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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

Dollywood is great, but unfortunately the article gradually shifts into bashing Tennessee and America for not using enough passenger rail. That train left the station a long time ago. Car ownership is very high, sprawl is very high. We do not have urban cores with the same density or concentration of business districts as European or Asian cities. Most of the time buses make more sense for public transportation in America, but even those often get low ridership. It's likely we'll shift towards autonomous mini-buses and electric over the next couple of decades and unlikely that anything changes significantly wrt passenger rail. There are real structural and societal differences here.

I say that and at the same time, I'd love it if Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville, and Chattanooga were all connected by a high speed rail line (and on down to Atlanta from there). I just don't see the will to get it done.

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Best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, etc etc.

Is the suggestion here to build more subways/rails? The problem is that more rails would not be useful because there is lower density in the US. Denmark is 141 persons/km^2, whereas the U.S. is about 36 person(census data).

Even if you built train lines everywhere outside urban areas, any stop you step off at would still require a 20 minute drive to get to where you are going.

Tell that to Sweden with a density of 26 people/km^2 and a functioning rail system. Also why use Denmark of all places, their rail system isn't even that great compared to e.g. France or Germany.

And the population density of Tennessee is much higher than that of Sweden (67 people/km^2). The states with population densities most comparable to Sweden are Mississippi, Arizona, Vermont, Minnesota, and West Virginia.

You can't look at average population density of the whole country. Look at the population density of the biggest cities:

Sweden - Stockholm (5260/km2), Gothenburg (2936/km2), Malmo (4641/km2) Tennesee - Nashville (557/km2), Memphis (777/km2), Knoxville (782/km2)

Averages lie.

But the trains connect cities? How is their density relevant? Moreover the density of the Gothenburg metropolitan area (which includes Mölndal, Hisingen) is 256 people/km^2 and the public transport network spans the whole area.

Density follows infrastructure more than infrastructure follows density. Building a station in a place is more likely to spring up new businesses (and residences) around it. It's not a guarantee and there are a lot of variables in play, but the same reason train stations wouldn't remain "20 minute drive to get to where you are going" are basically the same reasons on average most Interstate stops aren't "20 minute drive to get to where you are going" either.

The density map of the US already resembles the US highway map. Many of the few pockets that don't are explainable with old passenger train maps overlaid on top of that.

Just adding passenger train-only routes on top of existing interstate highways, stopping only at existing exits, would go a long way to service a lot of the US population. It would also presumably spur more walkability efforts at a number of those exits if it was also a passenger train stop.

It may surprise you, but the population density of Tennessee is 67/km^2, which sure, is a lot lower than Denmark, but also a lot higher than 36. Most of the east coast has a higher population density than Denmark. Florida has a higher population density than Denmark. When people talk about the low population density of the US, they're averaging in a lot of sparsely populated land west of the Mississippi, which has fuck-all to do with whether rail lines would be useful in the parts of the US where people actually live.

Florida has a high speed rail that runs between Miami and Orlando and has plans to expand. It's called Brightline, and it's one of the few successful passenger rail projects in recent years in the U.S.

Also population per km^2 can be incredibly misleading, because it's an average. One example could have the population far more evenly spread across the land area, and another could have a dense urban core surrounded by farmland or national parks.

Florida has a slightly higher population than Denmark, but as an example, one of it's largest cities, Orlando, has a population density of ~283 people / km2, while Copenhagen has a population density of 6800 people / km2.

I have lived in Florida all my life. It is sadly the definition of sprawl. There is no way to build enough rail that would serve the average Floridian for day to day transport.

OP wasn't making a shallow excuse. But this rebuttal does lack nuance :)

The overlapping network effects OP mentioned of how modern metropolises were built, combined with modern bureaucracy, make widespread passenger rail an exceedingly difficult political and economic proposal - far more difficult than it would have been 100 or even 50 years ago.

I'm sure others have mentioned this here, but look at how high-speed rail in California is faring for a good example of the political difficulty involved. The legal hurdles, environmental reports, back-and-forth bargaining between varying levels of government, the NGOs that need to be called in and paid a lot... it's not at all easy. And that's before you get to the structural mismatch between widespread rail transport and all the network effects that led to car culture.

Perhaps Tennessee can fare better due to it being a comparatively very conservative state (which currently codes as having less regulatory burden). But I'm not holding out hope.

