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Wow. "Who are you working for" is very unproductive. No argument on HN has ever been made stronger by the suggestion that its opponent is a shill.

> Only when being installed. When operating, the true cost per passenger mile is much lower than for interstate highways and cars. It's best to avoid misleading economic comparisons.

Installation costs would be included in your cost per passenger per mile (though likely amortized over the usable lifetime or augmented with maintenance/upgrade costs). But overall I agree with you that perhaps the cost per passenger per mile works out favorably for high speed rail for trips of a certain length (I address that in a different point). I am just pointing out factors the author glossed over.

> False choice. Cities have sophisticated, multi-level rail and surface mass transit systems for a reason -- they make economic sense.

What false choice? I am pointing out that traffic around cities is NOT predominately inter-state traffic but local commuter traffic. I agree that city transit can be very cost effective and eliminate local road congestion. However this is all ancillary to the high speed rail argument. High Speed rail is not used for local commuter traffic which I am characterizing as 50 miles or less. High speed rail (and the national funding associated with it) will not solve local city congestion.

> I have to ask -- who are you working for? Your arguments are all paper-thin, easily torn to pieces. Roads and cars are democratic? More democratic than a seat in mass transit?

I work for a software company as a developer :) So clearly I am the authority on high speed rail. I disagree that my arguments are "paper-thin" and easily torn to pieces. As far as my democratic statement I will expound as it was used in a context that your quote eliminated. High Speed rail is useful for longer distance travel where speed (time) matters. The frequent (daily/weekly) users of this system are skewed towards the very wealthy who have commutes/business travel that travel distances where high speed rail is cost effective. Thus using federal subsidies (which are pooled for the entire population) to fund a service for a fraction of the population is a hard sell in a democratic government. Roads are an easier sell since most citizens own (or could own) a car and have travel needs that fall within the radius where car (or local mass transit) is cost effective.

You need to realize that, if high-speed rail and the other discussed modes of transport compared poorly to highway travel in economic terms, governments would stop supporting them. The opposite is true -- alternatives to highway travel in individual cars are becoming much more popular, except in the U.S., where car ownership isn't a choice, it's a religion.

> You need to realize that, if high-speed rail and the other discussed modes of transport compared poorly to highway travel in economic terms, governments would stop supporting them.

I am sorry but this argument is not gonna fly. Saying that governments are infallible and make perfect decisions or trend toward perfect decisions is simply not correct.

And assuming you mean democratic governments this makes even less sense.

> Saying that governments are infallible and make perfect decisions or trend toward perfect decisions is simply not correct.

In that case, I'm glad only you said it -- I never did. Government is the art of the possible, and politicians generally know how to avoid being thrown out of office. Avoiding decisions that have no public support, choosing only those that have some public support, that's something politicians are good at. It's the political version of crowdsourcing.

> And assuming you mean democratic governments this makes even less sense.

You serious? Finding out what the voters want is even more important in a democracy than it would be in a totalitarian state. Political opinion sampling is why France and Japan have high-speed rail, and it's why the U.S. doesn't.

"Maintaining a positive perception amongst your constituents" has almost no relationship to "doing what the voters want."

I would disagree with your comments about finding options that have public support. Consider net neutrality. Who in the broad public outside those companies is in favor of the telecom companies extracting a toll from the content networks? Yet it remains a topic because politicians know they can get funding and connections from those companies if they can force through the legislation. Public support is not a core part of modern governance, partially because the public does not hold politicians on either side of the aisle accountable.

not to get into the nuances of how modern democracies work but thinking that politicians are constantly crowdsourcing the best ideas and using that information to guide them is an incredible naive view of how modern democracies (usually democratic republic with additional branches that contain a mixture of elected and appointed officials).

Politicians in a modern democracy do indeed need to stay elected but that is typically independent of what a true, unfettered democracy would produce. Some of this is by design -- a pure democracy would be largely unworkable. At best too fractured and at worst everyone would vote for more benefits and less (no) taxes at the expense of national debt for a future generation.

Mostly politicians vote for what keeps them in office. Which as we see in the US is typically special interest groups and powerful lobbists.

True crowdsourcing occurs in free market economies. We could go there :) The libertarian would say if high speed rail was so in demand and made such economic sense then why arent companies scrambling to take advantage of a market inefficiency to make gobs of money?

