High speed rail is a non-starter in the US, except for in certain regions.
It's 2000 miles from Chicago to LA. Optimistically, if you had a train that averaged 200 miles an hour, it would still take 10 hours. That's just not competitive.
Who is suggesting building high speed rail from Chicago to LA? Why would you pick that particular example? It takes even longer to drive, and yet we have built multiple highway routes that connect LA and Chicago.
Instead of picking dumb examples to discredit the idea, how about looking at obviously good places: The entire East coast from Boston to Miami would be a good corridor to build in. Or start in Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, and build links to cities between 200 and 500 miles away, where taking a high-speed train would be faster than either driving or flying, and extend from there. Eventually you will have a network that can take you from Chicago to LA, even if that's not the sweet spot for the type of transport. And honestly, a 10 hour train ride will take only 3-4 hours longer than the equivalent flight, once you factor in the huge overhead of time involved in flying.
It's actually a helpful example to support the conclusion. Why would the author provide a "better" example that supports his/her idea less? LA to Chicago may not be a commonly travelled route nor one that would lend itself to train travel best, but the author's point still stands, which is in the US on average distances between major cities are much longer than any individual country in Europe, hence the immense cost required to build infrastructure for trains. We might have bit the bullet and done it with highways back in the day for whatever reason, today the reasoning for doing the same thing may not apply and the cost unjustified.
> We might have bit the bullet and done it with highways back in the day for whatever reason, today the reasoning for doing the same thing may not apply and the cost unjustified.
So the rational, cost-effective solution would have been not to have any connection at all?
No one is saying build high-speed rail between cities that are extremely far apart.
Find the handful of places where it does make sense then build there. If it only makes sense in 4 locations then build there. You can safely ignore the other 20 locations.
> 2. Also, it appears that many states already get a lot more than they contribute. That subsidy probably isn’t going in the direction you think it is.
Sure, I'm not arguing that the distribution of federal money is 100% fair.
What part of it is not a "real" question? Are you saying there are assumptions in the question? Of course, the entire argument is hypothetical since currently there isn't a train system as described above in the US. The point of the comment was to seek predictive reasons in favor and against a hypothetical scenario. This has nothing to do with existing funding inside or outside CA. You seem confused.
Britain is tiny in comparison, with a nationally embarrassing rail service compared to our European neighbours. It's been deprived of adequate investment for decades.
Yet the sleeper services to Scotland are still going as a daily service. Even though the rolling stock must be some of the oldest on our railways. New rolling stock due next year.
10 hours HSR service to LA is the perfect time for a good night's sleep and a good full breakfast in the restaurant car. Arrive in LA fully refreshed ready for a full day.
How can that not be competitive and appealing? I'd take that over a 4hr(?) cattle class early morning flight, with an hour or so in airports each end, every single time. Your size is a point in favour of HSR not against. There must be countless viable HSR routes in the US.
The economics still don't work. It becomes a "public work" project instead of a self-sustained business. If the car ended up being much more expensive to purchase and operate, like it is in countries mentioned that are doing so well in rail, then more Americans would ride them. Once you have a sufficient amount of usage, then it would lead to more high speed rails being developed.
I wrote this up a few days ago for another HN post about the economics between Colorado Springs and Denver (I use to live in both, the springs for longer). It's about 21% of springs residents work in Denver. It's a ~60mile commute. There was the choice between widening the interstate by an extra lane ($350 mil) or make a rail for however many billions. Going by that second line they gave a price tag on, €3.4 billion for 182km, that's about $3.8 billion for 113 miles. About $30million a mile. That's a $1.8 billion price tag for one USA area that could theoretically use it. If you go just the shortest distance between the springs and Denver considered the "city limits" of either. Not center to center. Just the closest outskirts.
So you tell me, what would a politician prefer to convince people on a tax hike? $350mil for more roads that a majority of the people would more than likely use? Or $1.8bil for something that SOME people MAY use.
