Work begins on a $12B high-speed rail line between Las Vegas and Los Angeles
apnews.com
apnews.com
“and, by gum, it put them on the map!”
It would be more embarrassing if that gets built than if it doesn’t. Echos of Ted Stevens’ bridge to nowhere.
[1]: https://hsr.ca.gov/high-speed-rail-in-california/project-sec...
That's a lie.
> windy-er to save money
The opposite: some segments are longer, more complex, and more expensive to gratify some NIMBYs and influential congressmen.
Isn't that going to be the world's slowest "hi-speed" train ?
Reminds me of high-speed rail in France vs high-speed rail in Germany. To the point that newer Siemens trains will have a lower top-speed, because "there is no demand for it".
The Paris-Lyon line is by far the oldest, and is top-speed limited because of how it was traced. (And also because of its out-dated security system that is in the process of being changed)
The Paris-Brest line stops being a high-speed track in Rennes, so even if the first part is fast, it's still a long way to Brest on conventional tracks.
The newer lines are faster, as they are designed for theoretical operational speeds of 350 km/h, with a current operational top speed of 320. (LGV Sud Europe Atlantique, LGV Rhin-Rhone, LGV Est, and even the LGV Bretagne Pays-de-Loire going to Brest)
Then again, at about $45 million per mile, it's actually not even that much more expensive that Chinese HSR: to build the current 45000km of rail at the LV-LA price would be $1.25 trillion, which isn't vastly more than the Chinese system has cost so far. In fact it's very roughly about as much as the US spends, per year, on healthcare on top of what European countries pay for the same outcomes (total annual spending: 4.2 trillion and a bit, or 12.5k per person, vs global number two, Switzerland, at 8k: about 1/3, not far from 1.25/4.2!)
Those will be built as (if) they are funded. The only funding currently secured is the bakersfield to merced leg.
The problem is, that leg is nowhere to nowhere and is going to cost over 100B dollars. Most people take that to mean that it's incredibly unlikely that the more costly portions of the route (the ones that make it useful) will ever get built as they will be absurdly expensive.
I know that there are many factors affecting progress, but it's depressing that we can't get to consensus on building infrastructure.
Connecting them all up with rails and catenary is the (relatively) cheap, quick and easy bit, and it's done at the end - it's exactly all these structures (and the stations, which will likely be the next phase) that take all the time and money.
It’s like 2-3 hr drive between the two cities, and at both end you have to navigate auto transport, most likely a rental though maybe Uber would work out but at greater cost for anything beyond a single destination. I would imagine most people would just opt to drive, since they need a car at either end of that line?
Also, for the Las Vegas link, the terminus is on the Metrolink line so you can take a commuter train from Union Station. People taking Amtrak from points east could get off at the Ontario station and it’s a relatively short taxi/bus ride to the RC terminal (Amtrak uses a different set of tracks coming into L.A. from the east than the Metrolink station serving RC). I suppose it would be feasible to extend the line a little further south to connect with Amtrak should there be demand (if they went to the Ontario station, then the Ontario airport could also be integrated into the service).
LA to SFO would be worthwhile but probably much harder.
Between Sacramento and Merced, and LA and Bakersfield, there will be a "high speed rail bus service". For other parts there will be regional commuter train and bus services.
Then, eventually, it'll become: https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Business_Plan_...
Everyone owns a car and carpooling is trivial. Most homes have one car per adult.
There’s nothing of interest between Merced and Bakersfield. These were towns that grew from the old 99 freeway from Sacramento to Bakersfield and then on to LA.
I lived in CA for 15 years. I've been all over it (incl central ca). This would be such a pyrrhic victory, that I lack words! Who the hell needs to commute enough between those two god-forsaken places to justify the billions spent on this?
You can get high speed rail built for people from SoCal to lose their asses at a backgammon table in Vegas faster but if you want to, idk, travel for non-recreational reasons within the Midwest and you don't want to sprint through O'Hare for a flight between where you're from and where you're going, you'll probably be driving despite years of asking for Amtrak to find a way to go above 79 MPH.
There's loads of billionaires out there now with more money than sense. Get together a PAC, lobby them to fund high-speed rail upgrades, name a rail station after them or something.
if they don't want the tax they can hurry up and build the nice shit first.
Your response to the first high-speed rail line America is likely to see completed, being built by a private operator, is to propose effectively banning it?
Nationalisation in a country like the US generally means getting bought out at a fair, even generous, price.
We have the MTA in NY, they run the railroads and subways. The agency is massively bloated by costs not just where it costs $1.5 billion per mile to expand the subway, but even the railways are bleeding billions per year.
Can you show me one example from the post-War era where we nationalised something that wasn’t about to fail?
If we don't nationalise things that aren't about to fail then why should anyone be scared of being nationalised?
Nobody is currently afraid of it, probably because no one is seriously contemplating it.
The US system is optimized for freight.
It's not obvious that passenger is a better choice.
I mean, sure, you can get to Kansas City and Omaha via the Missouri. You can't get to Denver, though, or Phoenix, or Salt Lake, or...
-- https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fareed-zakaria-ameri...
The continental US (no Alaska or Hawaii) is > 22.5 times as big as Germany but has only 8.8 times as many miles of "navigable waterways." (However, it's not clear if the US numbers include the Great Lakes or the oceans; LA to Seattle and Miami to NYC goes by ocean, not some river.)
But, that doesn't leave much for the rest of Europe.
The other aspect is how the rail infrastructure is financed in the US vs Europe. In the US the infrastructure is to a large extent funded by the freight companies themselves, and in return their needs get priority. Take away that incentive and they'll stop funding the rail infrastructure meaning that much of that cost will end up pack on either the local or federal government, with all that that entails.
The biggest issue is speed. The maximum speed is just slightly above that of maximum highway speed, with freight speed limited to less than half of that.
Population density in North Sweden and Norway is low enough that a few times a day is probably sufficient for most local travel. I haven’t been during peak tourist seasons when that number of trains might not be enough.
A fun fact is that since the ore trains travel mostly downhill, braking generates enough electricity that the ore empty trains can return to Kiruna effectively energy free.
That makes it a tourist line, not a transit line.
There's nothing wrong with tourism, but it isn't transit.
The Us transports nearly 10 times as much freight-km as the EU and far more than 10 times tons/person.
https://transport.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/action-plan-...
Rail operators have also discovered a really nice side effect of ultra long trains: you don't have to pull into a siding to let a passenger train by as required by law if your train is longer than the siding.
I find that very unlikely and this link seems to contradict that: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Another aspect that needs to be taken into account is that a large part (perhaps 40%) of any number you see on total tonnes of rail freight in Sweden, is made up of handful of short rail lines doing nothing but transporting iron ore from a few large mines to the nearest harbour.
You claimed that there were "many" countries that had both good freight and passenger rail, but have yet to come up with one. (Sweden isn't an example - its "good freight" service (mines to ports) is where there's insignificant passenger service.)
