I feel like the argument weakens when he compares countries. I'm looking at the railway maps of France and Japan thinking: 'this entire country is the size of a single, largeish US state'.
Total land area is a problem to be solved in the US for train travel, and we only have Russia and China to compare to.
> this entire country is the size of a single, largeish US state
So why is there no comparable railway network in those largeish US states that are comparable to EU countries? Or in the many (almost all of them) states that are smaller than France and Japan?
Because there would be nowhere to go. Imagine building a rail network in New York. Where would it go? How often do people need to get from NYC to Syracuse? And if you built a train to Syracuse, what would you do once you got there (without a car)? The city is the centerpiece of a region with a million people, less than 1/6 of whom live inside the city?
The northeast US conurbation is one of the densest conglomerations of urban centres in the world. A proper high-speed rail system would take you from NYC to Philadelphia in less than an hour and to Boston or DC in a couple of hours. The ”US is so big and sparsely populated” excuse really doesn’t hold water.
The NEC is the one exception to the rule that the US is too big and sparsely populated to support dense intercity rail. (For comparison, the distance between NYC and Chicago is longer than the distance between Copenhagen and Zürich, which is to say, it's longer than the longest axis of Germany.)
The reason why we have such shitty HSR on the NEC boils down to two reasons: one, the corridor is too congested with commuter rail (particularly in Connecticut), and two, the route was rebuilt to "modern" standards in the 1930s. Rebuilding it again to truly modern 220 mph HSR standards involves needing to find virgin right-of-way in Connecticut, which is neither easy nor cheap.
The US is designed differently than the other heavily developed areas of the world. It's not about being "too big" or "not dense enough", it is more complicated than that.
The Northeast US has a similar statistical density as areas of Europe but looks so much physically different. Take some time on Google Earth and check it out. There is a nonstop blob of suburbs that go almost all the way from DC to Boston. In a proposed train network, most of the population has a long trip to the central station before they can take the train to the other city. They still need a car, and need somewhere to park it. In Europe or Asia cities are more concentrated, and the countrysides are less populated.
Building a center-city to center-city train network in the US is not impossible, but it simply wouldn't be as efficient as it would be in Europe or Asia because of the way the cities are designed.
Sure. Obviously it would require a new approach to planning and zoning. As the article says, rail corridors are obvious places for high-density mixed-use development. That aside, driving to a station and taking a train from there is still better than no trains at all.
The article presents DC's park and ride station as "a perfect example of WHAT NOT TO DO". But it's really all they can do if they must force a train system into an area without the right kind of density.
I very much agree we need a new approach to planning an zoning. We need to focus on that first. It could take longer than a generation to transition away from the suburban model.
The argument is that building train lines isn't the answer because the transport needs in the U.S. are different than Japan, Indonesia, Germany, Russia, etc. Having a cookie cutter "trains are the answer to everything" answer is shortsighted.
Have you ever been to Japan, Germany, etc? Cities there are shaped completely differently to cities here. The article uses the Vienna Metro as an example of what not to do, and in a way it is. But it’s that way because Vienna is almost entirely low density sprawl, with homes sitting on a quarter of an acre or so. The whole DC metro area is shaped that way, and that drove the structure of Metro. The DC Metro area has 6 million people, about the same size as the Berlin metro area. But 3.7 million Berliners live in the city itself, while just 700,000 Washingtonians do. Berlin and DC are similar of a similar density, but almost all the DC Metro population lives out in the low density suburbs. A lot of the jobs are out there too. A lot of tech jobs are in Reston and Dulles, 20-25 miles west of DC. Do you know what’s 20 miles west of Berlin? Nothing, it’s farm land. The kins of transportation network a city like DC, where the population and jobs are spread out among low density suburbs, and a city like Berlin, with population and jobs concentrated in the core city, needs are completely different.
Primarily: the need to get around in whichever city/area you are in once you get there. In all but the most dense cities (NYC/SF/Chicago), you have to have a car to get around. If I had a high speed train to get between Kansas City and Houston it still wouldn't do any good because you need a car to get around when you arrive. This is true for nearly every area of the USA. We tend to build out, rather than up, making public transport impractical and expensive. Building out does have the advantage of keeping land/home prices relatively low, though.
Many Americans prefer the freedom of being able to go A to B at any time without needing to wait at a bus/subway stop or hoping the transportation system is still running for the day. The amount of money it would cost to get the entire country walk able or reachable by public transit would be astronomical.
> Primarily: the need to get around in whichever city/area you are in once you get there. [...] If I had a high speed train to get between Kansas City and Houston it still wouldn't do any good because you need a car to get around when you arrive.
