As i understand things at a fairly high level, and particularly w/r/t the northeast corridor, high speed rail in the US has two interlinked technical facts about it that are hard to get over even if we can wave a magic policy wand and make governmental buy-in work several orders of magnitude better:
- It's not that "American rail construction is just bad. However, this is not because rail is bad; it’s because the United States is bad.". It's that american rail construction in the northeast is OLD, and we're hosed by the first adopter paradox.
- from this, it directly follows that upgrading the rail for high speed use is HARD, because the issue is at least in part down to rail line geometry. AIUI, a fundamental reason you can't go 95mph between Boston and New York is that the railroad tracks have curves in them whose radii have a maximum speed without risk of derailment that's quite low, and to resolve this problem you'd have to eminent domain swathes of, say, New Haven. There are other issues too, like local/freight/... sharing the same lines, but that's kind of saying the same thing twice: construction through densely populated Northeast Corridor cities is so impractical that it's hard to see how it could ever happen or be thought of as a particularly good thing if it did.
This is exactly right. It's not as simple as just upgrading tracks for high speed. There's only so far you can go around certain turns. There are also likely limits based on how separated the track is from the surroundings. Going 50mph has less of a risk profile than going 200mph. High speed rail is generally elevated and/or fenced off to avoid animals, peoples and objects that would otherwise be deadly.
The UK has this problem with old rail too.
European rail is quite new, probably thanks in part to the "benefit" of Europe being leveled in the last century. China and Japan have new rail too.
Another difference: populations in Europe, China and Japan are more concentrated. Just look at how many airports there are in the US vs Europe. France, a country of 60M+, has a mere handful of airports. So it's easier to serve more people with less line.
Lastly, construction is (now) super expensive in the US.
Sad as it is, I just don't see long-distance rail as being economically viable in the US.
Population clustering actually follows from the way people travel. It's a virtuous/vicious cycle where in the US we've been building in ways that reduce or eliminate the usefulness of high speed rail while countries that have favored rail have been doing the opposite. The US has always heavily-subsidized roads and automobile travel and as a consequence sprawl. I think it's catching up with us socially, economically, and physically.
In my opinion focusing on cost versus fares is myopic to the point of insanity. As long as we're laser-focused on the economic viability of rail we'll never see any of the other benefits.
We have a responsibility to future generations to not just keep things the same but to make them better, and I think rail does that. If you look around and you dislike your current mode of living, hate your commute, and want to have access to cities, then guess what rail is a solution for all of that. It takes decades to see any real benefit from it though, which is why nobody ever goes for it.
This is the main (and perhaps the most important driving factor) - if you build a rail line from empty land directly into the heart of a major US city, that empty land will develop relatively quickly over the next 10-20 years.
Instead we've done the same but with sprawling highways, which doesn't do much for density (and requires cars, and once you have a car you just use it for commuting).
Careful there. It is easy to do stupid things and so not get that growth. A HSR from middle of nowhere south Dakota to NYC grand central station will get approximately 0 riders - the distance (all distance in transport is measured in minutes not meters) is too far to commute every day, and there is nothing else to draw people.
I wish this didn't need to be pointed out, but there are a lot of stupid proposals out there. So be on the lookout - don't blinding support HSR: put support where it will be useful.
There's a common fallacy here: that a line built from "nowhere, SD" to NYC serves only people from either NYC or "nowhere, SD". But that's never true. It would serve people all along the route, people taking shorter, "more regional" journeys. The fact that nobody actually rides the whole line doesn't matter.
Of course, that still may not be enough to justify such a line, but the fact that nobody travels from one end to the other is not an issue.
Because a big advantage to trains over airplanes is you can stop at places in between for low cost. It is common for airplanes to spend more time getting from the gate to cruising altitude and back down than at cruise.
A train going Chicago to Minneapolis would only lose a few minutes stopping at cities like Milwaukee WI and Madison WI - both fairly large cities. An airplane could stop at each, but the cost of one stop would double the full trip time.
Where a train stops vs go past is a very complex subject full of trade offs. However in general a train that only goes non-stop between two points is a bad idea. I've been in discussions elsewhere in this topic about that - read them for more info. (including those who disagree - they have valuable insight)
They're explaining that cost-per-stop is much lower for a train than an airplane. A stop might cost an airplane an hour or more added to the duration of the full multi-stop route (slowing down, losing altitude, landing, taxiing, boarding, taxiing, take-off, gaining speed and climbing) even if we allow for some pretty serious optimization of processes. It might cost a train anywhere from 1-15 minutes. A train can make four stops between two points and, despite traveling at a much lower top speed, finish the whole route much faster than an airplane would, doing the same thing. That is, it's friendlier to multiple stops over medium-distance routes than an airplane. If you're going point-to-point and it's a very long distance, you may as well just take a plane. If you have a 250 mile route and want a stop every 50 miles, then a train's (way) better than an airplane. Multi-stop (not to be confused with excessive stops) routes are exactly where trains shine.
A HSR train stop and go - without opening the door is about 1.5 minutes added to the total trip time (depending on how fast the train goes of course). It is possible to get the time the doors remain open down to under a minute (this is done for airport trains), but I think 1.5 minutes is a more reasonable floor just because people need some time to get their bags on the train and around other people.
This puts the time loss to stopping a train at 3-17 minutes.
Sure, HSR is gonna have it worse than a minute, I was thinking of, say, subways and light commuter rail, with the 1 minute lower bound. Some of those don't spend more than about a minute not at full speed for some stations, including door-open time and de-/ac-cellerating. No train where people aren't traveling very light and prepared to get off fast is going to get quite that low a stop time, though, true.
We have plenty of proof to the opposite near where I live. Passenger rail was installed in several locations with the promise of growth that never materialized. One of the lines is from downtown to an airport, through a few miles of neglected neighborhoods that never got the rush of development and gentrification rail was supposed to bring. Another goes from the city through several suburbs and has had negligible impact because ridership is so low.
People prefer not being constrained to the train tracks if they can drive, they prefer to not live near the constant blaring of horns and squealing of wheels on the tracks, and in these days prefer not to be stuck in a cabin full of potentially sick strangers for 2-3 hours a day round trip.
Was it legal and politically palatable to build there, or in the neglected neighborhoods around it? In the USA, unless you're talking about actual greenfield land, rail-supporting development is usually illegal to build.
The central question is how was the land abutting each station zoned? Did they change the zoning to allow for more development? Or did it remain mostly residential-zoned and just change from single-family to multi-family?
The reason rail works beautifully in other countries is that you can get off the train and walk to useful destinations, even if where you disembarked isn't where you live. Shinkansen in Japan have tons of shopping, nice restaurants, and hotels all within a block or two of the station. So there's a reason for non-residents to stop as well as residents. And because everything surrounds the station there's no point for residents to go anywhere else.
You don’t provide enough specifics about your local situation, but it’s been long noted that airport rail lines underperform. The author Alon Levy’s blog and others in the transit space have covered this. TLDR: They fail serve the local riders well, in an attempt to serve less frequent airport riders who are more likely to pay for a taxi/rideshare, rent a car, get picked up/dropped off, etc. There are often poor airport connections, like people movers or airport connectors, getting to the right terminals, etc which creates more friction and confusion.
>neglected neighborhoods that never got the rush of development and gentrification rail was supposed to bring
Rail and transportation infrastructure generally is an enabler for re/development and land use, but not a guarantee of it. Necessary but not sufficient by itself.
It is a 40 mile total run, making a number of stops along the way. The more people it has to serve, the less convenient it becomes.
The other line (running from downtown to the airport) was also a total of 1 hour 30ish minutes including bus from my house to the terminal, then rail down to the airport. It otherwise was a 30ish minute drive, tops, and driving is what almost everyone chose to do if they had the car to do so.
It's like people have completely forgotten that rail allowed the USA to open up and develop in the interior in the first place! Look at the amazing featured map in [0]!
(I live in the town that had the first rail line in Australia.)
I'm not going to disagree with the arguments you are making as they are valid in their own right, but I will point some to some important tradeoffs your post skips over.
First, there is a fundamental tradeoff between location and transportation. Land is not a produced good, it is owned by landlords and its value comes from location.
Transportation makes prime land less valuable and outlying land more valuable, thus it redistributes value outward, allowing people to escape from the thumbs of landlords and buy their own land. Eisenhower's freeway building project and cheap gas is responsible for the American middle class, much moreso than anything FDR did, as people could move out of apartment buildings in inner cities and buy land of their own, due to the improvements in transportation technology.