2. We don't want 40% more trucks on the roads, so we need the system to still be able to carry large amounts of freight. The federal government is also not known for doing that well, still less for balancing that with #1.
3. In this country, we don't just get to nationalize things. We have to pay for them. Given the pathetic rate at which Amtrak is funded, do you really think that Congress is going to spring for the kind of money to buy all the freight railroads?
4. Speaking of Congress, it's going to take continual funding to pay for keeping the system maintained. Do you want the annual maintenance budget for this (including the freight portion) to be at the annual whims of Congress?
All around, this is a terrible idea.
Moving people around tends to not be that great a business in general. Providing them services once they are there is a money printing machine.
The only real challenging part of the route is going to be pass out of the inland empire where the I-15 grade is a really steep. The rest of the project is pretty straightforward, with rights of way already in place and very few expensive and complex grade crossings. They picked this city pair and route very carefully to have an excellent chance to succeed both on construction simplicity and ridership. I'm not sure they will actually open in time for the 2028 Olympics, but I wouldn't bet against 2029 operations.
As for high speed, it won't be able to sustain true high speed rail velocity across the whole route (150mph / 250 kph), but it will be much faster than driving and there will be long stretches that are very high speed.
Whereas another certain California rail project literally transports you from [place you need car] to [place you need car]. Which I don’t think I need to explain why that is silly.
The root cause of this is blue states often get Euro public transport envy — yet they don’t understand Europe has 3X the population density (and subsequent urbanization) of the US. Obviously public transport would start to make a lot more sense if you 3X’d the population in the same land area.
IMO fetishizing the European way of life is a bit silly, given density comes with its own problems (ie nobody having kids). In fact, there was this German guy in the 1930s who led the killing of millions of people partly to get more “living space”, so European density does have its downsides for…shall we say…stability. In fact, Europe has roughly the same amount of people today as it had in 1939. Meanwhile the US has more than doubled.
In most things, if you post a comment with points of discussion you get a thoughtful response here.
However on HN trigger topics, you get emotionally downvoted and nobody wants to engage in discussion.
Instead of linking to a youtube video from the r/fuckcars filter bubble, is there any succinct points to refute why a 3X greater population density would not naturally result in greater public transportation formation?
Or is it just the "dumb americans" and their "evil car culture?" With no further investigation of the first-principles reasons that culture was formed?
i’ve been using this example for about a decade.
of course, that route didn’t exist 20 years ago when I took Madrid to Seville. I can’t imagine what the population density of Seville is.
it would help if you give us the numbers you’re working with. I sure hope you aren’t doing the population density of the entire country. That’s a common mistake.
Genuinely curious what is meant by this since if I was asked what the most progressive ideal city layout was I'd respond with extensive, highly connected, frequent metro lines with islands of density around the stations that included plenty of non-market rate housing options within easy walk of each station. When more housing is needed extend the lines and start a whole new island of density. Make sure plenty of public green space is accessible from the metros just beyond the density islands.
Inter-city connections would be broadly similar, just zoomed out. Each city an island of density connected by fast and frequent rail.
Creating hardwired infrastructure to transport people from one place where they don't want to be to another place where they don't want to be, over timespans measured in decades for construction and a good part of a century to pay off, at a time when technology is delivering more options for individual mobility concurrent with other options that render commuting and travel less relevant, doesn't strike me as progressive.
I'm a huge fan of ebikes and other micromobility solutions for solving the last mile problem that has always plagued rapid transit, especially in low density areas. You want to move huge amount of people any significant distance? You need a train. Pretty much every proposal I've seen to move masses of people without a train ends up being train but worse, either in OPEX or CAPX (usually both).
Of course, you're comparing a single rail line to a single road, rather than to the entire network of roads that could have been built with the same funding in a fraction of the time, but... that's why I offered the OP the advice I did.
When you compare total CAPX and OPEX including the vehicles themselves and then actually moving people from place to place trains crush everything else. A highway-mile might be cheaper to build than a rail-mile, but it requires maintenance and replacement far more often and the vehicles don't last any where near as long. Large amounts of total costs like vehicles and fuel are shifted to the traveller, reducing the options for many unless they meet a certain economic threshold.
And yet when people have a choice, they take their car.
And nobody ever asks why. They just stamp their feet and demand more trains.
I have no issue with people choosing a car. I have issues where a car is the only choice due to the built environment being actively hostile to all other forms of transportation. Walking --> Cycle --> Train depending on how far you want to travel is far more sustainable and opens options for far more people than car-centric infrastructure where only a car is functional.
Building out a train network also doesn't mean we shouldn't also have a quality road network as well; there are plenty of long tail needs where a vehicle that can go direct point-to-point is very valuable. We just need to be building more than just a road network as roads alone simply cannot handle the needs all travellers.
That just false. Yes some people prefer cars, others don't. Overwhelming evidence shows that people most often prefer what the fastest thing is, and secondarily what the cheapest is.
I have plenty of money for a car, and I don't use one. So apparently I don't exist. Talking in absolutes makes you seem foolish.
The question you should be asking is, looking at society as a whole, whats and efficient and green way to meet the transportation needs of the population.
The reality in most cities less then 50% of population have cars, often much less. And that is after 50 years of pro-car policy. And literally every other possible benefit for cars.
What you should actually educate yourself on is that HUGE AMOUNT of pro car subsidies that actually exist in the real world. Of course if you make parking free, ram a highway right into the city center (burning existing communities down) and then make those people not even pay for the cost of that, then they will prefer the car.
If you design your roads in a why that makes it incredibly dangerous for anybody that is not in a car, guess what, more people take cars.
> And nobody ever asks why. They just stamp their feet and demand more trains.
There is actually lot of people that ask why. There is lots of research on this topic.
This research you clearly ignore because you have already made up your mind.
So maybe you should ask the 'why' question about your own position and study the history of it.
The reality is cites don't move, and population don't move very much either. And once you actually have fixed trains, population are even less likely to move. Many cities in Europe have literally been in the same place for 1000+ years.
Your augment might apply to mongolians in 1800s, but not to real existing western society.
Living in a country with amazing public transport, its just amazing what you can do. I was using public transport by myself when I was like 10, by 14 I was traveling all over the country and by 16 internationally without parents.
I can at any part of the day, randomly decide to go literally to any village above 100 people (and sometimes below), check and App that gives me a step by step guide how to get there. I have no fixed cost (if I don't want to) and then I can efficiently reach my destination while using almost no carbon. How is this not progressive? And btw, this can be done by anybody from 14 to late 70s. And this works right now, not in some amazing techno utopia future.
And I can use may laptop with high speed internet. I can easily go to a high quality bakery in between and get a high quality meal without losing any travel time either.
How non progressive it is to sit in a nice quite place with my laptop, eating a sand-witch driving threw beautiful country side.