We condensed redundancies in the 80’s to improve profit margins for rail. Those lines could have supported more cargo and passenger trains but they’re gone now. It’s difficult to add rail through populated areas. And some population centers are big enough that going around them is not feasible. Like you could go around Portland Oregon to add new west coast routes without much high profile eminent domain, but can you still do the same in New England?

You can't do that through Texas which is why the plan for a high speed rail making the triangle between DFW, Houston, Austin/San Antonio never succeeds. There's so much wide open space in Texas, but it's privately owned so eminent domain is a huge issue.

Even in the Midwest you see little doglegs in county and state highways where it’s obvious one farmer would not part with a 40 ft slice of land at the edge of his property so the road has to swing into his neighbors and then back.

That's not how eminent domain works. The government can always take land for public use provided just compensation. Now, was the farmer some influential person who could convince the city or state to route around? Probably. It's never the case that the government couldn't do it if they wanted to though.

When we built the interstates in the 50s and 60s nobody really gave a flying fuck about that. We destroyed a lot of towns and eminent domain'd a lot of property.

Naturally the regulatory and political landscape of now is quite different, and in a lot of ways for the better. But it is unfortunate that we've more or less forgotten how to do things.

In the 50s and 60s, the population was smaller. Towns/cities were smaller and not as developed as now. It would have be so much easier to build that infrastructure than it would be today. As it is now, to add rail cities are having to lose some streets to replace with rail or have some mixed use rail/car type of use. It makes no sense to compare today to the 50s/60s

We also just plowed through black and Hispanic neighborhoods and we are less cavalier about such things now.

We plowed through anything in the way, as is necessary to build roads, including vast amounts of white neighborhoods and farmland. But nonetheless, the idea of a black or hispanic or white neighborhood is increasingly antiquated.

Eminent domain for public transport is a nonissue. State and Federal government does it all the time for new roads or road widening. Plus Texas has extremely wide state-owned corridors that have plenty of width to implement a rail line. There is a private company trying to make this happen in Texas, which it may be able to pull off.

horse ownership is very high,

Sure but cars replaced horse ownership 1-1. The thing that's high is personal transportation. If whatever you propose as an alternative doesn't confer the benefits of personal transportation then adoption is likely to be quite low. Ride services took off even though busses were already there because it was personal transportation for hire.

Even in countries that don't have the structural problems the US has that lead to cars you still see personal transportation, be it vehicles or motorized bikes, thriving and the preferred means of travel.

It was not a 1-1 replacement. The rate of private horse ownership was not nearly so high back in the day as the rate of private automobile ownership is today. Today in the United States there are 284 million registered vehicles. Almost one car for every person. The American horse population peaked at 25 million in 1920, when the human population was at 102 million.

https://www.howardweinsteinbooks.com/single-post/2017/07/05/...

People also used oxen and mules for personal transport (we don't even have numbers for these and the equine count is probably less than accurate as well), back when the population was less than 70 million (and couples had upwards of 8 or 9 children frequently, so much of the population was younger) before mass migration at the turn of the century (itself made possible by advances in transportation with steam engines in use at sea and by rail). By 1920 cars were already commonplace, but either way, most of the population was doing subsistence farming in the late 1800s and went to town maybe once or twice a month for supplies. We were much poorer before cars, and raising and maintaining a horse requires land and resources.

You can see SF in 1906 as cars started to take the place of horse and buggy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHkc83XA2dY. The early automobiles even fit the same profile as a buggy.

I mean the passenger train from Lebanon, TN to Nashville, TN is quite busy. I rode it over a decade ago and it was quite used and my partner rides it now and it is much the same. If it still ran at night like it did back then, I'd probably take it into downtown (and go downtown more often) for events. I don't believe the train left the station a long time ago, we just simply shifted it off the tracks.

> I mean the passenger train from Lebanon, TN to Nashville, TN is quite busy.

From the article:

> Outside of Amtrak’s once-daily City of New Orleans, Tennessee has only three rail transit systems (two of which are currently suspended). That leaves just the WeGo Star in Nashville, which is among the lowest-ridership commuter rail lines in the country.

Nashville really sucks when it comes to public transit in general. The reason ridership is so low is because it doesn't go where you need it to and it takes way way longer to get to the places it does go. Also traffic is very bad and always getting worse everytime I come back. It's pathetic and it deserves all the flak it gets and then some.

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