Let's ignore worker costs to operate the trains, rails, ticketing, security, etc. Also, let's ignore fuel/electricity costs. Also, let's ignore insurance. Oh, and preventive maintenance, upkeep and the sort. What sort of prices do they have to charge for about 57,000 to use the commuter to make it economically viable for the city(s)? Let's take $10 a day. 57k x $10 x 20work days a month(avg) x 12 = $136.8mil. It'd take 10+ years for it to break even. If everyone volunteers to work there and fuel was free. And no accidents. And no need to fix things. No paid janitors either. Or flushing toilets. All that costs more money.
If you price it $10 or more a day, why would anyone logically change over from their car already? It costs $8-$12 in fuel a day to make a round trip in a car anyways. Plus you don't have to wake up any sooner to catch the right time train to get to work at a decent time. Plus, a majority of the vehicles heading north to Denver (I use to make this trip relatively often by the way) is filled with plumbers, carpenters, electrical workers, landscapers and the sort. They have their own trucks and vans to carry tools and materials. None of which you can take on a train for a practical expense or in practical effort.
The economics for a high speed rail doesn't make sense with the cost in the USA. Fantastic they work well elsewhere. Great for them and their not car dependent society. They don't work out well here. It's time to mature and grow up to the fact that not all solutions solve all problems.
And yes, the government should spend money to help society. I get that. But there are limits. Too many of these and the defense sector would no longer be the bad guy in government spending.
And don't use the relaxing/reading argument. Obviously, you've never had to actually commute on a regular basis on public transit. I used to use a commuter in Portland for a few years. Your quality of reading comprehension sucks and you spend the first hour just trying to fully wake up because you wake up damn early to make your line jumps. It's not like "Oh, the commuter train takes me exactly where I want to go". Nope, now you have to jump onto buses or other lines to get to where you work. Because the stations are never where you need them. And god damn, when it snows and you're waiting outside. Fuck. Oh, and you have to work late that day? Guess what, the commuter only runs at peak hour work days. You don't get to hang out in the city. If you do, call a friend with a car. Oh, and you owe them gas money now too.
> Obviously, you've never had to actually commute on a regular basis on public transit.
I lived and commuted in NYC, SF, and Chicago. I haven't owned a car in 6 years. I'm intimately familiar with commuting via public transit.
There's too much in your post to reply line item by line item... but I'll just say that a defeatist attitude toward rail or breaking the USA's car dependency will get us just that - defeat.
I'd take a 10 hour train trip from Chicago to LA in a heartbeat.
Security lines are shorter, and the beginning and end of a train trip both happen at a literal train station, so it's usually easier to get into and out of the city center.
Security lines are shorter than airports now because public is not relying on trains in the US for travel as much as airplanes yet, if that happens what makes you think there won't be TSA all over train stations making you take your shoes off before boarding?
You can't do that anymore with commercial aircraft either, since they started looking the cockpit door, yet we still act like every passenger is likely to try it.
Sure you can't do that exact thing but who would have thought of flying planes into skyscrapers before 9/11 except a few crazies anyway? We didn't exactly have a pandemic of people flying planes into skyscrapers for decades prior.
Sure you can't do that exact thing but who would have thought of flying planes into skyscrapers before 9/11 except a few crazies anyway?
Tom Clancy? In ‘Debt of Honor’ it’s a major plot-point after all. The issue here is not that making a train into a cruise missile is hard to imagine, it’s actually impossible. You can attack the train, or use the train to attack a station or something close to the tracks, and that’s it. It’s also a purely kinetic event, rather than adding the complexity of so much fuel.
Make it an overnight train with a real bed and the train sounds more appealing to me. Do a days work in Chicago, go to sleep, wake up, do a days work in LA.
Add 2-3 hours for airport time wasted on both ends. But regardless of the time, I would much rather take a 10 hour train ride in comfortable, roomy seats, with all my luggage within reach, than crammed for five hours into an airplane seat literally as small as it can possibly be and that I can't get out of for half the time, especially if it's cheaper, which it probably would be.
Because it sounds like you haven't. I think you're confusing Harry Potter with reality. The I-5 Amtrak is great and all between Seattle and Portland, but it sucks after the first hour. Now, do 10 for long distance. I'd rather have the same suck for 4 hours instead of 10.
Plus, trains especially don't really do straight shots for long distance. Lot's of connecting trains. Just as bad as plane connections.
The only benefit is the food car. But it's just as expensive as a plane.
