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Comment by abalashov | Hacker News Reader

Whatever the commercial viability of this particular idea, I hope that pressure from such ventures, whether delusional or otherwise, can inspire greater democratisation and fare transparency in air travel. For instance, I would be willing to pay an airline some amount of monthly recurring fees (though perhaps not $1k) to option certain seats on a large selection of flights at low prices. The monthly recurring revenue could, in theory, offset the impact of my unpredictability as a passenger on booking calculations.

Edit: On the other hand, I'd much rather the money go into some sort of vaguely 21st century high-speed rail infrastructure, particularly for short to medium inter-city trips. The absence of such makes us the laughingstock of Europe and Asia.

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> I'd much rather the money go into some sort of vaguely 21st century high-speed rail infrastructure, particularly for short to medium inter-city trips.

Yikes! No! This is a complete waste of money. Our cities are just not built to make use of something like this. The various stake holders (environmental groups, politicians, industry, unions, etc.) all but make sure that these projects will cost ten times more than they should and end-up in exactly the wrong places. And, because of this, not enough people will use them.

Take the proposal that was floating around a while ago (maybe still is) to build a high-speed rail connection between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Maybe it is a good idea, I don't know. Here's the problem. The start point in LA is Central Station. That's Downtown Los Angeles. In other words, an hour to two hours away from this great mass of people living in the area. That is, if you even want to consider going Downtown (it ain't like Downtown San Francisco). I know I have absolutely zero interest in driving 50 miles to get on a train. Heck, I avoid LAX like the plague.

Don't get me wrong. I'd love to see mass transportation akin to what they have in Europe. On my most recent trip I took the train from Amsterdam to Munich. I was great. I think that Europe evolved into this infrastructure while we evolved into something else.

Take a city like Amsterdam and look at the light rail going everywhere. And take a look at the tens of thousands of bikes running around. That bike parking lot in Dam Square across from Central Station is simply amazing. Their culture and way of life have evolved around these ideas. Try to bring something like that into a megalopolis like Los Angeles and you'll fail. The place simply was not built with this kind of thinking in the first place. Heck, I drive 60 miles a day just picking up my kids from school!

I would like to see a transition to something more sensible than what we are doing today. I really would. I just don't think that high-speed rail is the way to do it and, therefore, think that investing in it would be a complete waste of money and resources.

If you want to feed money into something that has the potential to make great changes given our way of life and culture, send your monthly check to companies like Tesla. We desperately need to move away from these horrible, polluting and inefficient gasoline engines into something that provides greater options in terms of where energy might come from and could just be better for the environment.

When in Europe do as the Europeans. Here in the US. Well.

The proposed maglev train to Vegas from LA was supposed to be from Anaheim (aka Disneyland), not Union ("Central") Station in Downtown LA. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California-Nevada_Interstate_Ma...

So a 1-2 hour drive for anyone living in Bev Hills, Hollywood, Brentwood, Santa Monica, etc... Not that Union Station is much more central. LA is just too damn big (geographically) to make that viable.

I think the choice of Anaheim was made in terms of moving tourists, proximity to Disney, right of way etc. Also Metrolink & Amtrak go to Anaheim, so you could in theory take the train from the Valley or SD and not have to drive at all

High speed rails rarely go directly to suburbs. That's the realm of supporting transit - busses, subways, light rail, etc. They're far more valuable going directly between commerce centers, where there are reasons for people to travel, and where supporting transit will actually be used to get to/from the center (since nobody actually lives there).

If the high-speed rail were put in, and that great mass of people would use it, there would be money in providing transit between the rail and the great mass of people. So it could be built, and problem solved. But I don't see how going to great mass X (instead of Y, Z, etc) is better than great(est) commerce center A.

As to those locations specifically - I have no idea if they're suitable. But high speed transit goes to city centers, not fringes, basically everywhere in the world, and this should be no different.

"High speed rails rarely go directly to suburbs."

And therein lies the problem for high speed rail in the US. We don't have that supporting network, and we're not going to. We're too spread out in our cities for it to work.

So it's drive 30 miles to the train station and then pay $15 a day for parking while on your trip, like the airport.

