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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

This tells me that speed increase made a large difference. Most people drive when it's faster than the train. So, when we get our first high-speed rail in this country, in a densely populated region, it should do well.

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Cost is a factor too. I'd love to take Amtrak from Los Angeles to the Bay Area, a trip I make a couple times a year.

But the current Amtrak service is incredibly slow and inconvenient in both timing and destination. I just can't justify it, as much as I'd like to.

So I usually drive, occasionally fly. High speed rail (in 2099 or whenever they actually finish it) would be a nice choice. But if it's several times the cost of driving, not including the car I'd have to rent at the other end anyway, it will be a lot less appealing. The drive isn't that long, and even HSR won't be that much shorter.

I'd be a lot more likely to take HSR to Las Vegas, weirdly. There I don't need a car at the other end.

Prior to today I had seen this anecdotally on the Keystone Corridor. I live outside Harrisburg, PA and have seen traffic increase dramatically once they upgraded the track to Philadelphia to dedicated "high speed" rail (110mph max) with free WiFi. Looking at the map both Harrisburg and Lancaster have seen half a million new riders in the past decade, all bound in the direction of Philadelphia. Unfortunately the Pittsburgh leg is shared with freight traffic and turns a 3.5 hour journey by car into an impractical and relatively expensive 6 hour train ride. There's a plaque in Pittsburgh commemorating the first rail line from Philly in the 1860s which shaved travel time from 7 days to 8 hours and all I thought upon seeing it was what a shame it was that so little has changed since then.

There's a bigger gap between the 75MPH that normal Amtrak trains operate with at peak speed and the 130MPH the Acela does than there is between the Acela and a European high-speed train. Also: high-speed rail is going to go where the Acela already is, and the Acela is already fast enough to be viable and competitive. So, I kind of doubt train technology is going to make a huge difference.

This is incorrect on all accounts.

The Acela doesn't run in California and it doesn't run in Texas.

http://texascentral.com/

Trains in Eurpoe are going to 220mph.

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/take-a-look-at-europe-s-faste...

The average speed between NYC and Boston is something like 79mph. Saying you have a top speed 130mph, and doing it only for a small portion of the trip is quite misleading. At any rate, peak has little meaning. I've been on commuter trains that peaked at 90mph for 5 minutes.

That's the point. Peak speed is really irrelevant on the northeast corridor. The bottleneck is track conditions and tunnel capacity.

Huh? Of course it doesn't: neither Texas nor California have routes that would be economical for an Acela-like service. LA-SD is a single point-to-point route; neither LA nor SD connect economically with any other California city.

I also don't understand your "peak versus average" speed thing. You're comparing apples-oranges, not me: I'm comparing peak-to-peak. Normal Amtrak trains also don't average 75MPH!

You really have to look at the sum of Acela and Northeast Corridor but it was still a substantial increase. The speed increase certainly helped ridership; it's probably worth noting that electrifying north of New Haven (required for Acela) also made the regular regional trains faster because they no longer needed to change engines midway from Boston to New York.

What these speed increases did was they made train travel roughly equal (well, probably within an hour or so) in time to plane for popular routes-BOS to NYP and NYP to points south. And given post-9/11 security, that made the train pretty attractive especially going downtown to downtown. I'd argue though that "faster" isn't an automatic win though. It has to be competitive with air.

The introduction of Acela also created a huge amount of publicity for taking the train rather than the plane

Not quite true. I'd probably be a bit faster door-to-door from where I live in Massachusetts to Manhattan Midtown. But that's, to my way of thinking, an awful drive. I think that's generally the case for a lot of the Northeast corridor routes that many people take. Train doesn't take much longer and they're not remotely pleasant drives.

What higher speed rail could do in the Northeast is make the New England to the Pennsylvania/DC routes more attractive which don't really work for most cases today. But that's sort of a marginal and it doesn't address the more interesting cases where the economics and travel time math don't really work vs. air (e.g. NYC to Chicago).

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