Why high speed rail hasn’t caught on
caseyhandmer.wordpress.com
caseyhandmer.wordpress.com
The term "High speed rail" isn't strictly defined, but seems to kick in somewhere between 110 and 155 mph. Pretty much every intercity train in the UK is running at 125mph for at least some of their journey. Europe is full of functioning high speed rail networks - TGV, ICE, Eurostar, networks in Spain and Italy. If you include 125 mph networks then there's loads of them - and those older, slower high speed networks have more or less been profitable.
Even the US has a high speed rail corridor in the North East.
The author tries to make the argument that there's physical limits to high speed rail that mean it'll never catch on. But the limits are far more political than physical.
If you live in the UK or Europe, rail is the go to method of travel between cities.
Edit to add: the distance between LA and San Francisco is 382 miles. Almost exactly the same distance as between either London and Edinburgh and London and Glasgow. There's something like 22 trains a day on each route - more or less every half hour during the day. The time from city centre to city centre is better by train than plane or driving. That's not even a proper "high speed" train - the routes they follow were laid out in the 1800s.
Imagine being able to destroy the idea of constructing rail in a few paragraphs of a tiny blog and then choosing to work on hyperloop, which has all the problems mentioned about rail but also throws in creating and maintaining a vacuum pipe in addition.
Hyperloop is a marketing project which is based on the assumption that a few PR drones can be lowder than anyone with any cursory knowledge on transportation engineering.
The same goes for the boring company, where the company tries very hard to pretend they invented digging holes in the ground while using COTS tunnelers.
The article says much less about rail at 200kph (125mph). Which might serve to replace airplanes. Especially once CO2 externalities are priced in.
Top speed means close to nothing, and it's one of the reason why the definition of high speed rail is not tied to top speed.
Great Britain has a notorious high speed railway corridor whose top speed is only around 160mph, and the reason is that the railway line was designed with the express purpose of preserving a cruise speed close to the top speed of the trains available at the time.
It's absurd to talk about high speed railway if it was a drag race. The main challenge in high speed railway is making it possible for high speed trains to actually travel at speeds that high-speed trains can already reach. Lines need to overcome constraints imposed by speed, geography and infrastructure costs, and tradeoffs often lead solutions to not match optimal layouts to reach top speeds.
Also, whenever a train needs to serve an intermediate station, they need to spend a great deal of time decelerating, stop at the station to serve passengers, and accelerate again. Sometimes it's feasible for infrastructure operators to spend money on a sideline to skip that station, but on some cases that's simply not realistic. Take for example Paris-Amsterdam and Paris-Cologne, which have to pass through Brussels and where the bulk of the train trip is spent passing through the inner city of Brussels alone where the top speed is 20km/h.
That's like claiming they rode taxis a lot and has owned a car, and somehow that makes them an authority on public transportation.
As to the expertise, he seems unseasoned but in command of a lot of facts. Which is why I think the conclusion is wrong despite the post being interesting and informative. Unfortunately, my fellow rail enthusiasts think I’m against them because I read the article and ignored the headline and first and last few sentences. :)
"Over longer routes, the relative hassle of getting to and from an airport instead of an HSR rail terminal is eroded by the higher speed of aircraft, even in places where the rail terminal is in a densely populated city center and the airport is way outside."
I think in the case of the US, the distance makes the difference. The trouble of checking in at an airport is factored out by the length of the journey. California to Los Angeles has a target time of 2 hours and 40 minutes. The train which I take in the UK most regularly runs for 2 hours, and that feels like a relatively long journey.
I think the issue is that in the US, most intercity journeys are much longer than this, which normalises air travel, meaning that rail ends up not getting a chance on the shorter routes on which it might be suitable.
I put "high speed" in quotes above for a reason, however...
I think the author has a very valid point when it comes to the cost of rail tracks. It's something the proponents always conveniently ignore. On top of that, a rail station has quite a limited capacity, especially if it's inside the city. The travel time between, e.g., Berlin and Paris is something like four to five times as long as by plane.
So unless someone develops a low-maintenance, high-capacity fast train, planes with ecofuel are probably going to win any fair competition.
is either existing?
> On top of that, a rail station has quite a limited capacity, especially if it's inside the city.
