As a European it boggles my mind seeing how trains are basically non-existent in the USA (just look at Houston station), given how dominant the whole "Wild West" railroad rush is in everybody's immagination. Railroads are super ubiquitous here, and we've to work with a pretty hostile terrain - Italy has lots of mountains, hills, rivers, and yet has one of the best networks in the world. Most of the USA are basically empty, it would be pretty easy to build high-speed rail.
The USA has a world-class _Freight_ rail network, and almost all existing track in the country is owned by the freight operators, who manage the track to optimize it for freight operations. In many cases, they are openly hostile to passenger service on their tracks.
On top of this, most cities in the USA were built (or destroyed and rebuilt) for private cars being the primary mode of transportation. In Europe, one of the benefits of taking the train over an airplane is that the train stations will often be in a walkable city center with a good connection to public transit. In the USA, outside of a handful of older cities (New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston . . .), the train station drops you off in the middle of nowhere, usually with far less connections and services than the airport has. When compared to air travel, intercity rail travel is often slower, less convenient, less frequent, and more expensive.
Even with the Acela/northwest corridor, flights are often cheaper than rail, so it is the convenience of the downtown stations and connections to public transit that drive people to take the train over airplanes. It's no coincidence that the major cities on the route (DC, Philiadelphia, NYC, Boston) are also cities with some of the best metro networks in the country.
No it doesn't have a world class freight rail network. The North American rail infra is incredibly primitive. Most of it is "dark territory" (no track sensors), unlike Europe. I used to write rail automation software for a German firm. They were appalled at the state of affairs here. One of the most lucrative rail systems in the US had an average speed of their trains in the single digits MPH!
I think the term "world class" is unfortunate with connection to freight rail networks.
Freight does not need to travel super fast or super high tech. What it needs is to be able to travel everywhere at high throughput and cheaply. US is doing quite well in that regard.
High throughput comes with a caveat, since it’s high throughput given the existing poor conditions.
The US used to have much more tracks, but the private railroads stripped a lot of them as far as they could get away with. There are lines that were four-tracked or were electrified that have now been reduced to unelectrified single track, so you now have a much more sluggish, polluting and congested railroad, and on top of that much is poorly maintained to save money.
—-
Also a lot of the freight is bulk freight like coal. This has led to some interesting dynamics where freight railroads oppose coal plant closures, because they will lose a major source of tonnage.
> Freight does not need to travel super fast or super high tech.
That depends on what you want to ship. In the US the train just gave up on many other class of freight. Yes, large scale slow bulk transport doesn't need speed, other things might.
Track sensors are especially useful in they middle of nowhere.
And there are plenty of latency sensitive applications for freight rail which are developed in other places. They don't make sense in the US because the capability isn't there, not because there's no market for it.
> They don't make sense in the US because the capability isn't there, not because there's no market for it.
There really isn't. Freight companies are responsible for maintaining investing in the rail, and if it doesn't make them money, they aren't going to put it there. Heck, a lot of places are single rail (meaning, no two way traffic at the same time), because it doesn't really make sense to dump more money into an extra set of tracks in those places.
Again, you're conflating things. There is a market for low latency rail freight. The rail companies find that it's better to keep the rail as is and invest the profits somewhere else. That doesn't mean that the market doesn't exist.
The correct approach is for low latency rail freight to operate on passenger rail systems which already have the necessary speeds and flexibilities. This is structurally unfeasible in the US but it's still definitely a market that better rail systems can service at no extra cost.
The freight companies own the railway, they optimize the rails for freight, which is why we move much more freight by train than Europe. Passenger service is something they do for the federal government subsidy and nothing more.
And actually, sharing tracks between passenger and freight service is something that they don't really do in Europe. Because they share tracks, American passenger trains have to build at a weight on part with freight trains. Most lines in Europe separate out passenger and freight service lines so they can run lighter trains for passenger service.
A big part of why the US moves more by rail is simply because it moves more goods overland than in Europe.
Low latency freight for smaller, high value items is often done on passenger lines (or even passenger trains) because it doesn't put any scheduling pressure on passenger service.
As far as use of freight in Europe, the elephant in the room is that the EU uses a lot more sea freight than the US. Indeed, while the modal split for EU trucking is around 50%, it's around 70% in the US, and it thus seems clear that the real reason that there is less rail shipping within Europe is because there is much more competition from maritime shipping.
This is a perfect example of path-dependent policy. Because the decision was to select for freight, other kinds of rail are "unfeasible". I'm using scare quotes to suggest that it's not really unfeasible, it's a choice.
And since trucking capacity has been maxed out in the US for quite a while (Amazon is the big mover for this situation, even before covid), you can bet this path dependence is biting us now.
I'm surprised by the general opposition to your comment. I agree. US transit infrastructure, including rail, is anything but world class. Sure, we move tons of freight, but is that the standard alone?
Just because it works doesn't mean it can't be improved better. It's always ok to reject the "don't fix it if it's not broken" mentality.
In the context of freight, it is the lone standard because as another commenter pointed out, throughput is more important than latency in bulk goods transport whereas latency is a much more important variable when passengers are involved.
US rail owners and operators know what the variables are that they care about and their customers care about are, and also what insurance companies care about and as a result, they are adept at moving goods coast to Great Lakes to coast, across the Appalachians, Missouri-Mississippi river system, the Great Plains, the Rockies, the Great Basin, the Sierra Nevadas, the Cascades and the California Coastal Range.
If they’re not using some software package or have complete sensor coverage on their tracks, they probably judged that they don’t need it. If a competitor actually finds advantage with these things tomorrow, then they will all adopt it.
I think it’s easy to call something out as primitive but what changes could be made and how much impact would it have? It doesn’t seem like our freight trains are the bottleneck when moving goods around the country.
They kind of are if you consider how many goods are still shipped by trucks.
The US is perfect for rail - lots of long trips, with lots of goods. It could probably have more market share if goods could move more quickly and flexibly.
Just to add some numbers, the freight modal splits as of 2018 (most recent year with complete data), measured in tonne-kilometers, for a few countries [1] and the EU taken as a whole [2]:
US: 45% road, 38% rail, 17% other (water/pipeline)
Europe is not perfect for rail. Shorter trips, complicated geography, etc. etc. there are some legacy technology constraints that the us doesn’t have or solved a hundred years ago (loading gauge, max train length, couplers).
The fact is the us could do better, pointing to Europe which could also do better is moot.
I believe this as well. And I happen to know of one of the largest rail systems in North America changes its topology weekly. I'm not sure "throughput over latency" is as much of a mindset as those here who say it is.
Imo, your choice of scare quotes around "smart" telegraph your unwillingness to consider even a well-founded data informed argument, for what it's worth.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
GP asked for a well founded data-based argument, assuming they don't actually want that is in bad faith.
I agree with GP that the connection between sensors and high speed to better freight rail is tenuous, whereas large amounts of tonnage moved more clearly indicates good freight rail.
I’ve never seen a return Manchester to london flight for £40, yet I can walk up to picadilly, but a ticket, board the train tomorrow and be in london in about 3 hours.
The fact the US is basically empty means the cost to build a HSR route to go between population centers is super high because of the sheer distances involved. You’re talking like 1000 miles, not 200. The places which are closer together, like the East Coast, do have some passenger rail but they’re also much denser, like Europe, and so they have the same kind of constraints (or worse).
The US has a lot of freight rail, and we use it.
