Passenger jets travel about 500 miles an hour or faster.
Bullet trains (which we don't even have in the US) are around 100-200mph at best.
That's still a huge difference unfortunately, especially going 2500+ miles across the entire country.
Bullet trains (which we don't even have in the US) are around 100-200mph at best.
That's still a huge difference unfortunately, especially going 2500+ miles across the entire country.
Okay, let's look at that bullet train. At best that's 200 mph. A trip from SF to NY is then going to be 12.85 hrs. Assuming we go in a perfectly straight line (trains can't do this) and no stops. We'll say 13 for ease. A nonstop flight (not hard to find) is about 5.5 hrs.
In both situations we're only considering the travel time of the vehicle and not including anything like layovers/stops or boarding and unboarding. These are not one or two hour differences in travel time and thus security would make the difference, there are over 7hrs difference! You could fly all the way back to SFO before that bullet train rider gets to NYC (you're already through security). (We're also assuming that as trains get more popular that similar security theater isn't also introduced)
Now I do think people would still take the train fwiw because even with a 7hr travel time takes up all your day and flying sucks. Plenty of people will make this trade as long as trains don't sardine pack like airlines do. But let's also not fool ourselves into thinking the times are roughly the same and that that train also isn't going to take closer to 16hrs to go across country. Which even means doubling the speed (400mph) still makes it slower than a plane with security check-ins.
I looked it up out of curiosity. To travel the length of Japan's bullet train network, which goes most of the length of the country, it takes 3 trains and 31 stops, for a total of just under 12 hours. A flight between the same locations is just over 3 and a half hours.
For those who want to look it up, these figures are for Kagoshima-Chuo Station to Shin-Hakodate Hokuto Station.
I can see how the train would be come out ahead for shorter distances, but I think this kind of trip is more reasonable of a comparison with the distance of flights that many Americans are taking.
Extrapolating from there your train would take 36hours.
Surely a US train could aim to be up there with the fastest?
Even with that boost though, your point remains.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/travel/article/worlds-fastest-trains...
Also note that while the Shanghai Maglev does have a maximum speed of 268mph it has an average speed of 139/155mph (different schedules = different speeds). We need to consider average when calculating travel times. You'll also note that on that CNN page that several of those trains have test runs that reach near 400mph! This is good for considering where we might be able to get with high levels of optimization but they do not reflect the reality of speeds that a passenger will actually experience. Considering the extrapolations we'd realistically need trains that could have max speeds above 600mph and sustained speeds (through quite windy areas and mountains mind you) of 400+mph.
I do think cross continental passenger trains can still have a market but I think more coastal focused lines will have substantially better markets and we shouldn't expect trans-continental train alternatives to planes being popular for quite some time. The coastal lines mostly make sense because the total times are still relatively short and we consider the convenience tradeoff more influential. I'm pretty sure that this trade-off is highly non-linear with respect to travel time (convenience weakly dominates in short transit but time strongly dominates on long hauls).
Transcontinental bullet trains across North America are a total pipe dream just based on simple geography. But bullet trains should play a role in our regional transportation infrastructure.
So I took train since land borders were much more permissive. Instead of 1.5h flight + a bit of time extra around, it took me full 2 days with extra sleep in Barcelona of fastest bullet trains Europe has (TGV + Spanish equivalent, 300kmh was frequent speed) to get home.
That's not even through-Europe crossing, rather a relatively small hop within south-western part of Europe. It was more expensive as flights too (but not that much, but then there was hotel). Any destination we went through for holidays in past few years are completely unreachable by trains, and the amount of hops (stress, delays, missed connections) is massive. Train networks have much more massive cascade issues with delays propagating like tsunami far and wide. Trains simply don't cover much apart from few very narrow cases in best possible situation globally. Everywhere else, train networks are much worse.
Japan is the size of California.
> You factor that into your plan and travel comfortably and peacefully.
If train travel became as popular as air travel in the US, the TSA would pay just as much attention to making it as miserable as air travel.
Train stations are often conveniently located in crowded downtowns. Airports are located some distance away.
Security is a lot more of a problem on planes because hijacking planes is a problem. Hijacking trains is pointless.
