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Comment by tomschlick | Hacker News Reader

Trains are only viable regionally in the US, unless you want to spend 72 hours traveling for greater cost than a plane ticket that would have taken you 4ish hours to go from NY to LA. Even if we did build high speed rail the whole way, the number of stops along the way would only cut that to 24ish hours. Most people would choose the plane.

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Look how many flights are from east coast city to east coast city. Just eliminating these would be massive.

But our rail system is outdated, our government won't allow realistic trains to be built. We don't need a million stops. We need metro to metro.

The east coast is large too. New York to Miami is over 1000 miles. People do take trains — it tends to be routes like NYC to DC or Boston, Philly to DC, etc.

The problem with any train system isn't the distance - it's the stops and slowdowns.

The fastest bullet train could make that (NYC - MIA) trip in less than 4 hours. (286 mph). That's great time. But once everyone adds a stop, and you have to slow down to a crawl through certain areas, and freight gets first pass, you can see why rail sucks in this country.

On land, it’d more like 1200 miles, so closer to 5 hours. Almost double the flight time.

I haven’t been to the US, but it can’t be all that special. Plenty of countries have high speed trains instead of most domestic air travel, even similarly sized ones like China.

Especially if you count the time to get to the airport and through security, high speed trains are highly competitive or even better than planes in total travel time.

The problem, as always, isn't size but density. Outside the east coast there is very little density. It's almost unfathomable having grown up in Europe how big and empty even large areas at the west coast are. This gets especially obvious when you get away from the central freeway that goes up the coast. Where I've visited our lived in Europe or Asia these areas would still be largely inhabited and have smaller towns sprinkled all over with small, frequently even walkable or bookkeeper distances between them. At the west coast, away from the freeway there is often nothing for miles and miles and then when you hit a small town is often partially abandoned. In other parts of the world these surrounding areas would provide passengers to the central transportation arteries via slow train and you'd have viable, slow trains transporting passengers to the major stops along the high speed track. None of that would be viable here. When the LA-SF highspeed train was planned they added stops in podunk towns to make it viable, IMO they were also removing any speed that would be comparable to airplane for any interesting connection.

And that's the west coast, once you go inland you'd maybe have one viable stop in most states of you want to keep it high-speed.

There are very sparse areas of China too, yet there are high speed trains between major cities across regions. Then there are additional slower lines with more stops from major cities to other nearby localities.

US coast-to-coast trains wouldn't need stops to be viable. They'd just need to initially be subsidised significantly, much like the current fossil-dominated industries are.

FYI: The Nozomi Shinkansen would take 13+ hours from NYC to LA at max speed if it was going on a straight line the entire time and completely ignore any constraints like mountains, etc. Even in this ideal scenario and it being subsidized to cost the same as an airplane ticket why would anyone choose the train?

The US is far less dense than China. China’s population is heavily concentrated on the eastern half of the country. The US has pockets of high density, spread all over the country, hundreds or thousands of miles apart. Major hubs include the Northeast, the Atlanta area, the Chicago area, the Texas triangle, Denver metro, Phoenix metro, SoCal, Bay Area, coastal Northwest, Miami.. building a HSR train network spanning the whole system would be massively expensive, and the density of the US makes it really hard to justify.

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