France's new high-speed train has Americans asking: Why can't we have that? | Hacker News Reader

France's new high-speed train has Americans asking: Why can't we have that?

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80 pointsdevonnull144 comments

I live in Europe and I also ask "why can't we have that".

High speed rail >240km/h is still very uncommon[0], especially cross border (tho notable exceptions exist, e.g. Paris-Milan with both TGV and Frecciarossa just reopened).

There are EU plans for a wider network but it's progressing very slowly.

The presence of fast trains between two cities, on the scale of <600km, is transformative, as it becomes more convenient to take a train than to fly, while also having less negative externalities.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Europe

As distance grows cost really becomes prohibitive and flying also becomes faster.

Not really. Flying is fast, but when you measure door to door, in distances of under 1000k, a high speed rail network would not be slower.

Hence "as distance grows"...

But a 1000km radius around any major center in Europe covers a lot of potential destinations. I assume that a lot of people, especially in the US underestimate the density of Europe.

1000km is a stretch to set the threshold at which trains win on time. It is also costly, not least when you hit a mountain range... at some point you need to balance billions of euros vs saving an hour (or even less).

Is that always true? In France HSR stations are often like airports, way out of town and you have to get a taxi in/out of wherever you're going. And the rail network seems more exposed to mechanical breakdown in general. I don't have hard data but it feels to me like trains fail or get cancelled much more often than flights do, and when a flight does get cancelled it's usually due to some major failure that'd take out trains too (e.g. power failure).

It's an investment though. Every part of France that's next to the high-speed train really blossomed.

In France pretty much anywhere near a high-speed train station becomes within convenient reach of Paris and so attracts a boom in second homes and hybrid/remote workers.

Different optimal solutions for different scenarios.

sure, that's why I mentioned "<600km", which is a distance covering many connections in Europe. E.g. Paris-Milan, Amsterdam-Berlin, Budapest-Vienna, London-Brussels, Geneve-Genoa etc

These would be

* many hours by car

* <3 hours by fast train

* <1 hour in flight by plane

The flight time is offset by security controls and getting to/from the airport, so a fast train is a good alternative (not perfect, just good).

There is also always the comfort factor. Increasing travel time by 25% or even more can be a non issue if I have high speed internet and proper food and drink service available.

> I live in Europe and I also ask "why can't we have that".

Which country are you in? Because the answer for "we" greatly depends on local environments and politics.

For Austria the answer for instance is "the alps" and urban sprawl. Trains stop everywhere and people want to keep this, there is just not enough distance to have high speed rails be effective and there is not enough space for dedicated lines. The answer is a very different one than for instance why Germany has so little.

That's a good point. The two endpoint of the main Danish railway line are both airports. Flight time between the two is around 30 minutes, maybe a little less, price, as little as €25. Take the train between the two, travel time is 6 hours, and it costs €70, if you're lucky you can buy something overpriced to eat, but don't count on it, so pack a lunch and drinks. So why would you ever take the train?

The problem is that Denmark is shaped like a big L and there's no way to connect the ends without building an insanely long bridge.

>For Austria the answer for instance is "the alps" and urban sprawl.

There are no Alps between Vienna and Graz, the second largest city yet it takes 2.5 hours to get to Vienna from Graz, while the same ~200km journey is faster by car on the highway and that's accounting for traffic and you sticking to the 100-130kmph highway speed limit which plenty of drivers do not to shorten their journey. My ex-CEO would floor it to get home much quicker than the train and have his secretary pay the speed-cam fines on his company's dime.

When you monitor the trains' speed on the internal screens, you can see the average speed on the straights is somewhere around 100kmph, slower than cars on the adjacent highway.

What's the excuse there for such slow ass trains? And Austrian train tickets aren't cheap either.

Not an Austrian, but your talking about "excuses for such slow ass trains" seems to be missing the fact that the Austrians are building two large rail tunnels:

The Semmering base tunnel - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmering_Base_Tunnel which will shorten travel between Vienna and Graz, and the Koralmbahn tunnel - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koralm_Tunnel

Also, no Alps between Vienna and Graz? Have you looked out of the window? If you haven't, here is the map. The heights of the peaks are in meters, so 3x for feet:

https://mapy.cz/s/bokococuza

That is a bona fide mountainous terrain.

I answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43647104

I checked this route, it's very wiggly. Would there really be much to gain, even if the top speed was doubled?

It's a train, so:

- Accelerating takes a lot of time and space

- Braking takes a lot of time and space

- Allowing overtaking takes a lot of infrastructure and good timetabling.

Sure, but as a traveler, why would you care about the details when a car ride is faster (and sometimes cheaper) than the train? The whole point of rail is that you get to the destination faster and cheaper than with a car.

For me, the whole point of rail is that I get to my destination more comfortably, and am able to do something else during the journey (e.g. work on my laptop). I don't mind if that's a bit slower, or takes longer, than in a car.