Traffic generated by rail station limited by capacity would require gargantuan airport to handle it, which would anyway require bus/train/car connections from within city taking even more space.
Daily passengers on the New York subway system is around the same as total daily passengers on every commercial flight in the US.
The main problem is that the original railway stations were laid out in about 1840-1870, for much smaller passenger streams, and today find it hard to cope with modern requirements (a lot of commuters from the suburbia). But given that there is dense city infrastructure all around them, the only way to solve this is to build a new station underground, which is hideously expensive and slow.
Berlin was somewhat "lucky" to have a good place to build their new Hauptbahnhof, a result of the former division of the city. Stuttgart is rebuilding and upgrading its railway network at a great expense, the construction works started in 2010 and are far from finished.
In Prague, there is a lot of discussion what to do with the rail network in the center. You cannot just tear down whole tracts of buildings in a historical city, so yes, we will have to go the Stuttgart route and who knows what the budget (and) time overrun will be.
I commute with a train daily. The lack of capacity is visible in chronic delays, sometimes up to 30 minutes. Fortunately I do not have to be at my office at a precise hour, but going to a medical appointment without wasting too much time is already a bit of a challenge. I even witnessed a 15 minute delay at 4:30 in the morning.
People can tolerate a longer commute to the airport and back, because few Europeans commute by air daily. Most of us fly at most several times a year.
And yes, the German system is a fascinating mixture of really good parts and really bad parts. But while troubled, to large degrees it works to acceptable measure.
If you are trying to say that some societies are wrong about it, that's a bit more of a tough sell.
The infrastructur was largely financed by the state, but that's true for any transport infrastructure.
The Deutsche Bahn has significantly degraded over time, due to insufficient investment, but it's still an incredibly useful system.
If you want to see what's possible with current technology, look at Chinese HSR. Beijing to Shanghai is a 20% longer distance than Berlin to Paris, yet it takes only half as long by train (just over 4 hours vs. 8-9 hours). If such a connection existed between Berlin and Paris, it would be very difficult to justify flying.
However, on-time performance in Germany is horrendous compared to China, so I'm not willing to call Germany's operations as a whole superior. If I had to choose between my train arriving within half an hour of the scheduled time and having to board airplane style, I would board airplane style.
I think your estimate is quite off here: Train connections from Berlin to Paris take about 8.5 hours. Flights take 1 hour and 50 minutes plus the overhead time for traveling to and from the airport, security and taxiing. Just let's suppose that this will be 2.5 hours in total, which would be very fast. So we are comparing 8.5 hours with 4.5 hours. So, the factor is less than two rather than the four to five you suggested.
most new&large airports are far outside of cities (example: Munich, Frankfurt, Berlin, ...) because of the enormous space needed and environmental problems is creates. Nearer airports will close operating at 10pm, whereas train stations will operate 24h no problem.
Large projects for new train stations/systems in major cities (Hamburg-Altona, Stuttgart, ...) take a long time, but they exist. Large new airport projects near (!) major cities here in Germany don't exist.
> Most of the German trains are slower than 300kph most of the time.
That's because Germany has dense population regions and there always will be stops in cities and a lot of passengers. It's an optimization question. Being able to run a train system with max 300kmph is much more expensive than at 250kmph and the advantages are not that huge.
> They are also often crowded, delayed or outright cancelled. They are also quite expensive, compared to planes.
Planes are always crowded with a tiny personal space, difficult to board/leave, difficult to work in, difficult to reach, subject to a complex passage on an airport with all its rules®ulations, longer upfront booking, ...
For example when I want to travel from Hamburg to Düsseldorf (400km) on wednesday morning, the price is around 35 Euros incl. local public transport tickets with my Bahncard 50 which I got from the company. There is no flight like that.
Hamburg/Munich: >600km. Already too long for a business trip by train. Cost 60€ with Bahncard 50 incl. local public transport tickets. Time: 6:30 center to center. Flight: much more expensive, unreliable (I remember been waiting on friday evening two hours on the runway for the start), Munich airport is 40km outside, the Munich airport has long transit times. Time from city center to city center by flight is around four hours. The travel costs about three times as much.
> Most of the German trains are slower than 300kph most of the time. They are also often crowded, delayed or outright cancelled. They are also quite expensive, compared to planes.