The Wild West mentality has gone away in the railroad industry which is now hyper-conservative and regulated.
I do sometimes wish the US lived up to the Wild West stereotype the Europeans imagine. But no, we often have just as much stifling regulation (if not more), depending on where you’re talking about. But we do have gun violence, so there’s that.
The center of population in the US is still just barely to the west of the Mississippi, whenever people point out how vast and largely empty the US is, the leave out that the population itself is actually generally fairly close together for a majority of the country.
You could easily have HSR all over the south, Midwest and NE, and then between population centers on the west coast, just likely not in the desert and western Great Plains.
See for example Alon Levy's map of proposed HSR for the Eastern United States: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/02/10/high-speed-rai... They've actually done serious investigation of what's viable given typical costs and ridership of high-speed lines elsewhere in the world.
The high-speed bits they propose are basically a Boston-Atlanta-Chicago triangle with some ornaments (Chicago - KC, Chicago - Minneapolis, Cleveland - Pittsburgh - Philadelphia, and connections to Toronto, Montreal, Quebec), and separate networks in Florida and Texas. Connecting the Florida and Texas networks to the main one is marginal.
I'm not sure of their opinions on separate networks in the Pacific Northwest and in California, but I'm sure they have looked at it. I do recall them saying that it doesn't make sense to connect, say, Portland to San Francisco - there's just not much in between.
It doesn’t make sense to connect Portland and SF, but there’s a lot of value to be gained in connecting Portland and Vancouver BC, and San Diego to SF/possibly Sacramento.
We would definitely want to have a “constellation” of networks rather than one interconnected system given the geography of the US, and that’s fine. There’s never going to be a time when it makes more sense to travel from LA to NYC by rail instead of flying.
The biggest takeaway is that there is a specific role that HSR can play, but it’s not going to take over all long distance trips. Given where we are starting in the US, however, there is a massive mine of untapped potential.
Right. You don't want a line down the entire West Coast, even though it's tempting to draw. But a line from Vancouver to Portland makes sense, as does a "greater California" system - roughly lines from Los Angeles to SF, Sacramento, Vegas, San Diego. The latter is basically the California HSR system that's under construction, plus the proposed privately built line from LA to Vegas. (Levy also proposes LA to Phoenix; Phoenix is further than Vegas but also bigger, so maybe it makes sense.)
Even in the east there are some gaps. It's obvious that a midwestern network centered on Chicago and a southeastern network centered on Atlanta make sense, but it's a bit more of a stretch to connect those to the northeast.
Why not? The great advantage of high speed rail is that with intermediate stops along the route you can service smaller cities which previously, or as you just did, would be considered flyover country. Thus making the value of the system greater than just the end terminuses.
Just looking at the towns between Portland and Sacramento Salem, Eugene and Medford exist. Neither would themselves ever be valuable enough for HSR, but as part of a larger system they definitely would bring value.
Especially since you would get 3.5 hour trains Bay Area <-> Seattle and 4.5 hour trains to Vancouver.
That is right at the limit of when flying starts to make more sense from a time perspective.
Edit: Here's a good video on the concept. From a comment (by the author) he says that France and Spain has many lines in the range of 4 given his scoring. It just seems miniscule compared to the enormous potential of DC <-> Boston corridor.
"U.S. High Speed Rail: What's Next? Analyzing Extensions and Expansions, and What Makes Sense"
> Especially since you would get 3.5 hour trains Bay Area <-> Seattle and 4.5 hour trains to Vancouver.
Hiroshima to Tokyo is just over 3.5 hours on the Shinkansen, and it’s a 500 mile trip. SF TO Seattle is roughly 800 miles… You’re making a very optimistic projection.
> Just looking at the towns between Portland and Sacramento Salem, Eugene and Medford exist.
You’re barely cracking 500k people and covering the most difficult terrain on the entire corridor.
The problem is that TSA isn't as bad as it was right after 9/11, and baggage tracking is much better on all airlines. You no longer need to arrive 2 hours before the scheduled departure and spend an hour collecting your bags.
With TSA PreCheck, I can reliably go from curb to gate in less than 15 minutes. If you're not someone who feels the need to be the first one on the plane, that means you can arrive at the airport 30 minutes before the scheduled departure time.
So, as a practical matter, that means a SJC->SEA flight is at least an hour shorter than the hypothetical train.
I'm also very skeptical that a train could reach Seattle in 3.5 hours from the Bay Area. That would require an average speed of over 200 mph on the great-circle path.
California High-Speed Rail only promises an average speed of 150 mph between LA and San Francisco (w/ a world-class top speed of 220 mph). Additionally, geography dictates a more circuitous route. CAHSR route-miles between LA and the SFBA (similar terrain) are 25% greater than the straight-line distance.
Realistically, the train would take almost 6 hours, and a plane would be less than half.
Yeah, I haven't flown for a while and I gather there's still a certain level of travel chaos. But pre-pandemic, I'd get to the airport early because it's more relaxing for me and my limo company doesn't like to cut things close. But with TSA Pre, I was rarely more than 15 minutes through security and often much faster. Backups happen and I'd rather build in slack for them. But in my experience, at the US airports I fly through, the "security theater" is rarely onerous.
South of Eugene and north of Redding, the land is mountainous and would be extremely difficult to build a straight enough line to serve as HSR. The existing Amtrak Cascades service goes between Eugene and Vancouver BC.
I agree, a high speed line between Eugene and Redding seems like an overkill. However a traditional electrified railway with a stop in Medford would be pretty sweat.
With the planned California High Speed rail going between Sacramento and Los Angeles, and the proposed Cascadia high speed rail going all the way to Eugene, this traditional link would enable a sleeper train between Seattle and Los Angeles in something like 10-13 hours. That is way better then today’s Coastal Starlight which makes the trip in 36 hours.
There really isn't much between Portland area and San Francisco area, and there isn't enough potential economic activity that an HSR would induce (it is too mountainous, which also means building HSR would be more expensive).
Because not enough people live along the way. Sure you an build track and run trains, but 5 hours on a train is about the time where flying is enough faster that people will fly instead of taking the train. Less than 5 hours train competes well (stations are closer to you, and no long security lines), but after that airplanes are enough faster that few people would use a train. That means only a small number of people will ride the train for those middle stations.
Sure if you are building a track you can put in stations in towns that don't generation much traffic, but you still need traffic from somewhere and it won't come.
Well with Maglev, Portland to San Francisco could make sense via Sacramento. You wouldn’t want to do it on the coast because of the mountains, and there’s at least Redding and Ashland and a couple of other places in-between.
At 500 km/h (310 mph) you could feasibly do Sacramento to Portland in under two hours. The less straightforward question is how much of the metro area do you serve around those two cities, and do you connect that line directly to San Francisco or do you run a separate line to Sacramento via the Delta? Do you go a sort if L-shape around Stockton first? The politics of this could push travel time up, but at 500 km/h you can cover a lot of ground, much of it fairly empty.
So a hypothetical Best Coast system would connect Vancouver, BC to Portland, Portland to Sacramento, Sacramento to Reno, Reno to Las Vegas, Sacramento to LA, San Francisco to Sacramento via Stockton, San Francisco to LA, LA to Tijuana via San Diego, LA to Las Vegas, LA to El Paso via Phoenix, Phoenix to St. George, Las Vegas to Salt Lake City via St. George, San Diego to El Paso via Tucson & Mexicali and now you’re in Texas where options include El Paso to New Orleans via either Austin & Houston or San Antonio & Houston, Brownsville to McAllen, Brownsville to Houston via Corpus Christi, Corpus Christi to San Antonio, Houston to Dallas, Dallas to Oklahoma City and I’m probably missing some, but you have the workings of a Gulf Coast constellation anchored by Texas on one end and Florida on the other.