For those who travel for work and business, time matters a lot, especially when you start to add the times to and from the train station at the source and destination. If rail ads 2+ hours more versus car, that's 2+ hours less you can be with your family that day. If you're travelling for vacation, those 2+ hours means you might miss out on a flight that's only once per day. And so on.

That's a different question to "why can't we have that"

> There are no Alps between Vienna and Graz [...]

You what? Please don't take this the wrong way, but the things I read about European countries on HN sometimes are asinine and part of why, despite desperately wanting to sometimes, I'll do my best to never comment on US centric topics where I have little to know personal knowledge or experience.

Not only is the Südbahn between Vienna and Graz going through the Alps[0], it is the railways that goes through the alps. It is world famous for that fact. It was the first regular mountain railway in the world and is a UNESCO heritage because of it.

> [...] 130kmph highway speed limit which plenty of drivers do not to shorten their journey.

I'm certain the Railjet could also gain a few minutes (at most considering the Autobahn between Vienna and Graz) if their drivers ignored both laws and safety.

> My ex-CEO would floor it to get home much quicker than the train and have his secretary pay the speed-cam fines on his company's dime.

And people wonder why the government saw the need to introduce the ability to confiscate the vehicles [1] of such responsible individuals. As a motorcycle rider, the wanna be speed demons who have such important reasons for speeding are amongst the most dangerous, next to people unwilling to put their phone away. Also, a great statement on equality in our society. For some, a speeding fine can be devastating, for others, it's something their secretary handles.

Maybe your ex-CEO should spend a bit of their precious time to calculate how much they are really saving by speeding on that particular stretch of the Autobahn compared to sticking to the 100-130km/h speed limits.

> [...] average speed on the straights is somewhere around 100kmph [...]

On the straights, which on this route are limited to the area between Gloggnitz and Vienna Meidling, the Railjet averages roughly 150km/h. I got off one, only a few hours ago, so can attest to that.

Look, the fact that the Semmering base tunnel hasn't already been built is a failure of local government, not least because the Westbahn (between Salzburg and Vienna) is already far faster than the car [2] and we could have had the same. Interested whether your ex-CEO at least uses the train between Vienna and Salzburg, considering it's only about the speed for them?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmering_Pass

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-19/austria-a...

[2] 2h 18m vs 3h 15m

In Hungary, and I'm pretty sure the answer is "corruption" here, but it was more of a rethorical device than an actual question :)

Just a gut-feeling, but in country with high level of corruption I wouldn't feel comfortable to ride a train that accelerates >240km/h.

Chances are, robust process-structures and engineering capabilities didn't rank that high as decision-factors for supplier and operations companies...

The Alps is not the answer when you look at all the tunnels that are already there (both in Austria and Switzerland). Rather, for Austria the answer would be 'because it's a small country with one big city', so purely from the local perspective it doesn't make sense to build up high speed rail. And for that to change we would need an earnest EU-wide effort, possibly even a crossborder rail company, that would build the missing links and possibly even operate the crossborder trains. Because currently the infrastructure owners and big train operators are state owned and have little incentive to build and operate fast crossborder trains.

Ok I have this pet idea for solving the tricky balance between "express" lines and having enough stops: With electric trains it's pretty trivial to give each car it's own motor, so what if every time you approach a stop the front car detaches from the train and shifts to the stop and a car at the station accelerates and attaches to the front of the train (or vice versa), all without the train ever stopping? Maybe it would have to slow a bit to make the attachment/detachment smoother, but you'd still skip the boarding wait and if it was going from like 600-300kph that would still be vastly better than starting and stopping.

You would board the train and get on the car that detaches at your intended destination. In the case that they want to run fewer cars than there are stops, either they could alternate which car detaches so that a core car makes it from start to end, or people wanting to make the whole trip would have to change cars sometimes.

Is this impossible? Would it be implausibly expensive? Is it "just an engineering challenge" like hydrogen fuel-cell cars (I.E. we'll figure it out just as soon as we have a better alternative)? I have no idea, but it sure sounds cool to me, and it doesn't feel like it's in the realm of fantasy.

I have thought about this as well. There are at least two issues:

1) The number of trains on the track would increase significantly making section control even harder. (In Germany this is one of the limiting factors for the overall capacity)

2) In order to attach/detach the front and back of the trains would have to be straight and vertical. At higher speeds this would lead to aerodynamic problems. You can see this issue when comparing local commuter trains which are vertical and often can be linked this way and high-speed trains which tend to have special aerodynamically shaped noses. The higher the speed the more elongated the nose.

Some precedence in the mail hook.

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

You want to switch tracks while the trains passes over them? Imagine what would happen if the switch fails!

> so what if every time you approach a stop the front car detaches from the train and shifts to the stop and a car at the station accelerates and attaches to the front of the train (or vice versa), all without the train ever stopping?

Has been done historically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slip_coach

In live in Ireland where there is hardly any rail, despite once having the densest network in Europe. Would love to see further state investment here as well. Ireland is small enough that it should be possible to be in Dublin from either Cork, Galway, or Limerick in an hour.