For those improvements to work, you have to fan out. A rail line isn't going to get it done, but what a rail line can do is transport people to a remote place and then they fan out with roads. That is a good idea for redistributing people if an area is already densely populated and the land is bought in a large circle around the city. Then you hop on a train to take you to nowhere and there you can buy cheap land. But if the built up area is relatively small, you are better off with a network of cheap roads to carry you to where land is cheaper.
Thus the U.S., which has always had smaller cities surrounded by more open space than Europe, got more bang from its buck with roads. But the same network of roads did not have the transformative effect in Europe as it did in the U.S.
What is interesting is the shift to remote work. The internet has made communication another strong rival to location, providing another threat to land values in inner cities. So it could be that in the future, we will not need so many subsidies for transportation but for things like broadband, to help nurture the middle class and allow people to buy land in remote areas.
People - especially landlords -- are very much aware of these dynamics, which is why historically there was great opposition to roads from moneyed interests, as documented by Adam Smith. And why roads are deserving of subsidies, due to all the positive externalities. In the same way, internet infrastructure is deserving of subsidies today. Whether or not rail is deserving of subsidies in the US depends on how large the disk is of expensive land surrounding cities. In the northeast, it is large, and that's why you see rail in the northeast. In most of the U.S., it's not large at all and you can buy affordable land without traveling too far away from work. In Europe, it tends to be large as well.
With the internet, that is only getting better and both road and rail are becoming less relevant as an agent for the promotion of the middle class land ownership. They are still relevant, but I believe the window has closed on dreams of high speed rail connecting cities in the U.S. High speed internet will get the job done faster and easier, if coupled from a large shift to working from home.
Not only is it "not far off" it's locally higher. Ohio is more densely populated than Spain. They even both have a city called Toledo. The difference is the smaller city in Spain has a high-speed rail link to the capital with 6 trains per day, while the larger city in Ohio has only two conventional trains per day, neither of which serve the nearest city, Detroit, only 60 miles away.
In any sensible universe, the major cities of Ohio would be connected to each other, Detroit, Chicago, and Pittsburgh by high-speed rail.
> Another difference: populations in Europe, China and Japan are more concentrated.
This is commonly trotted out, and it is false for all practical purposes. The US does have a lot of empty spaces where no one lives--but no one is seriously proposing to hook up empty spaces to HSR. If you instead look at where people in the US do live, it's not all that different from those places. If you mapped out the major cities of the Midwest centered on Chicago and compared it to France, you'll find that the US has larger cities whose distances from the major regional hub are roughly the same as their corresponding cities in France. Since HSR works in France to connect those cities, it should generally work equally well in the US to connect those cities.
I'll point out that Fresno, CA has roughly the same population as Nantes and Nice, France, both of which have dedicated TGV lines specifically to reach those cities.
Do you still think that qualifies as "empty spaces"?
Fresno (1700/sq. km) also has less than half the population density of Nantes or Nice (4200-4800/sq. km). It's not exactly a fair comparison if the area of the city is far larger unless the last-kilometer transit seamlessly scales to last-2km transit. You can actually walk to a reasonable number of places, or take a bus 1-2 km to many more, from a main station in Nantes, Nice, or any number of similarly-sized cities in many countries.
CAHSR’s mainline is intended to be SF-LA via the Central Valley, and connect the major cities along the way. Some of those valley have around a 1m+ people or will grow to that over time, making them viable to connect. Think “pearls on a string.”
>Only if people routinely travel to those cities rather than further away cities.
They do. People naturally travel more to places closer to them than further away. There is a strong correlation here. When you’re hungry and want to go out, do you go to a food place 5-10 minutes away? Or a place hours away? Or 3 Michelin starred place on the other side of the planet.
The regions targeted for HSR often have significant auto traffic on the highways connecting them, and short haul flights between their airports. HSR hits a sweet spot for trips that are long drives and short flights. Cost and time competitive, while also being more comfortable.
> Cost and time competitive, while also being more comfortable.
This is only true in a vacuum without our political and legal environment. If you could make the project immune to CEQA, eminent domain challenges, and union pressure, then you have a much more viable railway. If you could at least brush off two of those three and one of them was the union pressure, then it might actually get built in the manner it was intended to be linking San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Diego. At this point we’ll be lucky to get a line that doesn’t share tracks with freight between SF and LA.
They’re not but they’re already built and therefore are already an ongoing concern. CEQA and a lot of the more asinine pro-labor and tax policies that exist today throughout the State postdate the established right of ways for most of the highways.
Part of the issue is that the Midwest isn’t centered around Chicago. American inter city travel exists much less on the hub spoke style that you get in some European countries. While the density isn’t that different, the pattern of demand is!
the only difference between the US and europe that really matters is the degree to which our identification with cars is ingrained, and therefore how that has shaped our development patterns. it's why we have so many large trucks and SUVs even though 75-95% of trips are single-occupancy, why we dedicate so much land to roads and parking, and why we care so little for public transporation, pollution, and transport/energy efficiency. it's not population density, inter-city distance, or patterns of demand, as these are also byproducts of the same phenomenon (cause & effect reversal).
that doesn't matter either. air networks in both the US and europe are plenty extensive.
and to be clear, it's not that high-speed rail is an unmitigated good, but that we love our cars so much that any challenge to their supremacy is a literal (perceived) threat to our own egos.
high-speed rail makes a ton of sense for the coastal cooridors, as well as at least a few interior ones (e.g., the midwest, texas). it's probably not a good use of resources for a cross-continental passenger run of HSR, since air can more efficiently and flexibly link the coastal and interior intercity networks.
sure, and i'd posit that that's also a consequence of our love affair with cars. cars encourage urban sprawl (there's really no such thing as rural sprawl). perhaps a land value tax (with tax deferral until sale for non-wealthy primary home owners) can help us find an efficient optimum, something that would encourage urban density while not discouraging rural expanse.
>I’d posit that that’s also a consequence of our love affair with cars.
I’ve always operated under the assumption that there is massive selection bias in the United States for people who like more personal space. Never considered it was part of car culture.
the car, particularly for americans but also in other countries (mainland china being a prominently rising example), literally embodies individualistic expression, expansive freedom, and bold adventurism, as 50+ years of tv car ads can attest. that's not to pass an overly harsh judgement on any of those things, but rather, to say the balance is out of whack and has been for a while.
in LA, outside of a very few of the oldest core districts, even our supposedly sleepy neighborhood streets are often 40+ feet wide (note that cars are typically 6-7 feet wide), with 15 feet of public easement, and 15+ feet of mandatory setbacks, so urban land use gets out of whack real quicklike that way.
If we wait until areas have high population density, it's harder and more expensive to build through it, and people don't want to fund the project.
If we don't wait and want to build now, people don't want to fund the project due to lack of immediate ridership.
Funny how we keep building roads, and expanding highways, while saying building rail infrastructure doesn't make sense because there aren't enough people to use it.
Why is there this asymmetrical demand that only high-speed rail needs to be “economically viable“? Roads don’t get this demand: tolls and gas taxes don’t even come close to paying for their upkeep, and nobody cares because a transportation network is a public good where accurately billing for upkeep is worth a lot less than the societal benefits.
> Sad as it is, I just don't see long-distance rail as being economically viable in the US.
It’s not that sad. We have lots and lots of other low hanging fruit to pick.
Let’s even further improve fright distribution by rail. Let’s get mass transit within our cities and their suburbs to be less terrible. Let’s have more than a handful of cities in the entire country where people can reasonably live without cars.
The US does pretty good about freight by rail, and I think they should be left to improve themselves for now. There are a lot of things they should do better, but they are doing okay.
Most cities have terrible mass transit. Good transit is one where people don't have to arrange their life around it. Meaning it comes often, and is reasonably fast.
I’m not sure where you’re getting your facts from, but France has 3 major airports (Orly,Roissy,Nice), several other large international ones (Geneva, Mulhouse) and many more smaller ones
The Northeast corridor in the US was opened in 1834.
My point was that the rail infrastructure in Europe just isn't that old and even in the 1980s you had a huge advantage in building for speed over the 1830s.
The state of the 1834 track has very little bearing on building new track in 2020, which is how every other country on the planet has built high speed rail.