Thing is, I’ve worked this all out on paper too, including a Northeast, Southeast and Midwest map that looked much like one that someone linked to up the thread. Problem is, our choice of infrastructure is downstream from our cultural preferences which in turn are shaped by the infrastructure our ancestors built in the decades prior.
El Paso is about 725 miles away from San Diego according to Siri, so with the best trains in the world you could be inside the Texas rail constellation I briefly outlined above in about 2-3 hours which in turn could serve as the basis for a Gulf Coast constellation connecting Florida and the Southeast connecting to the Midwest and the Northeast and then to Canada.
It’s not built though because people just fly instead. We worked out how to get cheap air travel long before we figured out super-fast transcontinental rail travel that probably doesn’t make sense coast to coast but if it already existed, probably would make sense going coast to middle and middle to middle and would just happen to connect the coasts. Or you could just fly, which is what we do, and since that already exists and is even faster than rail travel, metro areas can figure out how their own inter-urban rail systems that are slow and local where it makes sense to build them and just try to make sure the airport is connected too. I like trains, but not so much that I’m willing to toss hundreds of billions of public money into some kind of “national rail system” whatever form it took for whatever prestige it might bring. Jumbo jets are cool too.
Wind resistance at ground level means that an airplane is much more energy efficient at those distances and speed. As such those distances are unlike to work just because an airplane is so much cheaper even if because of speed it is time competitive.
Here's a good video on one method of calculating what the sum of the smaller individual parts would be. This is for the north east corridor but the same thinking applies to any rail project.
It seems like about a million people live there, not nearly enough individually, and trains would likely alternate at which locations they stop to bring the total travel time between the larger areas down.
Might be hindered by the mountainous terrain though making the cost prohibitive.
"U.S. High Speed Rail: What's Next? Analyzing Extensions and Expansions, and What Makes Sense"
They did the math and decided to connect Florida to the main Eastern component (based on there being enough demand for Atlanta-Florida travel), so there are four components - the main Eastern component, Texas, California (+Vegas, Phoenix), Pacific Northwest (Portland to Vancouver)
I don't think you can take any national plan seriously if it doesn't include Chicago/Memphis/Jackson/New Orleans. Passenger rail service has been in almost continuous operation on that route since a little after the Civil War. It has to be there for the symbolism alone.
Levy addresses this, and agrees with you: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/03/22/high-speed-rai... Basically, Amtrak started out with the existing rail network, which is going
to be oriented to early-20th-century population centers, and so New Orleans is well-served by Amtrak standards. But a modern network in the South would be oriented more towards those parts of the South that have grown - Texas and the Piedmont - and less towards New Orleans, Memphis, and St. Louis.
American growth of the last 80 years is incompatible with the future of the world. You won't save a sprawly mess by putting a high speed rail station in the center of it.
If it was an important city before the age of the automobile, it has a chance. Put the "future" rail network in the cities that have a future.
Point number two, and probably even more important than the first, is the fact that you have to get your plan through a million committees, and through Congress, etc. You need support. His plan won't get it. Too much of it goes through places that hate trains and "socialism". And then it tells the people that have nostalgic memories of a railroad that lifted their family out of the Jim Crow south to go pound sand. His plan will never go further than his blog :)
Would you like an analogy to this situation?
Everybody in tech has incredible ideas for the future. But the startup world is littered with companies that have had no success at all getting from point A to point B despite billions in VC money.
Yes. It's an area with AT BEST stagnant growth, and likely contraction, versus areas like the Triangle in NC that are poorly served by rail and rapidly growing.
The entire Great Lakes region is decently densely populated.
- Columbus - Cleveland 142 miles
- Columbus - Cincinnati 106 miles
- Cleveland - Pittsburgh 134 miles
- Cleveland - Toledo 114 miles
- Columbus - Toledo 142 miles
- Toledo - Detroit 58 miles (Cleveland, Columbus, & Cincinnati can share this)
- Toledo - Chicago 244 miles (Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, & Detroit can share this)
Theoretically, you can connect Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, & Pittsburgh into <3 hr trips by HSR.
That's going to beat flying. And that connects about:
- Chicago 9.5M
- Detroit 4.5M
- Pittsburgh 2.3M
- Cincinatti 2.3M
- Columbus 2.2M
- Cleveland 2.1M
- TOTAL = 23M+ people (~7% of the US)
For 940 miles of rail...
Even considering that HSR costs ~$100M per mile - that's about $4k per person.
That sounds like a lot. But since we have frequent opportunities to finance 30-year treasuries at ~1.5% interest and the Fed mandates inflation to be ~2% or higher:
=PMT(-0.005/12, 30*12, -4000)
That's about ~$10.30 per month per person. Considering the average tax payer is paying ~$1,300 per month in federal taxes - 0.7% of that going to HSR where it makes sense - does not seem like a terrible idea...
For context, highways cost about ~$200B per year - which comes down to ~$49.75 per tax payer per month - however, only about 1/4th of that is Federal taxes (~$12.43).
I'll also add that the Great Lakes is probably at the bottom of the list of regions where HSR would make sense. Other places like the Northeast make much more sense.
Maybe I am misunderstanding some of the intent. But yes, a rail from NYC to Miami is far, but when you chunk it up, it makes sense. For a NYC-Miami, you could have stops in Philadelphia, DC/Baltimore, Richmond, Raleigh/Durham, Charleston, Savannah, Jacksonville, Orlando. It would really depend on the route. Like a NYC-Portland OR or Seattle, you can make some pretty good stops from NYC to Chicago, but once you get past Chicago, there probably is any really good population centers for stops there between Chicago and Portland/Seattle. So in some areas, those distances can be justified, but for sure we have some that can't be easily justified.
The thing about NYC-Miami is that north of DC the population is along the coast but south of it the population is inland. A route via Charlotte and Atlanta probably pencils out better than one via Charleston and Savannah.
Yea it does. If your gonna make a stop in North Carolina/South Carolina, Charlotte would be a good spot because it would have some good access to then change transportation and go to Charleston or Raleigh or Greensboro. Didn't consider Atlanta though since that would be a lease direct route to Miami. You have to go back East to hit something like Jacksonville or Orlando. But the trade off is, Atlanta is probably a more wanted destination than Savannah. Or pehaps something like Augusta where you don't have to go as far West, but your still not too terribly far from Atlanta.
Sadly our 1000 mile trips currently take ~24 hours rather than the 5-6 that it could. Multiple factors for that: slow trains; long stops; cargo rail gets priority over passenger rail.
Even the fastest trains Amtrak offers ("Acela") are zoned - or permitted, not sure what the right term is here - up to 150 MPH, and only on specific portions of the route.
The sense is that the Northeast corridor has too many curves and roadbed issues to be able to go faster.
There would have to be constructed a new corridor, not in the same path as existing railroad rights of way, for not a small amount of money, and going through expensive real estate.
The political will for that is not in existence, so far.
And the fact is that while taking a train the full length of the Northeast Corridor takes too long to be practical most of the time, NYC to points north and NYC to points south works pretty well (i.e. is competitive with flying) with existing trains.