Mmm, when I took a train based holiday in Ireland a few years back the rail map did strike me as rather withered. You wouldn't really want to try to go from Ballina to Sligo by train these days, although you technically could...

There’s a plan to build a Cork-Dublin-Belfast high speed (300km/h standard) line, but it seems unlikely to happen. There’s a more feasible-looking plan to upgrade Dublin-Cork to 200km/h (high-ish speed?) via improvements to the existing line (which currently caps out at, at best, 160km/h or so, but much worse in many parts); that seems likely to happen now.

This would bring it from 2h30m to maybe 1hr30, which would be a big improvement. There’s an argument that Ireland just isn’t physically big enough for ‘true’ (TGV/ICE-type) high speed, though I’m not totally convinced by it; with a 300km/h line it’d be less than an hour journey, making commuting borderline feasible.

As someone looking to move to notDublinButClose, I hope you get that wish!

Exactly, high speed rail is a nice option, but it's not really widely available. I needed to go to Warsaw, 1200km away, I wanted to go by train, but I don't have that kinda time. It's either 17 hours, half of which is going to be in a bus anyway. An alternative route had me take a ferry, extending the travel time to almost two days.

Taking a plane was cheaper and took three hours and given that airport security, at least in one direction is basically non-existing you just show up 20 minutes before your plane leaves.

France truly has awesome trains though. Main criticism is that it lacks routes that don't go through Paris (like Lyon-Bordeaux, or Marseille-Bordeaux). But I live close to Marseille and it takes me 7 hours to go see my father who lives in Cherbourg (with a 1-hour connection in Paris, and one of the train being local). Coompared to 1200km of driving and zero planes.

And boy, don't get me started on the Eurostar. It's expensive sure, but 2 hours-ish to go from London to Paris is ludicrous.

The centralization of train infrastructure in France is especially annoying for someone arriving from the North or East trying to travel towards the South. That Paris does not have a proper rail connection between its various high speed terminals baffles me.

We don't have a network quite like the Shinkansen or the Chinese one, but you've linked an enormous article with dozens of high-speed lines and suggested that it's "very uncommon" for speeds beyond 240km/h (which seems pretty arbitrary speed). That's pretty misleading IMO, and anyone who would scan through it or who took a glance at https://openrailwaymap.org with the "Max Speeds" style will see a lot of the major metros in the biggest countries are connected with high-speed rail.

Rail is undoubtedly vital for the future and we should always be pushing for more, but I think it's ok to step back and appreciate that high-speed rail (and rail in general) in the EU is so much further ahead than the USA, even if it does still lag behind Japan and China.

I took the TGV from Munich to Dijon with a train change in Strasbourg in December and we hit 315km/h on the Strasbourg to Dijon leg of the trip.

> The presence of fast trains between two cities, on the scale of <600km, is transformative, as it becomes more convenient to take a train than to fly

I haven't found this to be true for London to Brussels. Eurostar terminals seem to operate like airports and require check-in two hours in advance, with airport style security. So I don't save time, and for me, my regional airport is much easier to reach than the Eurostar terminal.

I can believe it works better for "normal" train travel within the Schengen area, but I wonder: what are the security requirements then, if any?

There are next to no security checks on stations that I regularly use throughout Germany, the Netherlands, and Austria. I believe that French stations have a turnstile at the platform for TGV trains. Other than that, I know security checks only from Eurostar terminals at the Amsterdam, Brussels, and Paris stations.

> but I wonder: what are the security requirements then, if any?

None, mostly. You just get on the train.

That's a strange article. The TGV Inoui is not a "new high-speed train", it is an SNCF brand (think "premium TGV") that has been operating for nearly a decade now, using standard TGV rolling stock. SNCF are simply buying new trains for that brand, and the interior design doesn't even look that different from other new high-speed trains in other parts of the world.

They are referring to TGV M, the latest version of the TGV that is being released by Alstom.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV_M

The best rail being built in the US is in Florida, the brightline:

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

it's a tad expensive for a lot of people, and doesn't go as fast as it could because it uses existing lines but.. it's pretty good. it came about during the 08' recession, florida (gov Rick Scott) cancelled what was going to be a statewide rail line to save money. i remember nearly all the people i mentioned it too wished it had been kept. whoever the man/team/group that eventually founded brightline they fought an uphill battle but it helped most seniors in the state at the time could remember the US with trains and it had broad public interest, along with the backing of Disney.

it's still really hard to use only the train in FL. florida is very spaced out and a misery of heat during the summer. you can avoid the heat if you go from inside>car>inside, but trains lend themselves to walking.

having optionality is nice and i take it at least once month for the novelty and invite friends on to hopefully build awareness.

the us can build great things. we just need more builders to take their eyes off software and go back to public projects.

https://www.gobrightline.com/

The best rail being built right now is the totally hated and despised California High Speed Rail.

being, built, right, and now.

four words that do not describe CHSR

Informed is a word that doesn't describe you.

https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/2025-Project-U...

