> 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.
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?