Easy to complain on the internet. Hard to change a hard left into a sweeping arc in the middle of New Haven.
Even ignoring the money, if you try and do a project like that you are going to get slapped in the face by all the same "cutting apart muh neighborhood" rhetoric that gets used against highways. Grade separation and "just paying those people to go away" are both expensive enough to be non-starters.
Highways and rail create different kinds of disruption in neighborhoods. Highways constantly have traffic, creating noise and pollution all the time. Railroads are mostly quiet, with loud traffic in short bursts.
Passenger railroads are narrower than urban highways. The US-101 freeway cuts through Echo Park and Westlake in Los Angeles, taking up as much as 330 feet of width, counting on/off ramps. California HSR has trench sections specced as narrow as 72 feet[1], and most of its urban rights-of-way are under 100 feet wide.
Walking next to the 101 in Echo Park you can see how it so starkly divides what was once a single connected neighborhood. The light rail lines (about ~40-50 ft to cross) in other neighborhoods don't give that impression.
I have no love for highway pits but to play if off like an HSR pit is some quaint little light rail is simply farcical.
You're being dishonest or ignorant. The fact that you compare max-width of one to min-width of the other rules out one option. A pit is a pit. You're limited to crossing at a few specific points no matter how narrow it is and traveling to those points accounts for the bulk of the distance covered. The physical width only matters if you're evaluating the neighborhood for visual appeal and not actual livability. "Quiet most of the time" doesn't really count for much because people acclimate to the background noise levels and that one train per hour is just as jarring as that one motorcycle with the insane exhaust per hour. At least with subways and airports it's every couple minutes so you get more used to it.
High speed rail is like having a jet plane go by,
given the intent to run at,
say 150 to 200 miles per hour,
and has its own troublesome neighbor issues.
It is 32 hours if driving 130-150 kph on the freeway (80-90 mph) without stopping for food, bathrooms, gas, or sleep. It's probably a few hundred hours with the train since you will have to go a few hundred or a few thousand kilometers north first.
Interestingly, there is a long train line from Louisiana to Los Angeles called the Sunset Limited. Up until Hurricane Katrina in 2005 it ran between Orlando Florida and Los Angeles,
On Amtrak, that's a 102 hour trip that takes you through Chicago and DC. Not an exaggeration. Given usual delays, that 102h is wildly optimistic. Coach seats: $387.
We're not talking about doing NYC - SF by train, but there are a lot of places where it makes sense.
As I used to live in the Bay Area, it really surprised me that there was no bullet train between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Yes, apparently it's planned but it boggles my mind that they waited so much before building it.
Americans don't realize how much nicer train is compared to plane for medium distances (up to 500 miles). Station being in the middle of the city, get in the train 10 minutes before departure without check-in or security, no waiting 15 minutes on the tarmac before disembarking... I guarantee you the door-to-door time is going to be lower.
Also train is more confortable, seats are wider, you can use phones/electronics for the full duration of the trip...
> Yes, apparently it's planned but it boggles my mind that they waited so much before building it.
Basically because there are only 2-3 places you can practically cross the mountains surrounding LA (Tehachapi Tejon, and the coast), and 3-4 places you can do the same for the SFBA. All of them are already occupied by existing rail or roads.
Those mountain crossings cost more that the rest of the system combined.
> get in the train 10 minutes before departure without check-in or security, no waiting 15 minutes on the tarmac before disembarking... I guarantee you the door-to-door time is going to be lower.
I wish, but you're wrong and it's not even close. (SFO, OAK or SJC) to (LAX, BUR, LGB or ONT) is about 45 minutes gate to gate. Add 5 minutes for security[], 25 minutes boarding, 15 minutes deplaning and you're at 1h30 curb to curb (vs. the almost 3 hours station to station that CAHSR claims* they will provide when finished).
The plane is faster even accounting for travel time to and from the station or airport. The contrast is especially stark if your destination is not downtown LA.
[*] TSA with PreCheck has gotten really fast in the past couple years. They no longer scan your boarding pass (just your ID + a database of the day's travelers). You don't need to unpack your bag, remove your shoes, nor remove your jacket. On a dozen trips in the past year, security has never taken me more than 5 minutes. It takes almost as long to walk through the maze of ropes forming the queue as the actual security procedure itself.
The biggest break for trains in the last 20 years hasn't been Maglevs or Japan's bullet. Matter of fact it has been OBL fixation on attacking America in a spectacular and televised fashion.
The lack of security abord trains is shocking honestly. Trains are special, there is something about them which calms people even the most evil, because ill intentioned people like terrorists and mentally deranged domestic shooters just ignore them.
I don't know why this is down-voted so, but to me also outside the US it seems correct? You bill for travel between stations, there'd be a lot more track & travel between stations in the US, on average, if it were as ubiquitous.
Intranational flight is a lot more common there. I imagine the economics of it are better, lower ticket price, and in many cases probably quicker too, even including airport BS.
>>Intranational flight is a lot more common there. I imagine the economics of it are better, lower ticket price, and in many cases probably quicker too, even including airport BS.
That is the problem in my opinion - I prefer sitting on a train, to sitting on a plane, but for most routes I need to travel (within the US) it takes longer to get there and is more expensive than flying - why would anyone want to pay more and waste more time? You either need to be faster or cheaper if you want my business.
The more rail improves the more I'm tempted to take it, with flying you have the additional time cost of just dealing with the airports, turn up an hour early, then get put in the metal tube where they won't serve you drink till they're up in the air, and you can't bring your own.
A train may take longer sometimes, but I find the whole thing much less stressful, you're not strapped to the seat, you have leg room, even a table, power sockets, bring your own food and drink, and the prices are competitive.
It still takes longer than I'd like to get from Switzerland to the UK, and that's mostly due to a lengthy change in Paris.
I think in France, and prob other countries too, their moving to ban domestic flights that can be done on rail instead
It's hard to overstate how different the European rail experience is from the American experience. SF<->LA is a 50m, $50 flight. It's approx. 9h and $400 by rail. In practice, the last time I attempted that route it took 15h because the train had issues halfway and none of the assigned seats had power or legroom.
Even the Seattle to Portland route, probably the best on the west coast, has issues. A flight takes about 50 mins and can be had for about $60. Alaska Airlines runs flights at least once an hour all day long. From 6am until midnight.
The train takes 3.5 hours (often closer to 4 and I've had it take more than 5 just because of freight priority). The train makes 4 trips a day (one being a longer route that is usually delayed) and the timing means that any business trip will probably require an overnight stay. The train is only $27 though because both states (especially WA) heavily subsidize the route.
In the end, it really comes down to where in the metro areas your trip begins and ends as to which works out best. For us, the train station saves about an hour of ground transport time compared to the airports and we can arrive much closer to departure, so the train works best. For plenty of others, the airport will be faster and probably easier logistically.
I don't really have a preference, but having done my first couple flights in close to 20 years in the past 3 months, I was struck by how much has changed in that time.
PreCheck and Global Entry weren't around when we went to Bermuda in August 2001. It was a trip notable not only for its proximity to 9/11 - by chance, my bag was searched either before we left L.F Wade in St. George's or on arrival back in Newark, but this happened without my knowledge and I only found out about it because customs had repacked it included a note informing me of this fact inside. - and also because a trip to camp the previous week was the start of an ear infection which burst my ear drum on the plane going down.
Fun times.
However, I quite like the idea of passport control on a train happening before you embark on the departing leg of a trip. With those formalities out of the way, just collect your bags at the destination and you're free to go.