For certain longer trips, but if I want from Hamburg to Berlin, Frankfurt, ... I take the train.
> especially if it's inside the city
That's great: with an ICE I want to reach the city center and not some airport 40km outside (like in Munich). I want to be in a big hub where all the local transports are reachable.
High-Speed trains here are connecting centers of a large local public transport system: local trains, underground trains, busses, ferries, ... When I travel by train between Hamburg and another major city, the tickets for much of the local transport systems for the start end destination cities are already included.
This is a silly red herring. Top speed means nothing. The only key factor is door-to-door travel time, and it means nothing if a train goes 180km/m in some sections and 320km/h in others if in the end you reach your destination 1h earlier than b flying.
> They are also often crowded, delayed or outright cancelled.
Things that are completely unheard of in any sort of public transportation service, specially air travel!
Please look at the Netherland's Schipol airport, one of the largest in the world and often used as the paragon of well functioning hub, and how they've been systematically cancelling and delaying flights throughout the year.
> They are also quite expensive, compared to planes.
No, not really. Only the lowest-cost low-cost operators tend to beat high speed railway on price, but they often have flights to airports well outside of city centers or even in suboptimal terminals with all sorts of hidden costs, and ultimately lead to a slower suboptimal experience.
There are other benefits like you can use your phone and get up and walk around more easily. If you go first class you can actually get some work done at tables and stuff. But the flip side is train travel is often 10 or 20 times more expensive than flying, so only worth doing if you can expense it IMO (or you get some huge off-peak super saver special one-time discount or whatever)
Paris-Marseilles in 3.5 hours is a better comparator.
The standard off-peak walk-up fare (i.e. the maximum you will ever pay) between London-Edinburgh is £82, and the peak-time fare is £176. Cheaper if you book a couple of weeks in advance.
It can cost less than this to fly sometimes, but in practice not by that much unless you’re doing awkwardly-timed no-baggage Ryanair flights from Stanstead or whatever.
I have done that trip hundreds of times over the years and I think I’ve only ever flown when engineering works made it in feasible to take the train. Usually it’s no competition.
London Edinburgh flight with Ryanair is £14 (fourteen) for tomorrow. On train it is £197 for tomorrow.
A £197 train ticket is a walk-up, peak-time fare from Euston, which will take you via Birmingham. Not the way you'd to want to travel to Edinburgh – go off-peak up the East coast, and the walk-up fare is £82.
One of the good things about the UK rail ticketing system is that—while complex—all ticketing information is publicly available. You can look up the available fares between any pair of stations using the BR Fares site – e.g. https://www.brfares.com/!fares?orig=KGX&dest=EDB
The author is showing considerable ignorance on the topic.
For decades it's well understood that railway top speed is lower than airwaily travel. That's irrelevant. For travelling, the key factors are door-to-door speed and rider comfort.
It makes no sense to look at plane speed as the defining factor because anyone onboarding to a flight has to endure mandatory 60m-90m waits within an airport to pass through security and embark, not to mention the fact that airports are very often located tens of km outside of city centers. Meanwhile, railway travel is hop on/hop off with central stations typically right in city centers.
Consequently, it's very well understood for decades now that high-speed railway is by far the fastest solution for trips up to a 600km-800km range. Above that threshold there's a tradeoff threshold with air travel, with longer travel distance favouring flights over train trips. Increasing high-speed rail's comercial speed only works to hike the crisp threshold where high-speed rail dominates air travel.
Edit: also, that added comfort is exponentially higher for families who can share a table or even a private compartment.
I get that it may be impractical to introduce a continent-spanning national rail service in the US, but there are a whole bunch of costal corridors where rail is—from a functional standpoint—objectively feasible.
There's just no political will to implement true HSR in America and I don't think there ever will be.
That advantage vanishes when you have more than 1 occupant in the car of course.
However if you can work from the train, the advantage flips back to the train. It is priceless for being able to relax and/or be productive. However, I do like the monotony and semi-meditative qualities of driving long distances. But I don't like being stuck in traffic and construction zones.
1. Your entire country (UK) is smaller than 11 of our 50 states. The several hundred miles between London and Edinburgh pass through many smaller cities and towns, between which people travel. Between SF and LA is a pea soup restaurant and a handful of midsized, mainly agricultural settlements that can't be gotten around without a car (or pickup if we're being specific). SF/LAers aren't going to Stockton, or vice-versa.