In 1hr Brightline can take you from Miami to Boca Raton, about 40 miles. In 1hr, Caltrain can take you from San Francisco to San Jose, which is also 41 miles. In 35 minutes, Amtrak Acela will take you from Boston to Providence, which is 41 miles.

the brightline has an unfortunate reputation of being a "death" train, because it gets a lot of news when it collides with vehicles.

IMO the onus is on the driving idiots who bypass rail crossing signals and gates, and/or get stalled on tracks and waste time trying to unstick themselves than calling the posted number or 911 to warn train operators, and secondarily on lax US rail crossing infrastructure

> TGV stands for train à grande vitesse, or “train of great speed.”

This is one of my pet peeves. Train à grande vitesse means high-speed train in English. There's no need to provide a mechanical word by word translation. It's like people saying al dente means "to the tooth" which is meaningless in English. Being al dente means something has bite. This kind of thing should only be a problem if the target language has no translation.

It doesn't bother me that much really but if we want to be pedantic the literal rendering would be be "train at great speed" - this would make your point more pronounced.

If you want to be pedantic, the preposition à serves about twenty different roles (per the dictionary), so even a literal translation will have to pick the right word, not just one of its homonyms.

At is not the right word, even if you're translating word by word.

I just wanted to reply how wrong you are and that the OP's version would be literal if "de" was used instead of "à" but just writing that made me realize that I'm completely wrong and you are totally right. That's a rare moment and I decided to celebrate it by making this comment. Thank you!

Describing al dente that way has helped me understand it quite a bit.

God forbid people learn a language's idioms by the actual way they are constructed and used.

Except here it's not even a correct literal translation of "TGV", so you wouldn't be learning anything useful.

I think it's a pretty reasonable one, no? The "of" is not literal but I would struggle to translate better

It's not the "of", it's just that "grande vitesse" means "high speed", it doesn't have the undertones that "great" has in English. Unless I'm overinterpreting the meaning in English (French is my native language, not English).

Maybe also "with"?

I think it's sense 13 at

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%A0#Preposition_3

If so, the most natural English version (when choosing to use a proposition at all) would probably be "with".

English has no literal word-to-word equivalent to this - this french "à" is used to describe the main property of a noun, and the translation in English when no original word exists is via a nominal group or a concatenation of nouns. An "avion à hélice" is a propeller plane, a "bateau à vapeur" is a steamboat, or an "étui à lunettes" is a glasses case. So a "train à grande vitesse" is similarly just a high-speed train.

"of" in English here sounds like you're describing what the object is made of instead of its property. A "boat of steam" is made of steam, it's not the same as a steam boat.

You don't translate it, that's the point. Train à grande vitesse means high-speed train. There is no "of", "at" or "with" there.

Similarly, pain au chocolat does not mean "bread of the chocolate" or anything silly like that. "Chocolate bread" would be the closest translation but since this is ambiguous in English we just use the French word as a loanword.

You won't learn anything by trying to find an English analogue for words like à in French. It will probably actually set you back. You just have to learn it how natives learn it. It's French because it's French. There is no other definition and you can't draw on any other language for guidance. This goes for all natural languages.

The reason why "pain au chocolat" is not translatable is because the correct term is "chocolatine" ;)

I wish we had /rail/, period, to many destinations. Utah's frontrunner doesn't go far enough north or south, which means I have to own a car :/

A French team offered to build a high speed line in California based on their technology. After several years they gave up and built one in North Africa instead, since the government there was so much more functional.

France still has some influence in Africa. I doubt the level of function of the government was the only factor.

(to your point: Bolloré will be on trial in a few month for active corruption of foreign state agent. In this particular instance, the first in which he was truly caught, it was for an infrastructure deal)

This is honestly just a dumb urban legend. SNCF wanted to run a route down I-5 which is highly problematic and would not have accomplished the goals of the project. After tossing around their politically impossible ideas for a few minutes, they went and did something else. CAHSR engaged Spanish civil engineering firms Dragados and Ferrovial instead.

There is only one skill that is important for building CAHSR and that is navigating the multiplicity of overlapping governments at the federal, state, county, and city levels and plotting a course through CEQA and America's ridiculous common law system to reach the end of the project. SNCF might have experience building railroads but honestly anyone can build a railroad and SNCF brings nothing relevant to such a project.

why is it problematic? could it be on a raised platform?

The law only permits the bond proceeds to be spent on designated routes. To accommodate this, the French fantasy plan needed long spurs across the San Joaquin Valley. This would have required more guideways overall, more parcel acquisitions, more waterway crossings, and generally higher costs. It would also have tripled the travel time between Fresno and other major cities, which would have sunk popular support for the project since millions of people would have correctly perceived it as serving only SF and LA.

The engineering side is probably not completely trivial, but be that as it may. Nothing that you've said contradicts the point that SNCF were able to go to Morocco and build a comparable HSR system that's been in revenue service for 5+ years now, while the US has failed to build anything due to political dysfunction.

But that's exactly my point. The skill needed to build hsr in America is navigating the layers of the federal system and avoiding the roadblocks of common law. SNCF doesn't have this skill.