Definitely - most places in the US can't support a rail system. Partly because we're so spread out, but partly because it's a catch 22: we don't have it, so we all have cars, so we won't use it if we're offered it because cars are more convenient and they're already a sunk cost. Then there's also that our culture doesn't cast a very good light on public transit (homeless people, pee, graffiti, etc), and we're still very caught up in cars == freedom mentality.

edit: all that said, I'm not aware of anywhere that has high-speed rails going outside city centers. But I'm hardly an expert on this - I'd love a counter-example. Japan, for instance, has their bullet trains essentially only between city centers, and subway and light rail supporting it. And that's one of the better rail systems in the world.

Homeless people, pee and graffiti are fairly easy problems to solve, and can be turned around quite fast. Lots of places have resolved this.

The sunk cost argument can be overcome if you make public transport faster than cars, less congestion and parking difficulties is a big change. But you do have to rebuild it first (yes the US had public transport in the past, you ripped it out).

They're fairly easy problems to solve, but public opinion of it generally lags behind reality. And the occasional reappearance only strengthens it in people's minds for longer. So even once you've solved it, you still need to wait what are likely to be years to see the general population actually using the system without it being their last resort. During that time, funding threatens to drop because of lack of use. You need people willing to throw massive amounts of money at it until it works, not until it stops making money.

And yeah, if public transit gets better than personal, things will change very quickly. But that path involves trillions of dollars, and just try getting a tax increase voted through for one. I'd love it, but it's not happening any time soon, and certainly not on a large scale.

cars != freedom. cars == parking nightmare. I always feel so free when I don't have to think about finding parking.

I've heard that we've got a great existing rail infrastructure--the problem being that most isn't straight enough or suitable for use with high speed trains.

For example, the last train trip I took stopped a handful of times while we waited for livestock to finish crossing the tracks. High speed trains do not do this.

In St. Louis, the suburbs have actively petitioned against and succeeded in blocking light rail service from the city. They are convinced that somehow evil city dwellers (mostly black, let's be honest) are going to come out to rob everything they own. Only in the last few years did the rail service even extend to the near western suburbs near the fancy malls, which if St Louis wasn't gerrymandered to shreds, would probably be part of the city limits.

It turned out the nightmare scenario came to pass and lots of young, black, lower income residents from East St Louis started showing up to the mall. A strange thing happened though, instead of destroying the area, they mostly just brought a lot of money and purchased things.

Seems obvious to me, but rich white folks be crazy sometimes and mostly they write the checks when it comes to city planning.

What do you think about this article?

http://www.riverfronttimes.com/2008-08-20/news/out-of-contro...

  Ask virtually any store manager at the Saint Louis 
  Galleria about shoplifting, and you'll invariably get two 
  responses: One, it's out of control; and two, it's gotten 
  exceedingly worse since August 2006, when MetroLink opened 
  a stop just 500 yards from the high-end shopping center.

  In the first six months of this year, Richmond Heights 
  police made 345 arrests at the mall. That's nearly double 
  the number of arrests made in all of 2005, before 
  MetroLink opened its Shrewsbury line.

  More alarming are the numbers of juveniles (kids under the 
  age of seventeen) arrested at the mall. This year police 
  are on pace to take 276 juveniles into custody for 
  shoplifting and other offenses — a sevenfold increase over 
  the 39 kids arrested at the Galleria in 2005.

  "I know it's not politically correct, but how else do you 
  explain it?" comments a frustrated Galleria store manager 
  who, like many Galleria shopkeepers interviewed by 
  Riverfront Times, says her employer prohibits her from 
  officially speaking for the company.

  "Anyone can see all these people crossing Brentwood 
  Boulevard from the MetroLink station," the manager 
  continues. "Most of them aren't here to shop. They're here 
  to hang out and cause trouble."

These statistics appear to support the supposition that the MetroLink connection did indeed increase crime at the malls. Do you have any data to support the alternative hypothesis that "rich white folks be crazy"?

The real key is the bottom line for the shop, if theft has doubled and sales have doubled then the shop should be making more money.

That isn't addressed, all the article says is that theft is up.

To be pedantic, the important metrics are not percentage increases but rather the change in profits and the change in costs associated with theft.

That's not pedantic, those are the same metrics retailers use when making decisions.

I said I was being pedantic because I was agreeing with the post's main point (what matters is the bottom line for the shop) but felt there could be a better way to describe what it means for it to be better for the bottom line.

Well, be Bayesian about it.