A railway is simply the most efficient way to transport goods and people and if you have city and you have a lot of people, it will always be better then whatever 'individualized fancy AI pod' you imagine.
Notice how those companies working on all these individual pods eventually come back to 'platooning' and then 'docking'. Then they realize that operations on rubber wheels suck. Just slowly reinventing trains. The same techno future ideas existed in the 60s.
The fact is 2 cities exist, and will continue to exist. People will want to continue travel between them, that was true 100 years ago and its true today, and its still true in 100 years. Rail ways were the most environmentally friendly and efficient way to do that, both 100 years ago, and still today and it will still be true long into the future.
And its absolutely perfectly compatible with the most intelligent individual of transport, the bike. Getting on low impact, high threw-put trains to connect urban centers (urban doesn't mean big city) and then having individual transport in terms of bikes and e-bikes waiting for you is by far the most progressive and most innovative transport system you can design today. People on bikes will navigate more efficiency then whatever AI pods some California startup will come up with.
In Netherlands a staggering amount of people arrive at the train station by bike and they can easily pick up another bike when the arrive at their location. This is not only incredibly green, incredibly energy efficient, its also good for health and fitness (one of the biggest public health crisis) and road safety.
And the sad thing is, non of these are fancy high tech solution. These are literally all technologies that existed 50 years ago. But we should really way for some company to finally sell us some individualized EV pods that cost 40k$ per pod.
Fixed rail is the only reasonable way to get large numbers of people in and out of cities.
- walking and cycling takes too long
- cars lead to congestion and you need to store them somewhere
- flying has security overhead and is terrible for the environment
You are also starting from the assumption that higher population density is better for high speed rail, which is easily countered with my previous point. An argument could be made that, practically, high speed rail is really better suited to places with low population densities centered around urban areas... like the unpopulated parts of the US West.
HSR is expensive and requires high degrees of funding and coordination. In other words there has to be a strong political and cultural will behind it, so yeah, it stands to reason that the US doesn't want it since they certainly have the money to do it if they want. Maybe there is a culture around forms of transportation that is particular to the US...
> Instead of linking to a youtube video from the r/fuckcars filter bubble, is there any succinct points to refute why a 3X greater population density would not naturally result in greater public transportation formation?
Do you really not understand how aggravation works?
Somehow the US can have very dense subways in New York, how is this possible, the US isn't dense. Its as if aggregate statistics aren't a good indicator when doing regional transportation planning for a region.
Direct from Wikipedia:
“Lebensraum (Living space) was the leading motivation of Nazi Germany to initiate World War II”
The Germans wanted 'Lebensraum' because they didn't want to import food and resources from others. They didn't want to relay on anybody else. They wanted the German race to dominate those resource areas. They wanted to compete in the great power game with US, Britain and the Soviets.
You act like they saw the apartment buildings in Berlin, decided that was 'to dense' and therefore they started WW2. That is simply not accurate.
Their aim was not to reduce density, but rather massively increase the population of the German race. Their policy was literally pro population growth. Their 'Lebensraum' was not for currently existing Germans, because German was to dense. The 'Lebensraum' was for future generations of German Supermen that they would literally breed.
I am serious by the way that this is an utterly disgusting way to argue. You should seriously be ashamed of yourself. I know that housing policy makes people insane, but you responding with 'Hitler genocide is because of urbanization' is the lowest level of argument I have come across.
Anyways, being confronted with contrarian ideas on the supremacy of European urbanism is clearly triggering for you (proving the point I made earlier). So much so that you feel the need to resort to ad-hominem personal attacks!
I won’t be responding anymore, but I recommend examining why you’re revisiting a thread days later to call a random stranger on the internet “utterly disgusting” for challenging your feelings on this topic.
> for challenging your feelings on this topic.
Don't flatter yourself, you aren't 'challenging' anything. There are plenty of arguments you can make about Urbanism and I have heard plenty of of them. Reasonable people can differ and I'm fine with that.
> I recommend examining why
Because you are using the suffering, death and rape of millions to justify your position.
> days later
Yeah whole 'days'. I mean its like you wrote this in the 1960s.
While you're checking the provided citation, you might want to compare those countries' fertility rates too (and others as well, of course – France's for instance is quite a bit higher than that of the US': 1.82 vs. 1.67). You have yet to demonstrate that your hypotheses are well supported by data.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
The root cause is that blue state Americans are still toxically individualist and anti-social and can’t undertake collective projects for shit. Europeans are at least somewhat orderly—in part because in several countries the disorderly anti-social people left for America: https://www.ft.com/content/dd212e0f-508a-3171-824c-d6076ae19....
If you’re built like a linebacker, you should give up your dreams of becoming a world-class ballet dancer. Likewise, blue states should give up the delusion that they can build large scale public projects like Europeans and Asians.
You’ve got the wrong color unless you think right leaning Americans are even worse than this description.
… should give up the delusion that they can build large scale public projects…
The highway system is a counterexample.
That does seem to be exactly the point. Notice the word "still".
Indeed, California isn’t very good at being a blue state. Its educational rankings are near the bottom. It doesn’t have universal healthcare. It doesn’t have good transit. Its cities aren’t safe and clean and homeless people aren’t taken care of. California—the beating heart of globalist financial capitalism, with some of the highest income inequality in the country—is much better at being a red state than even Texas.
Your take, as usual, is badly wrong. You fail to take into account pertinent facts and draw the wrong conclusion. Here’s one pertinent fact: California subsidizes states like Mississippi. California is also hamstrung by the fact that isn’t its own country. There are limits to what it can do given these two facts.
How? All the areas where California falls short—education, transportation, housing, healthcare, etc.—are ones left primarily to the states. For example, state and local governments provide 90% of educational funding, while the federal government provides only 10%. No federal law is stopping California from levying Sweden-like taxes to provide Sweden-like education, transportation, healthcare, and housing services.
It’s true that, under our system of progressive taxes, Californians pay a disproportionate share of federal taxes—because they make more money. They pay about 13% of all federal taxes, and get back about 83% of what they pay in federal services. That nets out to about $100 billion net transfer out. But that’s out of an economy of $3.9 trillion. That’s just 2.5% of California’s GDP. That money isn’t what’s standing between California and having high quality social services.
I think in many cases right leaning Americans are even worse in that regard. (E.g. tatted up Trump supporters and anti-vaxxers.) Orderly traditional conservatives are a minority on the right today.
> yet they don’t understand Europe has 3X the population density
Aggregated statistic comparison are completely meaningless. They might serve in a low-quality online rant but not much more then that.
California has many cities over 500k people and some with many millions connect in a line. The idea that there isn't enough population density is total nonsense.
Switzerland has towns with 100 people in low density areas that have regular public transport. The idea that cities like LA and Bay Area are to small or not dense enough is insane.
