Hacker News Reader

Comment by pembrook | Hacker News Reader

This is a false conspiracy narrative that belongs on Reddit in the r/fuckcars filter bubble.

Sure, the automotive industry stood to benefit from the decline of rail travel in the US. But they didn’t really need to do anything for that to happen on its own. Reality is far less interesting than that. Turns out when you have tons of fertile land, even pre-industrialization your population tends to spread out a bit (the vast majority of Americans used to be farmers). Today the US has 3-5X less population density than any country with high speed rail. Autos saw massive success in the US due to this fact, and their prevalence reduced the demand for rail travel as a side effect, it wasn’t some top down evil conspiracy.

It’s fun to blame everything on evil big business or evil big government, but it’s also important to look at the first principles and base properties of the issue at hand first.

View on HN

> Today the US has 3-5X less population density than any country with high speed rail.

This may be true when averaged across the entire country (or even just the lower 48).

But it is absolutely not true if you consider various zones of the country as candidates for good rail service.

Several such zones exist, among them:

1. the north east corridor, perhaps one of the largest and densest conurbations in the world

2. the roughly rectangular shape formed with the NW corner in Minneapolis, the NW corner in Milwaukee, the SE corner in Detroit and SW corner in <wherever the hell that is>

3. The triangle in Texas formed by Dallas/Ft. Worth, Austin and San Antonio

All 3 have higher population densities than those found in non-urban parts of Europe; the latter have good to excellent train service, but none of these 3 do.

The problem is the equivalent driving times aren't crazy on those routes either though.

When you factor in that you need a car in both your departing city and destination city (except for NYC), AND the fact that nearly every household in those regions owns one or multiple cars (which is not true in higher density/higher urbanization countries)...it begins to not make sense especially given the massive upfront cost of construction.

You highlighted it. The real problem is when you get somewhere you still need a car.

It's possible that would gradually start to change, starting around rail stations.

That requires the area around rail stations to be built for pedestrians and bicycles, not cars. That doesn’t seem to be the case in many places in America.

Places can change! American cities were built for pedestrians in the '20s, and Dutch cities were built fir cars until the '90s.

I do take Acela from Central Massachusetts to NYC but mostly because I hate driving into NYC so much. (And don't need a car when I get there.) It basically involves driving an hour in the wrong direction to south suburban Boston. I could drive to New Haven and for a longer drive I'd get a shorter/cheaper trip.

I will speak to the Chicago, Milwaukee, Madison, Minneapolis/St Paul region.

Rail is not going to happen until you don't need a car in those cities. Chicago you could do, but the others are not pedestrian friendly. Anyone traveling within that region will have a 95% chance of already owning a car. Unless the train gets you from Chicago to Minneapolis in an hour, people are just going to drive. The risk with car rental and money spent on Uber's isn't worth it.

I feel like these types of comments come from people that live in NYC or LA. The rest of the country is so fuckin sparse. Your "walkable cities" idea doesn't make any sense and is completely unfeasible outside of major metro areas which land wise in the US is like 99%.

I don't see why Madison doesn't work. I've taken buses to Madison, you can get downtown. You can usually find some transport. Or you can just call a ride share or something!

I've done Chicago -> Madison by bus, and honestly prefer it to the plane at least (even from the airport). More comfortable seats and I get out just at a station. High frequency bus lines feel like good indicators of where some trains could work, and it's not like bus services are dead.

(Similarly, I did Portland -> Eugene on Amtrak and it was nice and chill! I roadshared to my final destination but I had to get from A to B somehow)

For the record, I live in a tiny village in New Mexico.

Also for the record, the overwhelming majority of the US population lives in metropolitan areas, not rural ones.

I do agree with the idea of building out strong localised networks (and roll my eyes at the "US rail network" dream maps people post out). But my impression from France and Germany at least is that you have two sort of failure modes:

- For France, rural areas don't really have that good of a rail network. Instead there are several trunk lines that are reliable. But it means that east-west stuff is nearly non-existent. Lots of "drive me to the station and drop me off please". Good enough to put France at number 2 in numbers of km ridden per passenger!

- For Germany, the network is much more evenly spread out. But ever German I've met complaints constantly about the unreliability of the trains, combined with the low rate of service. So you end up with stations everywhere, but if a train gets cancelled you could be stranded for hours.

Anyways I do think the French model makes a hell of a lot of sense (prioritizing train frequency over coverage), but it might not be what people are expecting if they just look at a map of trains.

German trains are unrealiable because they spend like 5-10 times less per km of railway than Austria or Switzerland.

This probably has a lot to do with topography of Germany compared to both Austria and Switzerland.

Also in rural Germany you will need a car anyway, even if all major cities are well connected.

https://jalopnik.com/did-musk-propose-hyperloop-to-stop-cali...

    At the time, it seemed that Musk had dished out the Hyperloop proposal just to make the public and legislators rethink the high-speed train.
    
