How far can you go by train in 5h?
chronotrains-eu.vercel.app
chronotrains-eu.vercel.app
The installation used realtime data (Google directions API): I somehow figured out, that if I would run this from a local machine and reset the browser frequently, Google would let me do this even without an API key… they certainly sensed something was awry and I did get API warnings and captchas because of 'suspicious traffic on my network', but they were nice enough not to block me completely. I strongly doubt this would still work though, this was in 2017.
Pictures and videos of the installation: https://maschinenzeitmaschine.de/derweil/
I'm shocked how many apps rely on the google maps widget. It's expensive and mediocre, and ridiculously flaky on my phone.
The web touch UI is laughable, but at least the average third party occluding widget size keeps growing on mobile web pages -- I wouldn't want more than 10% of my phablet screen to be wasted displaying the map I just pulled up, after all!
[0] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API/Overpass_AP...
Very often "within a 10 minute walk of ANY train station" is preferable to "halfway between us", even if the train ride is 1 hour, because I can actually work (or catch up on sleep) on a train. Especially if that "halfway between us" is somewhere without transit which means I need to drive the whole way there.
An isochrone map is one of the best tools for weekend get-aways, job hunting, and finding a home location.
OpenStreetMap[1]! Add it to your site, it will be great hit, in my opinion.
I long for a map experience that's more like a SQL query than a catalog, and Zillow's filtering leaves a lot to be desired.
The results are very different, eg chronotrains-eu.vercel.app claims that Wittenberge is within an hour of Berlin Hauptbahnhof, but GeoApify won't take you further than Nauen. Possibly chronotrains-eu is showing a best-case travel time while GeoApify is attempting to calculate realtime travel using the current day's schedules?
I doubt the main OSM site would ever host an isochrone demo, as it's more of a reference implementation of very basic map and routing features that OSM data enables. Notably, the routing demos there do not (yet) include any kind of transit mode.
Though on geoapify you select a a street address rather than the train stop. So maybe they add a few minutes buffer for walking to the station.
I almost orgasmed reading "isochrone maps". I wasn't aware of the "concept" but it's one of those things you go "of course it is".
Compare this to Germany where almost any major metropolis can reach 80% of the country in 4h ...
(I'm not complaining, j'habite à Londres ;))
You don't need to go that much North - I used to live in Oxfordshire, trying to get to Cambridge for work was a joke (I don't drive). It would take 3.5h+ for a 140km journey from Oxford to Cambridge because train journeys were only through London (+ a railway station change), and there was only one coach that stopped in every town along the way (and which has been axed into two separate legs since the pandemic, making it 4h+ now).
In the end I moved to London, so that's manageable now...
Oxford/Cambridge is a classic example, yes. (For those unfamiliar, they're like two spokes right next to each other on quite a small rim where London is the hub. But large enough (or close enough spokes) that 'in and back out' seems silly.)
In fact, since Oxfordshire isn't very far north of London it's kind of a bad example. Of course it goes through London.
Cross country routes are local trains masquerading as long distance, thus with ridiculous prices and the requirement to do split tickets. There’s nowhere near enough capacity on the line.
Penzance to Exeter takes 3 hours - half the speed of a drive. From Exeter to Birmingham it’s another 2h30 at just 60mph average.
A good line would be an hour faster on both legs.
We also don't really have any of the major cities I meant in that context, Bristol I suppose. How do you get from Bournemouth to Bristol for example - via Dorchester with a station change? How about Southampton to Exeter - via Bristol? It's by no means the worst region, and I claimed the opposite, but it still suffers in the same way (albeit on a smaller scale) really, NW-SE rather than W-E in the North, in both cases its opposing the 'spokes' into London.
How can metropolitan France be larger than the entirety of Germany?
Actually, now that I think about it, the sense of "Metropolitan France" is very similar to the term "the continental United States"
But if you're a US citizen living over there and you made money from sources other than from that territory, you would have to pay US taxes.
So I wouldn't really consider citizens of US territories full US citizens.
So maybe it's more appropriate to say they aren't Americans, but they are US citizens.
But that is all semantics. My main point was the reason they don't have US representation is they don't have US taxation.
The District of Columbia has to pay US taxes without being allowed any US representation.
A Puerto Rican in California is entitled to all the benefits of US Citizenship whereas a Californian in Puerto Rico is not. Mostly these are related to welfare and elections. This would be the case for the Californian or Puerto Rican living anywhere in the world outside the US.
So a Californian that moves to, say, Germany can still vote by mail as though they were in California.
---
You're mostly correct about the loss of welfare benefits, though. The only exception being that you do remain eligible for Social Security retirement, although some people may not consider that "welfare".
I'm not sure that's true - it appears to involve a legal distinction. I see many references to Algeria having been an "integral part of France" where other French territory wasn't. But I don't actually know what the terminology means. Anyway, I'd begin by looking to the legal status France tended to give to overseas territories, rather than the attitudes of the French, to explain this.
> Meanwhile I think a lot of Americans kinda-unconsiously barely even consider Hawaii and Alaska really parts of America, let alone the numerous non-state territories.
And this is a perfect case in point; Americans do consider Hawaii and Alaska to be really parts of America, because they have the legal status.
What there is, is a blindspot about territories. Just look at the flag: that there are parts of the United States which aren't States kinda doesn't compute.
or
https://www.thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTU1OTU3NTE.MTE5NDg...
helps with convincing yourself.
> Since the beginning of the 1990s new high-speed passenger lines in Spain have been built to the international standard gauge of 1,435 mm (4 ft 8+1⁄2 in), to allow these lines to link to the European high-speed network.
(...)
> In general the interface between the two gauges in Spain is dealt with by means of gauge-changing installations, which can adjust the gauge of appropriately designed wheelsets on the move.
I didn't know that!
However the huge investment in HSR (longest network after China, but low utilization), has also come at the cost of the local and regional train network (which still use broad gauge, yes there are gauge changing trains, but the broad gauge network is languishing).
In nearly all bigger countries it is possible to reach most bigger cities within the 5h. But journeys in this time-frame seldomly go much beyond the border. There is still much optimization potential for transnational travel in Europe's train network.
We don't even have anything close to regional rail, and highspeed rail would consume all public capital that would be used to improve regional rail systems.
could be used, but we all know thats not how it works ...
This lets the high-speed train serve a lot more places without losing much speed. Maybe the local train serves several towns in the area.
---
Reliability
For a connection like this to work the trains have to meet, consistently, every hour or however frequently they run. This is pretty difficult, most rail networks are highly complex and delays cascade across a network. With station transfers this is okay, you can drop off anyone who needs to transfer to wait and let everyone else continue, but in this sort of moving transfer either people just totally miss their connection because it wasn't there, or the train loops around somehow and delays everyone else continuing on.
---
Practicality
Let's say trains meet at 80 mph. Assuming you give people one minute to get their bags, walk to the door, take their seats in the other train (fairly aggressive for anyone who isn't a fit young adult) that means you spend 1.3 miles of distance traveling. That means 1.3 miles of parallel track where neither train can actually stop to serve local communities.
Station transfers in comparison are fairly compact (the length of a train) and they can actually also let people on and off from the surrounding areas with appropriate exits, whereas that's not possible with moving trains.
---
Safety
We can't really guarantee two trains will move at the same speed parallel to each other. Trains are not automated to such a degree outside of self-contained metro networks, full automation is too complex to do in one shot and partial automation is still very complex and in its early days. Also whatever physical mechanism has to be tight enough to accommodate accessibility (wheelchairs can't go over large gaps) and reliable enough to work all the time; what happens if said mechanism breaks down while the trains are moving and conjoined?
---
Finally there's the matter of actual need. If you need trains to not get slowed down, you can have some express services skip connecting to local regional services at all. It turns out demand for that kind of service is fairly limited; as an example, Amtrak has tried several times to introduce nonstop DC to NYC service, but it turns out that the additional passengers do not offset the loss of passengers from Baltimore, Wilmington and Philadelphia.
The idea is to drop cars without slowing down. These cars would have brakes, that's it. Before the station, drop the car, it slows enough to give safe time for switching, and cruises to a halt at the local station.