I don't think that is true. Small bits of the Northeast corridor were opened in 1834 but the whole thing wasn't complete until 1880 or something like that. I think a lot of Europe's infrastructure is as old or older. Especially in the UK where trains were invented and first commercially operated at scale. If you compare to a route of similar length in the UK, on average the ~400miles of line between London and Edinburgh/Glasgow is probably about 20-30 years older. Trains were racing to Scotland from London up the West and East coasts from the 1860's onwards and there was a lot of competition between the two routes to be the fastest. The time over the 400 mile route was down to about 8hrs by 1880 and about 7hrs in the 1930's. These days trains operate on the two main routes at up to 140mph now and it's possible to get a train that does it in about 4h30m with a few intermediate stops. This is not so hot compared to TGV Paris-Bordeaux at 2h10 on a dedicated HSR route but it does compare favourably to Acela's 6h30 over a similar distance also on a legacy route. This is because the alignment has been worked on continuously over the years to improve speed, it's not the same alignment as it was in the 1850's when it was first completed and both East and West routes pass through quite a few cities and towns on the way.
The UK has quite high speeds (125-140mph) on its conventional rail lines all on lines that were first built between 1850-1900 but have been gradually realigned to be faster. Most war damage was to the junctions not the route alignment out in open country so there were improvements in throughput at junctions made by rationalisation of the layout but routes between cities weren’t realigned because of war damage.
What is hard is nobody is willing to make and follow a long term plan. Amtrak has plans since the 1970s to fix those curves. Most of the places that would need to be bought have gone for sale since then - a bit of vision would mean that very little eminent domain would even be needed (not zero - there is always the one family that has lived in the same house for years). Also with the plan, you don't need to do it all at once - fix something every year.
Amtrak hasn't had the vision to stick with the plan. Instead we get a new plan every 10 years or so. Sure the new plan is arguably better, but the old plan complete would be better yet. The money spent making a new plan would fix one of the bad curves (only one though)
> Amtrak hasn't had the vision to stick with the plan.
I think this would be better stated as “funding” — it's not like nobody at Amtrak has failed to think about the hotspots for them, it's just that they are in the unfortunate position of being expected to service a lot of [now] marginal routes against both very well funded alternatives, but they have limited governmental support for the kind of major infrastructure changes they need to dramatically improve their offerings.
A completely private business could, for example, simply discontinue unprofitable lines or acquire long-term debt to fund a major capital investment but they were created specifically to avoid closing routes and debt is a political hot potato. A government service could point to greater societal benefits to justify funding out of general tax revenue but Amtrak is expected make enough in ticket revenue that they're perennially short of cash. A large part of the problem is simply that railroads have high base costs which can be made up in volume but their service costs more than alternatives because we don't subsidize rail anywhere near as much as highways (for example, DC to NY on train costs more than a bus, but I-95 isn't a toll road funded only by users).
Edit: just to be clear, I'm sure that they're just as flawed as any other group of humans — it's just that whenever you see some obvious problem holding an organization back, it's almost never the case that nobody there has thought about it.
I'm sure some low level people at Amtrak have thought about it. Upper management has generally not, and thus not allowed the limited funding they could have to be put to good use over the years. A new plan after all is all yours, if you take the old plan your predecessor gets credit (this is also why new CEOs bring in major re-orgs soon after starting - they can't let any credit for success go to their predecessor).
What are you basing “upper management has generally not” on — personal experience, media accounts, etc.? From what I've seen in the public discourse, it's looked like fatalistic acceptance of very limited congressional support.
This is kind of partly true. The track in Connecticut in particular is bad enough that you really need new right-of-way as opposed to fixing individual curves here and there (which is the situation for the rest of the NEC). Alon has favored a new right-of-way that's basically right next to I-95 for as much as possible, which minimizes the takings you need between New Rochelle and New Haven. East of New Haven, there's far less density, and it's pretty easy to make a new right-of-way wherever you want to.
The other issue in Connecticut is that, even on the existing right-of-way, Amtrak isn't able to utilize the available speed capacity of the current right-of-way. This is due to Metro North intentionally slowing Amtrak trains down for its commuter rail schedule instead.
I’d bet metro north saves more co2 than you’d save even by eliminating every plane flight between NYC and Boston. Probably by at least an order of magnitude.
It is harder than you think. In 1950 it wasn't a problem, but these days people are aware that a freeway too close to their house is a negative. They will support the next neighborhood - close enough to be easy to get to, far enough away that they don't get the noise and traffic.
That map is at least a little bit aspirational: it shows the Northeast Corridor extending north of Boston's South Station to North Station via "Central Station". While I would love it if we built https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North%E2%80%93South_Rail_Link it does not currently exist.
The main impression it gave me (be sure to toggle to the satellite view - then you can also verify the existence of tracks) is how tricky it would be to build a reasonably straight railroad there while also connecting the population centers.
The route that the existing track takes is insanely suboptimal and seems so hard to fix considering the existing urban sprawl in the relevant areas.
It makes most sense to me for rails to be built in the interstate medians. You see this in Chicago, and could be done elsewhere relatively easily as its already government owned land. As a bonus, car commuters could see how much faster HSR might be than their normal commute.
Interstate highways are designed for a speed limit of <100MPH and have the curves to show for it.
High speed rail goes well beyond that speed and needs much larger curves, at which point you're deviating enough from main roads you may as well just take a different path entirely.
Your not wrong, but not really right either. Interstate highways do allow tighter curves and do have them. However most of the interstate is straight or a gentle curve. Thus you can limit your land takings to near the curves and then rejoin the interstate. There is a good chance that the highway department will be interested in your new right of way to make the curve better too - a lot of interstates have curves that are too tight for highway use without slowing down. Many of the tight curves are also near places where you would want to slow down for a station anyway.
The above isn't a perfect answer to all situations, but it helps a lot.
Maybe in very flat areas where the interstate was preceded by nothing, but curves to avoid things in urban areas or for geographical reasons are more common. And HSR curves are gigantic; the Chinese build their HSR lines with curve radii of 4km. Texas uses a maximum of 1.4km curve radii and they have some of the fastest Interstates around.
The rail solution to that would probably be a tunnel. A tunnel is a cheaper affair with just two tracks than if it has to be wide enough for two tracks and six to eight highway lanes.
Urban areas are just a small minority of where the tracks need to go, as such if the train goes half the speed in the urban area we are still okay on overall trip time. In fact I suspect (read I don't know because it hasn't really been tried) that HSR should probably do a bunch of stops in the urban areas anyway so it won't get up to speed.
When I say "urban area" I mean the continuous built up urban area into the suburbs. American sprawl means that metropolitan areas are much further spread out than their European or Asian counterparts, to the point where most of Boston-Washington is sprawl and very little of it is farmlands.
In any case when you start building HSR it becomes progressively harder to eke out savings and the highest come from urban area speedups. Going from 50 to 100MPH cuts a lot more time than going from 150MPH to 200MPH. And the former simply doesn't work in the median of a highway.
I don't really know this area. Say you wanted to build an entirely new and mostly straight Stamford - Waterbury - Hartford - Providence alignment. Some of that would need to be in tunnel. But how much of that could you do on the surface without needing to demolish too many houses?
How are you ever going to achieve high speed if you are stopping every 10 miles for another station? There appears to be 8 stations in Baltimore alone.
So the fast service shouldn't use that alignment. There must already be population centers that are skipped by the fast service - its tracks don't have to go through there either.
Today the fast services follow the same alignment.
Rerouting so far has been a headache; in New Haven-Boston where the tracks are so curvy new tracks have to be built, the FRA proposed going through entirely different population centers (the geography of the existing coast line is very challenging). This has resulted in an interesting fight where people want the train in their town, but also do not want the impact of newly constructed tracks through their town.
They accelerate reasonably quickly, but doing so any faster uses more energy and also starts impacting passenger comfort. People would like to have a cup of coffee on the table without hot liquid sloshing out onto their laps.
They absolutely can. They're obviously limited by passenger comfort as the other commenter said, but the difference between an Acela and a Northeast Regional in acceleration speed is obvious.
This map shows all the local stops for each city's commuter rail system. Intercity trains skip over many of these. The Acela leaves Boston, stops a the Route 128 suburban ring station (which has a large parking structure), and then hits 150mph on its way to Providence. Local MBTA service hits all of those intermediate stops.
> you'd have to eminent domain swathes of, say, New Haven
Just to pick apart that specific example, you could instead build a bridge from West Haven to East Haven with much less eminent domain, but much more complaints about the bridge being built.
When a suspension bridge was proposed for where I-95 crosses the Potomac, the residents of Alexandria complained that it would be an eyesore and were able to get a drawbridge built instead of a suspension bridge.
I really don't buy this oldness argument. We have to build new alignment you say? That makes it like greenfield elsewhere. Connecticut is dense you say? That's just much parts of Europe.
What that leaves your argument with is that existing rail only makes things harder because of a sunk cost facility. Let's improve our bean counting then.
