To go from coast to coast even with a dedicated high speed train would easily take a day or two. It’s just not competitive over 1000km.
The _lowest_ internationally accepted limit for high speed rail is 125mph.
Even if Beightline ever actually upgrades to 110mph that still won’t be real HSR.
They also have a real problem with Florida drivers being Florida drivers. True high speed rail is fully grade separated (no road crossings)
That said, this is their plan for the expansion to Orlando:
> Brightline will terminate at this station once the 170-mile (270 km) Orlando Extension track is built. Trains will run up to 125 mph (201 km/h) with a travel time of approximately three hours from Orlando's airport to Miami.
So even though there already is a sort of high speed rail between DC and Philly, I, as resident in the suburbs, would probably just drive unless work was paying for ubers on both ends. Even if Acela was a true HSP rail, that wouldn't really change my calculus.
So while there is a goldilocks zone where cars take too long and its too short for airplanes to be faster, it's probably not very viable.
If my circumstances were different, and that time was mostly recoverable as leisure then it's absolutely great advice, but it doesn't scale to every person.
You'd be much better off spending that money on local commuter rail, which is more or less a prerequisite for HSP to work anyway.
I live in a city with decent buses, 3 street train lines and a commuter rail, and use the street lines frequently. Unless your departure and destination are right on the train line, you're still looking at a 1 hour - 2 hour commute with possible missed connections every step of the way. To canvas the city thoroughly you would need buses or trains running every 10 minutes, on every 3rd or 5th block. They would also need to be preferable to the alternative (a personal vehicle with no disruptive passengers, controlled climate, that is available when and where you need it).
Do I love taking the train into the city center for a night on the town, or out to the airport to avoid parking? Absolutely. Will I sacrifice 3 hours out of my day just so that I can say I'm saving the planet? Probably not.
The only way it would work would be some giant weave pattern of train lines where 1 car continues on, one departs left, and one departs right every stop. The budget and logistics of that would make it prohibitively expensive and prone to failure. There are also loads of reasons why people can't take transit (kids, cargo, late night / early morning schedules) and if they're not 80% solved, it will never catch on in the states.
Such a disconnect.
If it was a 5 minute drive, in city, you could just walk there in 10.
Parent effectively said "not close". So you suggest a 1 hour drive, a 2 hour train, instead of a 90 minute drive?
(You also have to wait for the train to leave, wait for its stops along the way, and be there precisely on time (hence the wait at the start)).
I find so many of the comments boil down to "I live deep in a city, never drive, and am in an entirely different geopolitical environment, but I know what makes sense for you!
Having a system that takes people only from where they live to where they work is much more inconvenient when individual cars allow people to go from work to the kids’ sports game to Costco to a relatives house and then home.
But that model of public transit is not tenable outside of places with density like Manhattan. Even in New York City, all the public transit is mostly focused on getting people into and out of Manhattan, so people in outer boroughs like to have cars.
This is what a public transit map that would compete with the convenience of individual cars would look like:
https://www.tokyometro.jp/en/subwaymap/
Contrast with the best that the USA can do:
Not that Tokyo is perfect, but it still has a far greater radius that link with each other without going to the central district.
And my house is too expensive because I'm only 5 minute from the subway. The vast majority of people have to live further.
If I was going to downtown Philly, might be worth it. But if I wasn't, then driving would absolutely be a lot fast. Since I'd have to navigate the last miles there adding more time.
The ability to just leave whenever I want without having to connect a bunch of train rides is pretty valuable even if it took longer.
EDIT: and to make it clear, I'm not a suburanite who is allergic to public transport. Until a year ago, I lived in the city and didn't have a personal car. And even now, I'd take Acela to NYC rather than fly or drive. It just doesn't make sense for other stops on the way like Philly, Wilmington, Baltimore. And Boston would take too long on Acela, and I'd fly instead.
But... doing so requires driving an hour in basically the wrong direction to the suburban Amtrak station. And then it takes longer than driving directly would. The only reason I do it is that I hate driving into Manhattan and parking there. Whereas when I arrive by train I can just walk to my hotel.
And, yeah, for Boston to DC I'll typically fly. The train is viable and I've done it but it's a full day trip vs. a short flight. And one of the airports is right on the metro vs. the NYC airports which are not.
As of November 2022, the DC silver metro line now includes Dulles International (IAD). So both of the major airports are now directly connected.
https://www.wmata.com/rider-guide/silver-line-extension/Wash...
This is enabled by the fact that train stations have much more limited footprints, and that multiple train stations in a city do not get in each other’s way.
Heck in China many of the "small" cities on HSR lines are larger then Portland OR.
I definitely think that the markets would be far better doing along the coasts rather than connecting them, but I don't think there is zero market either.
If the train is an overnight with a bed, and goes midtown to midtown, I’d take it every time.
For as slow as such a train ride would be, it still seems implausibly fast. For example, flying from Seattle to Miami today takes less than 6 hours. If you laid a perfectly straight rail line all the way from Seattle to Miami, and ran a TGV along it at its top speed with no stops, it'd take more than 13 hours. And once you make the train case even slightly more realistic instead of using all of those best-case assumptions that are impossible in practice, you easily exceed 15 hours too.
As far as the ancillary logistics, less secondary infrastructure is needed meaning you don't have to go to a designated chunk of land the size of a midsized town that literally cannot be conveniently located, and you avoid the hassle associated with onboarding (read: the TSA). Luggage also doesn't seem to be nearly as much of a hassle for whatever reason. I'm not sure if this would carry over to true high-volume long distance trains, but at the very least the baggage problem is conceptually simpler than at an airport.
There are definitely downsides for the passenger, mostly the added time in transit, but in my experience this only matters is when you require quick turnaround and spontaneity in your travel — in which case you'd just take a plane. For a trip that is planned in advance, even a cross-country train trip can make sense, especially if you work on your computer/phone.
The main downside is that long-distance train travel requires a sleeper car and a roomette to be really viable in the general case, and this is hard to scale. This may be an unsolvable problem since it's just so much less space-efficient than row seats, but if it isn't I see no reason why long distance rail couldn't carve out a significant chunk of the cross-country market.
Is every track maintained every night? No. But:
* it is incredibly dangerous for a high speed train to collide with anything low speed (track maintenance vehicles, supplies, or workers). The rights of way are so constrained that there is no safe way to have them maintain only one track out of two, so they insist on total separation as a policy: https://international-railway-safety-council.com/wp-content/...
* the Shinkansen are a two track network without parallel lines of the same gauge, so any maintenance reroute would require changing to either a normal train or to a bus, making sleepers impossible to operate normally. Even if you could though, trains need regular schedules for both riders and employees, and using different reroutes every night would be a scheduling nightmare