That's drop off, pickup is the slow train, which runs twice a day in each direction and assembles the carriage on the way.
Impractical for various reasons, sure. But what if.
The "moving platforms" concept seems to come up quite often, ala https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlhuHmVn4Ss
It's also part of the current hyperpoliticalization we're seeing.
I've known lots of both (more of the latter), none of whom believe anything like that.
Not just, no. But, looking at population density by states, you've got roughly:
(1) the coastal states way at the top (except Alaska, Oregon, and Maine), (2) non-coastal Mississippi River states, Oklahoma, Colorado, and Arizona, and Vermont in the middle (3) Everything else.
They are very different environments for things like passenger transport economics.
> There are tons of big cities in non-coastal areas of the US.
Define “big city”? There are three (out of 24 in the US) metropolitan areas with a population over 2.5 million where the principal city is located in a state without ocean, Gulf of Mexico, or Great Lakes coast; 0 out of 9 of your cutoff is 5 million.
If you take the biggest countries worldwide, this doesn't apply.
For a short summary, the basic problem is that rail infrastructure is paid for by national funds, so there is a bigger incentive to connect two places within the same country than to connect one place within the country to another place within a neighboring country.
Wendover theorizes that the decoupling of rail networks from rail service operators (as pushed by the EU-level government) can lead to new demand for international routes as budget operators spring up that are less tied to the demands of a particular national government.
And yes, you can.
EU co-founded projects can be forced to operate only domestically too. For example polish high speed railways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendolino#Poland
> certification for international operation is not seen as a priority, as the trains are restricted to domestic services for an initial 10 years under the terms of a grant from the EU Cohesion Fund which covered 22% of the project cost.[31]
Oh, the irony.
There are initiatives like ETCS which partially improve the control situation, but even that has lots of national variations and takes ages to rollout.
Historic systems with little funding (relative to need) are fun.
There's also a Helsinki-Tallinn tunnel plan, which is more like in an exploration/planning phase, but that should connect those cities and make them function almost like one. Instead of a two hour ferry ride it would be more like a 30min train ride. Øresund Bridge basically did that to Copenhagen and Malmö.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVE#Lines_under_construction
Some problems with that approach are
1. It doesn't take that many different operators before you start running into capacity limits of the network and get into a situation where additional services (when you want even more competition) cannot be scheduled without actively worsening the services offered by existing operators (including operators that might not even be competing within the same market segment, i.e. like long distance operators vs. regional and commuter service operators or freight operators).
2. In principle connections are a core part of railways' service offerings (especially in countries that aren't as centralised as e.g. the stereotype of France), but attractive connection times are only possible between a very limited number of trains, so with multiple competing long distance operators who gets to decide which operator gets the path with the attractive connection times and who doesn't? Attractive connections also require through-ticketing in terms of passenger rights, so you won't be left stranded if you miss a connection because of preceding delays, and both scheduled/coordinated connections and through-ticketing run counter to the mantra of absolutely free-for-all competition.
3. For the wheel-rail interface to work well, you definitively need to take a holistic approach between the needs of the infrastructure and the needs of the vehicles running on that infrastructure. Introducing a hard legal split between infrastructure owner and train operating companies in the name of free competition unfortunately tends to turn that interface into a legal and bureaucratic quagmire that is anything but efficient for the railway system as a whole.
For example in Germany construction works (outside of emergency repairs) are required to be scheduled several years (not just a year plus a bit so its known in time for the next timetable, but some years more) in advance. At that point you already need to specify the exact and precise length of any required possessions, but at the same time due to the rules for tendering construction works, you're also not supposed to specify the exact method of doing those construction works, so for anything slightly more complex how are you now supposed to calculate the exact length for the required possessions if you aren't actually allowed to specify how the construction works are to be executed?
Or for another example: Within the wheel-rail interface you cannot avoid a certain amount of wear and tear, especially on more curvy stretches of line. This affects both the train operators (wheels) as well as the infrastructure operator (rails). Ideally you'd work out some compromise that is tenable for both sides of the interface, and normally somewhat more wear and tear on the wheels is to be preferred, because wheels can re-profiled and/or changed in fixed, covered maintenance facilities (i.e. better working conditions) and while the trains are potentially out of service for regular maintenance anyway, whereas rail renewals need to potentially brave the elements and either block rail traffic or else need to be conducted at unattractive times (for workers, i.e. on weekends and especially at night).
The legal separation between train operating companies and infrastructure owners nevertheless has led train operating companies to possibly try optimising the wheel-rail interface for their own benefit, which has meant that on some heavily used routes with tight(ish) curves, due to excessive wear rails now have to be renewed every year or two, which longer term absolutely isn't sustainable in terms of the demands placed on the maintenance personnel of the infrastructure operator (and never mind the costs, too). (Normally, rail life before a complete renewal is measured in decades!)
So now "the empire strikes back" and the infrastructure operator installs hardened rails in order to return to a somewhat more manageable and sustainable maintenance schedule, but because the vehicle operators haven't been prepared for that switch, they now suddenly find themselves with excessive wheel wear (and unfortunately at a point in time when due to outside political events there isn't much excess capacity in the market for railway wheels). In the end, it's ultimately the passenger who suffers here.
> It doesn't take that many different operators before you start running into capacity limits of the network
Don't get this. If there is that much demand, then clearly it makes sense to build out the system? More rails, higher speed, and/or better bypasses for trains that need to stop at each station for example.
It's usually a hard question to predict where public or investment money is best spent, but this situation seems like it would be quite clear.
Open access operators also often start running only a few trains per day – building additional expensive infrastructure for just a few trains per day might not be worth it, but conversely a few trains per day are potentially already more than enough to upset an exiting regular interval timetable and timed connections.
Plus, when it comes to daily "Pendlers" (people who cross the border regularly to work), often they cross the border in places where there is no extant railway connection. In Czechia, a lot of commuting people cross the German border using the D5/A6 highway, which has no nearby alternative. The closest potentially upgradeable railway is 40 km away in difficult mountain terrain, so even if it got upgraded to a reasonable standard, it would have to attract different customers going from different A to different B.
By far the most common demographics to cross the borders in trains in my country are tourists, who like to go from one capital or important city (Berlin, Krakow) to another (Prague, Vienna).
I wonder how much privatization has played a role in this.
One of the perverse things with our passenger rail network is that you can actually take take trains that "only" take 2.5 hours, but: they run nonstop point-to-point, and any subsequent connection you make (e.g. to Richmond, a major city in Virginia) will be on a diesel train that shares trackage with CSX or another major freight line. The end result is that traveling the extra ~90 miles from Washington, DC to Richmond generally takes over 3 hours, when it should really take less than an hour.
NYC to DC is also consistently around 3.5 hours, even with the slower NE Regional.
That's an average of 300 km/h. There are already lines in service elsewhere the world that are that fast.
Chicago-NYC with stops would probably be 5 hours, which is barely competitive with flying. The intermediate stops would potentially make it viable though.
However, modern high-speed rail lines are capable of 350 km/h top speeds, and there are lines that average 300 km/h, with stops included (e.g., Beijing-Nanjing).
I think it's the fastest long distance passenger service available and has the benefit of being central Shanghai to south-central Beijing (rather than north-east where PEK airport is). That made it noticeably better than business air travel between the two cities.
You could also ride the Pudong maglev (at 430km/hr peak and 250km/hr average), but it was never extended from PVG to Jing An and the main Shanghai station.
However, now you have to go through security at each end which adds at least 1.5hr, and that's ignoring pandemic restrictions.
Maybe even more impressive, the trains cover the first 1018 km, from Beijing to Nanjing, at an average speed of 316 km/h.
To be clear, I find it absurd that airplane companies are still allowed to sell tickets without pricing in externalities for trips with good and high-speed train connections like Paris–Madrid. However, for actually going somewhere far away there just isn't really another choice but to take that plane. Your only other choice is to never go there at all, or take out weeks of travel for a ship or something. It's still too cheap, at least those that go regularly can also afford for Climeworks to undo their environmental pollution, so I hate to be defending air travel here, but 10h flights are a different ball game than 10h train rides.