Maybe America is one big sunk cost fallicy, being an older republic. Time for some creative destruction I guess.
>Connecticut is dense you say? That's just much parts of Europe.
those parts of Europe, let's not forget, were rather thoroughly flattened to a wet paste about 80 years ago, and were rebuilt with nice, straight, quick rail lines by people who knew how fast trains that weren't built in 1840 could go.
I think you overestimate the extent to which the war ravaged the countryside. Some cities were destroyed. Most (most!) of the rest of Europe, the towns and villages, wasn't.
For the most part, the cities in France that could fairly be said to have been 'flattened' during WWII were in Normandy. Paris was scarcely touched. Yet they have a high-speed rail network covering the whole country. Spain was untouched by WWII, yet they have a high-speed rail network. The U.S. somehow managed to build an interstate highway system through every major city in the decades after WWII without being bombed flat. The WWII argument seems weak.
> The U.S. somehow managed to build an interstate highway system through every major city in the decades after WWII without being bombed flat.
The U.S. has essentially stopped building urban interstates since the late 70's, when opposition from residents became too strong to ignore. I don't foresee this changing in the near future.
My understanding is that construction costs in Europe are rising as well due to (among other things) increased use of tunnels in urban area due to opposition from residents.
I know the popular Western image of infrastructure development in China is jackbooted thugs forcing farmers off their land, and there's some of that as well, but most people are reasonably happy with the compensation they get. The Shanghai-Hangzhou maglev project (below) is also an instructive case study of an ambitious rail project that was cancelled largely thanks to (sadly unwarranted) public concern.
Your second point is missing some facts that actually make the situation more difficult.
1. Geography and geology is tricky. Rail lines don't curve because the builders just love curves. There's geographic and geologic reasons for a lot of rail line positioning. That's in addition to people living/working/shopping in a place where it would be useful to lay track.
2. Freight lines own most of the track in the US. Amtrak gets to use those lines but freight has right-of-way. Amtrak must side track when a freight train is coming. Amtrak only has a few sections of the NEC as dedicated passenger track. Without dedicated passenger track Amtrak's schedules are all over the place. Freight trains have trouble all the time and passenger trains need to sit and wait while they fix/move the freight train.
1. old rail line positioning was also influenced by land ownership and existing human structures. and our know how how to deal with previously difficult geography has evolved. you may want to study "Stuttgart 21" or "gotthard rail tunnel" or Eurostar channel tunnel or Berlin Munich high speed track to get an intuition for what's possible if there is a political determination.
2. France and Japan have dedicated tracks. Germany has reliable high speed freight lines. again more than anything it's a matter of political will.
France did but Britain largely did not upgrade the ROW to be straighter.
And it's largely irrelevant anyways because true high speed rail (TGV, HS2, ICE) doesn't start showing up in Europe until the '80s, long after WWII reconstruction wrapped up.
The UK has several “mainlines”, all built before WW2. All are fairly straight and have been smoothed and updated continuously since WW2. Anything destroyed in WW2 was repaired as quickly as possible at the time. Britain didn’t really “make use” of bomb damage to change the layout of London as it wasn’t really destroyed.
And then in the 1960s Dr Beeching’s cuts closed almost half the rail network.
The only new high speed railway in the UK opened in the 90s to connect London with the continent, I.e. Eurostar
> Moreover, all lines [of the TGV] are very profitable excluding the cost of fixed capital.
Why say this? It's a big capital-intensive project. A nuclear power plant is profitable if you exclude the cost of building the reactor, but that's the problem - you can't exclude it, and breakeven time is a big part of cost-benefit analysis.
What was breakeven time for the TGV? That would convince me more.
The next paragraph explains the return on capital for the various projects. This varies per-project and whether you include societal benefit or not. From a strictly financial return on capital perspective, the figures range from 15% to 4%, with the new Bordeaux-Toulouse likely to be under that.
I'd never made the connection between the gradual shuttering of coal plants and freight rail, but wow, that is a big deal. A quick search finds that coal is about 30% of rail tonnage in the US. A bunch more (not looking it up, but if you've ever seen a train, it's clearly also a lot of what they haul) is other fossil fuels.
I wonder how they're going to cope with (let's give a very lowball estimate) 40% of their tonnage tapering off over the next few decades. Looks like coal shipped by rail is already way down from its peak, and dropping fast. Looks like they charge a premium for intermodal shipping—may have to cut prices on that to keep volume up.
Coal and other bulk materials are “easy” - one customer on each end. Intermodal is more complicated but at the right price it’ll be competitive with trucking.
Because as long as their aren't ongoing operational costs it's enticing to governments to build, they don't care if it loses money overall because they aren't profit driven and have non-monetary goals.
Cars are too slow, airplanes too inconvenient, long-distance high-speed rail too expensive.
Why not all three?
Ground-effect airplanes should only take about 4x more energy than a car at the same speed, the track is just cement or even dirt, they're not useful for terrorism, no pilot needed, and they could even be powered electrically if they make stops every hour or two. You could drive onto a carrier and fly at 200 mph to your destination.
Basically a slow hyperloop, but you don't need a vaccuum or anything high tech at all. I've asked about this before and nobody has explained why it wouldn't work - maybe it's so obvious it goes without saying.
edit: hills could be made more flat but surely would be less problematic than for a train where the track must be almost totally flat, any small object or animal could be flown over maybe even trading speed for height, more energy intensive than high speed rail but construction and maintenance far less so. We can make a computer control system for F-117 but we can't control ground effect? These don't sound like carefully considered objections.
Wind resistance. Airplanes at altitude get a lot less wind resistance. Tracks also need a lot less right of way (width) vs ground effect airplanes which need wings.
Rolling resistance is not a big deal for trains (or even cars). It exists, but it is small. The real issues for going faster for both is wind resistance. (maglev is better more for maintenance cost than rolling resistance - at least until we get to hyperloop speeds - if we ever do)
It can and has worked in the past, but only over water. Ground effect planes over land have the problem that land isn't really flat, and ground effect doesn't buffer as well as you might imagine. Even small mounds of dirt can cause an extremely uncomfortable ride. You can think of it like riding in a massive monster truck, but without shock absorbers. You're basically guaranteed to get sick.
> Basically a slow hyperloop, but you don't need a vaccuum or anything high tech at all. I've asked about this before and nobody has explained why it wouldn't work
Ground effect is unstable and hard to control, incursions on the track would be very dangerous, but most obvious measures to mitigate intrusions interfere with ground effect flight or require bigger rights of way.
It would be a slow hyperloop with a much bigger ground footprint (like classical high speed rail), less efficiency than classical high-speed rail, control/safety issues not present in high-speed rail, etc.
If you have already have a track dedicated to the ground-effect airplane, seems to me that it'd always be more cost effective to build a railroad on that track and move more people. The track is the hard part.
Ground-effect vehicles might make sense over water, though, building effectively a very fast ferry. There's a startup from the last YC Batch trying it.
Regent: https://www.regentcraft.com/
One of the things that so many HSR enthusiasts seem to get wrong about HSR is expectations about non-stop trains between major cities. Successful systems either don't have them at all, or they are extremely limited. Certainly you can do non-stop trains, but the systems that do non-stop trains are all massive money losers.
This idea is always met with extreme incredulousness about it because it violates their intuition. "You have to go as fast as possible or it won't compete well with air travel! If I have to stop in Merced for 5 minutes to let a handful of people on or off, I'd rather just fly".
The problem is that those handfuls of people, the result of the potential travel between the cartesian product of dozens of cities, adds up. There are number of trade publications that have analyzed passenger patterns on successful systems and have found that the ridership exclusively between major terminal stations typically accounted for ~50% of total ridership, and less than 50% of total revenue. Smaller hops have higher prices and better market penetration because they aren't served by air travel and therefore have no competition. Larger hops between major cities have lower prices simply because they have to compete with air travel. Even in a "perfect" world with non-stop trains, HSR is still going to lose some traffic to air travel, and they won't have all of that massive supplementary revenue from intermediate destination travel.
Unfortunately, the idea that we should build a system that isn't optimized for them just doesn't resonate with people. And since high speed rail is now a partisan issue, and those same parties have a sharp urban rural divide, we get two camps: 1) democratic voters that want high speed rail, but lose interest when experts say that there need to be lots of intermediate stops, and 2) rural voters who don't want high speed rail, even though they would benefit from it greatly, because "socialism". And because of it, I believe American HSR is doomed. It will either get built and lose massive amounts of money, or it won't get built at all.
This is a major point - a high speed rail between Chicago and MSP would allow travel between those two points - but more importantly it would allow commuting travel from points in-between.