And no, the ticket is not cheaper. The big price difference, you don't save all that much between buying a ticket a month ahead of time and day of. The price is the price. Planes reward you for being able to plan ahead. Trains don't.
Sign me up for another vote in favor of a train ride... healthier and more comfortable, I can work, and I don’t have to deal with the TSA? Oh please god yes.
I don't think that this is necessarily true. In Europe we have night trains running between countries which of course also take 8 or 10 hours or more and they are more or less profitable.
However an average speed of 200 miles (320 km) per hour is still a lot. Especially because you will have stops in between which of course means that the v_max must be even higher.
Why do you pick San Francisco to Atlanta of all pairs of cities? How about Atlanta and Charlotte? Atlanta and Nashville? Dallas and Oklahoma City? Dallas and Houston? Dallas and Memphis? Memphis and Nashville? Nashville and Louisville? Louisville and Cincinnati? Cincinnati and Cleveland? Cleveland and Chicago? Chicago and St Louis? Chicago and Milwaukee? St Louis and Kansas City? Boston and New York? New York and DC? DC and Philadelphia? Philadelphia and Pittsburgh? Pittsburgh and Cleveland? These pairs are all in the sweet spot of where high speed rail makes an incredible amount of sense. And lots of the people driving or flying between them regularly would much rather take a comfortable train.
Canadians do. I dont know how you get along so well given how crammed together you all are. Pretty much every state can be driven across in under a day.
China is a pretty big place too, they didn't just give up. I have been on a fair bit of the train from Chicago out to LA, the flat bit through cornfields where you go to sleep and wake up a few hours later to the same view.
On that train I was shocked that it was six hours late. It got even later so I didn't get to see anything of Chicago, my day seeing the sights was not going to happen, the next train I was to catch - to Boston was waiting at the station.
What I was absolutely not prepared for was the reality that this rail link was just the one lot of tracks. In Europe you can expect four lines of tracks for fast and slow rains each way or just the two lines of tracks in rural areas, if there is just the one track you can expect that to be seriously rural, but even then you can expect a train every hour, even if the service is run down.
I was pretty much at starvation point waiting for the train to Chicago, since there was no useful information and no concessions at the platform I could not leave for that six hour wait as the train could arrive 'at any moment'. Then the speed of the thing was glacial, sometimes stopped for an eternity to let a more important freight train through.
Trains are competitive with planes although this is not believed in America. That 'two hour flight' never is, there are airports to get to, check in to be done, being divorced from one's luggage and a whole host of practical concerns that are not a problem when you have a rail network that has city/town centre stations rather than middle of nowhere airports.
Building a railway across China is not made magically easier because of some 'authoritarian government'. The railway still has to go across mountain ranges and houses have to be demolished with lots of complicated land rights issues every inch of the way. Putting two tracks through all those cornfields of middle America is a walk in the park by comparison. Two tracks are also cheaper to maintain, the wear is halved compared to the single track that you get in America.
Admittedly the Rocky Mountains do require a bit of route planning to get over, but compared to the terrain of China the grades are easy. Then there is Japan, on the Ring of Fire and requiring even more engineering.
The automobile may have benefits but having to hold that wheel thing and keep an eyeball on the road ahead is a bit silly. Trains just make more sense, the rails do the steering bit, plus passengers don't have to total approximately four.
Planes are a bit silly too, sure they have their place crossing from the edge of an ocean to another edge of an ocean, but planes can't stop off en-route to let passengers off and on with no more than a five minute pause per stop.
Often the US interstate highways have a median down the middle that is a hundred or more metres wide, perfect for putting some tracks down without having any land rights tussles.
For generations Americans have been electing the interests of Wall Street and The Pentagon into office, knowing full too well that the Democrats and the Republicans are fundamentally the same, receiving political contributions from the same military-industrial-complex. When the rare thing happens that a Ralph Nader comes along the Democrats double down on voting Democrat and berate the Ralph Nader candidate for splitting the 'liberal' vote to let the Republicans in, blaming all their woes on him instead of the interests of international capital that print money to keep everyone in debt.