Luckily, there are some lines under construction that will connect Spain to France through Irún, and which should make things much better.
Not sure if at a certain scale, one should see all the conenctions form all the train stations in Paris?
Aww, seems like Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia aren't a part of Europe, then.
But jokes aside, the visualization itself is pretty cool, though it might also be really useful to be able to put emphasis on the actual train tracks, especially in the further zoom levels, though map implementations don't always allow this to be done easily, without too much customization or running your own tile server.
Hovering around over South Sweden and North Germany, makes it quite obvious that the Femern tunnel will make a difference in connecting that area.
Same for connecting north from Lombardy through the mountains.
E.g., train connections from Czech Republic to southern Germany are missing all together.
This is a huge problem IMHO. You always have to use the route via Dresden/Prague - it was different in the past - Would be really great if there would be some Eurocity Nürnberg-Pilsen or Munich-Budweis.
It's the difference between 6-8h and 2-3h to reach a city in Czech Republic. However the tracks connecting Germany/Czech Republic in the south are not in good shape if I remember that correctly.
Building other routes would likely be possible, but only with a lot of tunneling.
The Czech-Polish border is similar, I think.
It's also important to note that Ukraine and Moldova run on a different gauge, so the border crossing takes some time.
The US has a lot of freight rail, and we use it.
The Wild West mentality has gone away in the railroad industry which is now hyper-conservative and regulated.
I do sometimes wish the US lived up to the Wild West stereotype the Europeans imagine. But no, we often have just as much stifling regulation (if not more), depending on where you’re talking about. But we do have gun violence, so there’s that.
Intranational flight is a lot more common there. I imagine the economics of it are better, lower ticket price, and in many cases probably quicker too, even including airport BS.
That is the problem in my opinion - I prefer sitting on a train, to sitting on a plane, but for most routes I need to travel (within the US) it takes longer to get there and is more expensive than flying - why would anyone want to pay more and waste more time? You either need to be faster or cheaper if you want my business.
A train may take longer sometimes, but I find the whole thing much less stressful, you're not strapped to the seat, you have leg room, even a table, power sockets, bring your own food and drink, and the prices are competitive.
It still takes longer than I'd like to get from Switzerland to the UK, and that's mostly due to a lengthy change in Paris.
I think in France, and prob other countries too, their moving to ban domestic flights that can be done on rail instead
The train takes 3.5 hours (often closer to 4 and I've had it take more than 5 just because of freight priority). The train makes 4 trips a day (one being a longer route that is usually delayed) and the timing means that any business trip will probably require an overnight stay. The train is only $27 though because both states (especially WA) heavily subsidize the route.
In the end, it really comes down to where in the metro areas your trip begins and ends as to which works out best. For us, the train station saves about an hour of ground transport time compared to the airports and we can arrive much closer to departure, so the train works best. For plenty of others, the airport will be faster and probably easier logistically.
It's going to be slower and more expensive so not so many people are going to want to do it so why build more of it.
If the major stops are closer together, 'a journey' is shorter and cheaper and beats air travel, and many more people will pay for it.
PreCheck and Global Entry weren't around when we went to Bermuda in August 2001. It was a trip notable not only for its proximity to 9/11 - by chance, my bag was searched either before we left L.F Wade in St. George's or on arrival back in Newark, but this happened without my knowledge and I only found out about it because customs had repacked it included a note informing me of this fact inside. - and also because a trip to camp the previous week was the start of an ear infection which burst my ear drum on the plane going down.
Fun times.
However, I quite like the idea of passport control on a train happening before you embark on the departing leg of a trip. With those formalities out of the way, just collect your bags at the destination and you're free to go.
I don't know if the FAA or TSA would consider this too burdensome to implement, but it's an idea.
It's better than that. Space on board is at less of a premium so train carriages can be made with plenty of room for luggage alongside passengers. No need to check baggage.
I haven't taken that train in many years, but they basically stop the train at the border and immigration agents board and check everyone's passport. It's scheduled to take 2 hours. Really stupid. It's a 45 minute flight, and you go through US immigration in Canada before boarding the flight.
That was the case even with the UK in the EU (maybe it's not any less onerous than an airport now actually, idk) but otherwise intra-EU over land is not an issue, almost necessarily. (But then, you might think that about Canada/US.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Central_Station
There are some disadvantages, such as not being able to pickup anymore passengers until crossing the border. Probably a non-issue with Vancouver close to the border.
Or (facepalm, more obviously) Alaska for that matter?
Popular with Canadians to send parcels to and pickup gas.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Roberts,_Washington
A school bus runs from there to mainland USA and I suspect there’s an informal agreement to drive without stopping through Canada so they don’t have to bother too excessively with clearances.
https://www.tgv-lyria.com/ch/en/travelling/on-board-support/...
There's no good reason for us to have zero public transit options between Atlanta and Savannah, Madison and Milwaukee, Columbus and Cincinatti, Denver and Colorado Springs, or Mobile and New Orleans.
Does regular bus service not count? Sure they're not publicly owned but does that result in any meaningful differences to the users?
Let's say Western Europe = Germany, Austria, Italy, and everything west of them, i. e. Benelux, France, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Great Britain (= UK - Northern Ireland). (I'm including the UK and excluding Ireland because there are rail connecctions from Britain to the mainland but not from Ireland to Britain. I'm excluding Denmark because isn't that really Scandinavia?)
Total population: Germany = 84m, France = 68m, Britain = 66m, Italy = 59m, Spain = 47m, Netherlands = 18m, Belgium = 12m, Portugal = 10m, Austria = 9m, Switzerland = 9m, Luxembourg = 1m. Total is 383m.
Total area, in km^2: Germany = 358k, France = 551k, Britain = 228k, Italy = 301k, Spain = 499k, Netherlands = 41k, Belgium = 31k, Portugal = 88k, Austria = 84k, Switzerland = 41k, Luxembourg = 3k. Total is 2225k.
So the population density of western Europe is about 172/km^2 or 445/mi^2.
The only states this dense are DC, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maryland, Delaware; New York and Florida are just under the cutoff.
If I've done the math right, DC + NJ + RI + MA + CT + MD + DE + NY + PA + OH (74m people/429k km^2) is the largest contiguous bunch of states which is over 172 people/km^2.
If we take the east to be everything east of the Mississippi, I get 190m people in 2.301m km^2, or 82 people/km^2. If we add in CA + OR + WA that actually drags down the density a bit.
So the densely populated bits of the Northeast/mid-Atlantic are as densely populated as Western Europe. But the eastern US as a whole isn't.
I agree that those pairs of cities you mentioned should have better connections between them though.
I just spent 7 weeks traveling around Europe by train. I would not have considered that approach without the extensive local public transportation systems. Atlanta is not remotely in the same league as Berlin in terms of public transit.
Western Europe's population density gradient is much sharper than most of the US. Only the coastal corridor of the Northeast US really comes close. The gradient of the populations is important because it tells you how many people are within a usable range of the train stations.
Even if you've got a high speed line between Madison and Milwaukee what in the hell are you going to do once you step off the train? Neither city has impressive public transit and both are very spread out. A high speed link might save a boring drive between those cities but that savings would get eaten up by the intra-city travel.
1000 miles is quite far. That would be 5-6 hours!
- NYC - Miami 1300 miles
- NYC - Chicago 800 miles
Then we have these:
- NYC - Philly 92 miles
- NYC - DC 225 miles
- NYC - Boston 215 miles
- NYC - Portland, ME 325 miles
- NYC - Pittsburgh 380 miles
- NYC - Cleveland 470 miles
- Cleveland - Chicago 350 miles
- St. Louis - Chicago 320 miles
- Houston - Dallas 240 miles
- Houston - Austin 170 miles
- Dallas - Austin 200 miles
- Seattle - Portland 175 miles
- Las Vegas - Los Angeles 280 miles
California too.
Even the fastest trains Amtrak offers ("Acela") are zoned - or permitted, not sure what the right term is here - up to 150 MPH, and only on specific portions of the route.