> IMO fetishizing the European way of life is a bit silly, given density comes with its own problems
Again, you totally misusing density statistics and that invalids your whole argument completely.
> comes with its own problems (ie nobody having kids). In fact, there was this German guy in the 1930s who led the killing of millions of people partly to get more “living space”, so European density does have its downsides for…shall we say…stability.
What complete and other nonsense are you peddling now? Nothing said here makes any sense at all.
hing Hitler was a zero-sum thinker who didn't believe in density and that's why he thought conquering more land was a good idea.
Also invoking Hilter and Genocide in a argument about trains in California is such a insane thing do. It shows that you have no interest in real debate and rather spout inflammatory nonsense about Hitler.
> In fact, Europe has roughly the same amount of people today as it had in 1939.
At least try to look up basic statistics:
558,000,000 -> 746,225,356
And to somehow relate this to some argument about density doesn't make any sense anyway so its completely idiotic to bring it up in an argument about trains in California.
First, aggregated statistics matter a lot, especially when examining the history of why humans have clustered in the US the way they have.
Second, nobody is saying public transport doesn't make sense inside the most dense US cities like LA, SF, etc (yes NYC exists). The issue is the network beyond those areas, due to suburbanization. The topic of this thread is building high speed rail to a suburban desert location.
Third, when discussing internet people's fetishization of European density over American suburban sprawl, its not crazy to bring up downsides -- of which there are many. It's true, the German desire for territorial expansion (and resulting World Wars and Genocides) were a direct result of perceived overpopulation. I dunno...I would call that a downside?
I know it's impossible to understand for an internet person in 2024, but childless urban living wasn't always cool and aspirational. Why do you think the automobile found such strong product-market-fit in the 1900s.
> At least try to look up basic statistics: 558,000,000 -> 746,225,356
If we want to argue of the semantics of "roughly the same," I'd say 35% growth qualifies when comparing a US population that grew 250% over the same time and a world that grew by 400%.
That's not what you did and its not what I objected to. But do play up the whole victim complex you have going on.
You are truly hitting all the 'alt-right' highlights. First make grand statements using totally misleading statistics then when this is pointed out to you react with 'Oh sorry I'm not allow to question things'.
There are actually good statistics that you could have used to make your point, but you didn't.
> Second, nobody is saying public transport doesn't make sense inside the most dense US cities like LA, SF, etc (yes NYC exists).
All of these huge places are by far big enough to have a robust local and regional public transit network. And then you connect those networks with an inter-regional connection, making both networks stronger by doing so.
That argument might not make sense to connect NYC with Denver. But it makes a hell of a lot of sense for LA and the Bay area. Specifically when both are trying to expand their public transit network and there are major cities in between where people would like to access both the Southern and the Northern regional transport networks.
> The issue is the network beyond those areas, due to suburbanization.
Aggregate density statistics would look the same no matter if urbanization or suburbanization.
> Third, when discussing internet people's fetishization of European density over American suburban sprawl, its not crazy to bring up downsides -- of which there are many.
And yet of those many non of the ones mentioned were correct or made sense or had statistical evidence backing them up. Maybe that why you got pushback.
Then you spun into some nonsense argument about Hitler.
> It's true, the German desire for territorial expansion (and resulting World Wars and Genocides) were a direct result of perceived overpopulation.
Assuming this was true, the term 'perceived' is meaningless. People can 'perceive' anything if they want to with enough ideology. The evidence would have clearly point out that they were wrong.
And people like you making argument in favor of those wrong positions against evidence are part of the problem with that perception.
> I dunno...I would call that a downside?
You are literally reducing WW2 to an argument about housing density. That completely ridiculous.
What matters to the Nazis was not relative density of urban areas but rather the TOTALITY of LAND and RESOURCE under state control. The wanted this to compete with continental scale powers like US and the Soviets.
So their conquests and ideology had LITERALLY nothing to do with urban housing density. They didn't see Berlin and think 'man people are so close together here, I guess we need to conquer Ukraine. That just total wrong, your argument is 100% wrong.
I suggest you read Adam Tooze work on Interwar and WW2 economics.
In terms of their architecture and city design they were french and Napoleonic inspired.
> I know it's impossible to understand for an internet person in 2024, but childless urban living wasn't always cool and aspirational. Why do you think the automobile found such strong product-market-fit in the 1900s.
The largest expansion in human population happened when humans started to live together more closely during the industrial revolution. And immigrants who usually have more kids most often move to cities as well.
The biggest fear of the 'over population' crazy people are mega cities like Delhi and Lagos.
Unless you have really amazingly solid statistics about humans living in density having much lower child rates when taking into account education, wealth and other factors. But you have not presented any such evidence. You have just asserted it to be true.
And even if it was true, to create urban sprawl just in the vague hope that people are gone have more kids is insane.
> If we want to argue of the semantics of "roughly the same,"
If you think '35%' qualifies as 'roughly the same' I question your sanity.
Need I remind you that you used pre-WW2 statistics and millions of people got displaced or killed? And millions of men died, leading to less kids? That had long term effects on population.
So if anything that 35% totally under-sells how many people would be in Europe how had WW2 not happened. So the argument that Europe grew less was related to housing density is nonsense.
WW1 had happened and reduced long term growth potential, then WW2 happened and made it worse. So of course for the next couple decades the US had a powerful economy and literally millions of Europeans went to the US and had kids there and many millions of Mexicans and Cubans (and many others) moved to the US. And non of that happened because of housing density.
I don't think the commenter meant this route was especially unfeasible. I think they were referring to the fact that the track record (no pun intended) of high speed rail projects in the U.S. is mixed to terrible.
Both takes are oblivious to the problem domain, to the point that you didn't even realize your worst-case scenario is completely irrelevant and doesn't even put any of the project's aspects into question.
Keep in mind that this is an infrastructure project. The expected outcome, such as the Interstate Highway System, is providing the US with infrastructure that is of critical importance to the local, state, and national strategic interests. Taking 10 years to build is not a problem because infrastructure projects often take decades to pull through. See Switzerland's Gotthard Base Tunnel and how it took billions to build and decades from signing off until being opened to the public.
Being non-high-speed is also perfectly ok. The difference between high-speed and non-high-speed in practice is the door-to-door travel time being close to 3h instead of around 1h30m. Once you start to think about it, you'll eventually realize airplanes take far longer than that to cover the same door-to-door trip as the flight itself takes less than a third of the time. In fact, it's widely established that commercial flights are only competitive with regards to high-speed trans for distances greater than ~600km, and trains remain competitive for half the distances if you have their commercial speeds.
More interesting, high-speed is just a brand. The important property is commercial speed, and you can have non-high-speed lines outperforming high-speed lines. A textbook case is Britain's high-speed rail network, whose top speed is ~160km/h, which is considerably slower than France's ~320km/h, but still ensures high commercial speeds as the track layout was designed to allow trains to constantly circulate at speeds close to the top speed.