If you build the rails well, you can run both express service (which skips stops to maintain higher speed) and local service (which stops at most or all stations).
I believe the way to solve some of this would be to attack it from multiple directions:
1. Require that future highway construction be "rail-ready" - i.e., leave room and have curves that are friendly to adding rail to the highway corridor in the future.
2. Develop local rail corridors that are "high-speed-rail-ready" - as a connection between two large cities is mainly of interest to a few, but commuter rail to the nearest large city is more obviously valuable. And if designed right it can be made for commuting but still be curved, etc correctly to allow higher speed trains if/when it's finally connected through.
> rural voters who don't want high speed rail, even though they would benefit from it greatly,
It's not clear to me how a rural voter (I guess the 'voter' part is because these are publicly funded works) really benefits. Once a year vacations to the beach? Shopping trips where you are limited to what you can manage on foot? Visits to a specialist doctor?
Since the sense of rail depends on regular use, I guess all that's left is commutes from a dispersed area to a central one. You have to wonder how much telecommuting will decrease the need for that over time.
One good thing about rail is that you are allowed to do it piecemeal. There's bound to be somewhere that needs a point A to point B bullet train.
A practical step that would not be excessively costly would be to standardize the three types of rail in the US - local tram, commuter, and intercity/high speed (fun fact - depending on your definition of high speed rail current Amtrak trains can hit that, as on correct track and with positive train control they can do 125+ MPH).
If it's standardized it will be easier to make sure you can develop it piecemeal.
You are not wrong, but that is misleading. HSR needs to be limited stop - they need 10 km just to get up to speed. Most of the energy is used getting up to speed (regenerative braking helps but doesn't get it all back), so for short trips you HSR is too expensive and not much faster.
That said, the advantage of rail is it stops at points in between. It cannot stop at every little town, but it needs to stop at every big city (you might even be able to do a suburb to downtown - the idea looks like it would work on paper but I'm not aware of real experience), and it the big cities are far enough in-between some small city should get a station.
This is very complex though. There is a trade off between stopping time and number of people on the train. You can stop in each city for as little as 1 minute (plus a few more to decelerate/accelerate) if your train has a lot of doors making it fast/easy to get on/off, but those doors mean there are less seats so less people are on the train. Or you can have just one door, but now there is a long line at that door and you need to stop for 15 minutes at each small town. So busy lines will have less stops than not so busy lines - the latter need more stops to attract all the customers they can get.
This trade off needs to be considered separately for each line.
The usual solution to this is having local vs express service - lines run alongside each other where there is a bumpkin train that stops every few miles, but every 50 or so it stops at a station that is also serviced by an express or even a high-speed stop.
This is how it is supposed to work. If you are going someplace distant you can take the high speed train most of the way and then transfer to the slow regional for the last leg of the journey.
Unfortunately this system means you need parallel tracks, one set for the high speed express trains and another for the regionals. This isn't as bad as it seems, it requires double the steel and concrete, but the land is the expensive part of the deal and even though the parcel you need is wider the expense is not doubled.
Or you can run the high speed rail on routes that are optimal for it and leave the regional rail in its byzantine routes from the 30s that serve the locals well.
I don't mean for it to be misleading, and I do agree with you. There is always a tradeoff between more stops and higher speeds, and if you're building high speed rail you do need to make different tradeoffs than commuter rail.
That being said, I think even people that agree with that statement would still be surprised at the kinds of stops that successful systems make. For example, Tokaido Shinkansen, the most financially successful line in the world, makes stops in Fuji (pop. 245k), Odawara(195k), Anjo (188k), Kakegawa (117k), Nakamura-Ku (135k), Mishima (110k), Hashima (68k), Maibara (38k), and Atami (37k). There are three services: all-stop, skip-stop, and non-stop. The fastest non-stop service is about an 1:40 faster than the all-stop service, and 1:00 faster than the skip stop service. But most terminal-to-terminal customers still take the skip stop service because it has the highest frequency...enough to negate the speed advantage of non-stop service in most cases.
When the CAHSR proposal first came out, the phrase "cow towns like Merced" was practically a meme. People were laughing at the stop in Gilroy, saying things like "why? so we can buy garlic on our way to LA?". Most people even thought that stops in secondary cities like Fresno and Bakersfield were entirely unnecessary. But the experts who wrote the report (who are fairly well regarded, btw) chose those stops for a reason: they are rural minihubs that aggregate a lot of traffic volume in areas that are too far from larger cities.
In the words of an operations researcher I once worked with: with HSR, top speed is what sells the service, but acceleration is what makes the money. Acceleration minimizes the time loss from making more stops, and more stops means more money.
I agree with your post thread. A lot of people uninitiated in railways think of HSR as an airplanes on rails. HSR =/= Airline.
Trains have a number of advantages, one of which is a small time penalty for stopping at a station relative to aircraft (2-3 minutes vs ~45+ minutes on average), and the aircraft requires a lot personnel/all-hands to turn around quickly (see: Southwest Airlines). A commercial aircraft is simply not designed for lots of really short hops in rapid succession. There needs to be a new preflight check, refueling, unload/load belly cargo, some maintenance items are based on aircraft takeoff/landing cycles (tires, cabin pressurization, etc.) Trains stopping at station and continuing is trivial by comparison.
A rail operator wants to collect fare paying passengers along the route they are planning on operating, it’s an easy way to boost ridership and revenue. It is a balancing act to have station stops, but not increase end-to-end trip time excessively. Basic rule of thumb: Does stopping add more riders than it costs due to the stopping time penalty? If the model/data say yes, make the stop; otherwise do not.
And just because we have a station, doesn’t mean every train has stop there. We can have local, limited, and express trains. We can passing/siding tracks at stations to prevent local stopped trains from blocking the mainline for limited/express trains. We can have cross-platform time transfers between different train types and destinations. We can have multiple mainline tracks. These things do cost a bit more upfront, but it’s more about good planning and what kind of service to the public is the goal.
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The Tokaido corridor (Tokyo-Nagoya-Osaka) is extremely dense, both the Tokaido Mainline and Shinkansen line are effectively at capacity (which is also part of impetus for the Chuo Shinkansen). Running at very high speeds with fews stops, consumes a lot track capacity. Which is why JRs prefer running more local and limited-stop service trains, and less than “non-stop” express trains. It’s what a capacity constrained operator should do to optimize operations and maximize capacity subject to those constraints.
Likewise a California HSR program, should find a way to cost effectively serve cities like Fresno, Bakersfield, Merced, etc. as part of a larger HSR network.
It is weird how many people miss the concept of express trains in this discussion. Convenience can’t be overstated either. When I take the train from Tokyo to Kyushu for work, I don’t even check the schedule. I show up knowing there will be a decently fast train within 15 minutes.
Having ridden the bus to work I've become very in tune to how much I hate having to watch bus schedule to figure out when I'm going someplace. More than once I've had to leave an interesting discussion because my bus was coming. More than once I've packed up and then needed to find something to do for the next 20 minutes. I'm surprised you consider every 15 minutes often enough to not check the schedule, but it would be much better than the every 30 minutes I had.
That's for a long distance train from Tokyo to Kyushu, about 500km. For that distance the timing is quite convenient. There's actually a train every 3 minutes or so, but it's prudent to wait for an express or limited express train as it will get there sooner.
Within Tokyo most of the trains run every 5 minutes or so.
Why is that? Cars and airplanes accelerate much faster, without any real rider discomfort. If it's due to train hardware itself, wouldn't an assist to get the train up to speed work, in a fraction of that distance?
Depends on the speed, but .7m/s^2 is a typical acceleration for trains. Cars can accelerate faster, and some trains can as well.
I just redid the math - to get to 300 km/h needs 4.8km, not 10 that I thought. Faster speeds need more distance or course. Hills also impact the distance needed. You also need to account for same safety distance for a lot of acceleration applications.
Depends on what you are doing. If you are building track, then distance is what matters. If you are spacing trains out for safety both distance and time matters. If you are planning a schedule time is what matters (unless you are mixing local and express service on one track - see the safety sentence before). If you are planning track than you need to start with ideal schedule and iterate around the rest until you find something that actually works for all considerations.
With trains its expected that you can stand up and walk around at any time (or in some cases even have standing passengers), which does limit your reasonable maximum acceleration somewhat compared to modes of transport where your passengers are all seated and wearing seatbelts.
There just isn't that much grip between the rails and the train, and any change to increase the amount of grip would probably sacrifice the efficiency and maximum speed advantages of rail. Remember, we're talking about steel on steel contact, which has incredibly low rolling resistance losses but is not exactly high friction.
