Texas could get a bullet train between Houston and Dallas

TxDOT is also actively making the problem worse by widening I-35 through Austin, which will result in a decade of construction. They could support alternative transit if they chose to, but it will never happen.

Even in cities with majority support for this type of thing, we can't get it done. See: Austin's Project Connect failure.

The problem is that most Americans have never lived in an area that is not car dependent and experienced the benefits. Their biggest exposure has likely been on a trip to Europe/Asia (and they wonder why the area they visited is so much nicer than their home city, never quite making the connection!).

I think this is probably the root of the problem in the US, including the “what will happen to my home values” type sentiments. Not saying that this is “right” morally, but blaming “car culture” as if it is some isolated delusion without deeper causes is probably not accurate.

- They are targeting business airline travel. The volume of business air commuters across this corridor was specifically why they decided to start with these two cities.

- This is privately funded (although certainly with government help like airlines).

- Dallas & Houston are 239 miles apart. It's really the sweet spot for HSR to be very competitive with air travel, especially when you factor in the airport experience.

All that said, there are SO many hurdles yet to overcome and the project has stopped and restarted a few times already. But I think this project is very well informed by the challenges and failures of California's HSR efforts and probably has the best shot of actually happening across all the national initiatives I know about.

EDIT: There was already an Amtrak partnership in place but it was really just allowing passengers to purchase tickets for the Texas Bullet Train via Amtrak. This seems like conversation to broaden the partnership, though details are sketchy. More partnership from Amtrak almost seems to add risk, though I understand it may be a necessary evil.

I recently traveled to Germany on business, traveled from Berlin to Munich via the ICE inter-city train.

Arrived in downtown Munich, hotel was 7.3 miles driving from the station. I jumped on the u-bahn made a quick transfer at Odeonsplatz and arrived at the hotel in 30 mins–including a 10 minute walk from the train station.

Door to door from Berlin to the hotel in Munich was 5 hours. If one were to drive my trip door to door, maps says 361mi/580km traveled if driving direct with a drive time of 5.5 hours.

For comparisons sake, let's take a hypothetical trip from Dallas Union Station to Apple's headquarters in Austin, TX, which is located 14.7mi/24.6km from the Austin train station.

According to Apple Maps, using public transit would take 9 hours. Driving direct from Dallas Union Station to Apple HQ in Austin is 187mi/300km in total with a drive time of 3 hours.

Yet somehow millions of people a year manage to fly to Texas without then becoming stranded at the airport due to not having been able to bring their car. This proves that either you don't need to connect the end points of long distance transportation systems to local mass transit, or Texas in fact does know how and has done so for airports. If the latter, then why could they not do the same for HSR?

It is hard to see that most people would prefer to use a train than a car to travel between cities unless they were going from a place close to a station to another place close to a station. So maybe the population might be simply democratically making choices to not invest in this because it goes against their preferences - instead of them being "deluded".

A different thing is intracity public transportation, like subway and bus systems. In many cases, I'd rather take the subway than use a car. But I lived in a very high density city, and it would take decades, if not over a century, to turn Dallas and Houston into high density so intracity systems would be convenient.

How has no one mentioned the actual reason it won’t happen? Texas citizens are not so enamored with cars that they prevent this from happening. Texans that frequently travel between Houston and Dallas fly Southwest Airlines because Southwest has spent an inordinate amount of money lobbying to prevent rail[0].

> Furthermore, HSR also requires some level of last mile connectivity by local mass public transit.

What do you think all the current business travelers are doing with their cars when they fly?

[0] https://www.texastribune.org/2014/03/07/firm-planning-texas-...

We just a major derailment accident (cargo train) in the Gotthard-Basistunnel forcing it closed for at least a week. [1] This even though it is one of the most maintained parts of the infrastructure and cost around 30 million a year in maintenance. A 57 km tunnel of non-high speed rail. I can only imagine the costs to maintain a high-speed rail line and make sure it is safe.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Switzerland/comments/15o3y1l/train_...

German here. Absolutely no chance? What would be the first step in this direction?

I imagine that to make HSR happen, first one would have to create walkable cities which make people want to use public transport so that the local transit network gets expanded which in turn makes high-speed rail viable.

Couldn't one start locally with closing downtown to cars? Would there be any chance for this to happen anywhere?

https://hsr.ca.gov/

SF-LA high-speed rail

The TSA/etc overhead make this suck for short-distance hops and from an environmental perspective it isn't very exciting, but it proves the point that Americans are willing to leave their car behind when traveling if the mass transit offers sufficient advantage over cars.