Makes no sense at all.
There would have to be constructed a new corridor, not in the same path as existing railroad rights of way, for not a small amount of money, and going through expensive real estate.
The political will for that is not in existence, so far.
Even ignoring the money, if you try and do a project like that you are going to get slapped in the face by all the same "cutting apart muh neighborhood" rhetoric that gets used against highways. Grade separation and "just paying those people to go away" are both expensive enough to be non-starters.
Passenger railroads are narrower than urban highways. The US-101 freeway cuts through Echo Park and Westlake in Los Angeles, taking up as much as 330 feet of width, counting on/off ramps. California HSR has trench sections specced as narrow as 72 feet[1], and most of its urban rights-of-way are under 100 feet wide.
Walking next to the 101 in Echo Park you can see how it so starkly divides what was once a single connected neighborhood. The light rail lines (about ~40-50 ft to cross) in other neighborhoods don't give that impression.
[1]: https://www.hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/docs/programs/eir_...
You're being dishonest or ignorant. The fact that you compare max-width of one to min-width of the other rules out one option. A pit is a pit. You're limited to crossing at a few specific points no matter how narrow it is and traveling to those points accounts for the bulk of the distance covered. The physical width only matters if you're evaluating the neighborhood for visual appeal and not actual livability. "Quiet most of the time" doesn't really count for much because people acclimate to the background noise levels and that one train per hour is just as jarring as that one motorcycle with the insane exhaust per hour. At least with subways and airports it's every couple minutes so you get more used to it.
All corridors are troublesome.
For me, in DC, the trip is half the distance (1,000 miles) and would take twice as long (25 hours, according to Google).
It is 32 hours if driving 130-150 kph on the freeway (80-90 mph) without stopping for food, bathrooms, gas, or sleep. It's probably a few hundred hours with the train since you will have to go a few hundred or a few thousand kilometers north first.
Interestingly, there is a long train line from Louisiana to Los Angeles called the Sunset Limited. Up until Hurricane Katrina in 2005 it ran between Orlando Florida and Los Angeles,
- Columbus - Cleveland 142 miles
- Columbus - Cincinnati 106 miles
- Cleveland - Pittsburgh 134 miles
- Cleveland - Toledo 114 miles
- Columbus - Toledo 142 miles
- Toledo - Detroit 58 miles (Cleveland, Columbus, & Cincinnati can share this)
- Toledo - Chicago 244 miles (Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, & Detroit can share this)
Theoretically, you can connect Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, & Pittsburgh into <3 hr trips by HSR.
That's going to beat flying. And that connects about:
- Chicago 9.5M
- Detroit 4.5M
- Pittsburgh 2.3M
- Cincinatti 2.3M
- Columbus 2.2M
- Cleveland 2.1M
- TOTAL = 23M+ people (~7% of the US)
For 940 miles of rail...
Even considering that HSR costs ~$100M per mile - that's about $4k per person.
That sounds like a lot. But since we have frequent opportunities to finance 30-year treasuries at ~1.5% interest and the Fed mandates inflation to be ~2% or higher:
=PMT(-0.005/12, 30*12, -4000)
That's about ~$10.30 per month per person. Considering the average tax payer is paying ~$1,300 per month in federal taxes - 0.7% of that going to HSR where it makes sense - does not seem like a terrible idea...
For context, highways cost about ~$200B per year - which comes down to ~$49.75 per tax payer per month - however, only about 1/4th of that is Federal taxes (~$12.43).
I'll also add that the Great Lakes is probably at the bottom of the list of regions where HSR would make sense. Other places like the Northeast make much more sense.
That being said, there are plenty of plausible HSR routes in the US. We're a very sparsely populated country in our middle, but there's effectively a "string" of large cities right through our middle: NYC - Pittsburgh - Columbus - {Cincinnati, Indianapolis} - {Louisville, St. Louis} - Kansas City - Oklahoma City - Albuquerque - {Phoenix, Tucson} - Los Angeles.
All of the legs there should under 400 miles, and most should be under 200. There's also plenty of room for adjustment: Louisville - Nashville - Memphis - Dallas and then onward south, for example.
You could easily have HSR all over the south, Midwest and NE, and then between population centers on the west coast, just likely not in the desert and western Great Plains.
The high-speed bits they propose are basically a Boston-Atlanta-Chicago triangle with some ornaments (Chicago - KC, Chicago - Minneapolis, Cleveland - Pittsburgh - Philadelphia, and connections to Toronto, Montreal, Quebec), and separate networks in Florida and Texas. Connecting the Florida and Texas networks to the main one is marginal.
I'm not sure of their opinions on separate networks in the Pacific Northwest and in California, but I'm sure they have looked at it. I do recall them saying that it doesn't make sense to connect, say, Portland to San Francisco - there's just not much in between.
We would definitely want to have a “constellation” of networks rather than one interconnected system given the geography of the US, and that’s fine. There’s never going to be a time when it makes more sense to travel from LA to NYC by rail instead of flying.
The biggest takeaway is that there is a specific role that HSR can play, but it’s not going to take over all long distance trips. Given where we are starting in the US, however, there is a massive mine of untapped potential.
Even in the east there are some gaps. It's obvious that a midwestern network centered on Chicago and a southeastern network centered on Atlanta make sense, but it's a bit more of a stretch to connect those to the northeast.
Just looking at the towns between Portland and Sacramento Salem, Eugene and Medford exist. Neither would themselves ever be valuable enough for HSR, but as part of a larger system they definitely would bring value.
Especially since you would get 3.5 hour trains Bay Area <-> Seattle and 4.5 hour trains to Vancouver.
That is right at the limit of when flying starts to make more sense from a time perspective.
Edit: Here's a good video on the concept. From a comment (by the author) he says that France and Spain has many lines in the range of 4 given his scoring. It just seems miniscule compared to the enormous potential of DC <-> Boston corridor.
"U.S. High Speed Rail: What's Next? Analyzing Extensions and Expansions, and What Makes Sense"
It seems like about a million people live there, not nearly enough individually, and trains would likely alternate at which locations they stop to bring the total travel time between the larger areas down.
Might be hindered by the mountainous terrain though making the cost prohibitive.
"U.S. High Speed Rail: What's Next? Analyzing Extensions and Expansions, and What Makes Sense"
Sure if you are building a track you can put in stations in towns that don't generation much traffic, but you still need traffic from somewhere and it won't come.
At 500 km/h (310 mph) you could feasibly do Sacramento to Portland in under two hours. The less straightforward question is how much of the metro area do you serve around those two cities, and do you connect that line directly to San Francisco or do you run a separate line to Sacramento via the Delta? Do you go a sort if L-shape around Stockton first? The politics of this could push travel time up, but at 500 km/h you can cover a lot of ground, much of it fairly empty.
So a hypothetical Best Coast system would connect Vancouver, BC to Portland, Portland to Sacramento, Sacramento to Reno, Reno to Las Vegas, Sacramento to LA, San Francisco to Sacramento via Stockton, San Francisco to LA, LA to Tijuana via San Diego, LA to Las Vegas, LA to El Paso via Phoenix, Phoenix to St. George, Las Vegas to Salt Lake City via St. George, San Diego to El Paso via Tucson & Mexicali and now you’re in Texas where options include El Paso to New Orleans via either Austin & Houston or San Antonio & Houston, Brownsville to McAllen, Brownsville to Houston via Corpus Christi, Corpus Christi to San Antonio, Houston to Dallas, Dallas to Oklahoma City and I’m probably missing some, but you have the workings of a Gulf Coast constellation anchored by Texas on one end and Florida on the other.
Thing is, I’ve worked this all out on paper too, including a Northeast, Southeast and Midwest map that looked much like one that someone linked to up the thread. Problem is, our choice of infrastructure is downstream from our cultural preferences which in turn are shaped by the infrastructure our ancestors built in the decades prior.
El Paso is about 725 miles away from San Diego according to Siri, so with the best trains in the world you could be inside the Texas rail constellation I briefly outlined above in about 2-3 hours which in turn could serve as the basis for a Gulf Coast constellation connecting Florida and the Southeast connecting to the Midwest and the Northeast and then to Canada.