[0] https://www.openrailwaymap.org//mobile.php?availableTranslat...
I was referring to Britain's adoption and pervasive use of its InterCity 125 trains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterCity_125
The interesting aspect of the InterCity 125 was the fact that, instead of going with an optimized record breaking train, British Rail went the other way around and optimized their track layouts to allow an unimpressive train to achieve what was at the time unmatched commercial speeds.
Just to be clear, this is to the "greater Los Angeles area", ending at Rancho Cucamonga station, a 48 minute drive (1h15m by public transit) to downtown LA, and a 1h15m drive (2h30m by public transit) to LAX.
My default assumption right now is that this sort of grand construction is generally infeasible in countries outside of China where they generally don't care who they displace or the environmental damage, and often are building the cities from the ground up in the first place with the trains as a part of the urban planning.
I've been peripheral to a few urban light/heavy rail expansion projects in the US and the consistent issue is that even cities with a lot of urban sprawl are still dense enough that you have to displace a lot of people/businesses to build a new line and the stations around it. It's the sort of thing that's a lot easier to do when the city is young, or the train line got built in an era where you could just force people to sell their houses and move.
I'd be honestly curious if anywhere in the EU has managed to put in a totally net-new line like this outside of existing tracks that included a stop at the city center and various stops on the way into town. Almost every city-center train station I've ever been to in Europe was over 100 years old (even if the building had been upgraded) and seemingly using most of the same lines.
The recipe is really simple: don't do megaprojects. Individual projects must be of appropriate size for the level of government that is making the decisions. When there are several projects of similar size in the pipeline all the time, the government can develop and maintain the expertise needed to build the infrastructure.
Do you see a lot of unity in the US or Europe these days?
It's why all the rail megaprojects are happening in Asia these days.
There's a lot of ongoing extensions, but into existing train station.
Eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttgart_21
https://www.zvv.ch/zvv/en/about-us/projects/in-betrieb/cross...
https://company.sbb.ch/en/the-company/projects/german-speaki...
(Switzerland has bunch of those since they typically expand capacity with 20-30y horizon)
Also, kinda tough reading that Stuttgart link where it seems like it was generally unpopular and the police did crimes to suppress dissent. I don't really know the details to have an opinion on if they're right, but still.
But given it's Switzerland they just decide to do it all underground.
Section 2 finished in 2007 (just within your 20 year cutoff!) It links the channel tunnel with London St Pancras. Much of the London part is in tunnels and it is 100% grade separated.
The uk High Speed 2 route was also going to do this and build a new high speed rail line and station into London, but the exact issues you describe seem to mean that it will be halting at a point outside London instead possibly using existing tracks.
Overall though, High speed rail doesn't need new tracks into cities unless all the existing lines are full (or they are too slow)
It's much easier to build high speed line in the countryside and link it to the existing lines that run to existing stations in cities.
(Also the Elizabeth line in London, but's more like a metro really, even if it is 'heavy' rail)
Though, somewhat funny to me that it seems like it all got paid for by Canadian pensions?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Speed_1
There have of course also been several urban rail projects within Greater London during that time.
Other examples of relevance:
* LGV Sud Europe Atlantique * Wendlingen–Ulm high-speed railway * pretty much all of Spain's high-speed rail network.
Yes, absolutely. London's Crossrail opened a few years ago. Paris has been building new RER lines almost continuously.
> I'd be honestly curious if anywhere in the EU has managed to put in a totally net-new line like this outside of existing tracks that included a stop at the city center and various stops on the way into town. Almost every city-center train station I've ever been to in Europe was over 100 years old (even if the building had been upgraded) and seemingly using most of the same lines.
Upgrading the existing station and existing lines, or building new lines along the same right-of-way, usually makes sense - the station is already in the right place and connects up to the existing network. E.g. Roma Tiburtina was basically completely flattened and rebuilt, but it's technically an "upgrade".
You're mostly right though, to build a new station in a city you absolutely do need a large block that you can reasonably demolish - e.g. in London the planned next high-speed rail station at "Old Oak Common" will be accommodated by demolishing a big prison (Wormwood Scrubs), and it's not exactly central. Or you build completely underground, but that's expensive and you still need to demolish stuff to make a worksite.
Frankly building a new station somewhere somewhat out of town is perfectly reasonable as a way of saving money, and generally a new business district will gradually spring up around the station - see e.g. Saint-Pierre-des-Corps, or Shin-Osaka. But you need good metro connections with the CBD, at least to start with, otherwise you end up like Haute-Picardie. IMO a lot of people who want high-speed rail in the US are putting the cart before the horse: you need to build a decent metro in a city before having high-speed rail to that city makes sense, and this kind of thing is exactly why - and one of the reasons this line works is exactly that it can go to a more "outlying" station because LA is one of the few cities in the US that has been building new metro lines over the last few decades.
Malmö: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Tunnel_(Malm%C3%B6)
Proposed lines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Proposed_rail_infrast...
I can't see a Wikipedia category for recent extensions.
It will very often make sense to connect the hundred year old station to a new major line, but as with Leipzig and Malmö they also build additional stations in the centre of the city.
Closer to home I'd point to Montreal REM which will be 67 km of track in new elevated guideway when it's all done using automated trains. Phase 1 opened last summer. They did re-use an existing tunnel through downtown, but it needed extensive repairs and reconditioning as it hadn't been is use for nearly a century.
If you're interested in what systems around the world look like and what's been possible to build I'd highly recommend RMTransit. Canadian like me, so many videos are focused here, but he has tons of explainers on metro and train systems all over the world.
And many cities even build office blocks and hotels on top of their railway stations. See London, Paris, Berlin, etc.
Why America is allergic to having a big central railway station in the middle of a city, I will never understand.
What reasons? They're building new right-of-way from Rancho Cucamonga to Las Vegas; doing that from Rancho Cucamonga to downtown LA is much harder, because there's all this city in the way. Now, there's existing rail there, but it's heavily used, and negotiating access won't be cheap. (Building an additional track along it also won't be cheap.)
If China can push 286 mph in Shanghai, which means the tech exists, then why isn't this comparable? This is not snark; I am just curious what makes the Chinese train capable of such speeds, but the US train can't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_maglev_train
>After May 2021:
>Cruising speed: 300 km/h (186 mph)
>Average speed: 224 km/h (139 mph) (duration: 8 minutes and 10 seconds)
The bigger issue is likely:
>According to Chinese media's report, however, due to the huge costs of operating and the lack of the passenger flow, Shanghai Maglev Transportation Company would lose 500 million to 700 million RMB every year
And of course high speed means higher cost. The average person is very price sensitive on transportation costs.
It is pretty impressive and they're looking at building an extension. however oddly its operation speed has been significantly reduced from 268mph to 186mph.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_maglev_train
The basic problem is that Maglev is on average more expensive to build and operate and cannot (unlike ordinary high speed rail trains) ever operate on ordinary (non high speed) rail track.