    He didn’t actually intend to build the thing. It was more that he wanted to show people that more creative ideas were out there for things that might actually solve problems and push the state forward. With any luck, the high-speed rail would be canceled. Musk said as much to me [Ashlee Vance] during a series of e-mails and phone calls leading up to the announcement.

Ahh the smoking gun...another conspiracy theory?

Trying to convince internet leftists that a cabal of Evil Capitalists are not behind all of the worlds ills is like trying to convince internet right wingers that most vaccines work.

I don’t really care what is in Elons heart. The lesson learned is the same regardless: ignore the nonsense gadgetbahns dreamed up by business people and focus on the real proven technologies in use already around to world.

Left, right, does such a dichotomy even matter?

An influential person admitted that he had interfered the development of the high-speed railway at US with a vaporware project, which reported to him juicy economic revenues generated by investments and subsidies from all over the world. Just with vaporware.

Should people think that this kind of interference does not happen with influential pockets because you call it a conspiracy, while they call it just business?

I don’t understand the density argument: HST aren’t supposed to connect every places, that’s totally ineffective.

Instead you build rails between major hubs (those that got the biggest airports usually) and add stops on some medium cities that happen to be on the way. It serves those living close enough of the connected cities that want to go close enough to another connected city. _close enough_ depends on the local connection options like regional trains, bus, bikes, trams… and if there’s nothing you just grab a cab or rental car. The city of departure can be reached with your own personal car which is usually a bit cheaper and faster (therefore more range). Most travels destination are big cities or close enough (business, tourism…).

Rail planing is a Pareto game.

If you ran high speed rail between the two most populated cities in the US (NYC and LA), it'd be a 14 hour journey. And there's not that many conveniently placed major cities along the way where it even makes sense to add more than a few stops.

I know we have a lot of rail enthusiasts here, but the average person tends not to like being stuck in a tube for 14 hours...even if that tube is substantially nicer and more roomy than an airplane.

Let's not even talk about the cost of constructing that route.

Everyone wants to think about how practical things are. A high speed sleeper train across America would be cool. People should do more cool shit.

I don't think anyone is proposing to start with a NY to LA HSR line. It's more like NY to DC, LA to SF, and maybe expand from there little by little.

For what it's worth, I somewhat agree. High speed rail in particular is super expensive, and airplanes are surprisingly cheap and flexible in comparison.

>the vast majority of Americans used to be farmers

The vast majority of every agricultural society used to be farmers.

While you're right about average density, there are some spots with much higher density population that could certainly benefit from high speed train.

Here's the source. There were actual-court cases which found that oil and car manufacturers conspired to monopolize and convert local public transit to buses from rail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

"Between 1938 and 1950, National City Lines and its subsidiaries, American City Lines and Pacific City Lines—with investment from GM, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California (through a subsidiary), Federal Engineering, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Trucks—gained control of additional transit systems in about 25 cities.[a] Systems included St. Louis, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and Oakland. NCL often converted streetcars to bus operations in that period, although electric traction was preserved or expanded in some locations. Other systems, such as San Diego's, were converted by outgrowths of the City Lines. Most of the companies involved were convicted in 1949 of conspiracy to monopolize interstate commerce in the sale of buses, fuel, and supplies to NCL subsidiaries, but were acquitted of conspiring to monopolize the transit industry."

This history also plays a large role in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," as a bit of fun bonus lore...

Local public transit in the US is a very different beast to getting across the country.

Manhattan may have high population density, and the public transit that goes with it; but building passenger rail thousands of miles to the other side of a sparsely populated continent just doesn’t add up in the same way.

Street cars != Intercity Rail

Also I'd argue street cars are way worse than busses which have route flexibility.

The bigger problem is Americans don't like being around other Americans and really don't like public transit.

It's not some giant conspiracy.

> Street cars != Intercity Rail

No, but the two feed into each other. Intercity rail loses most of its advantages if you have to hire a car at the destination.

> Also I'd argue street cars are way worse than busses which have route flexibility.

They're better for that very reason. You can move somewhere with a decent commute and know that the streetcar isn't going to disappear at the stroke of a pen.

I know that you were talking about individual commutes here. The city of Oslo, Norway was considering having a shared trunk in one corner, where the metro, the streetcar, and the intercity rail all shared a stretch of track. I believe it was to make efficient use of existing right-of-way. I think that there were problems due to electrification (750 V vs 15 kV) and other political problems.

There is a different section in Oslo where the streetcar and metro share a stretch of track using a clever interlocking.

"and really don't like public transit."

I don't like bad public transit either.

"Americans don't like being around other Americans "

There could be the option of having personal cabins for yourself.

I kinda agree, except on the car part, because cars dominate even densely populated areas where trams, metros and buses should.

You haven’t lived until you’ve been assaulted by a homeless person on a bus in the US!

Buses are a joke. We cannot have public transit here without security to match, like at airports.

US has a huge social problem that spills into a security one.

Quite unsurprisingly Americans end up isolating from each other in suburbs, often gated neighborhoods with private schools, cars and live overall miserable and unhappy lives.

I’d take this comment more seriously if there weren’t car companies that bought up rail networks and shut them down.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com