The incidents described in the full article include huge violent fistfights that led to curfews. Low income people are unlikely to spend lots of money. Lots of theft and violence is accompanied by lots of broken windows behavior that may not rise to the level of a criminal offense, but does scare away higher income people (example: screaming at the screen in a movie theater). And very few retail shops operate at 100% margins such that a doubling of revenue would exactly compensate for a doubling in theft.

All in all, it is highly likely that events transpired as predicted by the project's critics. No doubt the proponents like homosaur did not sell the project as "violence will increase, thefts will double, and your previous patrons like Johnny Fields will leave, but...". They instead tried to insinuate that "rich white people be crazy" to think something like this might happen.

And very few retail shops operate at 100% margins such that a doubling of revenue would exactly compensate for a doubling in theft.

They don't need 100% margins to come out on top if they sell more units than are stolen.

So if a shop was selling 10 units an hour and losing 1 unit an hour to theft, and footfall doubled (simplistically doubling sales and thefts), then the shop is now selling 20 units an hour and losing 2 to theft. At realistic margins, the shop is more profitable than it was.

The article says that arrests doubled, not that the costs associated with theft doubled.

Note that "costs associated with thefts" is not just the cost of the goods stolen. It includes the costs of security.

I also like how you think that they should be happy with your model, that how they feel about the situation is of no consequence.

They have to live with this situation; they've got skin in the game. You just post.

The article says that arrests doubled, not that the costs associated with theft doubled.

I wasn't discussing the article, but correcting errors in someone else's post.

I also like how you think that they should be happy with your model, that how they feel about the situation is of no consequence.

I never said what I think about the situation. I merely corrected someone else's financial misunderstanding.

They have to live with this situation; they've got skin in the game. You just post.

You're clearly angry at something. I strongly suggest you deal with this yourself, rather than continue to flail around and vent your frustration on strangers over the internet.

Violent fistfights are what make news. Just because something is news doesn't mean there is an underlying statistical basis to justify the conclusion of the article. Articles in papers are anecdotal in nature.

Actually low income people spend HUGE amounts of money, if you study economics you'd know that poor people pay more for almost any good than do the rich. What I mean by this is that the poor will by 500mL of milk rather than 4L, and so in a year when you look at the costs of milk for the poor they are more than the rich. Similarly, the poor shop at convenience stores and the rich shop at warehouse stores further exacerbating the price differential.

I will say, in rich white folks' defense, that the particular incident that is discussed in that article was pretty shocking; it wasn't just a couple of fistfights, it was a mini-riot. We're talking about 50 kids fighting here.

The issue of violence amongst teens has not been solved yet in St. Louis, even if the Galleria figured it out. The Delmar Loop, the other area talked about there, still has a major problem with petty crime and even had a shooting related to the spontaneous gathering of urban teenagers quite recently. The businesses can't have this both ways. They want all the increased business but they don't want to deal with paying for security. SLPD cannot solve these problems on their own and the Loop has dropped the ball on security and people are well aware of it now.

> They want all the increased business

Don't think it has yet been shown that their business actually increased due to these kids. The quotes from the article indicate otherwise: high income residents and middle lass kids were driven away by the violence and then the curfew. The mall owners aren't conflicted here, things transpired just as they had predicted.

That just isn't accurate though. That's not what happened at all. Yes, there was a period of about a year where they did not increase security or have a curfew or parental supervision policy in place where there were several incidents and a higher crime rate. That IMMEDIATELY plummeted over 25% after the parental supervision policy went in to place and by 2010 had dropped to levels that were essentially the same rate as existed before the metro stop was built.

You can't judge this from an outdated article about 2007. That was from that time period when it was a security free for all out there. The people who want to cause trouble certainly know they are not welcome at that mall anymore and will be arrested if they cause any trouble.

I'm guessing the Nordstroms, which is a very high end designer-centric dept. store with $200 silk ties and the like didn't move a 2 story store last year because the high income residents stopped coming. In fact, I'm sure the complete opposite is true.

That general hypothesis seems to be supported by the massive expansion of the Galleria in recent years, including the giant new Apple store, several new restaurants, Nordstroms, etc

Just so you know, this article might have been accurate in 2006, but it's completely outdated. Kids don't get to hang out in the mall anymore and security at the Galleria is quite strict on this. There is a very staunch curfew policy there and I haven't heard of any incidents of violence like this since probably 2006 or 2007 and I would say that's the mall's fault in the first place for not being ready security-wise. They are now and there are zero problems other than the same shoplifting that goes on everywhere.

http://voices.yahoo.com/st-louis-mall-sees-crime-drop-after-...

