Hacker News Reader

> rural voters who don't want high speed rail, even though they would benefit from it greatly,

It's not clear to me how a rural voter (I guess the 'voter' part is because these are publicly funded works) really benefits. Once a year vacations to the beach? Shopping trips where you are limited to what you can manage on foot? Visits to a specialist doctor?

Since the sense of rail depends on regular use, I guess all that's left is commutes from a dispersed area to a central one. You have to wonder how much telecommuting will decrease the need for that over time.

One good thing about rail is that you are allowed to do it piecemeal. There's bound to be somewhere that needs a point A to point B bullet train.

A practical step that would not be excessively costly would be to standardize the three types of rail in the US - local tram, commuter, and intercity/high speed (fun fact - depending on your definition of high speed rail current Amtrak trains can hit that, as on correct track and with positive train control they can do 125+ MPH).

If it's standardized it will be easier to make sure you can develop it piecemeal.

Amtrak is higher speed rail. HSR needs to average 140mph - including stops at any station between where you want to go.

Nobody would consider Tokaido Shinkansen to not be HSR, but it averages ~125mph.

They should. Back in the day it was built that was high speed, but technology has marched on and it shouldn't be called high speed anymore.

(separate post for politics)

> democratic voters that want high speed rail, but lose interest when experts say that there need to be lots of intermediate stops

A few do. Based on the people they elect most don't actually care about high speed rail. They care about workers - the more the better, and even better yet if you can make those workers minorities. High speed rail is only a proxy for spending lots of money on something that gets people working, if the rail is never finished that is so much the better because they can keep paying those people to build the line.

Rural voters won't benefit much. By the time they drive to a big city where they can catch the train they may as well fly. The amount of distance needed to get to the train station means that there isn't very much in range by rail that they are not better off driving.

Note, there is rural voters and hobby farm voters. The hobby farm voters live and work in a big city, and go home to their small farm with a little bit of livestock to farm for fun. They might make money on the farm, but it isn't their day job. The only difference from suburban voters is they are just a little bit farther out. There are a lot of these voters who don't see how HSR will help them, even though it will once they realize how much faster it is to get to other cities.

So write the bill to require Halliburton to build the rail and hire minorities to do so. Everyone gets to skim and everyone is happy and eventually you might even get something that kind of works.

/sarcastic, but not entirely

You're not ... wrong, but I can't shake your use of the term "hobby farm voters" which is the worst kind of no-true-Scotsman aspersion, it really brings the rest of your argument down. And what is the problem with putting minorities to work on the face, that it's a kind of virtue-signaling?

It seems like that there's no inherit value in these things by your argument.

And yet, yes, there is an issue with large infrastructure projects being turned into jobs programs so the scope creeps and they never get done-- A problem not unique to transportation infrastructure, but government-funded projects in general, as the incentives for project managers in govt and politicians are aligned to continuously increase scope

I couldn't find a better term for those who live close enough to a big city to actually make use of it, while far enough out to look like farmers. There are some real farmers in this group as well.

You are not wrong, but that is misleading. HSR needs to be limited stop - they need 10 km just to get up to speed. Most of the energy is used getting up to speed (regenerative braking helps but doesn't get it all back), so for short trips you HSR is too expensive and not much faster.

That said, the advantage of rail is it stops at points in between. It cannot stop at every little town, but it needs to stop at every big city (you might even be able to do a suburb to downtown - the idea looks like it would work on paper but I'm not aware of real experience), and it the big cities are far enough in-between some small city should get a station.

This is very complex though. There is a trade off between stopping time and number of people on the train. You can stop in each city for as little as 1 minute (plus a few more to decelerate/accelerate) if your train has a lot of doors making it fast/easy to get on/off, but those doors mean there are less seats so less people are on the train. Or you can have just one door, but now there is a long line at that door and you need to stop for 15 minutes at each small town. So busy lines will have less stops than not so busy lines - the latter need more stops to attract all the customers they can get.

This trade off needs to be considered separately for each line.

The usual solution to this is having local vs express service - lines run alongside each other where there is a bumpkin train that stops every few miles, but every 50 or so it stops at a station that is also serviced by an express or even a high-speed stop.

This is how it is supposed to work. If you are going someplace distant you can take the high speed train most of the way and then transfer to the slow regional for the last leg of the journey.

Unfortunately this system means you need parallel tracks, one set for the high speed express trains and another for the regionals. This isn't as bad as it seems, it requires double the steel and concrete, but the land is the expensive part of the deal and even though the parcel you need is wider the expense is not doubled.

Or you can run the high speed rail on routes that are optimal for it and leave the regional rail in its byzantine routes from the 30s that serve the locals well.

I don't mean for it to be misleading, and I do agree with you. There is always a tradeoff between more stops and higher speeds, and if you're building high speed rail you do need to make different tradeoffs than commuter rail.

That being said, I think even people that agree with that statement would still be surprised at the kinds of stops that successful systems make. For example, Tokaido Shinkansen, the most financially successful line in the world, makes stops in Fuji (pop. 245k), Odawara(195k), Anjo (188k), Kakegawa (117k), Nakamura-Ku (135k), Mishima (110k), Hashima (68k), Maibara (38k), and Atami (37k). There are three services: all-stop, skip-stop, and non-stop. The fastest non-stop service is about an 1:40 faster than the all-stop service, and 1:00 faster than the skip stop service. But most terminal-to-terminal customers still take the skip stop service because it has the highest frequency...enough to negate the speed advantage of non-stop service in most cases.