There is no delusion. Private cars a superior. If public transit were actually better, you'd see the German Chancellor preferring it over a private car. But you don't.

It’s like Caltrain, for many driving is actually a faster commute than taking Caltrain. People took Caltrain though as the 20mins ish more the train takes makes up not sitting in standstill traffic.

To Texas credit there is a luxury bus service vonlane that’s not bad

Never going to happen

Edit: The Dallas to Houston time is very wrong, against a 3+ hours drive trains have a chance.

---- G̶m̶a̶p̶s̶ ̶t̶e̶l̶l̶s̶ ̶m̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶D̶a̶l̶l̶a̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶H̶o̶u̶s̶t̶o̶n̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶h̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶d̶r̶i̶v̶e̶.̶ When you factor in the time spent in the train stations, the possibility of delay, etc, I don't think high speed trains can be fast enough to offer a clear advantage over driving such a short distance. A substantial fraction of that hour will be spent just getting to the train station in the first place, presumably using other intracity mass transit, or else driving your car to the station, possibly through the city, finding a parking spot, etc.

Planes succeed at competing with cars because they can turn a 10 hour drive into 1 or 2 hours, 2 or 3 hours including time to get to the airport and get through TSA. If it can't cut down on travel time by at least 50% then I think it won't succeed, and getting the whole journey under 30 minutes seems implausible. These cities are just too close together to make it work.

The Eastern seaboard of the U.S. absolutely has a) a very linear quality to it (from DC to Boston), b) density, and it's been so since the the early 19th century. Canada is huge, but its population lives along a very narrow latitude band, so it's linear (and low-density).

Outside the Eastern seaboard the U.S. really is huge, with nothing like a linear arrangement of cities.

The hang up was always the cost (not the environmental cost, likes the birds or whatever) and Brightline being privately owned meant zero hang ups

FL is a forward looking state: it looks forward to different future than Cali dysfunction

Airports are usually at the outskirts of cities where land is abundant. Central train stations are just that, central. Would there really be enough free land in downtown Houston and Dallas to create huge new car-rental infrastructure?

"Millions of Americans" could be less than 1% of Americans. How do the short hop regional flight numbers compare to the number of American driving equivalent distances?

Intrastate flights can be better than typical flying if you're using regional airports without the TSA, but these aren't the kind of airports near major population centers. There are a few scenarios where roads aren't an option, particularly Hawaii where short-hop flights are competing with ferries, not roads. Hawaii alone is probably a substantial fraction of that millions.

However, I used to travel to Houston all the time from New Orleans and I flew. That's more like a 5 hour drive (vs. 3-4 from Houston to Dallas) and I rented a car when I got there. Where I was going was basically never in anything like a city center.

Having to or wanting to rent a car when you travel to somewhere does significantly lessen the potential train advantage of dropping you off in downtown if that's not where you need to be.

Those routes didn't need tens of $billions in land acquisition and construction costs.

America is spread out because it serves the fossil fuel interests for cities to be zoned to their benefit.

The land between Dallas and Houston is fertile and valuable, and much of it is also oil country. Oil producers probably wouldn't mind ceding some land to a train project, but farmers and homesteaders absolutely would mind, and you can expect lawsuits for years and years.

The land between San Antonio and Austin is more expensive since it's all already an urban corridor, so the train would have to track West, except that West isn't feasible because it's Hill Country, so it would have to track East, but East is also quite urban/suburban as well. The further East you go, the better the land is for farming, the more it's worth.

The land between Houston and SA/Austin is quite valuable because, again, it's a long corridor of small towns with lots of very fertile land (all of it being East of I-35).

The land between Austin and Dallas is drier -so less valuable- and fairly flat, but still there's a lot of towns between DFW and Austin. This is probably the cheapest land to acquire for this project.

Just the land costs for this would be enormous. And conventional train tracks cost on the order of $1m/mile at least, with high-speed train tracks costing more. Because high-speed rail needs to be straighter and flatter, there will be more constraints on what land could be used, and geographic constraints will be more costly.

On the plus side Texas is now willing to tax businesses more in order to tax residents less. That might lead to the state being willing to raise the funds for this project, but I guarantee you it's going to be extremely contentious.

Do _anything_ of significance, and you will get hordes of people that demand that YOU pay for a hypothetical 5% decrease in delusional fictional real estate value.

Progress is grinding to a halt. We're economies broken by people who will not allow to take one step back to allow two steps forward.