Suburbs of Atlanta, where I live, have also very energetically blocked any expansion of the downtown subway system, for the exact same reasons, rooted in racialised politics. As a result, the system has not been expanded since 1989, and, despite its potential, goes to uselessly few places that have no imaginable relevance to the existence of 90% of metro Atlanta residents.

The funny thing is, all the poor black people from the inner city come to their suburbs anyway. Who else is going to work in their low-wage retail sector? It's just that instead of doing so in an efficient and economical manner, they do so in old, broken-down cars that greatly contribute to the traffic problem that causes these very same suburbanites so much agony.

“Everyone knows what M.A.R.T.A. really stands for.”

Of course. :-)

"It turned out the nightmare scenario came to pass and lots of young, black, lower income residents from East St Louis started showing up to the mall. A strange thing happened though, instead of destroying the area, they mostly just brought a lot of money and purchased things."

If the new arrivals had so much money, why couldn't they just drive in earlier? Why did they have to wait till (cheap) public transportation was available to come to this mall?

They could, and probably did. But I would guess that the majority of them came and used it because of ease, not low cost.

You mean why didn't they blow thousands of dollars per year on an inefficient mode of transportation irrelevant to their ordinary daily lives? Can't imagine.

The first rail project is sheer madness. A giant wasteful boondoggle. The second is too. The 50th, however starts to bring real change. People want to live near the stations, and start thinking of travel differently. The 100th brings sea-change. Everything becomes different.

Commuter culture doesn't make rail, its the other way around.

If an LA - Vegas rail funded by the Casinos brings wealth along the way to Indian country then I am so grateful.

Of course American cities aren't built to support it, with their own present state of extremely automotive, exurban decentralization and highly distributed typography. It's a catch 22 that can only be solved by rather preemptive "build it and they will come" style investment, the goal being to slowly influence organic behaviour patterns over time. In the best possible case, people will start moving closer and closer to rail lines, and density of coverage will continue to usefully increase. In some cities that have developed entirely along the automotive paradigm, particularly New South developments like Atlanta (where I live), that may not be possible without a very radical restructuring, given their extremely hostile layout to anything but the car.

Nevertheless, if you give any credence whatsoever to a hydrocarbon-constrained future (and there are plenty of compelling reasons to do so), electric high-speed rail is the only option that makes sense.

> Yikes! No! This is a complete waste of money. Our cities are just not built to make use of something like this. The various stake holders (environmental groups, politicians, industry, unions, etc.) all but make sure that these projects will cost ten times more than they should and end-up in exactly the wrong places. And, because of this, not enough people will use them.

Our cities are not built to take advantage of rail infrastructure because for half a century we have been heavily subsidizing the car industry instead of the rail industry.

Also, that's not even true. Lot's of parts of the country could take advantage of rail infrastructure. Amtrak's northeastern line runs at a profit, even though it's a shitty shitty excuse for a high speed rail line. A Europe-style high-speed rail connecting DC, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston would connect a huge urbanized corridor with half the population of France.

They basically have that already and it is heavily used.

Well, that's Los Angeles. In Cascadia it's a bit different--Vancouver and Portland both have very well-functioning mass transit systems, and Seattle has an adequate but growing one which links to the Amtrak lines that go between the three major cities as well as the Empire Builder line to Chicago. I have little doubt that upgrading the Empire Builder and Cascades routes would be worthwhile.

I commute between Portland and Vancouver fairly frequently. Initially I drove because I never really considered not driving, but round trip expense wasn't really that much cheaper than flying ($120 in fuel costs compared to $175-$250 to fly) and time in airports and on planes was time I could be somewhat productive, while my ten hour round trip drive was completely wasted.

Then someone tipped me off about the train. It takes slightly longer than driving and about twice as long as flying, but it's almost all productive time. It's cheaper than flying and about the same as driving (depends what days you travel), and it's a much more pleasant experience than flying.

The only drawback is limited service (it's daily, but with limited direct service), but with better promotion and subsidies to increase demand, there's no reason service couldn't be more frequent. I'm sure there's equipment upgrades that could be made to shorten service times also.