2. Your entire continent, minus Russia, is smaller than the lower 48 states (2.5 vs 3.1 million sq miles), with a much higher population density and, again, actual places every 10 miles or so. I've bicycled across the US, there are stretches bigger than Western Europe that are full of nothin in particular.
3. Look at some population density maps. The US is light on corridors of sufficient size & density to make much sense for HSR considering the space between population centers: the Northeast (already served by HSR) and my native Chicago-Milwaukee-NW Indiana corridor (already served by commuter rail). Maybe Florida where they're actually building rail, surprisingly. Detroit area, maybe throw Ohio & Pittsburgh in (Amtrak partly covers it). The eastern 43% of China's land area (~1.6 million sq miles) contains 94% of the people (~1.3 billion people) See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heihe%E2%80%93Tengchong_Line In Japan you can basically draw a single, ~1400 mile line from Hokkaido in the north to Kyushu in the south that hits most of the population centers. Actually, they did that for you, it's called the Shinkansen and it is awesome.
4. This is actually the main point but I thought I'd sh!t on passenger rail first. The US has the largest and most extensively used rail network on the planet earth. We just use it to move freight, which doesn't breath, eat, use the lavatory, attempt to explode the vehicle it's on, or (to stay my sarcasm for a moment) complain when it's delayed. I haven't done the numbers here, but that probably offsets a lot more GHG/oil than replacing airports with passenger rail would.
5. To dovetail on earlier points, the US is largely defined by invisible cultural borders. To a disturbingly large extent, city people travel between cities and country people travel around the countryside. Each are often actually afraid of the other places. City people talk about 'flyover country' or make jokes about rednecks, incest, the banjo from Deliverance. Country people talk about 'inner city violence'. This is a newer, still emergent phenomenon and only partially true (hence it's placement last on my list).
All this said, I love Amtrak and ride when I get a chance to take a little time off and enjoy the scenic route. You see the country from a grounds-eye view that you can't from the air, and it's pleasant to walk around the cars and talk to people you otherwise wouldn't (I once chatted with Seth Green's mom - or a woman convincingly claiming to be Seth Green's mom - on the City of New Orleans). On the longer routes eg Empire Builder you can buy one ticket and stopover at interesting places along the way and get back on tomorrow's train with the same ticket. I'm looking forward to taking the train from Anchorage to Denali next year. But I'll be flying home at Christmas, with only 5 days off.
If we're lucky, the decline of America will resemble the decline of the UK. If we're not, it'll resemble the decline of Russia.
While the amount transferred is impressive, much of it is low-value a-to-b bulk shipments. With coal drying up in the near future, that's going to be a major issue.
This is true, but it's not a reason to discount train travel. San Francisco is the size of Edinburgh and Glasgow combined - and between them there's 40 odd services a day. I get that route regularly, and it can be standing room only the whole way.
Edit: Did some searching and found the North Atlantic Rail initiative. According to the article I read, it would take 20 years to build. What a joke. What is going on in the U.S. that we can't do this stuff?
In practice we've seen hours long security/departure queues, having to wait for the luggage after landing, joining the wait for the expensive taxi/bus transfer from the airport, and many other issues which don't exist for train travel.
Then there's "yes you can show up 30min before, if you booked the plane ticket a week ago".
Having done both a lot, I'll take the train any time.
Where? I was flying in Europe and was asked to be on airport 150 minutes before departure.
That isn't a scalable or viable solution. The recommendations exist for capacity and planning reasons.
By the same logical extension you can simply show up at a train station 5 minutes before the train, the results of taking a chance are on you.
Further, the level comfort of the high-speed rail I rode on in China is not even remotely approached by any plane I have ever been on, and it was several times cheaper. There's also no difference between bringing a big suitcase or a small one versus checking or carrying on bags for a plane.
In many cities, the airport is in a terrible location. Boston, Denver, NYC, and many others have poor locations. Train stations, such as those in Boston and NYC, dump you right into the thick of the city. A high-speed rail train would be as fast as a plane's gate to gate time but basically platform to platform. A train is going to be much more efficient on emissions as well.