It’s not built though because people just fly instead. We worked out how to get cheap air travel long before we figured out super-fast transcontinental rail travel that probably doesn’t make sense coast to coast but if it already existed, probably would make sense going coast to middle and middle to middle and would just happen to connect the coasts. Or you could just fly, which is what we do, and since that already exists and is even faster than rail travel, metro areas can figure out how their own inter-urban rail systems that are slow and local where it makes sense to build them and just try to make sure the airport is connected too. I like trains, but not so much that I’m willing to toss hundreds of billions of public money into some kind of “national rail system” whatever form it took for whatever prestige it might bring. Jumbo jets are cool too.
With TSA PreCheck, I can reliably go from curb to gate in less than 15 minutes. If you're not someone who feels the need to be the first one on the plane, that means you can arrive at the airport 30 minutes before the scheduled departure time.
So, as a practical matter, that means a SJC->SEA flight is at least an hour shorter than the hypothetical train.
I'm also very skeptical that a train could reach Seattle in 3.5 hours from the Bay Area. That would require an average speed of over 200 mph on the great-circle path.
California High-Speed Rail only promises an average speed of 150 mph between LA and San Francisco (w/ a world-class top speed of 220 mph). Additionally, geography dictates a more circuitous route. CAHSR route-miles between LA and the SFBA (similar terrain) are 25% greater than the straight-line distance.
Realistically, the train would take almost 6 hours, and a plane would be less than half.
With the planned California High Speed rail going between Sacramento and Los Angeles, and the proposed Cascadia high speed rail going all the way to Eugene, this traditional link would enable a sleeper train between Seattle and Los Angeles in something like 10-13 hours. That is way better then today’s Coastal Starlight which makes the trip in 36 hours.
Hiroshima to Tokyo is just over 3.5 hours on the Shinkansen, and it’s a 500 mile trip. SF TO Seattle is roughly 800 miles… You’re making a very optimistic projection.
> Just looking at the towns between Portland and Sacramento Salem, Eugene and Medford exist.
You’re barely cracking 500k people and covering the most difficult terrain on the entire corridor.
They did the math and decided to connect Florida to the main Eastern component (based on there being enough demand for Atlanta-Florida travel), so there are four components - the main Eastern component, Texas, California (+Vegas, Phoenix), Pacific Northwest (Portland to Vancouver)
Times change.
In 1860 New Orleans was the 5th largest city in the country.
Today it is 52nd.
American growth of the last 80 years is incompatible with the future of the world. You won't save a sprawly mess by putting a high speed rail station in the center of it.
If it was an important city before the age of the automobile, it has a chance. Put the "future" rail network in the cities that have a future.
Point number two, and probably even more important than the first, is the fact that you have to get your plan through a million committees, and through Congress, etc. You need support. His plan won't get it. Too much of it goes through places that hate trains and "socialism". And then it tells the people that have nostalgic memories of a railroad that lifted their family out of the Jim Crow south to go pound sand. His plan will never go further than his blog :)
Would you like an analogy to this situation?
Everybody in tech has incredible ideas for the future. But the startup world is littered with companies that have had no success at all getting from point A to point B despite billions in VC money.
But as long as it exists, New Orleans means something to America.
The cost is high, but more painfully, the cost per-mile is higher than for the same distance of railroad in Europe or East Asia. That's not a result of pure geography.
Also, while the cost is high, it's not actually that large in comparison to the overall DoT budget, which is projected at $142B for FY2023. You could build a lot of train for that. Political will is a much more important factor. We just dropped $40B on the Current War without blinking.
Even so, this misses another key step: intercity rail in Europe usually connects seamlessly to metro rail, which is what makes it so easy and nice to use. But the cities themselves in the United States do not usually have rail systems to connect to. That's why the best near-term rail corridor IMHO is NY-Buffalo (subway) - Youngstown (possible Pittsburgh metro extension) - Cleveland (subway) - Toledo (possible Detroit metro extension) - Chicago, connecting to six subway systems.
how does this make any sence, we have to deal with tonneling under or demolishing existing densely populated real estate along the route, literal mountains in the way, etc.
HS2 in UK caused an outrage, someone's farm was cut in half, houses had to be demolished, etc
Consider instead putting Detroit in between the two. The Chicago-Detroit route already operates at 110 mph, Amtrak and the Michigan Dept of Transportation already own the majority of the track and give routing priority to passenger trains. Amtrak and VIA are already talking about a Chicago-Toronto train that doesn't require passengers to disembark for immigration/customs, and their systems are already connected via a rail tunnel under the Detroit River.
In theory, if Raleigh and Richmond (both very "blue" cities and maybe open to it) built LRT systems, you could get another route in DC-Richmond-Raleigh-Charlotte-Atlanta, where the other three have existing intracity rail.
The real reason we don't have high speed rail is that right of way acquisition is ridiculously costly unless government is involved, and we don't trust our government to do it right. Probably justified, if urban rail costs are indicative.
As I used to live in the Bay Area, it really surprised me that there was no bullet train between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Yes, apparently it's planned but it boggles my mind that they waited so much before building it.
Americans don't realize how much nicer train is compared to plane for medium distances (up to 500 miles). Station being in the middle of the city, get in the train 10 minutes before departure without check-in or security, no waiting 15 minutes on the tarmac before disembarking... I guarantee you the door-to-door time is going to be lower.
Also train is more confortable, seats are wider, you can use phones/electronics for the full duration of the trip...
The biggest break for trains in the last 20 years hasn't been Maglevs or Japan's bullet. Matter of fact it has been OBL fixation on attacking America in a spectacular and televised fashion.
The lack of security abord trains is shocking honestly. Trains are special, there is something about them which calms people even the most evil, because ill intentioned people like terrorists and mentally deranged domestic shooters just ignore them.
Basically because there are only 2-3 places you can practically cross the mountains surrounding LA (Tehachapi Tejon, and the coast), and 3-4 places you can do the same for the SFBA. All of them are already occupied by existing rail or roads.
Those mountain crossings cost more that the rest of the system combined.
> get in the train 10 minutes before departure without check-in or security, no waiting 15 minutes on the tarmac before disembarking... I guarantee you the door-to-door time is going to be lower.
I wish, but you're wrong and it's not even close. (SFO, OAK or SJC) to (LAX, BUR, LGB or ONT) is about 45 minutes gate to gate. Add 5 minutes for security[], 25 minutes boarding, 15 minutes deplaning and you're at 1h30 curb to curb (vs. the almost 3 hours station to station that CAHSR claims* they will provide when finished).
The plane is faster even accounting for travel time to and from the station or airport. The contrast is especially stark if your destination is not downtown LA.
[*] TSA with PreCheck has gotten really fast in the past couple years. They no longer scan your boarding pass (just your ID + a database of the day's travelers). You don't need to unpack your bag, remove your shoes, nor remove your jacket. On a dozen trips in the past year, security has never taken me more than 5 minutes. It takes almost as long to walk through the maze of ropes forming the queue as the actual security procedure itself.
In Canada, half the population lives near a nearly straight line from Quebec City to Windsor; you could put a high speed rail line down the middle of that.
Why anyone lives in apartments by choice is beyond me. The noise is absurd.
YMMV. Live where you want. There is no objectively better answer, just preference.
I am sorry but you westerners have no clue how to make decent apartments. London is full of 'luxury' highrises with basic design mistakes and complete failures.
In czech republic they would never build drywall separation between apartments, its always brick or concrete with real noise insulation.
The staircase is never attached to the walls of the unit, so you don't hear every step of people walking around
Premium towers here are built with zero green space. Buildings of 100's of units where every unit has their own boiler are a complete waste
Windows get built in such a way that it's impossible to clean them or install shades, etc.