Amtrak, in the pacific northwest at least, really is a hidden gem. It's a shame it's not more popular.

For American cities to stay competitive we need rail. We need to start building cities with rail in mind.

> Heck, I drive 60 miles a day just picking up my kids from school!

This is incredibly inefficient. You could choose to organize your life another way. You'll get the cheap electric car sooner or later. You might even get cheap energy to run it with. But you'll never, ever get that time back.

This is very true. To me, the time waste of driving is almost as great as the fuel waste or the environmental pollution.

But! I think the adoption of self-driving cars is actually going to beat the adoption of all-electric cars.

Agreed. My next car will be fully electric whether I buy it or build it myself.

As far as organizing my life around it. Kind of tough. Sell the house and move? Can't do that. The schools are not moving. One of my kids will start at a school closer to home this year. The number will go down to 35 miles per day then. I can then contemplate the idea of a pedal-powered electric-assisted four-wheel contraption that I could most certainly build myself for a fraction of what an electric car would cost. It'd be a great project to teach the kids some engineering and ride around during good whether.

The train station in downtown LA is called Union Station, the one in NY is Grand Central.

Also, they are extending the lines that feed into Union slowly but surely. Pasadena already has good coverage, Hollywood coverage is decent, Santa Monica's Expo line should be done in a couple of years - it's already halfway done to Culver City. South LA lines already get lots of riders.

The REAL problem in LA is a taxi is still the best way to get to LAX.

> The absence of such makes us the laughingstock of Europe and Asia.

Please. The geography of the US compared to these Europe & Asia projects are so radically different, the reason high-speed rail hasn't been a priority is because it isn't as viable here. Rail fares are more expensive than flights [1], and a trip from SF<->LA would take anywhere from 2-3 times as long. No thanks.

I've traveled by air and rail around Europe, and I greatly prefer flying. Cheaper, and faster. The only people laughing at us are the americans who think a rail infrastructure is something to be jealous of.

[1] http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/2011/11/despite-rising-price...

I would give a counter argument. Our industrial rail system is actually a stellar system. We simply made a choice a century ago to make our industrial rail a priority. Passenger railroad was the choice of Europe, but we can move freight across the country faster then anyone. This of course hampers any chance of passenger rail because they use the same infrastructure.

Greyhound is cheaper and faster from Seattle to LA than Amtrak.

Not everyone wants to go long distance all the time. Europe has airports too. Personally in Europe I usually prefer trains up to around 8 hours journey, but it varies and I do go for longer. You can work much more effectively on trains. That is say 1000 miles on high speed train roughly - you have places closer than that I think...

Norway has a population density about 1:10th that of the US, and somehow making rail work in most of the country hasn't been an issue.

What people forget whenever making this argument is that while your population density is low, you have large areas - larger than many countries - with quite high density. Your population density is pulled down by the vast areas with really low density.

And yes, as a European: Your rail infrastructure is the subject of widespread ridicule. I'm 36. I don't have a drivers license - I've never had a compelling need for one. Only time I've ever missed having one is when visiting the US.

Norway is the size of Montana.

Which is entirely irrelevant, given that this scales. Split your country into regions, and treat them separately. Oh wait, they're already split into states, countries, cities, and in many other ways.

It's a tedious argument that gets trotted out every time someone compares the US with another country in terms of public transport.

But every other country also has low density areas, which often have weaker public transport.

As it stands, the US has lots of low density areas, but also a large number of really high density areas. I don't think anyone would complain about lack of train coverage for your hopelessly low density areas.

What is a joke is that there are US cities with populations the size of small European countries that are still served by useless rails systems, and there such cities within what would be easy reach of each other with decent rails where it is pointless to try.

E.g. someone pointed out that Oslo to Bergen in Norway is still about 7 hours. But that is 7 hours between a city of 500.000 people, in a region with less than 1 million, an a city of about 120.000 people. Yet there is a viable train service covering the stretch. What's in between? Mostly a mountain range where practically nobody lives. It's a service that is mostly there to serve the endpoints.

Yes, a lot of the potential riders take a plane instead.

How many regions in the US do you have with 500k-1m people on one end of a what could be a 7 hour rail link with regular speed trains, with 120k-200k people on the other end, that are currently not served by rail at all?