It's a little confusing why anyone would prefer a plane ride over high-speed rail for regional travel.
Plus most train terminals are in the center of the city and quicker to get to.
Strong property rights, NIMBY local democracy with the good and bad that implies, free speech whereby this is all discussed by everyone with an opinion about it whether or not it's uninformed, that kind of thing.
Personally, I'd rather have the US style even though it's inefficient when it comes to HSR.
The Green Line extension for Boston's MBTA has taken 16 years and still isn't done and has cost several billion dollars. It was discussed even longer than that. New York's subway systems experience the same delays and costs. It's embarrassing.
Free speech, land/property rights, etc. are important, but they are just excuses, as they don't seem to be the things actually slowing down these projects.
Why do you say that? What is slowing them down?
I don't think I really need to go into detail about how broken US politics are. January 6, 2021 is proof of this.
Security theatre in the US means you don’t just walk on the train. You sit in a waiting room with no ambition for capacity and get escorted to the platform by friendly security guards. Quite an experience if you’re not from the US and used to the way trains normally run in the rest of the world.
Together with introduction of HSR they closed many slower lines meaning travel is now less available for majority of Chinese.
Same goes for their amazing subways, they have lot of lines but usually their population per line is double of Western subways, so the result is uncomfortable overcrowded system.
Only reason to use Chinese HSR is because you don't have alternative, there are really no budget airlines and car ownership is still very low compared to west plus cheaper slower trains were cancelled, so you don't really have any other option unless you wanna take dangerous very slow bus.
This is not even close to being true. Security in Chinese HSR stations is minimal. You walk through a metal detector, put your bag through a scanner, and that's it. Boarding itself takes a few minutes.
> prices are higher than European budget airlines
A 7.5-hour trip across the entire length of the country, from Guangzhou to Beijing (over 2100 km, roughly the distance from NYC to Miami, or Rome to Copenhagen), costs the equivalent of $130. It's difficult to complain about that price.
As I said 130USD is crazy expensive when I can fly in Europe similar routers for 20-50 USD and it will take me 2 hours instead 7.5 hours. There is no difference between getting to Chinese HSR station or European airport, but it's PITA getting to actual Chinese train vs European airplane.
And let's rather not compare slow European trains where can I board the train with zero checks anywhere, heck sometimes even without checked ticket.
It has never taken me more than a few minutes to go through security in a train station in China. You're exaggerating here.
Yes, you have to get your ticket checked before going onto the platform, but that's also just a few minutes in line. There are usually several automatic ticket gates, plus one or two people manually checking.
In European airports, it can take a good hour to go through security and get to your gate, if you arrive at a busy time.
> As I said 130USD is crazy expensive when I can fly in Europe similar routers for 20-50 USD and it will take me 2 hours instead 7.5 hours.
I gave Beijing-Guangzhou as an extreme example, to show how cheap even extremely long routes are. I think most people would fly that distance. However, on a route like Beijing-Shanghai (just over 4 hours), most people would choose to take the train.
About the price, $130 to travel across a country the size of China is not crazy, regardless of how cheaply you can fly in Europe. Your trip is also not going to be merely 2 hours - that's the amount of time it takes from leaving home until takeoff, if you're cutting it close.
> There is no difference between getting to Chinese HSR station or European airport
Security in a European airport is on a completely different level from Chinese HSR stations. Yes, the German model of open platforms without ticket checks is nicer than the Chinese model of ticket checks in front of the platform, but let's not exaggerate here. On the other hand, the Chinese model of trains actually leaving and arriving on time is nice.
I lived in China for years and I can guarantee you it took me NEVER just few minutes to pass through all checks. But if you visited tier 88 shithole I can see how it's not comparable with Beijing experience.
> In European airports, it can take a good hour to go through security and get to your gate, if you arrive at a busy time.
Hahahah, I just traveled in peak summer season clusterfuck this year and it took me for sure less than 10 minutes to pass through automated ticket gate and immigration check for non schengen flight to get to my security gate at boarding, all while at extremely crowded airport. I can't only imagine what experience it would be off season on Schengen flight.
> However, on a route like Beijing-Shanghai (just over 4 hours), most people would choose to take the train.