Literally any civil engineering firm can build a railroad through a desert under a totalitarian regime.

Please read Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson to understand why there is no TGV in California. Long story short : Well intended regulations and excessive outsourcing to the private sector made the costs prohibitive.

The route was also adjusted to be far less practical as a compromise to get the central valley politicians to approve it. I really wish they had done a straight shot between Burbank and San Jose but even then it would have been extremely expensive because contractors have learned how to extract every last bit of money while doing as little work as possible.

Americans are asking why they can’t have European trains, meanwhile Japan and China are ROFLing.

New high-speed train? There is nothing like even France's old high-speed trains in the US

Actually the Amtrak Acela train service is based on a French TGV (Train à grande vitesse). Just that the Americans never bothered to build an accompanying LGV (Ligne à Grande Vitesse ).

TGV without LGV = not high speed.

You're in the richest country in the history of earth. You can have anything you want. If you really want it.

When a 300mph Japanese maglev passes close by it looks like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Gp4DcRsELc

Imagine living in the SF Bay Area and seeing a BART train move like that? Just unreal.

But the US is huge. So is China, and they have fantastic trains.

The freedom to choose between public transportation and your own vehicle is immense. I don’t like driving, maintaining a car, or constantly paying for gas and insurance, and I’m fine with the inconvenience. At least in Europe, I have the option to give up a car and opt for public transportation.

If there's one thing we're good at in America, it's inventing cope. There are many dense corridors in the USA including the northeast and west coast. None of them have high speed rail, and most don't even have dense housing, nor do they have the desire to get them.

An explanation I once read, and I think makes total sense, is WWII. Europe was heavily destroyed after WWII with no exception to railway tracks. They needed to be rebuild. They were, but with a much better technology than what was there in the 1800s. This allowed faster trains, better technology overall to be "deployed" and ultimately better initial adpotion which started a positive feedback loop. Meanwhile railway tracks were never bombed and never needed to be rebuilt like they were in Europe, so the infrastructure didn't allow for the technological improvements and the positive feedback look never started.

What they forgot to mention in the article (or I missed) is that train is extremly expensive and has gotten more expensive over the years. I cannot do it right now but I'd bet the price per km is much higher that what it is for a plain ride or even a car ride (if the car is full, meaning 4 train tickets vs card ride) which very frustrating when the consensus is "we need to take the train more often, driving is not good" while salaries stagnate and inflation is having the time of its life.

That WW2 theory seems like a bit of an odd take, although not a completely outlandish one. I also noticed that in the late 19th century, railways received a lot of government support and that is what enabled a dense network of passenger train stations in city centers in the first place.

At least in Germany, there are options to bring the cost of long distance train tickets down considerably. Booking far enough in advance can get you almost any long distance ticket to proces comparable with flying. If you do that a 3 or 4 times a year, consider getting a Bahncard 25, which is a cheap 25% off coupon for a year. It just needs a few train rides to completely amortize. Just don't forget to cancel it in time when you no longer need it (that's the catch).

I don't know if other countries have similar options and how effective they are.

> What they forgot to mention in the article (or I missed) is that train is extremly expensive and has gotten more expensive over the years.

Expensive for the user or expensive for the state? I believe that almost everywhere in the west the cost-per-trip from the state POV is wildly in favour of trains.

For the user. But it's not linear and the longer the distance the more expensive it becomes compared to other form of transportations.

No I meant that if things were planned differently decades ago and we developed train networks together with road networks (eg IIRC switzerland requires new wharehouses to have a rail connection) then a good 90% of intercity trips (both people and goods) could be on rail and be way more efficient.

I would not be as convenient as taking a car everywhere with no traffic and easy parking, but more convenient than being stuck in traffic everywhere.

How do you explain countries that weren't bombed but have excellent railway? For example Switzerland, which has one of the best railways in the world. Additionally Sweden had fantastic railway back in the days but it has been slowly deteriorating since the 80s.

FWIW taking the train in Switzerland is pretty cheap. Definitely cheaper having a car.

You can ask the Wallstreet Apes for a detailed explanation, but it's a combination of corrupted government real estate acquisition, development, a pinch of nepotism to change ownership, and a lot of money laundering.

Don't despair:

- many parts of most EU countries still don't have access to high speed trains, and they complain too (with that said, some of them are French, so _of course_ they would complain)

- the parts that are on the way to have high speed train are complaining because of the infrastructure work involved (everybody wants the train station ; no one wants the trails)

- that parts that have high speed train will complain about delays, strikes, the lack of electrical plugs, the WiFi quality, etc...

- at least in France, it's still very often cheaper to flight than ride a high speed train (which does not make any sense to most people.)

The answer is in the American political system. First, USA is not a country, it is a union of states that are quite independent and at the dawn of the USA central government was avoiding enforcement of too much regulation, as states were very different - economically, socially, demographically, religiously, so it would be very risky to do something that might enrage one or several states.