Now add in the number of much larger cities.

That combined with the useless excuse for commuter rail outside of some very limited areas (mostly a handful of cities on the East coast) is what makes Europeans generally consider the state of rail in the US to be ridiculous.

The argument is valid. It's cheaper to fly than to take rail even in Germany where I live (I am an American). Multiply the distances by 3x or 5x and even if the USA had good rail services it'd be drastically more cost effective to fly (to say nothing of time).

It simply does not scale the way you think it would. The population density varies widely in the USA.

But you're not multiplying the distances by 3x or 5x. That's the point. You're not replacing air travel for distances where train travel is not competitive. You're multiplying the rail networks - covering a larger number of smaller hops.

That's how it scales.

The US has a massive list of metropolitan areas far more densely populated than Norway, and far more densely populated than the Oslo-region (by far the most densely populated area of Norway) that are under-served by rail or near enough to each other for cost effective inter-city rail connections but that doesn't have viable rail links today.

I'm not arguing that coast to coast rail links are viable in the US because they are viable in Norway. That'd be stupid - the distances are far larger.

I'm arguing that the fact that Norway has viable train links from Oslo to Bergen and Trondheim (about 7-8 hours without high speed rail for both of them) - from a region with less than 1 million people to regions with less than a quarter million people each - is a pretty good demonstration that there's a multitude of stretches in the US that are short enough and between populated enough towns that they could be viable for proper rail links, or because the stretches include more populated areas (both the Oslo-Bergen and Oslo-Trondheim links are through very sparsely populated regions so the traffic is dominated by traffic between the endpoints)

Nope - because of the unavoidable fact that you'll still need a car at the other end to get around. That's not how US cities work.

Unfortunately, Norway's rail is actually pretty comparable to the U.S.'s, I think. For example, the main Oslo-Bergen line, connecting the country's two largest cities, takes about 7 hours to travel the 500 km (300 mi), which is about Amtrak-level speeds. As a result, the Norwegian domestic air-travel market is one of the largest in Europe (esp. relative to population).

It's nothing like the US at all. You're right that in terms of speed, Norway does not have high speed rail (there's a massive amount of discussion about building out high speed rail service, but it's not likely to happen for years).

What Norway does have, however, is a rail network that is provides viable service for a huge number of people in terms of frequency, and a network that provides a decent route selection, and that particularly covers the heaviest commuter routes.

That's part of the point: Whenever rail in the US gets brought up, people use the vast size of the country as a counter-argument, but that's irrelevant: Countries like Norway who also deals with low population density and large distances still provide service that makes it easy to commute by rail and other public transport.

You don't need to cover every possible route. But there's a vast number of potential routes in the US, connecting areas with high population densities and a lot of commuter traffic, that's so poorly served that nobody can depend on them.

THAT is the problem. Not the distances. Lack of willingness to invest in making the routes that can be viable reliable enough and with frequent enough services that people actually can use them.

High speed rail is great for some routes. But frequency and reliability matters far more for most stretches.

In the cities and densely populated regions of Norway you can easily get around without having a car. Or flying. And that includes stretches like Oslo-Bergen, Oslo-Stavanger or Oslo-Trondheim, though all of them are slow. The rail, tram, light rails and bus services combine to provide services that are reasonably frequent, and reliable enough that you can actually use them without too much hassle.

And keep in mind our largest city has half a million people (Oslo), and the metro area around it has less than 1 million people including the city itself...

I'm from Oslo (though I now live in London) and used to commute from a suburban village outside of Oslo by rail for years, and then within Oslo and out from Oslo to a tiny little place outside of town for a few years. Trains were frequent and fast.

Fast forward a few years, and I had to travel regularly to Palo Alto. It was a nightmare without a drivers license. I depended on cabs pretty much everywhere. Sure, I could get the train in to San Francisco now and again, but the service is/was near unusable. Half hourly services a lot of the day, if that. Slow. Ends early in the afternoon - I went to SF one weekend and had to rush to get back to the station by 9pm to get the last train back. WTF...

Buses were a joke. Even walking is hell - "everyone" in Europe who's been to the US tends to consider US roads pretty much built to kill pedestrians. Menlo Park to Palo Alto, for example, or Redwood City to Menlo Park, are walking distance as far as I'm concerned. But the obvious route along El Camino Real is without sidewalks a lot of the way... Yet that was nothing compared to trying to walk around the small part of Virginia I've seen when visiting DC.