Yeah no, I also travelled this route for work few times, each time rather took flight for comparable price than slow train plus the HSR train station is further from city than old airport (which has maglev). So much faster and more comfortable experience for pretty much same price.
> Yes, the German model of open platforms without ticket checks is nicer than the Chinese model of ticket checks in front of the platform, but let's not exaggerate here.
Just out of curiosity how many years have you lived in China? Because I am not exagerating here. No delays. ROFL It must been my imagination to be stuck in middle of nowhere in train for hours, but I guess whether you travel 20 or 25 hours does not make much of an difference in the end, right... Unless you are going towards the most famous tier 1 cities delay was standard with slow trains, for sure worse than European trains at same time. It was well known fact in China trains towards Beijing had always priority because can't arrive in Beijing with delay to lose face, meanwhile facing opposite direction like Xian or Chengdu NGAF.
> Hahahah, I just traveled in peak summer season clusterfuck this year and it took me for sure less than 10 minutes to pass through automated ticket gate and immigration check for non schengen flight to get to my security gate at boarding, all while at extremely crowded airport.
It often takes 10 minutes just to walk from security to the gate. Security can easily add on an additional hour on a bad day. 10 minutes from the curb to your gate is unheard of, unless you're running the whole way and cutting to the front of lines.
> the HSR train station is further from city than old airport (which has maglev)
It's 40 minutes from Hongqiao railway station to Nanjing Road (East), in downtown Shanghai. It takes the same amount of time from Pudong Airport to Nanjing Road (East), even if you take the maglev (because the maglev only takes you half of the way).
Suffice it to say that I've traveled enough in China and in Europe to have an idea of the typical train delays. The situation in Germany is markedly worse. Official on-time performance for long-distance trains in Germany is about 60%,[2] and I think that there's a bit of creative accounting going on to even reach that number.
0. https://youtu.be/RIhseWP2LQQ?t=594
1. https://youtu.be/mo5CSafdwNA?t=172
2. Click on "DB Fernferkehr" here: https://www.deutschebahn.com/de/konzern/konzernprofil/zahlen...
1. The author says that HSR projects are about a third below passenger projections everywhere. Everyone who has taken the TGV between Bordeaux and Paris, the ICE between Cologne and Frankfurt and many of the other lines in Europe knows that it is trivially not true. The Bordeaux Paris train is often sold out several times a day.
2. The author says the SFO to LA line comes at $350m/mile which he gives as indication for HSR construction. I don't know about the accuracy for the SFO to LA line, but it's completely off for general HSR. Even the highest estimate here for a double track HSR line is $2.6m/mile here: https://compassinternational.net/railroad-engineering-constr...
3. The author says that 100,000 passengers daily is the SFO to LAX traffic today. If I look at stats for SFO it has around 3M passengers per month, I assume not all are flying to/from LA so the number can't be right.
4. The whole discussion about interruptions is also weird. Yes if a rail line gets interrupted you probably can't easily route around it. But it's incorrect to say you can always do that in a car, as everyone stuck in a traffic jam can attest to. Also I would like to see some statistics on rail/track interruptions vs road interruptions.
5. The subsidies discussion also seems weird. He acknowledges that roads and airtravel receive subsidies as well, but then dismisses them because road operation cost are covered by the driver. Sure but maintanance is covered by the state again. Most rail companies would be very profitable if they would not have to pay for the network (admittedly they often don't want to let go of that control, because it allows them to keep competition put)
I don't think I can take any argument so littered with factual errors seriously.
> A typical Japanese maintenance schedule has each segment of rail reground, to exacting tolerances, every 6 months while total replacement is required every 5 years.
Not really, given massive fixed cost at airplane terminal and airports being typically harder to get to than train station.
When I was flying this summer, I was asked to come to airport 150 minutes before planned departure.
200 km/h train would still be faster for distances of about 700 km.
And even for longer routes benefits of comfort, larger possible baggage, lower stress and so on would make it a clear winner.
This summer was exceptional, it will go back to normal like 60 minutes for domestic travel and maybe 90 minutes for international travel.
Break even, time wise, here is around 500 km and then train is the better choice. But there are a lot of destinations that can only be served realistically by airplanes and that is not likely to change much during my life time.