That's probably true (modulo taxis, even if you rule out public transport), but it's just as true when you fly from Kansas City to Houston. Which is why airports always come with car rental, and it works out for those who want a car. If a car is really needed at the destination, arrangements could and should be made to have car rentals available at the train station.
> A proper high-speed rail system would take you from NYC to Philadelphia in less than an hour
I mean... the shitty high speed rail we have (Acela) does it in an hour and 8 minutes. Making it 55 minutes probably won't change travel patterns substantially. (Although route upgrades to support that is the medium term plan)
The problem with Acela is that vast stretches of it aren’t actually high-speed because freight is in the way. And even at peak speeds, it’s relatively slow wrt other high speed rail.
Nope. The NEC corridor, on which Acela runs, does not carry freight traffic (at least, not except for some rare trains at night). Acela's conflicts are with all of the commuter rail systems that share the track (MARC, SEPTA, NJT, Metro North, Shore Line East, and MBTA commuter rail), plus the regular intercity Amtrak service.
Also, think about California's Amtrack - going from San Diego via Los Angeles to San Francisco. Currently trip from San Diego to LA takes 2.5 - 3 hours. With proper bullet train SD-LA should take no more than 45-60 minutes, making it much more convenient than now, and more convenient than 2 hour drive via highway.
And SD - SF should be less than 4 hours, making it faster than a flight (if you count all the time wasted at the airports).
>How often do people need to get from NYC to Syracuse?
For people living to Syracuse, tons of times. Equally many times with any EU train that connects e.g. Paris to a city within 50 or 100 or 200 miles.
>And if you built a train to Syracuse, what would you do once you got there (without a car)? The city is the centerpiece of a region with a million people, less than 1/6 of whom live inside the city?
If it's "a million people" it should be able to afford its own public transport connected to the train station, which answers the question "what to do there without a car".
It's not like there aren't places in Europe, Asia etc that are exactly like this...
Are there places in Europe and Asia like this? Syracuse doesn’t have a transit network because nobody lives in Syracuse, they live in the sprawl around it.
What shocked me about my recent trips abroad (to Munich and Tokyo) was that those cities were completely different. You drive a bit out of Munich and the city just ends and becomea farm land. Even with Tokyo there ia farmland between the city and Narita. In the US, it’a sprawl in every direction, and most of the population lives in that sprawl, and not in the city.
>Are there places in Europe and Asia like this? Syracuse doesn’t have a transit network because nobody lives in Syracuse, they live in the sprawl around it.
Well, not quite: "At the 2010 census, the city population was 145,252, and its metropolitan area had a population of 662,577". There are places like that in Europe.
In Greece Athens has a population of 600,000 people and the surrounding metropolitan area is 4 million -- of continuous sprawl in every direction.
> How often do people need to get from NYC to Syracuse?
Far more often than you'd think. If such a system existed people would use it all the time.
Look at the metra lines that go from Chicago to the suburbs in the north/northwest. People take those all the time because living in those areas is significantly cheaper.
People would be able to visit families long distance without needing to own a car or cough up for a plane ticket. That land in the US is vast is not really a good excuse.
Syracuse isn't a suburb of NYC. The distance between those cities is like the distance between Chicago and Iowa City. Nobody commutes to Chicago from Iowa City.
Commuting for work, probably not. But along that route I’d imagine people would utilize it, similar to how metra is used for people coming from Wisconsin.
Being able to conveniently take the train from Chicago -> Iowa would be great, especially if the route went further.
Forget about just inside NY. What about between NY, MA and PA. Are you going to say not many people will travel to/from DC-NY, Boston-NY, Philly-NY?
Arguments about distance and space or no passenger will use it are really excuses that was pushed down our throats.
No, they aren’t served well by rail. At least not at the scale of major European cities.
Yes, Amtrak runs from DC, Baltimore, Philly, NYC, and Boston. But, it’s not high speed (except a few sections on the Acela train). And the subways and neighborhood lines are lacking.
Take DC for example... the Metro single tracks and stops at every station. No express route across town. And trains only run every 20 minutes off-peak (and that’s assuming they haven’t shut the whole thing down because it’s caught on fire again). So, getting from Tyson’s Corner or Bethesda to Union Station is not fast.
An regular train from the inner business centers to Union Ststion, plus a proper bullet train to NYC would make a suitable substitute for flying. Right now, rail just isn’t a workable option for many business travelers.
Acela carries (per Wikipedia's cited source) around 3.5M passengers per year.
From Washington Dulles airport, approximately 265k passengers per year fly to Boston. Another 715k fly DCA-BOS. DCA-LGA accounts for 318k. DCA-JFK, IAD-LGA and IAD-JFK do not crack top-ten lists of busiest domestic routes for their origins.