Example. USA decided to change tariffs policy to help development of local industry at the times when USA didn't have its own, had to steal inventions from UK (see Slater the Traitor story). Those tariffs helped industrialization of the Northern states, but which hurt states that lived from agriculture production driven by almost free workforce and wanted as much free trade as possible to sell their products abroad. And, as we know, this caused a really bad war. BTW: the tale "to tariff or not to tariff" happens again and again in USA history, now we have another turn.

So there is historical reluctance to say for central government "ok, we will build a fast rail from Boston to Oregon, everyone on the way has to pay for it".

Secondly, USA is really, really decentralized on the counties level, this is again, historical thing. When American settlers where going West they couldn't count on central government to help them, so they knew that anything they spent, they have to earn, as a result, till today, there is no so much thinking about a "bigger picture", but mostly on the stuff which is just here. County X does not see much reason to pay for fast railway, or even letting it go through it, given the trains would not stop in that county, instead they will "have nasty, loud piece of steel" going through their land.

Thirdly, USA is big. Really big, it is way bigger and sparsely populated than France, so the viability of the railway is questionable. On shorter distances cars do their job, on longer flying makes more sense, as it does not require expensive infrastructure on the deserted and mostly empty territories.

There are areas in the USA that are more densely populated, mostly the East coast, so I can see fast rail from NY to Florida, but I don't see something like this in Montana, Idaho, Wyoming.

But how building this NY-Florida railway should be financed? Central budget? This would enrage other states, as for them this does not matter. Will NY, N/S Carolina, Virginia and Florida team up to do an investment? Is there any organizational structure in the USA that would provide a frame for such cooperation?

This is far from simple. People often say, "but this is working so great in Switzerland, Finland, France or Norway or even in China!" without looking on the specific political, economical, etc. aspects, that are incomparable to the USA.

Clearly the USA could therefore never build, for example, a network of interstate highways

OK I'll answer.

The US is owned by the fossil fuel industry. Just look at Trump's recent announcement about "clean coal". Trump is too stupid to come up with an original thought, someone told him that phrase and he mimics it now.

Apparently, part of the answer is "because of Elon Musk", after it became clear that the whole hyperloop fuss was a conspiracy to funnel money out of the ongoing Californian fast rail projects, which he was perceiving as a threat to his nascent EV ventures.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/elon-m...

Musk hates the High Speed Rail because he's never going to be able to use it.

Trains are nice on vacations since I don't care about the price and it's a novel experience. It doesn't make sense to do in America since it's more expensive than having people drive and it limits people's freedom to stations instead of where they need to get to.

More expensive that driving? My public transport ticket for my whole state costs less than 400EUR, (whole country ~1000) while a car would run me around 6000/year, depending on how much I'm driving

And the average EU country is quite a bit smaller than the average US state, along with the EU being more densely populated - public transit certainly has some artificial/political roadblocks in the US, but it’s also fundamentally more challenging and expensive here.

Even so, at least in France, only major cities have an OK-ish public transit network (when it actually runs). But if you live on the outskirts 'cause you can't afford an apartment in the center? You're SoL. You maybe get a couple buses around rush hour.

Hell, even in the Paris region, outside the closest suburbs, there are only a few train lines going into Paris. At best you'll need to ride a bus or two to grab one, but most often you'll take your car.

Yeah. Public transport works in major metropolitan cities. It doesn’t work outside that.

> EU country is quite a bit smaller than the average US state

You don't need to drive cross the whole state for your daily commute, do you?

> along with the EU being more densely populated

Reversing cause-and-effect, here. Suburban sprawl happens because of the car-centric development, not the other way around.

>You don't need to drive cross the whole state for your daily commute, do you?

I've done this before in America. It's over twice as cheap to drive than take a train.

For your commute?

Yeah, I can also take a plane from Germany to England and pay less than what it costs me for the taxi that I will need to get to the airport. Does that mean that flying EasyJet should be considered the most efficient means of transportation?

What exactly are you trying to argue, here?

- That the cost of one train ticket is higher than the cost of a car trip?

- For one single passenger or for a family?

- In the US or overall?

- Are externalities factored in?

>What exactly are you trying to argue, here?

I'm arguing that in America the only reason to take a train for me is for the novelty factor. Novelty isn't enough to garner a ton of investment to get rail built.

> The only reason to take a train for me is for the novelty factor.

Sure, if you are willing to disregard all of the environmental and health costs associated with car-centric development, then there is no reason to invest in rail.

If you are willing to ignore the more than 40 thousand people that die on car crashes per year in the US, then there is no reason to invest in rail.

If you are willing to ignore the fact that all cities are going bankrupt because they don't get enough in property taxes to maintain the roads and basic infrastructure in the suburbs, then there is no reason to invest in rail.

If you don't care about the fact that your kids are growing completely isolated because they can't go anywhere unless they have someone driving them around, then there is no reason to invest in rail.

It must depend on the cities and how far in advance you can book.

I just checked on Amtrak and you can get a train from Seattle to Spokane for $37 in July. This website suggests a comparable cost for driving: https://www.travelmath.com/cost-of-driving/from/Seattle,+WA/... . That seems to be based purely on fuel costs, not counting the marginal costs of insurance and maintenance.