> democratic voters that want high speed rail, but lose interest when experts say that there need to be lots of intermediate stops
A few do. Based on the people they elect most don't actually care about high speed rail. They care about workers - the more the better, and even better yet if you can make those workers minorities. High speed rail is only a proxy for spending lots of money on something that gets people working, if the rail is never finished that is so much the better because they can keep paying those people to build the line.
Rural voters won't benefit much. By the time they drive to a big city where they can catch the train they may as well fly. The amount of distance needed to get to the train station means that there isn't very much in range by rail that they are not better off driving.
Note, there is rural voters and hobby farm voters. The hobby farm voters live and work in a big city, and go home to their small farm with a little bit of livestock to farm for fun. They might make money on the farm, but it isn't their day job. The only difference from suburban voters is they are just a little bit farther out. There are a lot of these voters who don't see how HSR will help them, even though it will once they realize how much faster it is to get to other cities.
So write the bill to require Halliburton to build the rail and hire minorities to do so. Everyone gets to skim and everyone is happy and eventually you might even get something that kind of works.
You're not ... wrong, but I can't shake your use of the term "hobby farm voters" which is the worst kind of no-true-Scotsman aspersion, it really brings the rest of your argument down. And what is the problem with putting minorities to work on the face, that it's a kind of virtue-signaling?
It seems like that there's no inherit value in these things by your argument.
And yet, yes, there is an issue with large infrastructure projects being turned into jobs programs so the scope creeps and they never get done-- A problem not unique to transportation infrastructure, but government-funded projects in general, as the incentives for project managers in govt and politicians are aligned to continuously increase scope
I couldn't find a better term for those who live close enough to a big city to actually make use of it, while far enough out to look like farmers. There are some real farmers in this group as well.
You can have both though. In Europe and Asia you can usually choose a train with few stops or many on the same line, and you’ll see the fast train blow by the slow one as it’s stopped at a minor station.
There's a deeper issue, which is that such analyses always treat profitability as the key goal. This is public infrastructure -- it doesn't need to be profitable, just meet some more important public goal. We shouldn't expect that the electric grid be profitable in providing power to rural customers (and, similarly, mail delivery), and providing low-carbon, high-speed, easy-to-use transportation to everyone is an important societal goal.
Public services also have the benefit of being connected to the greater tax pool. If profitability is a goal of a public service, it shouldn't be measured in isolation. If the service causes an indirect increase economic activity it will cause a proportional increase in tax revenue.
I think the author touches on this? France seems to include social value in its profitability calculations. (SNCF is the French state-owned railway company.)
Back in 2012-2013, I did a type of competitive debate in american high school called "policy debate". That year, the topic (which we debate the full year about) involved transportation infrastructure. At the time, my partner and I read an affirmative about how good mass transit is.
Randal O'Toole is the primary author of "mass transit is bad" style arguments used against us. It was so prolific that I had a counter piece of evidence titled "O'Toole is a tool" which just tried to character assissinate him.
What is he doing still being relavent and stuff? I had judges on my debate circuit that apperently knew him in real life and mentioned at the time that he was old...
Edit: for anyone that wants to know O'toole's canadian, extremely liberal equivilent who supports mass transit, I recommend you checkout the work of Todd Litman from the Victoria Transportation Institute. He wrote most of the evidence for "mass transit good" and has publicly feuded with O'toole multiple times.
In high school debate, including policy, strategy usually involves reading a bunch of different responses to make your opponent have to frontline (respond to responses) all of them in a tighter speech. Generally, high school debate is not a great forum for legitimist investigation of issues, and should be treated more like an advanced game with a lot of strong and unintuitive meta-strategies.
There's a lot of hand-waving and unrealistic beliefs in this piece with regard to costs. For example:
"
O’Toole looks at the most expensive few lines possible:
Britain’s 345‐ mile London–Scotland HS2 high‐ speed rail line was originally projected to cost £32.7 billion (about $123 million per mile) and is currently expected to cost £106 billion ($400 million per mile).
International comparisons of high-speed rail costs exist, and Britain’s costs are by far the worst.
"
It looks as if California will exceed that cost by quite a bit for it's equivalent length HSR project, if and when it's ever completed.
And how does this square with the current reality of the California project costs (estimated to be over $100M, even though it's over a decade for completion, and the budget has already grown >2.5x)
"
the official Obama-era crayon, at 20,000 km, would be $500 billion at tunnel-free European costs, or maybe $600 billion with 5% tunneling
"
So we're gonna do the rest of the 19,400 km for only $500bn, when the most recent 600km is costing $100bn?
A good friend of mine works for a large construction firm that has bid on some of the California high speed rail jobs. He said that for much of the work (particularly moving existing utility infrastructure) there are no firms bidding, or at most one firm. They therefore know they can jack up the price to 2-3X normal costs. The work needs to happen in places where there are literally no construction workers, and crews don't want to go to where the work needs to be done since there is other work close to their house.
Where I live, which has a large African-American population, construction workers that I see are overwhelmingly white and many of the unions are notoriously racist (and I don't know about the others). Just notice the people working those jobs around you.
How much is that racism costing the US economically? Of course it costs the targets of racism the most: I don't have high-speed rail; they don't have jobs, health care, etc.
Broad generalization: Unions that existed when segregation was still a thing generally have a less diverse membership than newer unions. I’ve mentioned it before here, but this historical holdover is one reason why US unions are dysfunctional relative to those in other countries.
American bullet trains are hamstrung by America's world leadership in legalized institutional corruption. Any big-ticket, long-term US capital project will be first and foremost a multi-year conduit from the public purse to private pockets, and might only incidentally deliver what was supposedly paid for, at 4x-20x the originally quoted price. The 3x-19x is corruption money.
We see this, at various times, in transit tunnels (Big Dig, 2nd Ave Subway), nuke power plants, the embassy complex in Iraq, the Wall, F-35 and other military procurement, manned spaceflight, and California's bullet train fiasco (mercifully killed after shoveling out only the first few $billions of what promised to be a truly massive gravy train).
Solar and wind power projects seem momentarily immune to this process, for reasons not exactly clear. Their short terms, clear goals, and simple accounting may leave little scope for massive corruption. Corruption wants projects that deliver a steady flow of cash for at least four years, preferably 10 or 20.
There are rumblings about a new $trillion missile program, perhaps to take up the SLS contractors when SLS has to be cancelled in favor of SpaceX Starship at well below 1% of the price.
The difference between SLS and Starship illustrates the difference between a program intended mainly to fuel corruption, and one with goals that match the label.
Despite several flaws and uncharitable misrepresentations in his policy analysis, I actually agree with most of O'Toole's conclusions.
I post a lot on here about rail, and I disagree with a lot of output from the Cato Institute, but the infrastructure cost of long-distance High Speed Rail in the US would be immense, and the geography of settlement and commuting patterns in the country are too car-oriented to take advantage of passenger-only HSR. Americans already do most travel by car and long-distance travel by air, so High Speed Rail would be a slower and costlier substitute for long-distance flights, and a maybe-faster but drastically less flexible alternative to <300 mile travel.
It's no accident France runs the TGV like an airline, because they work the same way: you get to your destination station, and now what? You need to hop on public transit or rent a car like you would at an airport. But in Europe, a big town is far more likely to have public transit of acceptable quality, frequency, and coverage to solve the last mile problem; all but the most transit-webbed US cities do not.
This article exposes some of the flaws and misrepresentations in his analysis, but then contributes its own flaws in turn. One example: in truth intercity buses are very widespread in Europe, and not only do they fill in gaps left by the rail system, but thanks to expressways on some routes they be as fast as "moderate-speed trains" too. Truly High Speed Rail only runs in a dozen corridors in Europe, and the rest of the passenger rail on the continent runs the gamut from decent to atrocious. Buses are flexible, because they can go where the roads already go.
One way to get around the last-mile problem is to ensure your destination is likely to be transit-webbed town, or your destination station is very close the location to which you actually want to go. This sounds a lot like commuter rail -- the speed depends on how much you want to spend on infrastructure. In the US, this would mean that lines radiate out from NYC, Boston, DC, Philly, Chicago, Atlanta, LA, SF, Miami, Seattle, Portland... but not any further than an hour or two of travel. The Northeast Corridor is a lucky exception because you have some of the most interconnected cities in the US all in a convenient line.