> This capacity could also be served by a fleet of just 40 737s [...], of which Boeing makes more than 500 per year. Bought new, this fleet would cost $3.6b, and with a lead time of, at most, a few months.
Boeing has a backlog of 4000 planes.[1] Current delivery lead times are 5-10 years, so getting 40 planes within months is ludicrous. Aircraft might be available on shorter timelines from aircraft lenders, but probably not in that timeframe either. It's also not what the article argues.
This puts a question mark over the content: which parts are actually correct and which are merely presented as fact without any checking?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_737_MAX_orders_...
> airplane-competitive speeds, which for all but the shortest routes, require > 300 km/h or > 185 mph.
This number feels arbitrary, where did this come from, is it because very very few exist? Looking at the map, > 200 would do just as well and still lend itself to the author's point - some exist but not a huge amount. Even taking that point, high enough speed rail is good enough for inter-city travel, it isn't meant to be an aircraft replacement, it is an alternative form of travel. You wouldn't say that people shouldn't drive between cities, because airplanes are faster. It is an alternative form of travel which allows for mass transit, and in using it, you adjust expectations.
> Comfort and convenience are other important factors, but there aircraft are also quite competitive.
I doubt that, it's possible the author flies exclusively in business/first class, which is giving them a skewed perception. Aircraft are uncomfortable compared to trains.
> Contrast this with aircraft. There are 15,000 airports in the US. Any but the largest aircraft can fly to any of these airports. If I build another airport, I have added 15,000 potential connections to the network. If I build another rail terminal and branch line, at significantly greater cost than an airstrip, I have added only one additional connection to the network.
This is completely wrong. Building an airport doesn't automatically come with the ability to accept any aircraft. There are a lot of restrictions and regulations around what you can and cannot do with an airport and its associated routes. An "untowered paved strip" has a specific kind of usage which does not include commercial routes, which is what the premise of the post is, so this is a disingenuous, unfair, and misleading comparison.
That's a big red flag as anyone with half a brain knew it was bullshit.
But also, why not invest in virtual presence so we don't need to travel so much? Except if we want to.
Modern trains are infinitely more comfortable than modern planes, so they do not need to match planes in travel times. A modern train features silent travel, ample leg room, unpressurized air and no seat belts. Reliability is key and that does require infrastructure investment.
Rail infrastructure will always require subsidies but the costs do not have to be astronomical. Meanwhile, the cost of air traffic emissions are carried by society, which can't go on much longer.
To take the example of Europe, it's much more important to connect a location, by rail, with as many other locations in a radius of 200-300 km, and, even more importantly, to connect those other locations between themselves, than to connect that location by HSR with another one placed at ~1000 km. So, much more important to connect Paris with Caen, Nantes, Rennes, Brest, Reims, Rouen, Troyes, Tours, Orleans, and, more importantly, to connect Nantes with Caen, or Troyes with Tours, or Reims with Rouen, than is to spend the money in order to build a HSR between Paris and Berlin.
More to the point, I'd rather we spend the money to have the French rail network of 1914, which was slower, but which was covering a lot more places, than the French rail network of 2014, which is way faster, but which is covering fewer places. See this reddit thread for the relevant rail maps [1]
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/202ym3/evolution_o...
As a result there are many issues in both mere orographic terms and in maintenance terms.
Rails are good for applications like non perishable goods transport, they can sustain heavy loads, move them with less energy than others ground means, they are easy to automate, so ideal for mid and long range on-ground logistic.
For transporting people the air, yes, I'm definitively serious, is the best and cheapest solution:
- it's fast, at least it can be fast, while supporting a wide range of speeds and ranges
- it's flexible, behind VTOLs/STOLs we just need "terminal" infra, the path between them is free
- in whole infra terms it demand far less infra to build and maintain than roads and rails
You might argue that actually the cheapest STOL is far more expensive than a car, but in resource terms it's not. In fuel terms consume more than an equivalent (load capacity) car, for safety demand more entertainment to be sure nothing fails, but just in raw material terms is a damn cheap car, very little steel, less aluminum, a bit of copper, glass, eventually wood and plastic. On scale planes can be on par with cars in final product costs and while we need more energy we do not need complex road infrastructure hard to maintain and evolve. Not really flexible.