When the CAHSR proposal first came out, the phrase "cow towns like Merced" was practically a meme. People were laughing at the stop in Gilroy, saying things like "why? so we can buy garlic on our way to LA?". Most people even thought that stops in secondary cities like Fresno and Bakersfield were entirely unnecessary. But the experts who wrote the report (who are fairly well regarded, btw) chose those stops for a reason: they are rural minihubs that aggregate a lot of traffic volume in areas that are too far from larger cities.

In the words of an operations researcher I once worked with: with HSR, top speed is what sells the service, but acceleration is what makes the money. Acceleration minimizes the time loss from making more stops, and more stops means more money.

I agree with your post thread. A lot of people uninitiated in railways think of HSR as an airplanes on rails. HSR =/= Airline.

Trains have a number of advantages, one of which is a small time penalty for stopping at a station relative to aircraft (2-3 minutes vs ~45+ minutes on average), and the aircraft requires a lot personnel/all-hands to turn around quickly (see: Southwest Airlines). A commercial aircraft is simply not designed for lots of really short hops in rapid succession. There needs to be a new preflight check, refueling, unload/load belly cargo, some maintenance items are based on aircraft takeoff/landing cycles (tires, cabin pressurization, etc.) Trains stopping at station and continuing is trivial by comparison.

A rail operator wants to collect fare paying passengers along the route they are planning on operating, it’s an easy way to boost ridership and revenue. It is a balancing act to have station stops, but not increase end-to-end trip time excessively. Basic rule of thumb: Does stopping add more riders than it costs due to the stopping time penalty? If the model/data say yes, make the stop; otherwise do not.

And just because we have a station, doesn’t mean every train has stop there. We can have local, limited, and express trains. We can passing/siding tracks at stations to prevent local stopped trains from blocking the mainline for limited/express trains. We can have cross-platform time transfers between different train types and destinations. We can have multiple mainline tracks. These things do cost a bit more upfront, but it’s more about good planning and what kind of service to the public is the goal.

— The Tokaido corridor (Tokyo-Nagoya-Osaka) is extremely dense, both the Tokaido Mainline and Shinkansen line are effectively at capacity (which is also part of impetus for the Chuo Shinkansen). Running at very high speeds with fews stops, consumes a lot track capacity. Which is why JRs prefer running more local and limited-stop service trains, and less than “non-stop” express trains. It’s what a capacity constrained operator should do to optimize operations and maximize capacity subject to those constraints.

Likewise a California HSR program, should find a way to cost effectively serve cities like Fresno, Bakersfield, Merced, etc. as part of a larger HSR network.

It is weird how many people miss the concept of express trains in this discussion. Convenience can’t be overstated either. When I take the train from Tokyo to Kyushu for work, I don’t even check the schedule. I show up knowing there will be a decently fast train within 15 minutes.

Having ridden the bus to work I've become very in tune to how much I hate having to watch bus schedule to figure out when I'm going someplace. More than once I've had to leave an interesting discussion because my bus was coming. More than once I've packed up and then needed to find something to do for the next 20 minutes. I'm surprised you consider every 15 minutes often enough to not check the schedule, but it would be much better than the every 30 minutes I had.

Too bad I don't work in that office anymore.

That's for a long distance train from Tokyo to Kyushu, about 500km. For that distance the timing is quite convenient. There's actually a train every 3 minutes or so, but it's prudent to wait for an express or limited express train as it will get there sooner.

Within Tokyo most of the trains run every 5 minutes or so.

> they need 10 km just to get up to speed

Why is that? Cars and airplanes accelerate much faster, without any real rider discomfort. If it's due to train hardware itself, wouldn't an assist to get the train up to speed work, in a fraction of that distance?

Depends on the speed, but .7m/s^2 is a typical acceleration for trains. Cars can accelerate faster, and some trains can as well.

I just redid the math - to get to 300 km/h needs 4.8km, not 10 that I thought. Faster speeds need more distance or course. Hills also impact the distance needed. You also need to account for same safety distance for a lot of acceleration applications.

The distance to achieve top speed is irrelevant, it is the time lost that matters.

How much time is added to the journey for a single stop (including time for the stop itself, braking and acceleration).

Depends on what you are doing. If you are building track, then distance is what matters. If you are spacing trains out for safety both distance and time matters. If you are planning a schedule time is what matters (unless you are mixing local and express service on one track - see the safety sentence before). If you are planning track than you need to start with ideal schedule and iterate around the rest until you find something that actually works for all considerations.

With trains its expected that you can stand up and walk around at any time (or in some cases even have standing passengers), which does limit your reasonable maximum acceleration somewhat compared to modes of transport where your passengers are all seated and wearing seatbelts.

You’re right, that’s a good point.

There just isn't that much grip between the rails and the train, and any change to increase the amount of grip would probably sacrifice the efficiency and maximum speed advantages of rail. Remember, we're talking about steel on steel contact, which has incredibly low rolling resistance losses but is not exactly high friction.

This is a major point - a high speed rail between Chicago and MSP would allow travel between those two points - but more importantly it would allow commuting travel from points in-between.

If you build the rails well, you can run both express service (which skips stops to maintain higher speed) and local service (which stops at most or all stations).

I believe the way to solve some of this would be to attack it from multiple directions:

1. Require that future highway construction be "rail-ready" - i.e., leave room and have curves that are friendly to adding rail to the highway corridor in the future.

2. Develop local rail corridors that are "high-speed-rail-ready" - as a connection between two large cities is mainly of interest to a few, but commuter rail to the nearest large city is more obviously valuable. And if designed right it can be made for commuting but still be curved, etc correctly to allow higher speed trains if/when it's finally connected through.

You can have both though. In Europe and Asia you can usually choose a train with few stops or many on the same line, and you’ll see the fast train blow by the slow one as it’s stopped at a minor station.