US rail is so pathetic. Not the rail’s fault per se, but it's pretty embarrassing for a a supposedly wealthy country to not be able to offer its citizens cheap, easy, high speed travel across the country.
In the US, rail is for freight. In the US, cross country distances are too large for terrestrial transport to be high speed. A flight network allows for much better speed, without needing to have continuous infrastructure.
Rail in general requires pretty specific alignment and limits on turns and slope; high speed rail has even tighter tolerances. It's very expensive to build that, especially through rocky terrain, and through existing development.
Flight networks are much more flexible. If you have room for an airport, and demand, you can get direct flights to/from anywhere. Roads are good too; because of their utility, they have a large network which tends to offer better routing than rail, and piecemeal upgades work for roads; switching routes is much easier for cars than trains, and roads can be quite rough but still usable at low speeds.
Flights are nowhere near as efficient as rail, not to speak of the environmental issues.
It's factors like this that show how the US is falling behind in international competition.
I'm sure that rail wins over flights in terms of efficiency for passenger miles traveled. However, you often have to travel more miles to get to your destination. A direct flight can save a whole lot of time. Flights are much faster, although security theater adds a lot of time[1]; but for longer routes, or routes with many stops or connections for rail, the single segment operation of a flight starts to win.
Also, China has the advantage of authoritarianism which allows it to more easily get right of way that's well aligned for HSR. While it was once easy to get land for railroads, when there were active land grants, now you'd need to do a lot of work to get well aligned land to add a rail line; where they're still active, existing rail right of ways through developed areas are fine enough for slower service, but expanding the right of way to better align the tracks is a lot of work. In theory, you could eminent domain, but that process is long and expensive.
[1] In a world where you think it's possible to have government intervene to expand passenger rail in the US, it's equally possible to have government intervene to streamline the security theater in flights; or they might add the same security theater to passenger rail.
Openrailwaymap plots tracks by max speed, and you can see the map of China here: https://openrailwaymap.org/?style=maxspeed&lat=30.9587685707... --the tracks that are red-to-purple are the ones that are high speed.
It's not a question of wealth but of efficiency. Even if you took every single meter of high speed rail that France has built in the last 50 years, you would barely cover 2/3 of the distance of a single line between New York and LA.
Some of those routes sound nice, but they don't usually have enough daily traffic between them to warrant the massive infrastructure costs. LA to Vegas would rival the distance of the longest European high speed lines, but with many fewer stops between and a fraction of the passengers between. Outside of connector flights, I don't even know how many people even regularly travel between Chicago and Detroit.
Part of the advantage places like Japan and Europe have over the US is not just that they are dense, but that their population skews to one massive metropolitan center. So it's easy to design a hub model where traffic patterns are easy - in and out of one area. You see this in the success of regional commuter rail networks in the US.
(SF and LA is a great candidate though, and it's failure a highlight of how hard it is to build in the US)
Many fewer stops: that's a good thing. A fraction of the passengers? No, that's absolutely false. Brightline estimates 50 million trips between LA and Vegas every year [1], which is more than, for example, the total number of tourists to Paris every year.
> their population skews to one massive metropolitan center
Japan, sure, being a long and skinny group of islands definitely helps. But is that actually true of Europe? Germany has a great high-speed rail network (current on-time performance issues aside) with a very pluricentric population.
[1]: https://www.brightlinewest.com/overview/project#:~:text=Toda...
Their pricing is expected to be over $100 a person one-way: https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/ticket-prices-leaked-h...
So this puts it at pretty low ridership and much higher ticket prices than equivalent lines around the world. (I'm very supportive of the project! It's just worth being realistic about the economics here.
My understanding of Germany's high speed network is that it is pretty comparable to the Acela - high speed in certain corridors, reasonably affordable, and dense population along the corridors. Which is pretty realistic goal for parts of the US. But often we compare to France's network which really outperforms nearly every other country outside of Japan.
But it is worth calling out that good regional rail services exist in the US, and they don't even have to be that fast to be successful!
That sure seems like it explains a lot about the state of US passenger rail.
I'm not sure if this would be enough to make coast to coast passenger trains more viable.
The best routes are the ones that replace short-haul flights that are currently really inconvenient in terms of driving and rail service. A route like New York to Toronto would make plenty of sense, where you have two major population centers that are very close together, but a huge headache to travel between by rail today (at 12+ hours total on Amtrak and Via Rail).
I could have flown it in less than 2 hours, security included. The flight would have cost less too!
The only way it would work is PreClearance on both sides (but then again, Canada has never been interested in staffing PreClearance in the US, even though they had reciprocal rights to do it). They only started their first one this year in rural NY.
The USA has solved two problems: cheap and easy travel across town (in your car) and cheap and easy travel across the country (in a plane).
Both COULD be done by rail, and some places do - sometimes on the same rail network.
And when the ONLY option for transcontinental travel was rail - the USA has some impressive shit.
Given the limitations and money available it’s surprising it’s as good as it is.
It's only cheap and easy if you discount omnipresent traffic jams, 50,000 deaths per year, ever-worsening climate change and the inability to walk/bike anywhere anymore.
Aside from that, it only costs the average American $1,000/mo to keep that cheap and easy transportation!
People buy and use cars because the benefits exceed their costs.
It isn't easy to value the benefits nor the externalities.
Sure, through a simple analysis of CO2 kg/km, trains are better for the climate for long distance travel, but they are vastly slower (average time from LA to DC is over 80 hours), which has knock-on effects, e.g., sleeping at home averages 0.25 - 0.32 kg/night, whereas staying at a hotel averages 10-40 kg/night, eating at home averages 2.3 kg/meal vs. 3-8 kg/meal, etc.
You have a business trip and need to go from A to B by yourself? Take a train, it frees your brain and the highway for people traveling in groups or with lots of luggage.
Incidentally it also avoids moving 2 tonnes of material for no reason.
If the cities are closer than 600 km. Trains are good for movement inside a typical state, but rarely between states.
That’s about a ton per passenger.
[1]: https://www.news8000.com/news/amtraks-borealis-line-celebrat...
Care to flesh this out?
I can only find data that contradicts this:
https://railpassengers.org/happening-now/news/releases/new-p...
https://media.amtrak.com/2023/08/data-finds-overwhelming-sup...
Most places where people want trains have them (high density places).
This doesn't address OP's comments. To remind you, they mentioned "cheap, easy, high speed travel across the country". I would grant Amtrak is easy. It's not the other things though...
If the rail infrastructure was upgraded to allow for faster travel and the costs were lowered, Americans would find them more desirable—-guaranteed.
National passenger rail.
We still have the world's largest rail network [1]. It's just focussed on freight. (We also have world-class municipal and regional rail in the New York area.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tran...
If by world-class you mean something that most of the world would consider a rail system, yes (in comparison to most US cities' attempts which aren't really worth even pretending constitutes regional rail). If you mean something that most of the world would consider as something worth emulating, nope.
If anything, that is one reason that passenger rail sucks because the freight companies own the rails. They delay passenger trains and don’t get punished. The freight companies don’t spend on maintenance, and have pulled up double track.
Why are you bringing cargo into this? The argument was about passenger travel…
Much of the actual wealth is in the northeast corridor, where the Acela is improving the quality of their product, and in California, where Southern CA and the Bay Area both have fairly nice regional trains that go as fast as the right of way will let them. I think we've done OK connecting places that matter, and as flying continues to enshittify and people will choose rail for comfort.