Comment by zanny | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zanny | Hacker News Reader

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I have to think the only reason trains pretty much died as an industry in the last hundred years is due to government fiddling or poor infrastructure maintenance. In a trifecta of balancing cost to time to carrying weight, trains should almost always win, with cars never winning in any of them and planes winning only at time investment.

Yet we all drive cars (which win in being personal transport where free wheels in 2d on tarmac is much more portable than steel wheels on tracks in 1d) even though they should cost significantly more, take longer (if we had even a reasonable bullet train at 150 - 160 mph, not even close to the 260mph Japanese / Korean lines) and carry less (especially compared against fuel consumption or just the raw bearing weight of car frames and rubber tires against rail cars).

An amtrack ticket from NY to Austin is $800 round way, and 50 hours each way. I can rent a car for $100 a day, and do that drive in 40 hours. So I save time, it costs the same when you factor in gas, and the only benefit is I can read a book on the train. Which is a nice plus, but not double the price worth.

Trains didn't die as an industry. Actually the US has an exceedingly good (privately-owned) freight rail system, compared to the rest of the world (assuming you're talking about the US from the Amtrak reference).

What did happen is that Amtrak was displaced by said freight rail system. It doesn't really own any rail - everything is under contract, with freight getting first priority contractually. Though it also has other issues.

From my understanding and someone editing Wikipedia, Amtrak has priority by law [1], thought the Amtrak page mentions a time window which the trains must hit to receive priority [2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trackage_rights 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amtrak#Trains_and_tracks

Not at my primary computer at the moment, so can't check this.

That's not the case as far as I'm aware - but I'm not an Amtrak expert. A citation (the Wikipedia article doesn't provide one) would be nice.

[EDIT]

Looking around, it seems that Amtrak does have preference under certain circumstances. Until around 2008-2009 the rules for enforcing that were very lax and the common case was that freight was given priority. See http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/04/opinion/04hallock.html and http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500395_162-2522531.html for example.

Some legal changes (including the Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008) improved conditions, mostly by setting standard rules for allocating usage - but the language of the regulations is still very flexible. There are also some issues around the difficulty of one train passing another on single-tracked rail with limited sidings.

Moving freight by train is also a lot more efficient than moving people by train. Freight doesn't need room to walk around, doesn't need to eat, doesn't need to sleep, doesn't need bathrooms.

I agree. I'm quite happy with the current freight rail system, though I'd enjoy more passenger rail for mostly aesthetic reasons.

I don't think that's a good reason to be too disruptive towards the freight industry.

The tohoku shinkansen in Japan can have trainsets with up to 1600 people in one 16-car train, and can slam them down the line at 250+kph, one every 3 or 4 minutes. A couple of E5s could do 1400 people at 320. If that isn't efficient then I'd love to know what is!

Japan is a very compact country. Lovely for anyone in the DC-Boston corridor, doesn't scale to most of the states however. Consider how there isn't much of anything between San Francisco and LA.

Love the Shinkansen though. My preferred method of travel within Japan.

The "compact" excuse is a cop-out, IMO. LA and SF are two massive cities well within high speed train range. Of course there's nothing in between them - there's no transport! You're thinking backwards. Put a station 150km outside of SF with a 30 minute commute and do you think there'll still be nothing there in 5 years?

My point is that these lines would be considered viable in Japan - more than viable; completely obvious. The fact we can't seem to build them - can't even take the idea seriously - is more about the nature of our society than anything to do with geography.

Its not really that though, there is nothing between LA and SF because the land is not really suitable for big cities. Japan is quite lucky because much of the island is unsuitable for habitation pushing many of the cities into a narrow band (e.g. Tokyo - Osaka). You can't really fight geography, and you work with what you got.

> Put a station 150km outside of SF with a 30 minute commute and do you think there'll still be nothing there in 5 years?

At Shinkansen ticket/pass prices? Really? Depends if we can become as rich as the Japanese. I also find this to be a bad outcome; if you work in SF, why not just live in SF? Do we really need to build a 150km-away bedroom community?

> Japan is quite lucky because much of the island is unsuitable for habitation pushing many of the cities into a narrow band

Lucky? How is that lucky? I believe this is the first time I have ever heard someone describing a lack of habitable land as "lucky".

It's true that in the last 50 or so years, the USA has become extremely suburbanised, totally reliant on cars for transport, which makes it hard to pick "winners" as to where gets a station, but you can't just use that as an excuse to do nothing!

> At Shinkansen ticket/pass prices? Really? Depends if we can become as rich as the Japanese.

The Japanese are far from "rich". Anyway, a commuter pass pass from, say, Utsunomiya to Tokyo only costs a few hundred, and is anyway paid by employer. The alternative is spending several times that on housing, in a situation of intense competition for limited housing stock in a viable commuting range.

> if you work in SF, why not just live in SF? Do we really need to build a 150km-away bedroom community?

I don't understand this answer. Obviously, not everyone can live in the CBD of the city they work in. That's the problem fast transport solves in this situation. What's your better idea?

Anyway I'm not blindly recommending anything the Japanese do. I'm just saying that fast transport has the effect of greatly expanding the viable urban living of a major city.

Amtrak is actually a creature of the federal government that does own the northeast corridor rail lines. There's no reason Amtrak can't run bullet trains on the NE corridor except that they lack the capital needed for the track upgrades, and likely are incapable of executing on the project.

The market for train travel from New York to Austin is pretty much non-existent because it just doesn't make any sense unless you can't fly for some reason. Even with high speed trains, it'd be a ridiculous choice. With demand so inelastic, you get exorbitant prices and no reason to invest in improvements. Neither are Amtrak's or Congress's fault.

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