Rail need not be absent from the US forever, high speed lines in interstate medians could cover the country in ten years, with huge benefits for 'making America great again'. But with 700+ billion spent on defence and a similar sum spent on paying interest on 22 trillion dollars of debt there is no money for the American government to invest a cent in anything that could be instrumental in the prosperity of the US. It was industrial capital under a different dollar that made 'America great', since WW2 America has been coasting, with everyone working harder and harder, under this new regime of 'international finance capitalism'. The 'free market' actually means freedom from this pernicious vulture capitalism that has sucked the industrial lifeblood out of America.
If times change and the American people take up their 'amendment rights' to see to the people that control their currency then America could join the rest of the world and have nice things like a modern rail network in a lot less time than what it took China to get theirs.
Sorry, but an "Authoritarian Government" absolutely makes it FAR easier because it can chase any kind of developmental boondoggles it wants to. See China's ghost cities. It has stupid cheap labor supply and can relocate hundreds of thousands of people in the snap of a bureaucrat's finger because they have no rights to fight the state.
They also have cities with 30 million people in them, and dominate the cities with populations > 1M on the planet besides India and other parts of SE Asia. Rail just makes more sense there in a way the US can't even compare. It has nothing to do with country size and everything to do with density and cost.
Even if you could plan HSR in the most rail-friendly parts of the east coast, you're going to have to eminent domain tons of property for immense cost, or disrupt the shit out of the exiting rail line which the region actually depends on for things like commuting.
The conspiracy about interests wanting to kill rail make little sense. Its struggled because other modes of transit have proven better. Amtrak is heavily subsidized and terribly unpopular for travel because planes are just better here.
California's eternal dream is HSR between LA and SF and it is turning into a ludicrous cost-overrun disaster. Construction of rail costs 7x in NYC what it costs in France due to labor, environmental and other land use regulatory burdens -- let alone how much cheaper it is for China (who has a looming debt problem but is also mostly internal IIRC, and doesn't have to worry about efficiency because it is not a business)
Rail doesn't happen en masse in the US because other modes are more cost effective given the population density realities. Atmospheric CO2 scrubbing tech is coming a long way in a short amount of time, so rather than chasing rail that will never be faster than flying (not to mention the fact that you can change flight paths with ease as demand to go from place to place changes because there's no physical infrastructure limiting you) we should focus on the rest of the green energy in our grid to make a dent in carbon.
I lament USA's car driving culture as much as anyone. I live in a dense and transit friendly city and wish more parts of the USA were like that, but HSR is part pipe dream, part white whale, and part hammer that politicians want everything to be a political nail for. One can't just assume that just because something works in one place, it will work everywhere. The realities in the US are different, and next-generation transit here has to face those realities.
There's probably room for more rail here as cities become revitalized and between things like airports and said cities, but you will have to change the entire face of the majority of suburbia and rural America to make trains become the most useful mode of transit here and as someone who wants to go live in Europe for a bit for many of the same quality of life dreams you probably share, I wish you good luck with that.
You’re right, it is a political hammer. The thing is, it never survives feasibility studies. The Tampa Orlando hsr has been a talking point for at least 20 years that I know of. There just isn’t enough people who even say that they MIGHT use it. But politicians love promising it and fancy 3D renders. Hsr in the states is exactly like that bridge to nowhere in Alaska everyone got on Palin back during Mcain v Obama. If they applied the exact same logic, not enough people will be using it to justify cost, we wouldn’t be having these discussions.
I just don’t see the appeal. First off, I’ve done long distance trains. They suck just as much as planes and they’re slower. The tickets won’t be that much cheaper than puddle jump flights. And since it’s a longer trip, a negative, it has to be cheaper than plane. There are still checked bags on a train. Still a 20 min on boarding process from entering station to train. That’ll get worse as more people use it.
I just mostly want to understand how trains are an indicator of a country’s tech prowess now. Or whatever fantasy they think comes with them. Trains are literally the symbol of old school social elite and unbridled capitalism and social control. God damn Vanderbilt? The car was the turning point of democratic maneuverability. People could go where ever they wanted and when. Well, that’s mostly true for Jeep owners at least. The hell happened?
It's 2000 miles from Chicago to LA. Optimistically, if you had a train that averaged 200 miles an hour, it would still take 10 hours. That's just not competitive.