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Comment by likeabatterycar | Hacker News Reader

Can you provide sources for the Big Oil conspiracy you cite? Because nationwide high speed rail isn't as easy - or practical - as you think. California hadn't been able to build a train a fraction of that distance without delays and squandering massive amounts of money.

The PNW has been unable to build it from Portland to Vancouver.

The US is many times larger than any European country or Japan. There are US states similar in size to EU countries with comparable rail networks.

The US literally invented air travel, which made traveling long distances by train largely obsolete.

Aircraft aren't limited to where they can go by rails.

So please explain with all these concrete examples of failure how it's a corporate conspiracy and not general purpose government ineptitude?

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Japan is almost all mountains, it's one of the worst geographies to build high speed rail where tunnels and turn radii need to be especially large. But they pulled it off anyway. The bullet train initially only connected metros like Tokyo and Osaka but today runs all the way to many remoter areas. The most recently added line connects Fukui prefecture, population 780k.

The US has many areas with suitable population density to be served by high speed rail, and with more accomodative geography than Japan. It's just that in the US, it was considered fine to use government funds and authority to bulldoze land for the interstate system, but not for high speed rail.

Washington - Atlanta with stops at Richmond, Raleigh, Charlotte. I don’t understand why this isn’t an hourly train.

> California hadn't been able to build a train a fraction of that distance without delays and squandering[??] massive amounts of money.

It costs money and time to build HSR. Fine. The J(N)R director who ran the shinkansen project literally lied to multiple levels of government to shield the (2x+) budget overruns. He resigned and then within a year of it opening he was given a medal for extraordinary contributions to Japan.

> Because nationwide high speed rail isn't as easy - or practical - as you think.

Who is claiming that it is easy? However, it is practical! It takes 6 hours to drive Tokyo to Osaka; it's 2hr by train. Trains leave every 5 minutes.

A west coast HSR network is just obviously practical! Beijing-Shanghai HSR is 1300km; SF to Seattle would be the same. It'd be 4-5h on a train. Right now it's 2.5 hours on a plane plus a recommended 1.5 hours for security and boarding plus transfers on each side--I'd rather take a high speed train If I could! SF to LA could be ~3h. 90 minutes on a plane plus lead time and transfer times and it's competitive. Again.

> There are US states similar in size to EU countries with comparable rail networks.

Oh, which ones?

>A west coast HSR network is just obviously practical! Beijing-Shanghai HSR is 1300km; SF to Seattle would be the same. It'd be 4-5h on a train. Right now it's 2.5 hours on a plane plus a recommended 1.5 hours for security and boarding plus transfers on each side--I'd rather take a high speed train If I could! SF to LA could be ~3h. 90 minutes on a plane plus lead time and transfer times and it's competitive. Again.

So just to be clear you are saying at best the time difference between flight and HSR would be minimal - so where is the payoff for the billions the infrastructure would take to build. If it's purely capacity couldn't you spend a fraction of the billions you'd spend on the new infrastructure to bolster the existing system?

Environment? Comfort?

That's worth the price tag, environmental impact, and government land repossession that will be required?

Often, yes. Have you considered how the alternatives fare on those?

I think it's relevant that Shanghai and Beijing are 5x the size of SF and Seattle while construction cost are a significant upfront barrier and don't go down much by needing to service fewer travelers.

China, Russia, and India have high speed rail.

Can you cite the reasons that these large countries are capable of building high speed rail while the US is not?

Where is the recent innovation in US air travel? It has gotten considerably worse over the last 30 years. Supersonic passenger flights stopped in 2003 around the same time that TSA added hours to every flight.

Russia hardly has high speed rail, it's just one line (Moscow to St. Petersburg) and top speed is just 200 km/h for most of the line.

2.5 times faster than any train in my wealthy, western country.

I don't know which wealthy, western country you live in, but to be clear in the US Acela trains get up to 150 mph (241 kmh) -- admittedly in a short section, but with other sections that have a top speed of 135 mph (217 kmh). The entire route from Washington to New York has an average speed (including stops) of 90mph (140 kmh).

Should Acela be faster? Probably! But people should be clear-eyed about what the reality of the situation is.

New Zealand. You know that place americans fantasize about moving to when the newly elected president has the wrong colour tie. Trains are 80km/h max.

If New Zealand is a western country do you consider Canada to be the middle east?

I never took the term "western" to be purely geographical

That might be the average scheduled speed, but it’s not my average experienced speed on Acela, with about half the trips seeing significant delays from schedule.

And high speed in India is apparently 100mph/160kph.

As others have pointed out Russia didn't have high-speed rail. The reason is related to the real reason the US doesn't have it. It's of course density. Relevant US cities are much further apart. You practically need hsr to make it practical at all which prevents incremental improvement of the train system. I hear that's different on the east coast (I've spent very little time there) but it certainly sets culture when for most of the country trains are a bad option.

I mean, the recent innovation in US air travel is that the TSA no longer adds hours to every flight. Like, is it maddening that we're curing a self-inflicted problem? Sure, of course it is. But the railfan community is also stuck in 2010. Every flight I've been on in the last 10 years I've walked through a metal detector, not a scanner, I've kept my shoes and belt on, my laptop in my bag. It's like 2000 all over again, except that now we have to pay a nominal fee every 5 years or whatever it is to use PreCheck.

Everyone should be mad that we dug this hole and then climbed out of it, but people shouldn't pretend that we're still in the hole.

Still, we don't put airports in the middle of built-up downtown areas, and for good reason. You usually have to hail a taxi or bus from an airport, whereas you can step out of a (good) train station and be right where you want to be.

Boston, San Diego, and Wash DC all have airports roughly 3 miles outside their main core. Toronto (YTZ) has an airport less than 2 miles.

There are good transit connections from Logan airport, but you'd still have to board them. I wouldn't want to walk anywhere from the arrivals terminal on foot. Walking out of South Station is pretty nice though, lots of places I'd want to be nearby.

Billy Bishop is pretty convenient, I think it's quite unusual in that respect. But for the same reason, it's rather controversial and limited in the airplanes it can take, and its future is often in doubt.

Still nonsense.

Train stations and airports are where they are. Lots of them are quite close to downtowns. Others aren't. Nobody's changing their locations in existing large cities.

There are plenty of cities where the nearest airport is closer than the nearest long distance rail station. There are plenty of cities where they aren't.

I tend to show up fairly early because neither myself nor my limo companies like the stress. But the idea that you need to show up hours early just isn't true in general.

Policy, The Koch Brothers and "eminent domain" problems in the US.

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