It's also still pretty experimental, the Shanghai one is operational and high speed, all other operational systems are either low speed or experimental test beds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev
Regular high speed rail is a fairly routine thing and all the parts are well understood.
Are you talking about the Maglev train connecting Longyang Road Station on the Shanghai Subway Line 2, to Pudong International Airport?
If so, it is only 30km (19mi) long…
instead you should see Japan's shinkansen as a measure of standards. They built that in the sixties
What's missing in America is national unity and political will.
I mean, most of Europe has, China has, it's not really a case of "nobody else" doing it.
It's one the highest bars in the world, safer than Euro HSR. Wenzhou was the only large accident. Safety record after has been Shinkansen tier, except on largest network in the world. Crippled speed Brightline is already a deathtrap, US HSR would be fortunate to be a fraction as safe as PRC HSR.
The problem is getting to the Brightline station since it's so far out from the middle of LA.
Having branded luxury cars would be he fairly easy and could easily be a hit; private cars are unlikely to be feasible with your regular high speed electric multiple units.
[1]: https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/28-amtrak-...
California's HSR is very far from last-mile connectivity being a problem, mostly due to the geometry of starting in the middle.
CA HSR Phase 1 is SF to LA with a spur up to Merced.
CA HSR Early Operating Segment is Merced to Bakersfield.
I don't know how much these rail tickets will cost, but I find the math on that to be unlikely.
4x plane tickets, assuming rock bottom minimum $60 a head to basically anywhere, $180-240...
Hmm
Flat pricing + make ticket good for something like 2 weeks to ride whenever.
If there was such predictability and flexibility, they'd immediately significantly increase their ridership.
There's a dead reply below that says "shinkansen are cheaper when bought in advance" --- I was led to believe otherwise, good to know as I ride it a few times a year.
Compared to trains being run as a semi government provided utility, like the Netherlands, where pricing is flat based only on route. Makes the train a more relevant alternative, which helps with road congestion. But tax money is used to build railways and stations, the tickets only pay for operating the train itself.
This can only possibly work with low ridership numbers. Imagine getting to the railway station with your bags and all seats are spoken for.
Aircraft fuel isn't taxed, but train 'fuel' (electric or diesel) is taxed.
Airlines can base their staff in a cheap country and pay lower wages, avoid unions etc.
Local governments subsidise airports to attract tourists/business. The railway already exists and doesn't get this subsidy.
For example, I wouldn't consider taking a flight from Copenhagen to Århus (40 minutes vs 2¼ hrs) as the saving is wasted on waiting, and flying is much less comfortable.
(That's an extreme example for the distance, as it crosses a sea.)
It's certainly a competitor, but definitely not the preferred option.
Only for very specific routes. If I want go to from here to the one of the maybe 4 closest large cities, I'm definitely taking the train. If I want to to go from here to just about any other major city in Europe flying is almost always much faster. A bunch of people from work where going to a conference in Amsterdam a few years ago and some of them wanted to take the train for environmental reasons, and the train was literally 20+ hours door to door from the midsized European city I live in. Directly flights are under 2 hours.
Two hours flight time from Amsterdam is Italy or beyond, that's quite different.
But the train is much faster if you want to go from city center to city center for a distance that's a relatively short flight. Like London to Paris or Amsterdam to Frankfurt. If you want to go across Europe from one side to the other, the plane is much faster.
Honestly LA to LV is probably not bad it’s the right distance, it’s mostly desert so most of the HS2 issues will be avoided. If it’s actually high speed eg 200mph+ then I could see it working.
Edit: oh it’s 100mph, and it stops 37 miles outside of LA. Should rename it HS3
There is also going to be two intermediate stops in California at “Hesperia and one in Apple Valley.” (1)
So, 3.5 hours or so for guessing $100 one way versus 4-5+ hours at $40 gas 30mpg 220miles by car vs 1hr 8 minutes gate to gate $21-$60 by air without including security for any options.
They mentioned a metro link stop for LA but nothing about a plan for quite a ways off the strip in Las Vegas. Maybe a shuttle stop on the airport - car rental return loop. It’s going to be opposite the Las Vegas South Premium Outlets at Warmsprings rd and Las Vegas Blvd.
I compare to Brightline’s other rail project from Miami to Orlando. Tickets $80-$300 for similar mileage. Their high speed rail ended up with 70mph to a record 130mph.
https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/brightline-from-miami-to...
(1) https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2024/04/20/high-speed-...
> The federal government is increasingly embracing private business collaboration in its space missions, space-based projects and to power the new US Space Force as it ramps up in Los Angeles. This is creating a lot of activity and opportunity for LA-based aerospace companies.
https://www.foxnews.com/tech/exclusive-inside-area-51-the-se...
> Jacobsen, a contributing editor and investigative reporter at the Los Angeles Times Magazine, interviewed the former Area 51 employees in 2008 and 2009, shortly after the CIA declassified much of the work they had done.. Jacobsen reveals some of the wild research that went on in the 1970s at Area 51 -- where the military built the U-2 spy plane
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_51
> Area 51 is located in the southern portion of Nevada, 83 miles (134 km) north-northwest of Las Vegas.
Lots more environmental studies to be done.
Lots more interests involved. How many private individuals had to be imminent domain'd for JWST?
I imagine there will be more people employed building the rail, but overall lower average salaries.
If you want real ridership, public transit in both LA and LV needs to be functional.
Connect it to Union Station and LAX if you want some ridership. On the Las Vegas end make it stop smack in the middle of the strip.
Otherwise this thing is useless.
Also 125mph is not high speed rail. LA-LV in 2 hours + time spent getting to the train station + buffer time to avoid missing the train + long slow car rental line on the other end while 15 people ahead of you each have a chit chat with the one employee dealing with the rentals would be more time than just driving end to end. These people just don't get it.
Try LA-LV in 1 hour and maybe we're talking. But really, fix public transit in both cities first.
FTA:
>Brightline West [...] aims to lay 218 miles (351 kilometers) of new track almost all in the median of Interstate 15 between Las Vegas and Rancho Cucamonga, California. It would link there with a commuter rail connection to downtown Los Angeles
https://metrolinktrains.com/schedules/?type=station&originId...
So cut the commuter rail crap and just send the bullet trains to downtown Los Angeles?
Put another way, they've cut 4 hours of driving into 3 hours of train riding where you can't even get 3 hours of sleep and have to haul your luggage to another platform, likely up and down some stairs, 2 hours into it. And you still need to deal with transit once you arrive, so add another hour to get wherever you're actually going in LA (if you're lucky with the traffic). Time savings is zero.
The US is only fifty years late.
The UK is finished with ambitious infrastructure (and house building), as we are a populous country of rich and influential NIMBYs with a party often in power that panders to them
In 1947 a law was passed requiring trains above 79mph to have some kind of automatic train stop system, so that ended most of the high speed steam service.