It's a cultural issue that starts with the assumption that everyone will drive, so why bother? If you're going to get trains, the assumption needs to be that people will leave the car at home (or that you want to try to get them to, at least). So it needs to become easy to walk locally, easy get the bus when you need to go a little but further, with good service to rail stations, and frequent rail service suitable for commutes or taking a trip into town.

Only then is there much point thinking about things like high-speed rail. High speed rail is for a population that's already used to consider rail a good choice, and that often opts for rail even when plane is faster, because of the convenience.

If you mean that urban transit (commuter rail, buses, etc.) is better in Norway, I can agree with that, though you're comparing to Silicon Valley, one of the more notoriously car-centric parts of the US. It explicitly opted out of BART in order to spend more money on freeways, giving it the distinction of being one of the few places in the US that has not only national interstate highways and state highways, but also county highways built to full freeway standards (overpasses, etc).

Transit convenience is much better in New York, Boston, or Chicago, and many people in New York don't own cars. Heck, even other parts of the Bay Area are better; if you live in SF or Berkeley you don't need a car, and many people don't have one.

In any case, it's the intercity lines I'm more skeptical of, which so far (I live in Copenhagen) don't seem all that much better in Scandinavia than Amtrak in speed or frequency. You can go once per hour Copenhagen-Stockholm, for example, which is about the same frequency as the Boston-NYC-DC route. And like the US, once you get off one or two main routes, everything is slow and infrequent. For example, Copenhagen-Oslo (600 km) runs twice a day (with one change) and most people fly instead. I've also ended up giving up and flying instead every time I've tried to find a train from Copenhagen to continental Europe. It looks like getting to some German cities would be possible, but getting to Amsterdam would've required 12 hours and two changes.

Funny that you should mention recurring fees in return for lower prices _and_ inter-city rail infrastructure - that's exactly what the Swiss have: http://www.sbb.ch/en/travelcards-and-tickets/railpasses/half...

German railways also lets you buy a discount card - 25%, 50%, or 100% valid for a year. I got the BahnCard 50, and the first week of intense conferencing already paid it back.

On the East Coast high speed rail infrastructure has existed for over a decade. So CA is also trailing other parts of the US as well, considering that Amtrak has been able to operate Acela trains across multiple states on aging infrastructure for some time now.

Acela is awesome and I prefer it to flying when going from Boston to NYC and back, but you can really tell that the tracks are old. The ride is nowhere near as smooth as the trains in Europe, especially when you hit 150 mph.

The absence of such makes us the laughingstock of Europe and Asia.

I was with you till this point, but that's just wrong. The USA is vastly larger than continental Europe, and has problems of scale that are correspondingly larger. If you don't believe me, let me do some back-of-the-envelope land area comparisons for you to the UK, France, and Germany (or your country of choice).

No-one's suggesting cross-continent rail. The argument that US population densities are vastly below those in other countries is true on a country wide scale, but false when you look at the key population corridors.

San Francisco to San Diego is approximately 500 miles. 24 million people live in that corridor.[1]

Paris to Marseille is 481 miles. It takes about 3 hours and 16 minutes by train to make that journey. I'm not particularly adept at French, so finding corridor population details is difficult. However, judging by the population of the regions the train passes through [2], I'd estimate that (11.7, 1.6, 6.1 and 4.9) 24.3 million people live in that corridor. That's a really rather close number.

Lack of high speed rail in the US is probably due to the auto companies removing the public transport that provides a feeder into that kind of system. The large spread out cities are a symptom of a car culture, not the other way around.

[1]: http://www.slideshare.net/mmazner/ne-corridor-facts [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_list_of_French_regions

Thats what you get now (and for the last 40years)by buying full price tickets - you can simply not checkin and pay nothing

Thats the whole reason for overbooking flights, adn why you can upgrade to 1st class - the airline only knows that the discount seats will show up

$180 for a flight tomorrow AM on southwest SFO LAX. That's $360 RT. Of course Palo Alto is more convenient than SFO and you're going to be taking a $100 car ride each way that's $200. So $560. Four times a month and it's a bargain... I know plenty of people from Palo Alto who had made that type of commute twice a week.

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