But concrete is pretty unfriendly to the environment and has a low expected lifespan. Much of the US is covered in trees, so an average apartment is primarily constructed from wood. Condos and apartments are generally constructed to different standards, due to the former being intended as a purchase, and the latter as a rental.
reinforced concrete has low expected lifespan in exposed conditions because moisture causes rust causes degradation. The concrete used for division between units, as being discussed here, is unreinforced. As long as there's no sulfate-containing minerals in the aggregate (and it's protected from moisture), an unreinforced concrete block wall will last indefinitely.
Typical dividers in apartment buildings in the west are either concrete as I just described, or they are made with "steel studs" (C-channel with gypsum board). The latter is awful for noise isolation, while the former is okay (and better if some additional considerations are taken).
Apartment buildings in my (north american) experience are built to the same standards as condos. The only time wood would be used in either is in a low rise (<4 storey) construction, which tend to not have any of the density benefits that you want from multi-unit construction, and all of the possible downsides.
Yes, older buildings can have terrible sound insulation, but modern apartments are well-built and you won't hear a thing (at least in Germany, and in my experience).
Train travel has the advantage of not needing to do the driving. You can spend that travel time doing something productive, rather than staring at tarmac. Additionally train travel is potentially more accessible (assuming proper investment in infrastructure). The obvious example being that blind people are never going drive anywhere, regardless of how “mobile” it makes them.
While your point about being close to train stations has some validity. For the vast majority of European urban, and sub-urban areas, a fast train connection is only 20-30mins away via local public transport. So living “close” in terms of time, doesn’t require you to be physically close to the train station.
Finally high-speed rail, is really fast. Up to 200mph fast, well over double what’s realistically safe in a private car. So while the train might not be direct, it’s going that much faster, you can still get to your destination quicker than a car.
To provide some context, many Amtrak lines are limited to 80mph, and only a small number can achieve Amtraks top speeds of 150mph. That’s ignoring the frequent delays due to track congestion and freight priority, which results in even slower average speeds. It’s not a surprise that trains look unappealing to many Americans, when the average US passenger train can only just keep up with a passenger car.
Wear headphones.
Unless you are talking about dumb mass freight, freight does actually mind just staying around. Its just that all those things have been taken of the railroad.
> As a result people are much more mobile and can live in a wider area in USA
If they have money for a car.
> where in Europe to commute to the office you really have to live near a train station
That's nonsense. There are these things called bicycles and also these things called trams and buses.
https://www.thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTY3OTMzNjA.NTkxNzE...
U.S compared to Europe:
https://www.thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTc4NDEwOTE.MjkxMDg...
My daughter, visiting home from college this weekend, took Amtrak from Richmond, VA yesterday. She's taking the train back Monday. Without delay, the train takes about 4 hours. Driving takes about 3 hours. Add an extra 15 minutes on each side for getting to/from the station, so 4:30 hours vs 3 hours. Distance is 150 miles (241 km).
Cost of the train is $42 (coach) each way. Cost of gasoline would be ~ $24 each way.
Her train yesterday departed about 30 minutes late and arrived an hour late. Supposedly it may have been traveling slower due to the heat wave.
Here's a live map of the Amtrak network:
https://www.amtrak.com/track-your-train.html
That's just our national train system. Many municipalities have their own patchwork of train networks. Some off the top of my head: BART, LIRR, MTA, MBTA T, Metro (D.C., Atlanta), L (Chicago), Metrorail (Miami).
The cost of driving is more than just the cost of gasoline.
If you buy a car/rent for that trip alone, then the cost of driving is far higher. However for most Americans the cost of a car is a sunk cost that cannot be counted. If you live someplace where it is possible to live without a car, then you can make that argument, but most of us do not.
So, to reiterate, the cost of driving is much more than the cost of gas.
That is closer to your total cost of use of your automobile.
IRS 2022 Business milage rates:
https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-issues-standard-mileage-rat...
The average vehicle costs $40k, is owned for 11 years, gets driven 13k miles per year, burns 25 mpg, gas costs $3/gal, insurance is $1500 per year, and the vehicle needs $900 per year in maintenance and repairs.
A lot of people spend far less than this (my car cost me $0.384/mile so far), and some spend far more, but it's not a bad approximation.
And built into the IRS rate is probably an expectation of significant repairs.
That changes the capital costs.
Most people are paying 4.00 to 5.00 dollars a gallon these days.
At a generous $4.00 a gallon, and as you indicate, .04 gallons per mile, gas alone is lately above 0.16 cents a mile. At $5, that would be 0.20 cents.
Generously (on the thrifty side) estimating, at minimum, capital, insurance and maintenance doubles cost of gasoline alone.
The Amtrak trains are slow? I mean even adjusting for the potential 40 to 10km difference and the fact that the NS does between 8 to 10 stop depending where you want to go out in Brussels or Amsterdam, 4h for a 241km trip is slow.
It is a bit cheating as if you want to do Brussels - Arlon, a 190-ish km trip inside Belgium, it will take you 2h45. And if you want to more or less cross Belgium from North to South (Oostende to Arlon), 310-ish km trip will take you around 4h15 by train and between 3 to 4h by car due to the fact that you will take the Brussels ring road. So small country, yep. Still 4h for 241km is slow.
What really matter, obviously, is population density. And population density would justify passenger railways on the coasts and in more than half of the US:
https://www.ecoclimax.com/2016/10/population-density-of-worl...
Additionally, it's also based on the flawed assumption that transportation should adapt to the locations of where people live rather than the other way around.
The prevalence of both has been a big detriment to rail initiatives. For whatever reason people have associated a nearby train station with crime and opening up the neighborhood to the "wrong people".
And the incredibly cheap and ubiquitous car culture (especially in the post-war period) provided the alternative. That of course interacts with the dramatic lack of density for new post-war suburban neighborhoods as well, which is a function of both issues mentioned (cars and racism) as well as the fact that the US does indeed (or did) have a whole lot of extra space compared to Europe.
I read comments on HN and kind of wonder if this is why people believe all these terrible things about the US. Never been here, and only have comments online to judge by. Explains a lot.
I never realised we had Stalinists over here - thats a line of seasoning he would endorse - gather up all the poor and the undesirables, send them off to a gulag and the rest of us don't have to be bothered by them.
Actually Stalin doesn't fit, it's more of a victorian england or feudalist line of thinking
In New York, you can probably do better, but if you leave the Northeast Corridor (the stretch between Boston and Washington, DC, along the coast) destinations to other major cities like Montreal will take around nine hours (if they ever restart that service post-pandemic), and even the fastest train to Chicago takes around 20 hours. NYC to Los Angeles? at least 70 hours.
How far can you get to by train from Paris in 70 hours?
Portland is only 112 miles from Boston.
NYC->LA is about the same as Paris->Moscow and that takes nearly 3 days as well. Paris Instanbul is similar distance which is a little quicker but still over 2 days.
So does U.S., a lot more in fact. The length of Italy north to south is 1,320km, the distance from San Francisco to Chicago is 3,220Km and that's only 2/3rds of the east-west distance of the continental U.S. And there are two major mountain ranges to cross on that trip, and huge stretches with almost no population. (How many deserts to cross does Italy have?)
Trains need crews, the crews need to work in shifts, the crews need to be available along the way, even in Nowhere, Nevada. That causes delays and restricts schedules.
Total time 4 hrs.
Or they prefer driving through traffic from one city to the other for 4.5 hrs where they have to have complete concentration so they literally don't die and kill a bunch of other people?
As opposed to a 4.5 hr train ride where they have lots of seating space, an extremely comfortable ride with great views where they can basically just sleep through the trip and/or work comfortably on their laptops with great wifi?
These are not hypotheticals. These are literally your options if you were to travel from NYC to Boston.
All the modes of transport take about 4-5 hrs. Train is significantly better in almost every way. The only problem is that Amtrak subsidizes the rest of its highly unprofitable network which means they price gouge the NorthEast corridor and under invest in it, making it more expensive, and not as good as it should be.
Even with a sub par train service relative to European and Asian counterparts, train is easily the best option on this route.
A guaranteed way to become sad, is use the Tokyo trains, then come home to New York, and use the Metro/LIRR.
I kind of feel that 24/7 service is actually one factor in why the NYC subways have so many problems - both in terms of logistics and aesthetics.