I don't know if the FAA or TSA would consider this too burdensome to implement, but it's an idea.
They've been trying to implement passport control before boarding the train between NYC and Montreal for a while, but nothing seems to have come of it. It was an Obama-era priority.
I haven't taken that train in many years, but they basically stop the train at the border and immigration agents board and check everyone's passport. It's scheduled to take 2 hours. Really stupid. It's a 45 minute flight, and you go through US immigration in Canada before boarding the flight.
That's crazy. Perhaps a good comparison is the channel tunnel, e.g. going from London to Paris you go through security similar (a bit less onerous) to that at an airport before boarding.
That was the case even with the UK in the EU (maybe it's not any less onerous than an airport now actually, idk) but otherwise intra-EU over land is not an issue, almost necessarily. (But then, you might think that about Canada/US.)
There are some disadvantages, such as not being able to pickup anymore passengers until crossing the border. Probably a non-issue with Vancouver close to the border.
What about that piece of the US that's isolated from the rest, quite close to Vancouver I think, Fort something attached to the South of BC, accessible only through it. Do you have to go through something like that twice, or can you go between it and the main body of the US more easily (without stops perhaps)?
Or (facepalm, more obviously) Alaska for that matter?
A school bus runs from there to mainland USA and I suspect there’s an informal agreement to drive without stopping through Canada so they don’t have to bother too excessively with clearances.
> However, I quite like the idea of passport control on a train happening before you embark on the departing leg of a trip. With those formalities out of the way, just collect your bags at the destination and you're free to go.
It's better than that. Space on board is at less of a premium so train carriages can be made with plenty of room for luggage alongside passengers. No need to check baggage.
Nobody's asking for an express train between Jackson and Billings. When you exclude the Mountain States and Alaska, the US has about the same population density as Western Europe.
There's no good reason for us to have zero public transit options between Atlanta and Savannah, Madison and Milwaukee, Columbus and Cincinatti, Denver and Colorado Springs, or Mobile and New Orleans.
Quick sanity check here, because I've seen this claim and never bothered to check.
Let's say Western Europe = Germany, Austria, Italy, and everything west of them, i. e. Benelux, France, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Great Britain (= UK - Northern Ireland). (I'm including the UK and excluding Ireland because there are rail connecctions from Britain to the mainland but not from Ireland to Britain. I'm excluding Denmark because isn't that really Scandinavia?)
Total population: Germany = 84m, France = 68m, Britain = 66m, Italy = 59m, Spain = 47m, Netherlands = 18m, Belgium = 12m, Portugal = 10m, Austria = 9m, Switzerland = 9m, Luxembourg = 1m. Total is 383m.
Total area, in km^2: Germany = 358k, France = 551k, Britain = 228k, Italy = 301k, Spain = 499k, Netherlands = 41k, Belgium = 31k, Portugal = 88k, Austria = 84k, Switzerland = 41k, Luxembourg = 3k. Total is 2225k.
So the population density of western Europe is about 172/km^2 or 445/mi^2.
The only states this dense are DC, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maryland, Delaware; New York and Florida are just under the cutoff.
If I've done the math right, DC + NJ + RI + MA + CT + MD + DE + NY + PA + OH (74m people/429k km^2) is the largest contiguous bunch of states which is over 172 people/km^2.
If we take the east to be everything east of the Mississippi, I get 190m people in 2.301m km^2, or 82 people/km^2. If we add in CA + OR + WA that actually drags down the density a bit.
So the densely populated bits of the Northeast/mid-Atlantic are as densely populated as Western Europe. But the eastern US as a whole isn't.
I agree that those pairs of cities you mentioned should have better connections between them though.
>There's no good reason for us to have zero public transit options between Atlanta and Savannah, Madison and Milwaukee, Columbus and Cincinatti, Denver and Colorado Springs, or Mobile and New Orleans.
Does regular bus service not count? Sure they're not publicly owned but does that result in any meaningful differences to the users?
Most of the US is nowhere close to as densely populated as Western Europe, even excluding Alaska and the mountain states. You can't just look at the land area and population and make a naive calculation of density.
Western Europe's population density gradient is much sharper than most of the US. Only the coastal corridor of the Northeast US really comes close. The gradient of the populations is important because it tells you how many people are within a usable range of the train stations.
Even if you've got a high speed line between Madison and Milwaukee what in the hell are you going to do once you step off the train? Neither city has impressive public transit and both are very spread out. A high speed link might save a boring drive between those cities but that savings would get eaten up by the intra-city travel.
One reason is that, once you arrive, options for public transport within the destination city in the US are limited. So you need a car once you get to your destination anyhow. What do you do when you step off the train in Atlanta or Savannah?
I just spent 7 weeks traveling around Europe by train. I would not have considered that approach without the extensive local public transportation systems. Atlanta is not remotely in the same league as Berlin in terms of public transit.
I’ve never been to the state of Georgia, but I was under the impression that both Atlanta and Savannah had pretty good public transit systems. Atlanta has a metro system (MARTA) which is the eight largest in the USA by ridership. And Savannah has an extensive bus network, and a walkable downtown area where transit is actually free to ride.
I agree that we should let density and demand drive construction of HSR.
That being said, there are plenty of plausible HSR routes in the US. We're a very sparsely populated country in our middle, but there's effectively a "string" of large cities right through our middle: NYC - Pittsburgh - Columbus - {Cincinnati, Indianapolis} - {Louisville, St. Louis} - Kansas City - Oklahoma City - Albuquerque - {Phoenix, Tucson} - Los Angeles.
All of the legs there should under 400 miles, and most should be under 200. There's also plenty of room for adjustment: Louisville - Nashville - Memphis - Dallas and then onward south, for example.
> the cost to build a HSR route to go between population centers is super high
The cost is high, but more painfully, the cost per-mile is higher than for the same distance of railroad in Europe or East Asia. That's not a result of pure geography.
Also, while the cost is high, it's not actually that large in comparison to the overall DoT budget, which is projected at $142B for FY2023. You could build a lot of train for that. Political will is a much more important factor. We just dropped $40B on the Current War without blinking.
Even so, this misses another key step: intercity rail in Europe usually connects seamlessly to metro rail, which is what makes it so easy and nice to use. But the cities themselves in the United States do not usually have rail systems to connect to. That's why the best near-term rail corridor IMHO is NY-Buffalo (subway) - Youngstown (possible Pittsburgh metro extension) - Cleveland (subway) - Toledo (possible Detroit metro extension) - Chicago, connecting to six subway systems.
Toledo directly to Chicago doesn't make a lot of sense. Most of the track would go through Indiana, which is at best indifferent to Amtrak.
Consider instead putting Detroit in between the two. The Chicago-Detroit route already operates at 110 mph, Amtrak and the Michigan Dept of Transportation already own the majority of the track and give routing priority to passenger trains. Amtrak and VIA are already talking about a Chicago-Toronto train that doesn't require passengers to disembark for immigration/customs, and their systems are already connected via a rail tunnel under the Detroit River.
Oh, yeah, that sounds pretty good. My main point is that you want to connect the long train to short trains.
In theory, if Raleigh and Richmond (both very "blue" cities and maybe open to it) built LRT systems, you could get another route in DC-Richmond-Raleigh-Charlotte-Atlanta, where the other three have existing intracity rail.