Using the same method, I can get Amtrak from Seattle to Chicago at $169, vs $300 drivings costs.

There are so many examples in the US where this isn’t true. Examples of where lines make economic sense but have not been built: Ohio (Cleveland/Columbus/Cincinnati possible extension to Detroit ), Texas (Dallas/Houston), Cross-state lines like Detroit/Chicago and Madison/Milwaukee/Chicago. There are others. The problem is a lack of will to do it, a century of demonization by the auto industry, and seventy years of deep pocketed sponsorship of the interstate freeways by the federal government to the exclusion of railways.

Country size is irrelevant for two reasons:

- most travel is within the local polity, e.g. suburbs to work & back, social activities, etc. The radius for these is not hugely different between the US and the EU.

- it's the European train network at this point, not one country's, and it needs to be one US system too, not one state's.

Yes, trains are hard in the US Midwest. But not on the west coast, and not in the larger east coast area either.

> the average EU country is quite a bit smaller than the average US state

I ran some rough calculations and this is true but the distinction is perhaps not as great as you imagine.

USA has land mass 9.1 million km2 50 states => 182000 km2 per state

EU has land mass 4.2 million km2 and 27 countries => 156000 km2 per country

The average EU country is 87% the size of the average US state.

€6k/year is a crazy price for a car. For me insurance, tax, servicing and depreciation are about £1k/year. And also that's an extremely cheap train ticket. In the UK it would be 10x that easily.

… Do you get free petrol?

Fuel, mandatory insurance, yearly service (also mandatory here), highway tolls, parking fees, usually even the parking space at home, in apartments,...

Just goes on and on

That depreciation number is extremely suspicious, unless your car is very old/cheap in which case your service number is suspicious (or you value your time at close to 0 GBP per hour).

Also, your car has to park somewhere presumably, which uses land, and I assume your car uses fuel (or electricity, but unlikely if your car is that cheap)

I bought it for £12k when it was 3 years old (Skoda Octavia) and I'm hoping it will last 20 years at least. Service is like £200, insurance £230, MOT £50, tax £130 or something. Ok maybe more like £1.3k. Still waaaay less than €6k.

Park it on the drive. Yeah I wasn't including fuel costs because they depend on how much you drive. I'm probably about at about £500/year at most (I work from home).

When I commuted by car it would have been maybe £1k/year (£10/day but I lift shared).

Ah, okay, so the deprecation is more "this is what I imagine the deprecation to be" than anything else. You may expect maintenance costs to... increase as it gets older.

Yeah that is true, but even extremely pessimistically there's no way I'd get near €6k/year. My last car only cost £4.2k (in today's money) and that lasted for 10 years.

But what about fuel?

£5k/yr would be fairly typical for lease of an average family car in the UK I think. Quite low, even.

Maybe you can get it down to £1k/year by driving an old car that you’ve fully paid off (in which case you’re ignoring the amorted cost), never needs maintenance, has a low value to minimise depreciation and insurance etc., but even then 2-3x that wouldn’t be uncommon.

It's absolutely not crazy, and I don't know how a car could only cost you 1k/year. This is just an example but has the average cost of motoring in Ireland in 2019 at almost 11k€/year : https://www.theaa.ie/motoring-advice/cost-of-motoring/.

One of the issues with trains is that people often severely underestimate the true total cost of car trips.

Nonsense. First, the money is pretaken from your salary under several categories (taxes, social changes, public transportation tax, and occasional taxes for specific lines).

Then, a metro monthly pass is around $100 in Paris and $130 in NYC. In other words, after paying through taxes, you have to pay for tickets at market rates. That’s $1200 for city transport, not covering outer zones or intercity travel (unless you live in densely populated cities that have sufficient transportation, in which case you pay in rent).

Then, you pay through wasting time, and other factors I mentioned in my other comment.

I am in Switzerland, public transport ticket is $3500 a year for one person. We are 2 and a dog.

It's kinda sad, but a car is the WAY cheaper option for us.

Which ticket do you mean? If you're thinking of an adult GA it's actually now ~$4,700/yr :(

But, an adult GA is a premium ticket. That buys you unlimited travel on the entire network for a year. Not many travel patterns need that. If you just buy tickets as you need them and especially combined with a Halbtax it's not so bad. Where the crossover between car ownership and using public transport for everything occurs is going to depend a lot on your specific travel patterns and what kind of car you compare to.

That's a lot more than I remember, but doesn't surprise :)

You are right tho. If I would live near a bus station that has more than 3 rides a day (which 98% of all Swiss do, rough estimate) I would probably just use a halbtax and a Region specific subscription.

But if I use regular SBB tickets for like 10-15 short trips a year you are already getting closer to the GA. Depends on your patterns :)

Hmm what do you define as a short trip? 10 trips/yr at $4700/yr would be $470 per trip, I don't even know how to spend that much by crossing the country: Zurich to Geneva Airport without a halbtax is $114 CHF.