To get a feel for just Acela (which is not the only Northeast Corridor train service), it's slightly less than the annual passenger volume by air SFO-LAX, SFO-JFK and SFO-BOS combined.
The entire Northeast Corridor carries approximately 12M passengers per year. If it were operated by air, it would be the second-busiest route in the world by passenger volume, slotting between CJU-GMP in Korea (13M/year) and MEL-SYD in Australia (9M/year).
In 2012, the New York Times reported that 75 percent of travelers between New York and Washington used one of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor trains (Acela isn't the only one), and between New York and Boston 54 percent used a train:
There certainly are things that could be improved. But Amtrak's operations in the northeast are not some hypothetical potential maybe-someday competitor to air travel. They are and for years have been a real and significant competitor to air travel.
And for what it's worth, Amtrak also has a farebox recovery ratio for its entire nationwide network that hovers around 95%, second in the US only to BART Oakland Airport Connector (96%).
Sort of off-topic, but every time someone says this, I am reminded of the subprime car loan market where the same car is sold at inflated prices and usurious interest rates to people who have bad credit, then repossessed and sold again. If we had decent public transport, that wouldn't happen.
This argument doesn't hold water. Why is there no decent regional train system in the US then? Your point explains why there is no coast to coast NYC-SF bullet train, fair enough. Each US megaregion [0] could have a decent train system like France, Germany or Japan.
The short answer is that not enough people want that. The argument seems to be that they would if only they knew how awesome it was. But that argument isn't sticking, so the political will to make it happen is not there.
It seems a bit more complicated than that to me. In many cases Americans in at least some regions do want it, and even vote to fund it, but nonetheless the political & civil service machinery seems unable to actually deliver it. Especially, unable to deliver it for anything approximating a reasonable cost. See, for example, the way over budget and delayed NYC 2nd Ave Subway, or the California HSR. Some countries are able to build a single 400-mile HSR line in less than 30 years.
I take the Acela from Boston to NYC often. It's okay but not great. Nothing like the TGV which I've also ridden.
If the trip could be two hours instead of 3.5+ that would be great but as it is it is barely justifiable over flight (being dropped off midtown is a big bonus tho).
The benefits for even longer travel just don't exist. Once you start getting into the 4+ hours on a train it's almost always better to find a flight.
Japan's shinkansen travels at 2-2.5x the speed of the Acela. At the maximum speed of current bullet train technology, Boston - NY could likely be done in about 1.5 hours, Boston to Washington in about 2-3, and even Boston to Cleveland in around 3-4. That basically covers the entirety of travel in the Northeast corridor.
This doesn't even cover the new maglev trains that are expected to go into service sometime in the late 2020s in Japan, which have a maximum speed of 550km/h, expanding the range of that 4 hour "maximum" significantly.
The major problem with the Acela is that it mainly runs on older infrastructure that wasn't designed with HS trains in mind. This severely limits its speed on most of its route. Most HS systems in other places around the world are on newly developed HS lines that were built up specifically to support the much faster speeds and requirements of these trains, and are completely separate from the regular rail lines (which might be running in parallel nearby).
It is also that many people actively oppose trains because they are afraid that the trains will bring in undesirable people (poor people, criminals, hipsters from New York) to their neighborhood. When New York MTA tried to extend Metro North service 25 miles beyond Poughkeepsie on already existing tracks, residents of the surrounding towns opposed the extension claiming that NYC commuters will move to their rural towns.
>I feel like the argument weakens when he compares countries. I'm looking at the railway maps of France and Japan thinking: 'this entire country is the size of a single, largeish US state'.
Not that old tired chessnut again.
First, all of Europe is connected by trains. You can go from any country to any country in EU by train -- if you wish so. That's equally large to the US (and the train lines even continue down to Moscow and further down to Beijing).
Second, it's not like you need to hook up all of the US or nothing. Where is a comparable and equally nice metro/train solution within a single small state (dozens of which are smaller than most European countries) or even within a city?
Even Chicago or Manhattan are worse than anything shown train/subway wise.
> You can go from any country to any country in EU by train
Surely you mean "continental Europe" unless there's a tunnel to Ireland
> That's equally large to the US
Uh, no. The southwestern tip of Portugal to the northeastern tip of Estonia is around 3300 km. The mainland US equivalent is 4400 km. Moreover, unlike Europe, the population centers are mostly along opposite sides.
If you want to do it, the fast train from Birmingham ends at Holyhead station in Wales, and (depending which end of the train you're in) you walk about 100m to the check-in building of the ferry.
I don't know for this place, but it's fairly likely that the ferry schedule aligns with the train schedule.