The speed claims are good: going in saying it will be shinkansen fast, 350kph would be suicidal when it can't do it. Going to market on 125MPH means when they exceed it (and they will) it will be better for them.
I think they have made savvy financial choices. I get your pushback, it will suck living the commute delays either side. You think it kills it. I think it's a forcing function.
In countries where it works, it's a non-issue to get to/from the train station on both sides, and the train stations have ample good food options (real food; not a Dunkin Donuts), clean restrooms, direct connections to subways without having to even exit the building. It's an all-around pleasant experience.
I suppose, if they can go to market on 125mph, fine, but I'm rather pessimistic that anyone who lives in LV or LA (especially) would use it considering the sad state of public transit in both cities.
To be honest, faster rail between Boston - NYC - Washington (on the order of 1.5 hours between Boston-NYC and 1.5 hours between NYC-Washington, which is doable at Shinkansen/CRH speeds) would be a better market in my opinion until the west coast can get their shit together with public transit (if ever). There's plenty of business need on the east coast for faster trains, the space for the rails is already carved out by Amtrak's stupidly-slow Acela Express, and all 3 cities have excellent public transit, good enough that a significant chunk of the population of all 3 actually lives car-free.
In Europe and Asia I've never had a situation in an urban area where there wasn't an easily accessible public bathroom within a couple blocks.
People in SF complain about piss on the ground. Yet I've had to piss on the ground waiting 45 minutes for the Caltrain because the goddamn Caltrain bathrooms were closed for the rest of the night and the Panera next door wouldn't let me use theirs. What do you expect?
They don't want homeless people using them.
This isn't rocket science.
It sucks but it’s not a young minimum wage worker’s primary job.
The Brightline website says their trains in Florida have toilets, I don't see why California would be any different.
i find there to be quite a few things to love about Europe over the US, but the idea of toileting as superior in Europe than in the US strikes me as odd. colloquially, i chalk it up to travel/cultural anxiety and stress because i can find a place/way to toilet in SF, NYC, or Orlando far more easily than in Paris, Florence, or Frankfurt
https://www.maps.stadt-zuerich.ch/zueriplan3/Stadtplan.aspx?...
I found plenty of free toilets in Amsterdam and Copenhagen and plenty of pay toilets in Stockholm and Oslo. In Germany I usually looked for supermarkets, train stations, fast food restaurants, but come to think of it, Germany was harder.
Perfect is the enemy of the good. Even if everyone who takes the train drives from Los Angeles to Rancho Cucamonga (or takes an Uber), they're still offsetting less-efficient transportation modes.
The drive costs around $40 in gas one-way. If this train is indeed $80 per ticket one-way, then I fail to see how it will be competitive with driving. A group of 5 going to Vegas would pay 10X the cost of driving and lose a lot of flexibility.
But they'd gain back the time they would have spent driving. Pretty much everyone I know in Los Angeles flies to Las Vegas, though it's an admittedly biased sample.
Huh what? Almost everyone I know in LA drives to Las Vegas just to avoid having to deal with airports. And when you arrive in Las Vegas you already have your favorite car filled with your favorite snacks.
I’ve probably driven 100+ days in Vegas over the years and doubt I’ve paid more than $100 in total for parking over that span.
it will be a fast line of ubers and yellow taxis
but okay 2005 called.
jokes aside, Brightline has delivered before. It has potential for grift but I think they’ll pull this one off. They already plan to use metrolink from downtown LA Union Station. not perfect but decent coordination.
Also there are already plan for a major bus hub for the regional area in Cucamonga as well.
The magic that makes this work is that the right of way is down the middle of the existing I15 freeway. No real impact studies are likely necessary for that route, and once they hit Barstow, it’s quite flat.
Friday commute traffic out of LA and OC to the area at the bottom of the pass is absolutely impacted by the crush of traffic heading over the Cajun pass into the high desert. Not all of it is Vegas bound, but much of it is.
I am curious how they will get through the pass. I’m assuming they’ll lease ROW from either UP or BNSF, as they own the two sets of tracks currently over the pass.
Maybe it’s time to get serious about desalinization plants and get a pipeline to desert communities? They’ll sure as hell build an oil pipeline, so water should be an easy choice, right?
This is a definitional thing; for whatever reason US regulators define this as 'high-speed', but no-where which operates actually high-speed (ie pushing 300km/h) lines does. The LA-Las Vegas project, and the California high speed rail project, are high-speed by international standards, at least in parts.
No, 125mph/200kph is the standard international definition of high-speed rail. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Europe#/med...
In the United States, "higher-speed" rail has been the term used for trains up to 125mph.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail#Definitions [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher-speed_rail
Let’s be honest the project will take longer than expected and end up costing more than 12billion.
France is planning a new 410 km high speed rail line between Paris and Lyon for €12 billion [1]. That's $11.2 billion at current exchange rates, giving $25 million per km. That seems to be a pretty normal price for high speed rail in Europe [2] for routes that don't need tunneling.
So this US project is about 36% more expensive than a typical EU high speed rail project. Higher, but is it really enough higher to qualify for "what's wrong in the US"?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_France#Unde...
[2] https://op.europa.eu/webpub/eca/special-reports/high-speed-r...
Another real possibility is the project starts and gets engineering plans developed certified and on the shelf and 2 billion is spent getting things going… only to run into a snag and never get completed.
(Google the high speed rail line from Iowa City to Chicago .. that was also fully funded .. and still 10 years later not a single mile of rail has been laid)
What would be the cost of a high-speed rail version of this?
EDIT: I stand corrected. I looked at the Coast to Coast "Vacation". https://www.amtrakvacations.com/trips/america-coast-to-coast
Currently searching on amtrak.com (they don't seem to make PDF schedules anymore, sadly!):
449 Lake Shore Limited BOS - CHI 22 h 22 m
5 California Zephyr CHI - EMY 52 h 57 m
Scheduled transfer time in Chicago Union Station is about 4 hours.
So this should take a total of about 79 hours.
It takes just over 3 days to travel from the Bay Area to NYC. The price is $281 [1].
Now if you throw in some rooms, you are talking about first-class travel that includes all meals free. You need to consider how much money a few days of hotel and restaurants would cost, so the comparison is complex. Also the room cost is not really per-person unless you are traveling alone.
[1] I looked up the price for June 11th.
It's important to note that that's 3 days in a coach seat. 3 days.
The food is terrible, like truly terrible.
We brought a bottle of Jack and had a decent enough time. Wouldn't choose it again.
It looks like the sleeper version is indeed quite expensive nowadays if you're doing it as one person.
How many days does it take to fly from SF to NYC?
> Now if you throw in some rooms, you are talking about first-class travel that includes all meals free.