You're right, government officials never support programs that are economically inefficient. Especially large, sexy programs that get tons of media coverage and often get a politician's name associated with them. Nope, those are the first to get the ax when it's determined that there are more economically efficient, less sexy alternatives.

> Only when being installed. When operating, the true cost per passenger mile is much lower than for interstate highways and cars. It's best to avoid misleading economic comparisons.

Well, the interstate highways are already installed.

> I have to ask -- who are you working for? Your arguments are all paper-thin, easily torn to pieces. Roads and cars are democratic? More democratic than a seat in mass transit?

This is not at all constructive. And I believe the author probably meant "individualistic" rather than "democratic."

There are no sound reasons for investing in passenger rail in the US now. The current system is already meeting demand, and on a national level all lines except the North East Corridor requires heavy subsidy.

If there were a pent up demand for it, it would have happened. We could artificially create demand by jacking up the price of petrol, but then we are taking choice away from the consumer.

Building better, faster trains is hardly a guarantee that they will be used. My experience (which I admit is purely subjective) is that people who want nicer trains already use them. I live in a major transit corridor to NYC, and the folks who already ride the train would love it to be faster and nicer, but would they pay the higher prices? Why are they all taking slow NJ Transit instead of high speed Amtrak?

> We could artificially create demand by jacking up the price of petrol, but then we are taking choice away from the consumer.

Jacking up the price of petrol doesn't take away choice. It may be internalizing the massive externalities associated with the use of petroleum based fuels and making the choice better reflect net utilities (including disutilities experienced by people outside of individual purchase decisions as a result of those decisions), or it may be artificially creating a new externality so that the decisions less-accurately reflect real net utilities, but in either case its not removing choice.

> There are no sound reasons for investing in passenger rail in the US now.

There are no viable political reasons to invest in high-speed rail. Americans love their cars, the interstate highway system is in place, that's a lot of inertia to overcome with economic arguments.

In Europe and Japan, on the other hand, high-speed rail is booming. One of the reasons is that the prior infrastructure was substantially destroyed in WWII, allowing more options than we Americans have. Also, it's possible that Europeans aren't quite as crazy about cars as we are.

> Building better, faster trains is hardly a guarantee that they will be used.

That's certainly true, and it's probably a big argument against high-speed rail, especially when you read the recent history of Amtrak, which has always struggled to find riders. On the other hand, Amtrak has always been a "Me too" mode of transport, a niche, a novelty for the curious.

If we were deciding this without an interstate highway system and a huge, well-established car culture, I think it would be a different debate.

I realize this is a stupid question but I'm going to answer it anyway.

"Why are they all taking slow NJ Transit instead of high speed Amtrak?"

1. There are few stops in NJ. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Amtrak_stations_in_New...

2. It doesn't go much faster than the regular train.

>but an airplane ride from A to B is cheaper than an equivalent car journey for most trips.

Anyone with a family knows this blatantly false. Family of four form SFO to SAN ~$700 - 1K on a plane. Gas at 30mpg is $132 round trip. Add in a $100 each way if you are renting a car for one day, one direction, and you are barely at half the cost of the cheapest flight.

For an individual it's much closer to true. The larger the group the larger the savings from amortizing the costs of the vehicular trip across the group.

So it's not so much blatantly false as dependent on the size of the group traveling. Not to mention to really compare apples and oranges you would have to compare the airlines costs to transport an average airplane load vs the equivalent number of people traveling by road.

I have no idea what that comparison works out to but it would not surprise me if the plane wins there.

He said most trips, which is blatantly false if you have a family because that's wrong for almost every trip.

>False choice. Cities have sophisticated, multi-level rail and surface mass transit systems for a reason -- they make economic sense.

The constant financial troubles of all of the rail systems in the Bay Area seem to tell a different story. It's almost as if everything is not as black and white as you believe...

Actually bus is more expensive at cost per passenger mile. Math has been done numerous times lately.

Than rail: Sometimes.

Than single-passenger automobile (the point above): Only if the bus is empty.

Any sources? On the first look that doesn't seem even remotely possible.

http://www.debunkingportland.com/cost_of_transit_&_cars.html

http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/bp107.pdf

By car manufacturers?

>False choice. Cities have sophisticated, multi-level rail and surface mass transit systems for a reason -- they make economic sense.

This is about high speed rail.

thank you happyscrappy :)