And security is not just about hijackings. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_...
Yes the seats are obviously more comfy than plane (although one should compare with business class because it costs similar), but turbulence is not fair comparison.
No matter how many want to avoided crowded places, they are crowded because a lot of people are already there, and a lot of others would like to grow. And this is only possible if there actually are good ways to get there.
To serve a geographically spread out group, it is reasonable to build a a hub and spoke system. And the geographically convenient place to put the hub generally already has a city built there exactly because it is geographically convenient.
If I--and almost certainly many other people who don't live in the city--had to drive into and park in downtown Boston to take Amtrak it wouldn't remotely be a consideration. And, yes, there's commuter rail but now you're adding hours to traveling.
At that point I'm just driving into NY or maybe driving to a NY commuter rail station.
The only real credible threat is mass violence against the passengers. That could just as easily occur in any crowed public space.
Not coincidentally, these are historically the most commonly used methods.
Boarding a passenger car from which it is hard to get to the engine where the engineer is driving the train is far less likely to be effective.
Meanwhile, the fastest train in India averages under 60 mph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatimaan_Express
How do you figure that? I'm thinking out loud here: If we use some real examples: I'm lucky in that most of my family lives near major travel hubs, so I can fly direct most of the time. However, they all live in various places along the east coast of the US whereas I'm on the west coast. My trip last summer to see one group of them represented a 3100 mile / 5000 kilometer journey.
The flight was 5 hours and 30 minutes. Let's add 2 hours of airport shenanigans to cover showing up ahead of boarding, handling bags, picking up luggage on the far side, etc. So 7 hours 30 minutes of travel (not counting commute to or from airport, but you'd have to get to your high speed rail station as well)
(as an addendum, I was able to take public transit on both sides - busses & BART on the bay area side, and a local commuter rail on the far side. I had to get picked up by car from the train station though, no busses in that town)
The fastest Japanese and European high speed trains go 300 km/hr. That's 16 and a half hours of rolling at top speed - no stops, slowdowns, sharing slower track, etc. If you stop at major cities along the way (say one stop per US state), you're probably looking at 20 hours of time on the train - each stop meaning you have to stop for 5-10 minutes, slow down and speed up, generally not be able to hit top speed in the confines of the city, etc.
The transit time would be nearly triple in the best case scenario for a coast to coast flight in the US.
The only thing I can think that would mitigate this is, as you said, sleeper cars. West coast to east coast is generally considered a lost day between the travel time and the timezone shift. I guess if you start your train journey in the early morning and sleep on the train that evening, arriving in the early morning next day, it could make up for the "get to the family's place and immediately go to sleep" pattern. You're just sleeping enroute rather than at your destination.
For "mid range" journeys, take a bullet train trip I did in Japan: Sendai -> Hiroshima. I spent 6 hours on the train, the flight would've been about and hour and a half plus the extra 2 hours of airport fun. Because it was a vacation I wasn't going to meaningfully fill the "saved" 2 to 3 hours and the train was way more comfortable. But, for business travel, this wouldn't have been good. In the US it's not an uncommon pattern to take a flight to the next major city for same-day business to avoid hotel costs.
For flights so short the airport time exceeds or matches the train difference, obviously this doesn't matter (e.g. SF <-> LA travel if California high speed rail manages to survive until completion).
But you may be sent from SF to Chicago and be expected to attend meetings upon arrival. Can't do that with high speed rail. Even if they went 50% faster, it'll take 7-8 hours to reach Chicago from California.
For the record, I love high speed trains. I've enjoyed using them in the countries that have them. But the longest journey I've ever taken on one is that Sendai to Hiroshima trip, and the second longest is Munich to Berlin (I originated in Innsbruck, Austria but the leg to Munich was not on a high speed train).
It'd be great if we could replace "intra-state" or "neighboring-state" flights with trains, places where they really are faster or at comparable travel times. Obviously none of this is looking at the fact that all of these high speed trains are electric, so they could be powered from zero-carbon or carbon-neutral sources, whereas air travel is a significant source of emissions. But that's a separate argument.
If we could train more of those the airlines might be able to run their continental flights more successfully.