I have fond memories of using the subway/trains in Tokyo. Ditto for Seoul (which I'd rank even better than Tokyo's), Hong Kong, Singapore.
I dread using the subway in NYC and nowadays try to avoid using it as much as possible (mostly via biking).
As such, people saw the roads as belonging to everyone but railroads being to the benefit of a few.
And an even more significant portion of the land was simply stolen from natives (both by settlers and by the railroads.)
In Europe with we have spoke-and-hub railways - want to get into London? There's almost certainly a local station near you in the suburbs. Then jump on the Eurostar to Paris. Get to Paris, and then get a local line back out to wherever you want to go.
Right now, it would have to be airport like terminals, and a multi-decade (if not century long) plan to connect the city centres.
In the US, drive to the new high speed mainline station outside the city, where there would have to be as much parking as an airport, and then get the high speed line to the destination, and then... hire a car?
Building a mainline station in many US city centres for high speed lines isn't going to work right now. There are too few local lines going in, and nowhere to build super-sized car parks.
The year 2040. Two technologies combine make never a reality.
1. Maglev trains that travel at 350 miles per hour (600kph)
2. Self-driving taxis
Exhibit 1:
https://www.cnn.com/travel/amp/china-fastest-maglev-train-in...
NY to LA in 10 hours by maglev sometime in this century.
The 4 hour maglev between Miami and NYC will be popular.
Problems the US has:
* Lack of spoke and hub railways.
* Cars.
* Cost-per-mile, which if I understand correctly is a political and a union-thing.
* And just politics by itself.
It's not dissimilar in the UK, but somehow we muddle through it. I don't believe that "cheap" maglev will ever help the US, it's been around for decades, and the longest highspeed line built by the Chinese is 19 miles at a cost of "only" $1.3 bn (I'll leave it up to the reader about how realistic that construction cost would be in the West).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev#China,_2000-present
The US will still have the same problem huge construction costs, political lobbying from the airlines, no hub and spoke railways, a vast airport style set of car parking around any terminals that are built.
The West now suffers from pointless adversarial politics where the opposition votes the opposite to the government simply "because", and for no rational reason other than "it's the other party". Even once you get past that hurdle, it's how "cheap" is the cheapest bidder. Labour/labor laws and so on.
I would genuinely love to see the US lead the world with high speed rail, but I just can't see it.
If vacuum trains ever happen, then things change. However those are very expensive to build, and have safety issues. We can solve the engineering problems with safety, but the expense doesn't seem possible)
Meanwhile California High Speed Rail (under construction) is planning to build stations in downtown San Francisco (and anther close to the city center, and a third by the Airport in Millbrae), close to downtown San José, downtown Fresno, close to downtown Bakerfield and downtown Los Angeles. Palmdale is the only city over 100,000 which gets a station in the city outskirts in California, and Burbank gets one by the airport.
I’m guessing California High Speed Rail did the work and came to the opposite conclusion of yours, that it does—in fact—work to build mainline stations in many US city centers.
That will improve next year too with the direct Paris Berlin train that should only take 7 hours.
You mean the culture of the government spending an absurd amount of money on highways and each town massively subsidizing sprawl?
An interesting video on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbEfzuCLoAQ
Public transit isn’t bad - I told on an Amtrak from LA to SD yesterday which was quite nice.
But, I also rode on the LA metro which was filed with mobs of mentally ill marauders.
My experience to Rome (albeit a bit over a decade ago) was similar. That’s an off putting response that likely plays a big role in sinking demand for public transit - esp. as compared to a car.
Of course, America was also designed for the auto - we’re newer, and gas was cheap during the highway construction heyday.
I think the most overlooked factor is poor intra-city transit and lack of mixed use density in our city cores.
I recently traveled to Germany on business, a few nights in Berlin then took the ICE inter-city train to Munich.
The ICE train dropped me off at the main station in Munich—my hotel was 7.3 miles driving from the main station. I was able to jump on the u-bahn and with a quick transfer at Odeonsplatz get to my hotel in half-an-hour including a 10 minute walk from the train station.
Door to door from Berlin to the hotel in Munich was 05:00 hours. If one were to drive, maps says 361mi/580km traveled if driving direct with a drive time of 05:30.
For comparisons sake, let's take a hypothetical trip from Dallas Union Station to Apple's engineering headquarters in Austin, TX 14.7mi/24.6km from the Austin train station.
According to Apple Maps, taking public transit would take 09:00 hours. Driving direct from Dallas Union Station to Apple HQ in Austin is 187mi/300km in total with a drive time of 03:00.
For long hauls, we use our RRs to move freight and airlines to move people. By traveling at 600mph instead of 60mph (the speed of most European train travel - intercity high speed rail is rare and expensive) I can get to anyplace in the continental US in under 5 hours from my home in Austin.
The argument for trains is often more about taking out the need to drive everywhere than the need to fly from coast to coast though, as a train is never going to beat that.
On top of this, most cities in the USA were built (or destroyed and rebuilt) for private cars being the primary mode of transportation. In Europe, one of the benefits of taking the train over an airplane is that the train stations will often be in a walkable city center with a good connection to public transit. In the USA, outside of a handful of older cities (New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston . . .), the train station drops you off in the middle of nowhere, usually with far less connections and services than the airport has. When compared to air travel, intercity rail travel is often slower, less convenient, less frequent, and more expensive.
Even with the Acela/northwest corridor, flights are often cheaper than rail, so it is the convenience of the downtown stations and connections to public transit that drive people to take the train over airplanes. It's no coincidence that the major cities on the route (DC, Philiadelphia, NYC, Boston) are also cities with some of the best metro networks in the country.
The US is perfect for rail - lots of long trips, with lots of goods. It could probably have more market share if goods could move more quickly and flexibly.
US: 45% road, 38% rail, 17% other (water/pipeline)
France: 75% road, 15% rail, 10% other
Germany: 62% road, 25% rail, 18% other
Spain: 92% road, 4% rail, 4% other
EU: 76% road, 19% rail, 5% other
[1] https://stats.oecd.org/BrandedView.aspx?oecd_bv_id=trsprt-da...
[2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
The fact is the us could do better, pointing to Europe which could also do better is moot.
GP asked for a well founded data-based argument, assuming they don't actually want that is in bad faith.
I agree with GP that the connection between sensors and high speed to better freight rail is tenuous, whereas large amounts of tonnage moved more clearly indicates good freight rail.
Freight does not need to travel super fast or super high tech. What it needs is to be able to travel everywhere at high throughput and cheaply. US is doing quite well in that regard.
The US used to have much more tracks, but the private railroads stripped a lot of them as far as they could get away with. There are lines that were four-tracked or were electrified that have now been reduced to unelectrified single track, so you now have a much more sluggish, polluting and congested railroad, and on top of that much is poorly maintained to save money.
—-
Also a lot of the freight is bulk freight like coal. This has led to some interesting dynamics where freight railroads oppose coal plant closures, because they will lose a major source of tonnage.
That depends on what you want to ship. In the US the train just gave up on many other class of freight. Yes, large scale slow bulk transport doesn't need speed, other things might.
Just because it works doesn't mean it can't be improved better. It's always ok to reject the "don't fix it if it's not broken" mentality.
US rail owners and operators know what the variables are that they care about and their customers care about are, and also what insurance companies care about and as a result, they are adept at moving goods coast to Great Lakes to coast, across the Appalachians, Missouri-Mississippi river system, the Great Plains, the Rockies, the Great Basin, the Sierra Nevadas, the Cascades and the California Coastal Range.
If they’re not using some software package or have complete sensor coverage on their tracks, they probably judged that they don’t need it. If a competitor actually finds advantage with these things tomorrow, then they will all adopt it.
Have you seen the USA? The places where they lack track sensors are basically out in the middle of nowhere with no one around for miles.
> One of the most lucrative rail systems in the US had an average speed of their trains in the single digits MPH!
That really isn't bad for freight. They optimize freight for throughput, not latency (something passenger rail is more concerned with).