> the cost per-mile is higher than for the same distance of railroad in Europe
how does this make any sence, we have to deal with tonneling under or demolishing existing densely populated real estate along the route, literal mountains in the way, etc.
HS2 in UK caused an outrage, someone's farm was cut in half, houses had to be demolished, etc
I see no mention of 737’s and A320’s here or in most posts. Compare the price per mile with those of alternatives. The U.S. doesn’t even resemble Europe.
The Midwest cluster of cities which include Chicago, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, St Louis, Columbus, and Detroit, have an extremely similar density and distance distribution compared to France, where high speed rail is incredibly successful. We could have successful high speed rail nearly everywhere in the US with a possible exception of the rocky mountain regions. I wish this density trope would die.
The real reason we don't have high speed rail is that right of way acquisition is ridiculously costly unless government is involved, and we don't trust our government to do it right. Probably justified, if urban rail costs are indicative.
You'd only want to build regional HSR systems that would connect cities that get a lot of traffic and flights between them and are under 300 miles / 500 km apart. So, the northeast corridor, connect California major cities, connect Portland to Seattle, connect Dallas/Austin/Houston/San Antonio.
In Canada, half the population lives near a nearly straight line from Quebec City to Windsor; you could put a high speed rail line down the middle of that.
It’s almost forgotten how much resentment Americans had to the private railroads. They would buy land along the tracks, refuse to make a stop in your town, and start a new town. There was a phrase, ‘railroaded’ to describe being a victim of this power imbalance.
As such, people saw the roads as belonging to everyone but railroads being to the benefit of a few.
Yeah partly because the roads were literally paid for by the state, specially the highways, and truck and bus companies don't have to pay for maintenance.
To go against the grain somewhat, I think distance is an overrated factor in regard to its impact in preventing US passenger rail adoption.
I think the most overlooked factor is poor intra-city transit and lack of mixed use density in our city cores.
I recently traveled to Germany on business, a few nights in Berlin then took the ICE inter-city train to Munich.
The ICE train dropped me off at the main station in Munich—my hotel was 7.3 miles driving from the main station. I was able to jump on the u-bahn and with a quick transfer at Odeonsplatz get to my hotel in half-an-hour including a 10 minute walk from the train station.
Door to door from Berlin to the hotel in Munich was 05:00 hours. If one were to drive, maps says 361mi/580km traveled if driving direct with a drive time of 05:30.
For comparisons sake, let's take a hypothetical trip from Dallas Union Station to Apple's engineering headquarters in Austin, TX 14.7mi/24.6km from the Austin train station.
According to Apple Maps, taking public transit would take 09:00 hours. Driving direct from Dallas Union Station to Apple HQ in Austin is 187mi/300km in total with a drive time of 03:00.
I've found many Newyorkers will respond to any negative comparison of the NYC subways to other cities with a retort of "but we have 24/7 service and they don't".
I kind of feel that 24/7 service is actually one factor in why the NYC subways have so many problems - both in terms of logistics and aesthetics.
My daughter, visiting home from college this weekend, took Amtrak from Richmond, VA yesterday. She's taking the train back Monday. Without delay, the train takes about 4 hours. Driving takes about 3 hours. Add an extra 15 minutes on each side for getting to/from the station, so 4:30 hours vs 3 hours. Distance is 150 miles (241 km).
Cost of the train is $42 (coach) each way. Cost of gasoline would be ~ $24 each way.
Her train yesterday departed about 30 minutes late and arrived an hour late. Supposedly it may have been traveling slower due to the heat wave.
That's just our national train system. Many municipalities have their own patchwork of train networks. Some off the top of my head: BART, LIRR, MTA, MBTA T, Metro (D.C., Atlanta), L (Chicago), Metrorail (Miami).
What really matter, obviously, is population density. And population density would justify passenger railways on the coasts and in more than half of the US:
Additionally, it's also based on the flawed assumption that transportation should adapt to the locations of where people live rather than the other way around.
Not if you already own the car. Then the cost of the car and insurance are sunk costs that do not count. Sure there is a little wear and tear, but that adds just a couple bucks.
If you buy a car/rent for that trip alone, then the cost of driving is far higher. However for most Americans the cost of a car is a sunk cost that cannot be counted. If you live someplace where it is possible to live without a car, then you can make that argument, but most of us do not.
The resale value of the car, insurance (even if you don’t do pay per mile, insurance quotes are generally going to have some basis in miles driven per year), and maintenance are all directly correlated with miles driven. So, while these are often treated as sunk costs, that is due to improper accounting.
So, to reiterate, the cost of driving is much more than the cost of gas.
Age of a car is the largest factor of value, not miles. Used to be cars wore out in 70,000 miles, but the 1970s are long gone. Yes miles lower the value of a car a bit, but not much.
I do a similar travel distance (between 213km - 230km by car on the highway) monthly minimum between Amsterdam - Brussels taking the inter-regional train (NS) (understand the "slow") : 2h45 for around 25-29 EUR each way if booked a few days in advance. The fastest one with the Thalys is 1h55 for around 90EUR. Driving take around the same time than the slowest way ~2h30.
The Amtrak trains are slow? I mean even adjusting for the potential 40 to 10km difference and the fact that the NS does between 8 to 10 stop depending where you want to go out in Brussels or Amsterdam, 4h for a 241km trip is slow.
It is a bit cheating as if you want to do Brussels - Arlon, a 190-ish km trip inside Belgium, it will take you 2h45. And if you want to more or less cross Belgium from North to South (Oostende to Arlon), 310-ish km trip will take you around 4h15 by train and between 3 to 4h by car due to the fact that you will take the Brussels ring road. So small country, yep. Still 4h for 241km is slow.
I thought that was so high, so I ran the numbers using some median and average values and I got pretty close.
The average vehicle costs $40k, is owned for 11 years, gets driven 13k miles per year, burns 25 mpg, gas costs $3/gal, insurance is $1500 per year, and the vehicle needs $900 per year in maintenance and repairs.
A lot of people spend far less than this (my car cost me $0.384/mile so far), and some spend far more, but it's not a bad approximation.
I used to think this too, now I live here the American system actually works pretty well. Railways are actually very busy with freight, which keeps it off the roads and freight doesn't mind pauses and running overnight. Lots of rural connections are much easier to drive. Even between cities its easier because for train connections you'd have to get to the station (usually central) where if you drive you can go directly where you want. As a result people are much more mobile and can live in a wider area in USA, where in Europe to commute to the office you really have to live near a train station.
This does make the fundamental assumption that train travel and driving are equal from a users perspective.
Train travel has the advantage of not needing to do the driving. You can spend that travel time doing something productive, rather than staring at tarmac. Additionally train travel is potentially more accessible (assuming proper investment in infrastructure). The obvious example being that blind people are never going drive anywhere, regardless of how “mobile” it makes them.
While your point about being close to train stations has some validity. For the vast majority of European urban, and sub-urban areas, a fast train connection is only 20-30mins away via local public transport. So living “close” in terms of time, doesn’t require you to be physically close to the train station.
Finally high-speed rail, is really fast. Up to 200mph fast, well over double what’s realistically safe in a private car. So while the train might not be direct, it’s going that much faster, you can still get to your destination quicker than a car.
To provide some context, many Amtrak lines are limited to 80mph, and only a small number can achieve Amtraks top speeds of 150mph. That’s ignoring the frequent delays due to track congestion and freight priority, which results in even slower average speeds. It’s not a surprise that trains look unappealing to many Americans, when the average US passenger train can only just keep up with a passenger car.