What's most frustrating is that many of both the opponents and supporters of HSR in the US miss the point: the point is to both invest in and subsidize infrastructure and programs that are societally useful and unlock productivity and opportunities. The Cato Institute would prefer a world without subsidies, but that's not appropriate for the sorts of high-cost functions that offer a major benefit to society. Pedestrian Observations would prefer more mobility and transit, but sometimes that transit actually looks like an airplane or bus or subsidized taxis, because it's what makes most immediate use out of the current infrastructure in a way that balances opex with capex.
> so High Speed Rail would be a slower and costlier substitute for long-distance flights, and a maybe-faster but drastically less flexible alternative to <300 mile travel.
Lots of people in the US fly distances in the 300-800km range cited in the article. So equating long-distance and flight doesn't seem right. Trains are no less flexible than flights (or busses) over any distance (obviously they can be slower); they only lose flexibility when compared with cars.
> One example: in truth intercity buses are very widespread in Europe, and not only do they fill in gaps left by the rail system, but thanks to expressways on some routes they be as fast as "moderate-speed trains" too.
The article's author says more or less precisely the same thing as you've said here. In addition, the flexibility of busses is not the same as the flexibility of a bus. Yes, bus services can range from inter-city routes moving at 80mph to local ones servicing small villages. But these are never the same busses.
>they only lose flexibility when compared with cars
Planes fly in more or less straight lines from source to destination, and adding a new route is just some paperwork and renting the terminal space. No multi-billion dollar investment to connect a new nearby or distant city.
>flexibility of busses is not the same as the flexibility of a bus
Again, he means the flexibility of adding new routes, not having the bus pick you up at your hotel.
> Adding a new route is just some paperwork and renting the terminal space. No multi-billion dollar investment to connect a new nearby or distant city.
Adding a new route, sure. Adding a new destination, not so much. Are airports cheaper than train stations? I don't know.
> Planes fly in more or less straight lines from source to destination, and adding a new route is just some paperwork and renting the terminal space. No multi-billion dollar investment to connect a new nearby or distant city.
One of the justifications for California HSR was that existing airport slots are almost saturated. Studies showed that airport expansion was going to cost at least as much as HSR. Runway and terminal expansions actually do cost billions of dollars.
And while HSR costs have ballooned, so too would airport expansion costs. Perhaps even more so because much of the HSR cost increases are related to intransigent farm owners in rural areas, whereas the majority of airport capacity expansion work (at least on a cost basis) involves much more developed areas, where NIMBYs tend to be at least as ornery.
The studies also projected greater cost burdens with highway expansion alternatives. Nobody disputes that building additional lanes on I-5 in the Central Valley is cheaper than building HSR in those areas. But that's beside the point because the dilemma isn't about increasing throughway capacity in the Central Valley, but expanding capacity into and outof the SF and LA metro regions, where highway expansions are insanely expensive. Trains (and planes) let you offload people at various points within the metro region, so there's less of a highway bottleneck[2].
Maybe those studies were biased. Certainly many critics believed so. But the relative costs are much closer than people tend to believe.
>In March 2018, the Authority revised its estimate to $77.3 billion and up to $98.1 billion, pushing initial service to 2029 and services from Los Angeles to San Francisco to 2033
The cost of Ca HSR has gone up to $98 billion. There is no way building even 6 airports could possibly cost that much, and you can build the airports when you need the capacity one at a time and airports support travel to anywhere in the world, not just the handful of other cities in California the rails connect to.
So California could build 5 huge earthquake proof airports in the middle of the ocean including sea wall and bridge for the cost of HSR. It just makes no sense. I'm not opposed to rail or high-speed rail. But the places where better public transportation are needed are mostly in the US North East where density is much higher. Existing rail infrastructure is crumbling in the North East while California asks for Federal money for white elephant boondoggles like Ca HRS. It's infuriating.
I think given the variation in costs for HSR worldwide, we need to consider the first point of discussion for CA (or US) HSR to be "why are the costs so much higher here?"
It's true that the costs are crazy high, but that's not true worldwide. That means that objections to CA/US HSR are initially (at least) really objections to the ridiculous costs, not the actual idea itself.
Much of the cost increases you see in figures like those quoted for CAHSR are related to timelines.
First, projected infrastructure project costs in the United States are usually quoted (by agencies) in year of expenditure dollars, which means projected expenditures for each particular year are literally inflated. If you push a project back 15 years, you can easily see double-digit percentage increases in quoted total expenditures. I don't know the exact figure but AFAIU this is very much the case with CAHSR--a large fraction, and perhaps even a majority, of nominal cost increases is related to inflation adjustments as the timeline keeps getting pushed back and stretched. (Of course, that still leaves a large component that isn't.)
Secondly, pushing back timelines incurs all sorts of additional real costs. For example, you have to extend supply and labor contracts, which often means you end up getting less for your money because more people and equipment will end up sitting around idle for longer. You can also incur greater financing costs.
Also, I don't think any of the figures in that therichest.com link are inflation adjusted. AFAICT, they seem to just be tallying the year-of-expenditure or perhaps year-of-completion costs. This difference compounds inflation discrepancies even more. (There are other problems w/ those comparisons, too, such as that most of those airports were built far away from developed areas, but it's not worth going down that rabbit hole.)
Time is the themostcritical component in all large construction projects, public or private. Time is money isn't just a catchphrase. If there are any hand-wavy, magical solutions to the cost problem that can be easily applied, one of the simplest and most obvious is to finish projects as quickly as possible. Don't let them linger and get stretched out.
Unfortunately, there are often political and regulatory pressures that push things in the wrong direction. If political blowback causes timelines to be stretched out, directly or indirectly, cost increases become a self-fulfilling prophecy. After learning about the accounting methods for how projected costs are quoted, and in particular digging into CAHSR costs, I vowed as a voting citizen to never oppose a project once it got off the ground, even if I initially opposed it.
In my comparison of HSR vs. cars for <300 mile travel, the rail being 'drastically less flexible' means that it's subject to the same last-mile problem as planes are, whereas cars do not have this problem. Therefore the advantages of cars for trips like this are difficult for HSR to overcome.
As for buses, the article's author diminishes the significance of intercity buses in Europe by making it sound like private intra-national intercity bus service isn't competitive with HSR on travel time, as if HSR were widespread. HSR is only present along a dozen or so corridors in Europe, and while within France such premium bus services are a relatively new phenomenon, that isn't true elsewhere on the continent; so across the whole of Europe intercity buses are both much more common than he initially suggests, and much more competitive vs. rail than he suggests. After this, he does say buses thrive in the gaps between the train network, complement it, and have historically been important for international travel because of rail fare structures, and on those points I agree.
My wording of 'buses are flexible' does refer to the ease of introducing new routes (i.e. not having to build lots of rail), as a sibling comment correctly identified.
>In my comparison of HSR vs. cars for <300 mile travel, the rail being 'drastically less flexible' means that it's subject to the same last-mile problem as planes are, whereas cars do not have this problem. Therefore the advantages of cars for trips like this are difficult for HSR to overcome.
For personal travel, I think I'd generally agree. However, lots of US business travellers (pre-COVID anyway) would fly distances of 100,200,300 miles (the shuttles from Phila to NYC were almost always full, and that's just 90 miles!). These journeys have the no-car-last-mile problem, but that doesn't seem to have stopped the wide use of flight for those journeys.
Granted, post-COVID, it's no longer clear how many of these short-haul journeys business travellers will be making in the next 2-10 years.
Business travelers take taxis from their arrival airport to their destination and then get reimbursed by their company later.
They are among the least price-sensitive travelers and are the ones least inconvenienced by the last-mile problem, so their decision-making differs from those traveling for other reasons. (On average, they are less constrained by price and switching of modes, but are more constrained by idiosyncratic company procedures around travel.)
> infrastructure cost of long-distance High Speed Rail in the US
Is 4 to 7 times higher than anywhere else in the world. We need to bring it down to reasonable levels.
>commuting patterns in the country are too car-oriented
HSR isn't for commuting. It is for trips longer than a normal commute. The US is car-oriented - but I disagree with the word "too". HSR won't do as well (at least for the first dozen years) as other countries, but there are a lot of places where it should do well enough if we ever build it for a reasonable cost.
HSR is for commuting in additional to longer travel. I say this as someone that uses the HS1 line in the UK to commute to London at 140mph.
The key is the commute is under an hour, one stop, and it’s into London which a massive source of jobs in South east England.
I agree with your comment that HSR doesn’t do well for a decade. My train runs on the Eurostar line. That took a decade to draw people from planes. And the domestic train that I catch is now standing room only into London.