And there are plenty of latency sensitive applications for freight rail which are developed in other places. They don't make sense in the US because the capability isn't there, not because there's no market for it.
There really isn't. Freight companies are responsible for maintaining investing in the rail, and if it doesn't make them money, they aren't going to put it there. Heck, a lot of places are single rail (meaning, no two way traffic at the same time), because it doesn't really make sense to dump more money into an extra set of tracks in those places.
The correct approach is for low latency rail freight to operate on passenger rail systems which already have the necessary speeds and flexibilities. This is structurally unfeasible in the US but it's still definitely a market that better rail systems can service at no extra cost.
And actually, sharing tracks between passenger and freight service is something that they don't really do in Europe. Because they share tracks, American passenger trains have to build at a weight on part with freight trains. Most lines in Europe separate out passenger and freight service lines so they can run lighter trains for passenger service.
Low latency freight for smaller, high value items is often done on passenger lines (or even passenger trains) because it doesn't put any scheduling pressure on passenger service.
As far as use of freight in Europe, the elephant in the room is that the EU uses a lot more sea freight than the US. Indeed, while the modal split for EU trucking is around 50%, it's around 70% in the US, and it thus seems clear that the real reason that there is less rail shipping within Europe is because there is much more competition from maritime shipping.
And since trucking capacity has been maxed out in the US for quite a while (Amazon is the big mover for this situation, even before covid), you can bet this path dependence is biting us now.
Happens a lot in Switzerland.
But the train is the more convenient option, because you don’t have to deal with the security circus at the airport.
The Freight network is also not as elite and really only good at a few specific things.
To be fair though, the continental US is almost double the size of Europe and Amtrak is actually alright in the areas that it serves (although my experience with trains in Switzerland/Italy was definitely much better).
Europe (the continent) is slightly bigger than the entirety of the USA...
I guess you are talking about continental Western Europe where much of the high speed rail is?
And a good bit more than double the number of people.
Now, consider the convenience of traveling by car: You can leave and arrive when you want to. For a longer journey, you don't need to deal with transferring between trains/busses/whatever, which means that you can keep your luggage in your car until your destination. Chances are, you can park your car at your destination or very close.
As far as sprawl: In some places, building codes require more land. Other times, banks won't lend to build unless the land is worth a certain percentage of the building. For example, when I built my house, the bank wanted the land to be worth about 25% of the value of the house; and the town required that it was so many feet away from the road. That forced my neighborhood to have large, open lawns. (And as much as I love my lawn, I'd be just as happy with a postage stamp yard too.)
There's also the rumor that the US was deliberately built to sprawl after WWII as a way to survive a nuclear attack. I don't know if that's true or a rumor, though.
Each isochrone is loaded from a static server/CDN -- for example https://chronotrains-eu.vercel.app/api/isochrones/7100002 -- and that bit of vector map data is then rendered using the mapbox gl/js frontend. Great work
I wonder if it loads the entire set of isochrones when you open the page, given how incredibly responsive it is. I tried to share it with someone who would really enjoy it, but alas, no luck at all.
The isochrones are loaded over the network on mouse hover. I thought that scheme would keep working and remain fast since the loaded vector data is completely static.
I guess the /api/isochrones/<id> url does point to some server-side code which couldn't keep up, unfortunately.
Actually, Vercel is returning "This Serverless Function was rate limited." and a 429 code i.e. too many requests. So it's more of a "hitting the limits of the Vercel plan" problem than anything.
Taking the train is more a novelty, and unclear who would actually use it regularly because it takes much longer (10 hours east cost, 20 hours coast to coast), transport on either endpoint requires you to park or taxi, and you lose all flexibility.
We like the idea of the train more than the reality of the train. I've lived in various places around the world where you had to take mass transit always, and all it does is add one to two hours to your commute when I would have much preferred to drive.
edit: I think I read it wrong wrong, it put a small darker ring around kings cross and I got 3hr and 4hr colours mixed up (:
California's cities are all arranged in a line, it should be the easiest high-speed rail project ever, but it languishes due to lack of imagination.
California's cities are not all arranged in a single line. They are in two roughly parallel lines, separated by up to hundreds of miles and across mountains. There are the coastal cities of SF, SJ, SLO, LA, and SD (follows highway 1) and the Central Valley line of Sacramento, Stockton, Merced, Fresno, Bakersfield, Lancaster/Palmdale (follows highway 99 mostly). The 5 is a compromise interstate that runs in between these two, and there is very little development there. If you've ever driven the 5, you know what I'm talking about. Even most towns "on" the 5 are a few miles away.
The HSR line could have been drawn from LA to SF more or less following the 5, stopping at the outskirts of Bakersfield and then zooming straight through to a fork that stops next in either Gilroy (en route to the Bay Area) or Modesto (en route to Stockton and Sacramento). This would have been cheaper, shorter, and less encumbered by the need to get permits, approvals, easements, and the like from everyone in the Central Valley. Meanwhile, the chosen HSR route through the Central Valley runs through dozens of different counties, cities, tax districts, and regional planning agencies.
Also, Fresno is far less dense than Bordeaux, and has a population that generally considers a mile to be a "long walk."
The latter is way easier to build in particular the spine through the Capitol.
LA plus the Bay Area is most of the State, but travel between those two endpoints is a lot less than that plus travel between each of them and the Central Valley, and along the Central Valley’s North-South axis.
Sacrificing the stop in Fresno (and the other Central Valley cities) would not have enabled HSR for the majority of the state. If anything, it would have made it less viable, not only politically (both in terms of federal and state politics), but also in terms of meeting the actual official goals of the project.
No, they aren’t.
> it should be the easiest high-speed rail project ever
The error in the preceding claim isn’t the only reason why this one is false, too (geography and preexisting land use also play roles).
> but it languishes due to lack of imagination.
Mostly, it has been delayed by lack of funding, not imagination, but its not really “languishing” right now, either.
- Wales and deep into northern England (Newcastle
- the whole western border of Germany
- the south coast of France
- Switzerland
I was never into the whole "center of Europe" thing, but this puts things in a different perspective.
I'd be interested in their perspective since you can buy a 'train' ticket which includes a ferry crossing, so the isochrone would either extend up to London and beyond (if you allow the ferry), or be restricted to just the island itself (if you do not).
One suggestion for the app: allow us to pin a city when clicking on the desktop version ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrone_map
So you don't have to manually explore the map.
You might be able to get from New York City to Boston within 5 hours. If you're leaving from Fargo, though, it would be hard to make it into neighboring Montana.
Our best case for taking a coast-to-coast train is 72 hours, but I've never seen a long Amtrak train arrive on time.
Just how far can you travel by bus from London in 24 hours? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28262194 - Aug 2021 (128 comments)
If anybody here has suggestions where we can spend a few days taking in non-Parisian France, let me know.
There are also the night trains (Intercities de Nuit), which go from Paris to some destinations at the periphery of France that are way too long for a normal day trip. It is usually 4 or 6 bunks in a room, but you can pay extra to book the entire room for the two of you. Go to sleep in Paris and wake up 12 hours later in Nice on the Med coast, Briancon (ski resort town in the Alps, great in Summer too), or any of the medieval towns in the Pyrenees near Spain (Carcassonne, Narbonne, Perpignan)
I like the idea of a night train, but there is a significant chance either my wife or I won't be able to sleep. That would make the next day unpleasant, so we'll save the night train for some time when we have a few more days to spare.
Now we are thinking Dijon.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Line_for_Europe
It will take 4hrs from Paris to Munich (900km)
Top contenders:
- Paris, Gare de Lyon (doesn't seem to include going to Gare du Nord and going to London in this?)
- Brussels — can go as far as Newcastle or Avignon
- Random ones in the center of Germany which cover all of Germany
And the US to just be... humiliating...
#NeoIntercontinentalRailroad
I supposed it would be much worse in Germany if real data was used
In reality there is a train e.g. every hour or so, or even none at the same day
That really depends on your route. Some busy lines in the UK have trains every 30 minutes, 15 minutes or even 10 minutes. Across London, it might be every 5 minutes or even every 2.
> Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).
kilometers.