We do not develop such mean in most of the world just because we need roads anyway to move heavy loads, we already have much of them since centuries etc, but while most disagree it's the future. Some know and know most disagree https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... but as any real tech evolution it will happen, it's just a matter of time.
I'm Spain quite fast rail has replaced planes as the preferred means of travel. Spain, señite being quite "bumpy", does have the advantage that a hub structure is natural.
Not long after my sleeper train holiday I had to travel from Schiphol Airport for work, where I was expected to be 4 hours before take off. Those 4 hours could have been spent working in a train in a quiet zone, or looking at the scenery pass by.
Next time I will try to take a train instead of an airplane.
The key part.
If there's any, on a mile-per-mile basis, it's probably <0.001%.
The actual problem is that we have imposed a profitability imperative on some services and not others.
In Australia, where we have cheap petrol compared to Europe or Japan a little over half of petrol tax goes into roads or public transport.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-03-21/fuel-excise-not-being...
US highways subsidize other forms of transportation, too. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33222584>
>If there's any, on a mile-per-mile basis, it's probably <0.001%.
US highways do pay for themselves <https://web.archive.org/web/20170712175437/www.rita.dot.gov/...>, and help pay for other modes of transportation. Transit receives the biggest subsidy per passenger-mile, with rail and airlines in between.
(For those wishing more detail: From the executive summary <https://web.archive.org/web/20170628114204/http://www.rita.d...>:
>*Highways*
>* Users of the highway passenger transportation system paid significantly greater amounts of money to the federal government than their allocated costs in 1994-2000. <https://web.archive.org/web/20170628114204/http://www.rita.d...> This was a result of the increase in the deficit reduction motor fuel tax rates between October 1993 and September 1997, and the increase in Highway Trust Fund fuel tax rates starting in October 1997.
>* School and transit buses received positive net federal subsidies over the 1990-2002 period, but autos, motorcycles, pickups and vans, and intercity buses paid more than their allocated cost to the federal government.
>* On average, highway users paid $1.91 per thousand passenger-miles to the federal government over their highway allocated cost during 1990-2002.)
Consider a set of n cities.
Being able to go from one city to another by plane only requires n airports. However, to have a complete rail network, one needs n (n-1) / 2 tracks.
Hence the complexity analysis: one solution is linear, the other one is quadratic.
So you want to build a train network that costs hundred(s) of billions but skip adding a couple stations for millions of people the track is passing by? Sounds like a poor idea.
For those TLDR. HSR fails cost/benefit analysis.
The paragraph is very good :
"By CA HSR’s own numbers, the completed system may carry 35 million passengers per year by 2040, or 100,000 per day. This capacity could also be served by a fleet of just 40 737s (less than current LAX-SFO traffic), of which Boeing makes more than 500 per year. Bought new, this fleet would cost $3.6b, and with a lead time of, at most, a few months. Upgrades to Modesto and Bakersfield airport terminals could service the 737 for mere $10s of millions. The fleet would cost about $2.9b to operate each year, which under current airline business models can be served by fares of about $60 each way. If we operate this airline for free (no tickets!) for 40 years, the total operating costs climb to $120b, which is equivalent to CA HSR’s currently wildly unrealistic estimated construction costs."
Rail is great, for freight.
It only fails the cost/profit analysis. The benefits are priceless when we consider the environmental impact.
not really
environmental impact has limited costs, and investing to reduce environmental damage makes sense when benefits are sufficiently large for given cost
CA HSR is uniquely badly mismanagement and operating in runaway NIMBY land.
> The only good thing about trains are the views.
And allowed baggage, and far more space...
I think train-operators should build more trains with transparent walls cars and lounge-space. It's more fun to travel when you don't have to sit in the same place for many hours. But not sure how much it would add to the cost.
By plane is 30 minutes to the closest airport or 90 minutes to the two further away (by train or bus, about one every 20/30 minutes.) Boarding time, probably at least one hour (factor in the connection time with the train or bus). Taxi to take off, one hour flight, taxi to terminal, leaving the plane.
At this point we're spent about the same time. We still have to possibly collect luggage and go from the airport to the city. The high speed train is a no brainer.
Naples is one hour of train further away. The choice between train or plane starts to be more nuanced. I went by train last time because I just sit down once and I don't have to move me and my luggage anymore.
Milan to Paris? Fly.