You're right of course, I've been stuck on the M1 on a Sunday night and watch a train doing 100 mph blast past. There are good and bad parts on either side. Yes driving means you dont need to concentrate, but you're stuck on someone else's timetable, you can't play your own music or stop off at interesting points along the way.
But that means the modern USA misses out on the inherent benefits of density. This is a weird counter rational behavior— it is in everyone’s perceived best interest to live in big separate homes, but the collective social economic benefit of living together is evident. Also evident is how sprawl sucks vitality from culture.
> Why anyone lives in apartments by choice is beyond me. The noise is absurd.
I am sorry but you westerners have no clue how to make decent apartments. London is full of 'luxury' highrises with basic design mistakes and complete failures.
In czech republic they would never build drywall separation between apartments, its always brick or concrete with real noise insulation.
The staircase is never attached to the walls of the unit, so you don't hear every step of people walking around
Premium towers here are built with zero green space. Buildings of 100's of units where every unit has their own boiler are a complete waste
Windows get built in such a way that it's impossible to clean them or install shades, etc.
Plenty of condos in the US (and I'm guessing London) use concrete walls between units. This isn't something magic that only the Czech Republic understands.
But concrete is pretty unfriendly to the environment and has a low expected lifespan. Much of the US is covered in trees, so an average apartment is primarily constructed from wood. Condos and apartments are generally constructed to different standards, due to the former being intended as a purchase, and the latter as a rental.
> But concrete is pretty unfriendly to the environment and has a low expected lifespan
reinforced concrete has low expected lifespan in exposed conditions because moisture causes rust causes degradation. The concrete used for division between units, as being discussed here, is unreinforced. As long as there's no sulfate-containing minerals in the aggregate (and it's protected from moisture), an unreinforced concrete block wall will last indefinitely.
Typical dividers in apartment buildings in the west are either concrete as I just described, or they are made with "steel studs" (C-channel with gypsum board). The latter is awful for noise isolation, while the former is okay (and better if some additional considerations are taken).
Apartment buildings in my (north american) experience are built to the same standards as condos. The only time wood would be used in either is in a low rise (<4 storey) construction, which tend to not have any of the density benefits that you want from multi-unit construction, and all of the possible downsides.
I'm more of a 6-8 storey with 90% lot coverage kind of person. 4 storey and less in north american jurisdictions fall under different building code regulations, and typically different municipal zoning regs. They tend to have lower lot coverage (leading to less density), more surface parking (leading to less walkability), lower construction quality (leading to worse complaints from noisy neighbours etc), lower building lifespan.
What noise? I've been living in an apartment for three and a half years and the noise is really not a big deal. The primary issue is being quite close to a busy-ish street, which can be annoying with the windows open. With the windows closed, it's basically a non-issue. And when I do hear my neighbours, it's heavily muffled and just turning on the TV is enough to drown it out.
Yes, older buildings can have terrible sound insulation, but modern apartments are well-built and you won't hear a thing (at least in Germany, and in my experience).
You are assuming you only have 2 choices, single-family home or apartment. That's a very American perspective because most of America only allows those two but in a proper city you have townhomes, duplexes, casitas, bungalows and many more options that aren't just apartments. However, most of American is zoned exclusively for single-family homes and not mixed-use so like the parent comment said, you don't get benefits of proper density which includes many home types.
I was going to say you're wrong because here in the NE there are loads of townhouses, duplexes and bungalows, but you're right - in the US single family homes and apartments dominate. https://www.census.gov/construction/chars/highlights.html
I love living in a walkable suburban neighborhood with a supermarket and home store within easy (sub-5 minute) driving distance. Quiet, spacious, ultra convenient. More so than living in the city, because I can carry my purchases in my car all the way into my house.
YMMV. Live where you want. There is no objectively better answer, just preference.
I walk <2 minutes to a grocery and home store.. I can carry my purchases from the store to my house, about as far away as a parked car. But this is ultra convenient, not all city living is that easy!
I get that, I live with children in an apartment in a city. However most people dont want that, the trend to WFH means people are moving to smaller, quieter locations away from other people.
Is that driven by preference or cost? In my own case, I moved to a smaller town (mostly) because it's a lot cheaper. Most of the denser areas I would prefer to live would be significantly more expensive than rural Appalachia.
Unless you are talking about dumb mass freight, freight does actually mind just staying around. Its just that all those things have been taken of the railroad.
> As a result people are much more mobile and can live in a wider area in USA
If they have money for a car.
> where in Europe to commute to the office you really have to live near a train station
That's nonsense. There are these things called bicycles and also these things called trams and buses.
> a pretty hostile terrain - Italy has lots of mountains, hills, rivers
So does U.S., a lot more in fact. The length of Italy north to south is 1,320km, the distance from San Francisco to Chicago is 3,220Km and that's only 2/3rds of the east-west distance of the continental U.S. And there are two major mountain ranges to cross on that trip, and huge stretches with almost no population. (How many deserts to cross does Italy have?)
Trains need crews, the crews need to work in shifts, the crews need to be available along the way, even in Nowhere, Nevada. That causes delays and restricts schedules.
Getting to desert areas to maintain the rails takes time and resources. We're talking about large swaths of deserts and desolate land with absolutely no cities or towns for double-triple digits of miles.
I'm not convinced high speed rail would ever work in the US due to how entrenched the car culture is, regardless of the terrain.
In Europe with we have spoke-and-hub railways - want to get into London? There's almost certainly a local station near you in the suburbs. Then jump on the Eurostar to Paris. Get to Paris, and then get a local line back out to wherever you want to go.
Right now, it would have to be airport like terminals, and a multi-decade (if not century long) plan to connect the city centres.
In the US, drive to the new high speed mainline station outside the city, where there would have to be as much parking as an airport, and then get the high speed line to the destination, and then... hire a car?
Building a mainline station in many US city centres for high speed lines isn't going to work right now. There are too few local lines going in, and nowhere to build super-sized car parks.
I did sort of contradict myself there and say never and multi-decade plan.
Problems the US has:
* Lack of spoke and hub railways.
* Cars.
* Cost-per-mile, which if I understand correctly is a political and a union-thing.
* And just politics by itself.
It's not dissimilar in the UK, but somehow we muddle through it. I don't believe that "cheap" maglev will ever help the US, it's been around for decades, and the longest highspeed line built by the Chinese is 19 miles at a cost of "only" $1.3 bn (I'll leave it up to the reader about how realistic that construction cost would be in the West).
The US will still have the same problem huge construction costs, political lobbying from the airlines, no hub and spoke railways, a vast airport style set of car parking around any terminals that are built.
The West now suffers from pointless adversarial politics where the opposition votes the opposite to the government simply "because", and for no rational reason other than "it's the other party". Even once you get past that hurdle, it's how "cheap" is the cheapest bidder. Labour/labor laws and so on.
I would genuinely love to see the US lead the world with high speed rail, but I just can't see it.
China is backing off their high speed maglev trains. While it is possible to make maglev go that fast, wind resistance means it is far to costly. A large airplane (because it runs at 30,000 feet) is not only faster, it uses less energy.
If vacuum trains ever happen, then things change. However those are very expensive to build, and have safety issues. We can solve the engineering problems with safety, but the expense doesn't seem possible)
In the current planed and under construction high speed rail in the USA by far most large city stations are planned to go in (or near) the city center. Texas Central (planned) is only planning on building 2 big city stations which the go to the outskirts of Houston and Dallas respectively.