Train+ferry connections used to be very common in Europe. Sometimes the train was loaded onto the ferry (still happens between Germany and Denmark). Some have been replaced by bridges, others are defunct, but where they still exist it's usually possible to buy an ordinary train ticket which includes travel across the ferry. Interrail/Eurail passes include the use of these ferries.
>Surely you mean "continental Europe" unless there's a tunnel to Ireland
Surely that's a pedantic objection, when you can get to 95% of EU (or more population wise) by train, and when you can just take the ferry off of Scotland (and France and UK are of course connected by train)...
>Uh, no. The southwestern tip of Portugal to the northeastern tip of Estonia is around 3300 km. The mainland US equivalent is 4400 km. Moreover, unlike Europe, the population centers are mostly along opposite sides.
That's a difference of 25%, and not the machine scale difference implied at first with the US vs France comparison.
Second, that's off too. Trains continue way past Estonia, (Sweden and Finland go even further north, part of Russia is in Europe etc). Furthermore train connections continue all the way to China (e.g. with the trans-siberian-express) and even Korea and across the sea from Japan.
>Uh, no. The southwestern tip of Portugal to the northeastern tip of Estonia is around 3300 km. The mainland US equivalent is 4400 km. Moreover, unlike Europe, the population centers are mostly along opposite sides.
Besides the fact that the rest of the US is still 150 million strong (and thus could very well have some good lines connecting it), this just makes it even easier to have a great train system in those populous cities in the opposite sides -- one in East and one in the West coast for example.
Heck, the US doesn't have a good train and subway system anywhere (e.g. not even within a single state), so the logistics to have one throughout the continent is a red herring.
That the whole of USA is a large land mass is no excuse for individual cities having bad public transport.
To take the analogy over the top, Greenland is a part of Denmark, I don't hear them saying that because of that, they should start investing only in freeways for cars in Copenhagen?
Only Texas and Alaska are larger than France. I give you Alaska, due to the geography and low population, but Texas is just slightly larger and has half the population of France - not a massive difference.
I think it could be reasonably fair to compare countries to single states at least?
You can, of course, compare countries to states but sadly too many of these articles make sweeping generalisations and don't mention the compromises. Most people would much rather have the convenience of a car if possible and cheap but in Japan it is often neither due to space constraints and generally parking is illegal on most roads.
Compare Texas, lots of open space and historical reasons necessitates car travel except for major urban to urban transport which could be done by train but why bother? As in the UK, the acceptance that cars be supported for some journeys means that on balance, they are better to use for most others. Even for me, the coach runs direct from my town to Heathrow airport in a similar time to a car and pretty cheap but it won't always run when I need it so why not drive (or get a lift)?
As a Londoner (have lived both centrally and in the suburbs) I think you're right that it's one or the other.
If you design for cars (e.g. M25, UK motorway network and roads, towns like Swindon and MK) then cars are the uncontested king.
In an area like London, it almost becomes an emergent phenomenon. The suburbs have car use because they're not very dense and it still beats sporadic bus routes.
In the centre there's just no space. Forget parking, Uber might be slower than the tube in a no-congestion scenario simply due to traffic lights and giving way.
Germany and California are in the same ballpark when it comes to size and economic power. The state's internal transportation network should be just as developed but it is not. It's not only the size of the country, it's also the philosophy of the people and society.
When they talk about the train in Russia, they really only talk about the train in Moscow. Everyone I know says stations are very nice, and schedule during peak hours is like a train/min. BUT, at the same time, it's much much more packed than here in new york. Even during rush hour I don't feel pressed against other passengers here.
You can't claim that a high-speed line between Boston, Providence, CT cities, NYC, Philly, and down to Washington is not sensible. For many other states like Illinois, where there's one big city without much else near it, yes it's sensible to not have a great network of rails. However, there is really no geographic excuse for not having high-speed rail in the basically linear east coast corridor.
Having traveled many times from Boston to NYC via car, which is about 5x cheaper than Amtrak and yes actually comparable in cost to the bus, depending on your MPG, it's kind of ridiculous to me that we don't have a better version of Amtrak by now.
TO be fair, despite the US having some large emptier states, the US has nodes of very high urban density - most notably the Northeast corridor. From Boston to Washington there's around 50 million people, with - depending how you define it - a density of around 390/sqkm, three times that of France's 120/sqkm.
Of course not representative, but you can definitely see the influence of the automobile in how these cities have grown. Compare to say, Moscow - another major urban city in a fairly sparse city - New York City has only added a few km of subway lines in the past 20 years compared to 150+km.
Total land area is a problem to be solved in the US for train travel, and we only have Russia and China to compare to.
City to city comparison makes much more sense