First class? I've done the trip in a room and there's nothing first class about it. The bedding was suspect. Everything in the room felt old and dirty. In the dining car, you don't even get your own table. They cram you with other passengers. And for much of the trip, your view consists of corn fields and miles long CSX trains slowly chugging alongside your train. And to add insult to injury they was hours late ( 9 hours if memory serves ) so if you have friends or family waiting to pick you up, make sure to tell them to set aside the whole day. If you are a light sleeper, then you are not going to have a good time because the train wheels on the tracks are very loud. If you have cash to burn, then try it out for the experience. But it's not a trip I'd recommend or take again.
Regarding your bad experience on the train... it seems to me that a lot of quality went downhill during the pandemic, and I'm wondering if you went before or after the pandemic started.
On your comments about lateness and how hard it is for light sleepers. Your comments there are very true, and people who would be concerned with either of those should think twice before riding.
I love riding long-distance trains. But I don't kid myself: it is way longer and more expensive than flying. There is a reputation on Amtrak for severe lateness. And the pandemic has made some things onboard worse. People should definitely read negative reviews and look for common issues; if the common problems would be a problem for them, that should be a deal-breaker.
I agreed with you there. That commenter exaggerated the costs. My response was directed to the 'first class' portion of your comment.
> And the pandemic has made some things onboard worse.
My trip was many years ago. Before the pandemic. I personally don't think the 'first class' amtrak experience is worth the money unless amtrak upgrades everything about the experience.
The line connecting NorCal to SoCal is so much more productive that any other line being prioritized is crazy to me.
This is estimated to be a $12B project. $6.5B raised so far: $3B grant and $3.5B in tax-exempt, "private activity" bonds. Does anyone actually think the rest will come from investors? Of course not, the government will see a half-finished project that it supported and provide the funding to finish the job, including the inevitable overruns.
A private company receiving 6.5B (and likely, eventually $12+) of government money... no pressure or expectations to make any profit. Great deal if you can get it!
https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/2024/03/08/brightli...
The rail infrastructure is publicly owned. But the rail infrastructure is open access that private companies can pay for. As far as I understand you can even have a public carrier but it must bid for access like its private counterparts do.
This has already led to an explosion of high quality high speed rail service in countries like Italy and Spain.
To rephrase, some things are not directly profitable but tend to have outsized profitable effects. E.g., the education budget doesn't directly generate profits, but educated people go on to get good jobs and pay a lot of taxes, refunding the cost of their education by many multiples.
The same goes for roads, highways, and rail. Not directly profitable, but they enable a lot of free movement that boosts the economy and, in turn, taxes.
I’m not in support of private companies receiving subsidies, but at least do some research before reacting..
1- https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/08/04/how-brightline-is-changi...
The regulations of rail in the US are slightly perverted (freight rail interests dominate the discussion, usually). The economics of passenger rail in the western US are also difficult when large densities of people are so spread out and the only "primary" reasons for going from A to B are for recreation, not work/industry.
- Maintaining what's already there
- Select state-level projects, in some states
- Select municipal-level projects, in some cities
This means there's been a huge deficit in this kind of project at the federal level.
In saying that, I don't want to give the impression that I'm on some ivory tower. Via Rail, a crown corp, is our national rail operator, and it's riddled with issues with little in the way of meaningful solutions.
It would be amazing to book a high speed train from Amsterdam to Barcelona at prices competing with Aviation. But nobody cares about this at a pan-EU level.
The likely outcome of a whole-EU train system is something like the US system where Amtrak generally hits the major population centers, but leaves a ton of the US behind because when you talk about Federal priorities, a train from Denver to Dallas isn't a huge priority compared to LA to SF or Boston to NYC. Obviously the EU system would fare better because it's starting from a better base, but it's emblematic of the tradeoff between bottom-up and top-down planning and investment for something like this.
So there's not really any interest in selling tickets from Country A to Country C. Because country B has to put up with the traffic which is already resource-restricted. And they prefer their internal customers to get priority.
This way it will never end up as a reasonable alternative for flying. What's really missing in the EU is the ability to bypass cities. A train from Amsterdam to Barcelona has to cross right through the center of Antwerp, Brussels, Lyon (or a transfer in Paris through a horrible metro connection). It's not possible to have a direct train that bypasses all the cities straight to its destination. That would be a real alternative to flying. Considering the amount of flights between Amsterdam and Barcelona daily it's easily possible to fill a few direct trains. It's that stopping in every city center (without in-city facilities for high-speed tracks) that make it so horrible.
But anyway the EU really doesn't care about this at all and considering the huge construction durations they're too late for this to make a difference in climate change anyway.
There's little faith that public projects have the expertise to actually get it done and make it work. It's hard for me to imagine the federal government succeeding at that for any reasonable cost, and I suppose you could blame some of that on partisan bickering. But I also can't imagine California succeeding for any reasonable cost, and it's a one-party state, so there's no excuse.
At the end of the day you need some people who actually know how to do the job rather than just argue over plans and subcontract twelve levels deep. My guess is that Birghtline found a few such people and that's their competitive advantage as a business.
This ends up being self-fulfilling. People don't trust the government, so they suffocate the project in fixed payscales and low-bid rules and endless reviews, and so the government can't get anything done, and so people don't trust the government...
> At the end of the day you need some people who actually know how to do the job rather than just argue over plans and subcontract twelve levels deep.
Right - so you need to be able to hire those people and pay them something close to what they're worth, or build up that expertise over the long term by having a steady pipeline of projects and training people as you go. But voters don't trust these governments enough to empower them to do that.
Perhaps. But once the expertise is lost, you can't get it back by throwing more money at the problem. You have incompetent people hiring people who check all the right boxes but still can't do it, and then you have a huge sunk cost that you don't want to cancel so it drags on forever, eroding trust even further.
Private companies have some advantages here. If they don't think the project will succeed, they will stop, because they know there's no payday. If it's due to bad laws, they will lobby (a bad word, I know) to change them. They'll fire people who don't perform. They'll look in all kinds of creative ways to find people who can get the job done. They'll stop and think about who might actually ride it, because they need the ticket revenue, so they will build the lines in the right places with the right stops.
Maybe all of that could be true for some governments. But there's a long way to go before the US or the California government is able to do any of those things.
Maybe. Maybe there's no alternative to doing a pipeline of progressively bigger projects with in-house management and accepting that the first few will suck. But if you're not willing to pay what the expertise costs then there's no way you'll make it work, you need to get that level of expertise in house. I'd think that if you're willing to pay top dollar then you have at least a chance of hiring the right people.
Aeroplanes used to be something just for rich people too. Heck, go back far enough and so were cars, or even bicycles. You've gotta build a bunch before it becomes something mass-population.
I think if there were more free bathing facilities around, this would be a non-issue
I can only guess either you know homeless people that can afford such tickets, or you simply didn't RTFA.
Nice positive attitude btw.