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Comment by lutusp | Hacker News Reader

But the argument for high-speed rail isn't that it will serve as a stopgap measure until we have self-driving cars, it is that a railroad train is vastly more efficient than any imaginable car technology.

Railroad trains are very energy-efficient, compared to cars driving along a road, or even trucks driving along a road. And if we suddenly had self-driving cars, packed close together and safer than the existing system, trains would still be more efficient.

The link below shows a table of transportation methods and efficiencies -- it shows railroad trains beating even motorcycles for efficiency.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transporta...

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The reality is not quite that simple, you need to consider the energy required by and environmental impact of building out and maintaining a high speed rail infrastructure. Rail efficiency is also highly sensitive to occupancy, a train carrying a small number of passengers could well be less efficient than transporting that number of people by auto. And cars are getting more fuel efficient as well

And if the government is involved, forget about it. It will be a massive mess of cost overruns and other financial shenanigans. And Amtrak proves that the government can't even run a railroad, let alone build one.

All these criticisms seem to apply equally to roads and bridges

Yup, and rail is much more durable, much less resource-intensive, and has much less of a negative effect on the environment than roads (in typical usage, a single dual-track rail line carries the same number of people as 10-20 lanes of highway)...

The Wikipedia article shows that passenger trains use about 35% less energy per passenger/mile than the average car. If fuel efficiency for cars rose to 40 mpg (less than a Prius), they'd be equivalent.

Self-driving cars wouldn't need the jack-rabbit acceleration and deceleration characteristics that drive sales of US cars, and so would probably be more efficient even without the heroic technology of hybrids. If we ever got to the point of self-driving taxis rather than owning your own car, right-sizing would drive the efficiencies even further - if you're just commuting by yourself, call for a single-occupant tiny car rather than driving an oversized hunk of metal down the road.

In addition to your point, high speed rail can also carry cargo as well as passengers.

The table is missing railroad unions-- the anti-efficiency factor that's ruined American passenger rail.

Amtrak makes good money where there are customers, even with the same unions. It's almost 100% the fault of politicians that won't let Amtrak shut down low passenger volume lines. If we shut down the losers and actually invested the profits from the Northeast Corridor back into that line, you would see great growth.

You know, the way a company would do it.

If we shut down the losers and actually invested the profits from the Northeast Corridor back into that line,

Yglesias wrote up this exact argument this week [1]. The Northeast Corridor profit he dug up [2] amounts to all of $136 million/year for the Northeast Corridor; a proposed upgrade is estimated at $151 billion [3]. (And the profit figure only includes operating costs -- the actually relevant figures aren't available).

[1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/03/01/amtrak_profit...

[2] http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Reports/2013...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Corridor

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