The irony of saying this about a place where walking most places is literally dangerous.

The first argument is BS as you have no idea what a non-existing service would be priced at.

Your second argument on the other hand rings true and is the main reason high speed train service in the US makes less sense. Many cities have near-zero infrastructure locally to transport passengers to their final destination.

Same goes for airports too though.

It's very different for Paris - London where both cities have excellent subway networks or Tokyo - Osaka (ditto) or anywhere within China. The Taiwan HSR is also very successful since it got better connected to local trains including Taoyuan airport.

For the first point I'm comparing against existing rail. It makes 0 sense for me to use the existing rail. Even when it is being subsidized it's still more expensive than driving.

Note that driving is also subsidized.

Driving takes active attention while being on a train liberates your commute/travel hours. That's also a form of freedom.

The best is still to not have to commute. Work from Home when your job allows it should be the norm, not the exception.

No time lost commuting, no fuel / electricity used to move and roads are less congested for people who have to commute due to their jobs requiring their physical presence.

as someone that just started using Waymo I can take a car without having to give it any attention. I love trains and public transportation in cities with good systems in place and lived without a car for 15 years. but, in areas without that already in place, my prediction would be that self driving cars are going to win. they are already functioning today and the experience is amazing. A good public transit system will take 50 to 70 years here with all the red tape but self driving cars are already here and will expand much faster

I’m not judging them as better. I’m just predicting they’ll come first and make it even more challenging to get public transportation funded and approved

Even for inter-city trips, though? Some quick googling suggests that Waymo costs around $3 per mile. That would have to come way down if you wanted to compete with trains over a thousand or more miles. And you'd still be way slower, and have less ability to stretch your legs, go to the bathroom etc... .

For people who are interested in the question whether self-driving cars are the solution to commuting: an video essay of why self-driving cars are worse for a city than public transport: https://youtu.be/040ejWnFkj0?t=1684

This mentality is why rail is always destined to fail in the US. That mentality didn't stop China, which has a comparable land area to the continental United States and allows it to benefit from highly efficient cargo operations all over the country.

But if you want to keep the France comparison, let's compare a journey from Paris to Marseille with a journey from San Francisco to Los Angeles:

Paris to Marseille: - by car: 7h30m (773km/480mi) - by train: 3h11m direct for 94 EUR/103 USD with luggage and WiFi, amongst others

San Francisco to Los Angeles: - by car: 6h (613km/381mi) - note that I'm checking the route times at 8:24 BST and so it's night time in the US - hence less traffic. - by train (and bus): 8h30m with a change for 61 EUR/67 USD

The SF to LA route covers less distance and requires a change, so the passenger would travel 6h by train and then a further 2h on a bus - and when you compare that to driving it doesn't make any sense to ever pick public transport.

I do think there's more to it than just Americans not liking rail travel or preferring their cars. To build significant passenger rail infrastructure requires coordination at state government levels with all the stakeholders; funding; purcahsing land; technology to build modern and efficient railways etc. I don't believe the US has the capability to just build rail anymore - it would require significant investment in skills and manufacturing to increase capability to the point where it will be able to build the type of modern railway they would need to actually be a viable alternative.

It's agonizingly slow (I used to take it to college in SLO) but between SF and LA you could take the Coast Starlight (you'd BART to Oakland first). It's 12 hours though. https://www.amtrak.com/coast-starlight-train . I used to take the Chinatown busses and they were faster, or ride share on Craigslist (or, really aging myself here - remember Zimride?)

These arguments also apply to planes, which remain popular.

Also, not sure how it's more expensive than having people drive. I save 10k+ a year by not owning a car. And I can sit in the train and get work done, have a drink, sleep, whatever - can't do that while driving.

Because you can’t have America and France at the same time!

You can’t have 300k salaries (you gotta cut it by 90% for taxes), small government, small regulations, limits on other public services that follow suit, low energy prices …

You can’t cherry pick. If you want fast trains from France, you need to become France.

At the end, public transport will be congested, captured by homeless, dirty, … There is no train from any A to any Z, you have take it from A, change to B, C, to Z. You will burn out in public transport, and drive a car. Not to mention US is a vast sparsely populated country, compared to EU that may have no choice but to rely on a mix of public and private transport.

> Because you can’t have America and France at the same time!

Why not? That could look something like Denmark, or the Netherlands ...

Denmark and the Netherlands have income tax rates and public services much more similar to France than to the US.

IIRC they take it more kindly than the French to have their public services be run by corporations

Yeah true, in France the SNCF [0] both maintains and operates the railways. In most other EU countries (and the UK) the railway infrastructure is maintained and developed by a state-owned organisation and operated by a mixture of state-owned and private operators. In fact there are quite strict EU rules about tendering out railway services, which is one of the few things I dislike about it.

Note that France has had true high-speed rail (>200kph) since the 80s, and the newer lines allow speeds exceeding 320kph. Denmark does not have any rail exceeding 200kph. The Netherlands has had high-speed rail since 2009, though I'm not sure if it's used by private operators.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNCF

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