Meanwhile California High Speed Rail (under construction) is planning to build stations in downtown San Francisco (and anther close to the city center, and a third by the Airport in Millbrae), close to downtown San José, downtown Fresno, close to downtown Bakerfield and downtown Los Angeles. Palmdale is the only city over 100,000 which gets a station in the city outskirts in California, and Burbank gets one by the airport.
I’m guessing California High Speed Rail did the work and came to the opposite conclusion of yours, that it does—in fact—work to build mainline stations in many US city centers.
Travel between countries in Europe is improving every year too. Next week I'll be traveling from Bordeaux to Berlin (over 1,600km) - it's faster than the car (16 hours by car vs 12 hours by train), and cheaper than flying, in the summer at least (150 euro by train, vs 300 euro by plane - booking 6 weeks before).
That will improve next year too with the direct Paris Berlin train that should only take 7 hours.
And that's why they prefer a mode of transport that requires you to drive an hour outside the city in traffic, arrive at least an hour before your flight so you can go through the indignity of airport security, take an hour long flight, and then wait for bags and then drive an hour back into your destination city in traffic?
Total time 4 hrs.
Or they prefer driving through traffic from one city to the other for 4.5 hrs where they have to have complete concentration so they literally don't die and kill a bunch of other people?
As opposed to a 4.5 hr train ride where they have lots of seating space, an extremely comfortable ride with great views where they can basically just sleep through the trip and/or work comfortably on their laptops with great wifi?
These are not hypotheticals. These are literally your options if you were to travel from NYC to Boston.
All the modes of transport take about 4-5 hrs. Train is significantly better in almost every way. The only problem is that Amtrak subsidizes the rest of its highly unprofitable network which means they price gouge the NorthEast corridor and under invest in it, making it more expensive, and not as good as it should be.
Even with a sub par train service relative to European and Asian counterparts, train is easily the best option on this route.
That does assume you live conveniently to the train station in Boston or the suburban station to the south. I do generally take the train to NYC but mostly because I hate driving into NYC so much. I have to drive an hour in the wrong direction to get to Route 128 so the time tradeoff actually isn't great.
Trains in the US are widely prevalent! It's just that they're used for freight rather than passenger travel. The main driver behind this is the population density of the USA, cities are spaced too far apart to make passenger travel by train viable. Not coincidentally, the only area that does have significant passenger rail networks, the DC - Boston corridor, has population density similar to Western Europe.
For long hauls, we use our RRs to move freight and airlines to move people. By traveling at 600mph instead of 60mph (the speed of most European train travel - intercity high speed rail is rare and expensive) I can get to anyplace in the continental US in under 5 hours from my home in Austin.
Intercity trains often go much faster than 60mph. More like an average of 90mph with a speed limit 125mph on the main lines in UK. Thats not even the HS1 (and eventually HS2), that's on our old AF Victorian rail roads.
The argument for trains is often more about taking out the need to drive everywhere than the need to fly from coast to coast though, as a train is never going to beat that.
As an American, it doesn't really boggle my mind at all. We have a very car-centric culture. Just look at how we treat cyclists/cycling infrastructure, especially in cities. It's night and day compared to most European cities.
To be fair though, the continental US is almost double the size of Europe and Amtrak is actually alright in the areas that it serves (although my experience with trains in Switzerland/Italy was definitely much better).
Trains "work" in Europe because many European cities are easily walkable. The trains (and other public transportation) comes every 10-15 minutes, so you can leave and arrive when you want to.
Now, consider the convenience of traveling by car: You can leave and arrive when you want to. For a longer journey, you don't need to deal with transferring between trains/busses/whatever, which means that you can keep your luggage in your car until your destination. Chances are, you can park your car at your destination or very close.
As far as sprawl: In some places, building codes require more land. Other times, banks won't lend to build unless the land is worth a certain percentage of the building. For example, when I built my house, the bank wanted the land to be worth about 25% of the value of the house; and the town required that it was so many feet away from the road. That forced my neighborhood to have large, open lawns. (And as much as I love my lawn, I'd be just as happy with a postage stamp yard too.)
There's also the rumor that the US was deliberately built to sprawl after WWII as a way to survive a nuclear attack. I don't know if that's true or a rumor, though.
I live near Boston in the US. In five hours, you can get as far north as Portland Maine (there's no passenger rail service north of there), and as far south as Philadelphia, and as far west as Albany.
In New York, you can probably do better, but if you leave the Northeast Corridor (the stretch between Boston and Washington, DC, along the coast) destinations to other major cities like Montreal will take around nine hours (if they ever restart that service post-pandemic), and even the fastest train to Chicago takes around 20 hours. NYC to Los Angeles? at least 70 hours.
How far can you get to by train from Paris in 70 hours?
> How far can you get to by train from Paris in 70 hours?
NYC->LA is about the same as Paris->Moscow and that takes nearly 3 days as well. Paris Instanbul is similar distance which is a little quicker but still over 2 days.
I'm visiting Italy in a month and have multiple tickets booked on Italo's Club Executive class. The seats look sweet and the price was surprisingly affordable. Looking forward to see how good it is.
Italy is much smaller than the US. It’s about the equivalent size of New Mexico - which has 1/30th the population (2M).
Public transit isn’t bad - I told on an Amtrak from LA to SD yesterday which was quite nice.
But, I also rode on the LA metro which was filed with mobs of mentally ill marauders.
My experience to Rome (albeit a bit over a decade ago) was similar. That’s an off putting response that likely plays a big role in sinking demand for public transit - esp. as compared to a car.
Of course, America was also designed for the auto - we’re newer, and gas was cheap during the highway construction heyday.
There are plenty of higher density areas within the US though, where trains would be a good option. Maybe Cyanide Springs, Oklahoma to Blandsville, North Dakota doesn't make sense for trains, but you could do bits of the PNW, California and the east coast with higher quality rail pretty successfully.
I think any answer to this has to involve two staples of American culture, cars and racism.
The prevalence of both has been a big detriment to rail initiatives. For whatever reason people have associated a nearby train station with crime and opening up the neighborhood to the "wrong people".
And the incredibly cheap and ubiquitous car culture (especially in the post-war period) provided the alternative. That of course interacts with the dramatic lack of density for new post-war suburban neighborhoods as well, which is a function of both issues mentioned (cars and racism) as well as the fact that the US does indeed (or did) have a whole lot of extra space compared to Europe.
I used to walk past a bus station to lunch most weekdays. Nearly every single day I witnessed an assault at the bus station. Mass transit hubs do bring crime. Why minimize that?
They just… don’t, elsewhere. That’s not a normal state of affairs. Something is horribly wrong with how you’re doing something - either with the stations, or with society - if that’s the case.
Assaults on mass transit in the US aren't what I'd call a normal state of affairs. I haven't seen it yet in person, though clearly it happens. Petty theft is a good bit more common, though like 99% of the time I just see people doing their thing and ignoring everyone else on the bus/train/whatever.
I read comments on HN and kind of wonder if this is why people believe all these terrible things about the US. Never been here, and only have comments online to judge by. Explains a lot.
I never realised we had Stalinists over here - thats a line of seasoning he would endorse - gather up all the poor and the undesirables, send them off to a gulag and the rest of us don't have to be bothered by them.
Actually Stalin doesn't fit, it's more of a victorian england or feudalist line of thinking
