much like to see it change, but it took two generations of bad investment patterns for us to make it like this, so my guess is it would take two generations of concerted effort to correct. But first we have to actually start trying.
There is tremendous economic incentive against passenger rail as well; path dependent it may be, but real nonetheless.
Specifically: most of the roadway is designed for freight, not humans, and what little passenger rail there is must run over it, typically yielding priority to freight. Thus at this point the network reaches deep into agricultural, manufacturing and port relations and little goes near the major cities.
Even Caltrain in the Bay Area runs on a freight line owned by S&P; while I’ve only seen freight on it at night, S&P could contractually push Caltrain aside for freight (though it would cause an uproar S&P would rather not deal with). S& P received Covid relief money to government on its tracks in case caltrain couldn’t pay the rent.
The US has the most efficient rail system in the world...for freight. Berkshire Hathaway has been investing.
Passenger rail barely exists any more (in fact rails have been pulled up and sold for scrap and the land repurposed over the last century). To bring it back would mean building a lot of infrastructure from scratch. That’s not necessarily bad as the the layout of the population has shifted lever the last century as well.
Its exactly the opposite of flying cars. There are billions being spent on autonomous driving, DOT is onboard and trials have begun.
I do agree that its not going to happen in next 5 years as Elon Musk claims.
Investors piling into self-driving doesn’t mean it will work. It is pretty clear at this point that even if it happens the timeline is such that 100% of the me-too venture investments are going to fail completely with perhaps a few exceptions that get acquired by bigger fools first.
If anything autonomous cars would be great for train travel as a last mile solution to replace taxis.