After reading the article, I can't help but feel that high speed rail is not:
. An optimal solution to a problem or
. A sexy solution looking for a problem
but that it's an integral part of an entire society and lifestyle that some people want to embrace. Serious people-mover rail seems to be an organic part of some countries that are different in 100 (1000? 10,000?) different ways that people would like to emulate
The arguments about serious modern rail investment look to be proxy arguments.
HSR was new in 1965. Most people reading this were not even born then. Congress wants to fund something new and exciting not the same old thing with just small upgrades. Of course the next congress will want to fund something different - so nothing will ever happen.
At least a tax cut lets me use my money in something useful for me. My taxes that have went to CAHSR have nothing useful to show for them. (I don't live in CA, so that is effectively zero, but the point stands) IF CAHSR would be completed it would develop economic growth. The consultants who have made money to date are not growth, they are a zero sum game where they could have been doing something else.
I really don't understand the argument for high speed rail in the US (outside of the NE corridor). There's nothing magical that's going to make it cheaper (see, e.g., California). The US is huge. High speed rail is absurdly expensive compared to planes, and capacity is nearly nothing compared to planes. So why is it such a focus of obsession? Because it looks cool seems to be the argument that is most prevalent. But the devil is in the details.
The US may be huge. But regions within the US are not huge. There are at least a half-dozen regions in which high speed trains would make as much, if not more sense than they do in Europe if judged by population density and distances.
It's chosen because airport and highway expansions also cost many billions, and at least on paper HSR often pencils out. California studies showed that alternatives centered on airport and/or highway expansions without HSR would have also cost tens of billions, and altogether ultimately more than a master plan including HSR. AFAIU the same analysis is true for the NE.
CAHSR costs ballooned, but so do highway and airport expansions. The U.S. and many other countries have cost management problems with all large infrastructure projects.
How do you figure capacity is nothing compared to planes? The Tokaido Shinkansen carries 500,000 people per day, and it has a much higher capacity. Trains (not all of them express) leave about every 5 minutes at peak times and each one seats more than 1,000 people. People pay for the convenience even though flying is half the price and takes about the same amount of time when you factor in transit to/from airports.
I don’t get the country size argument either. Europe and China are also huge with trains stopping in small cities. At least, each coast should have a north-south line plus some truck lines to heavily populated areas.
Instead of focusing on other countries successes with HSR it may be more applicable to look at our ongoing attempts at high speed rail. The California HSRA has been working toward the goal of HSR in california for over a decade. California has the largest tax revenue in the US and one of the most progressive populations. Despite this, they still are plagued by cost overruns, deadlines, and political opposition.
At the rate things are going, I wonder if it would be cheaper to just tunnel through most of urban/suburban areas. Seems preferable to building on top of ancient railroads, dealing with all those rich NIMBY assholes, and forever getting stuck with suboptimal path.
South Korea built a whole 50km terminal section of HSR in a tunnel[1], starting at the outskirts of Seoul. It only took 3.0605 trillion KRW or about 2.7 billion dollars.
SF to San Jose is only slightly farther (~50 mi or ~80 km).
Lots of intercity bus advocates in the comments; I wonder if those people are frequent users. I’ve always regretted when I’ve chosen intercity buses. They are uncomfortable and cramped, get stuck in traffic, and you can’t properly do laptop work. I once took a flixbus from DC to NY to save $30 over Amtrak - what a terrible decision. (Riding Greyhound is an even more self-hating experience.) The price difference is telling: no one takes a bus when a train is available at the same price.
I'm not quite as down on busses, but trains really are vastly more comfortable. After a bus ride I am physically tired because I need to engage my core to stay balanced through the bumps and turns. On a train you can actually rest.
I want to like trains, but riding Amtrak a couple of years ago was disappointing. It was significantly more expensive than flying and took days rather than hours (though you don't have to show up 2 hours early for security thankfully.) The train itself was pretty run down compared to what I would have expected given the fare.
On the up side, there is lot of space for luggage and stretching out, you can walk around the train, and there was an observation car and a café car (the food being more functional than palatable, but the scenery being rather nice.) So it's kind of like taking a break from reality and hanging out on a train for a few days while it slowly moves toward your destination.
So it had its moments, but I'm in no hurry to do it again.
How long did you travel? Trains sweet spot is a few dozen to a couple hundred miles. Anything longer really should be fulfilled with high-speed rail, or air.
As someone who had the distinct pleasure of some long bus rides in college:
I would rather staple myself to the bottom of a semi than ride a bus between 2 cities. I’d rather hitchhike, end up temporarily imprisoned in a grain silo, and fight free using my wits and a corn cob than ride a bus again. If my choice was a bus or simply never traveling again: well welcome to my cloister.
Yes, fine, the particular bus service I utilized in school was remarkably evil…
Suburban Express allegedly denied credit cards from ZIP codes with high Jewish populations, instructed employees to avoid handing out coupons to certain students who appeared not to speak English well and recorded a YouTube video in a UI dorm while complaining about the lack of English speakers and mocking Asian accents by saying "No Engrish."
My last long bus ride between Chenzhou Hunan and Guangzhou was a bit meh. Chinese buses are a bit nicer than American ones, but the ride is bumpier and traffic can screw up the schedule. But there isn’t much of a choice when HSR tickets are hard to score on that leg.
From western Europe : No. The wifi did not work. You had commute times at in shitholes at the middle of the night. Overall the traject lasted two more hours than was announced. It's very uncomfortable. Don't do it without taking some kind of pillow. Even if the buses were faster by two hours trains, I would still take the train. Actually, now that I have some money, I actually feel like I am treating myself when booking a train.
I took a 5eu special from Amsterdam to London and it was perfectly pleasant, and we even got to walk around in the eurotunnel. Don't recall any Wi-Fi though.
Ahhh hello fellow Illini. I didn't mind the long bus rides too much, but I was ~20 and probably hungover most if not every time. Not something I'd rely on as a functioning adult, that's for sure :).
Agree, the experience of intercity buses is terrible. Sometimes no restrooms, sometimes restrooms don't have running water hand wash, cramped seats, you have to carefully plan when you board the bus if you want to be able to pick who you sit next to (mostly because I want 100% of my seat space not 70% damnit), no food service, bumpy ride that you can't get work done on, hard to sleep on, and Greyhound sometimes makes you get off the bus and re-board the same damn bus every few hours.
Horrible experience. Trains are so, so much nicer. I always prefer trains over buses or planes (time permitting).
Trains are also much safer than buses, statistically.
I used to take Boltbus semi-frequently intercity, and it was spacious. I'm relatively tall and found it had adequate leg room and room for a laptop.
The killer feature for me on multiple occasions was that they were one of the few transit options with enlightened bicycle policies. I once rode Boltbus to NYC, purchased a bicycle there, and took it back to Philadelphia in the space under the bus. They say you can only bring a bike if there is room under the bus, but I've never seen the cargo space fill up ever.
Frustratingly, even though Amtrak is starting to support bicycles, they do not allow bikes over 50lbs, which eliminates every e-bike or cargo bike that I've owned. This was not an issue on Boltbus.
> no one takes a bus when a train is available at the same price.
I agree, although I'm curious - was this trip to NYC, or somewhere else? Round-trip Amtrak tickets from DC to NYC sell for $150+ dollars, while equivalent bus rides are usually $60 or lower, depending on your departure times.
I've happily taken buses over trains, despite the cramped conditions, just so I don't have to pay $100 more.
Sorry, I just guessed the difference. It was DC to Manhattan one-way. Looking at emails, I paid $20 for Flixbus in Nov 2019, booking three days in advance. I recently took the same trip by Amtrak and paid $29, but I booked two weeks in advance, plus pandemic. Booking an Amtrak departure for three days from now costs $128-196. [A related way to save money I've regretted is flying from Paris to London rather than taking Eurostar. More false economy.]
Yeah, obviously the difference in price. I can go Manchester-London on a bus for 3£ (which I've already done a couple times overnight), whereas the train would have cost anything from 40£ to >100£.
Randal O'Toole has been crashing rail conversations for years, always with wrong and misleading facts. It's not like he doesn't know when he's off (like his argument about the topography of Japan). He just bends the data however he can to support his anti-rail argument.
Rail doesn't always make sense and rail projects can absolutely be poorly managed. But O'Toole adds nothing but noise to the conversation.
High-speed rail feels like such a red herring for the US (and really any part of the world). You know what's great and costs a fraction of this stuff? Normal trains. HSR is not very useful for local commutes cuz if it's going fast there aren't going to be many stops. So just build cheaper intercity networks that bring people where they need to go, and have _lots_ of stops.
Successful HSR exists in places like France and Japan because of how urbanism was shaped in those places. Everything is in Paris, so people _have to go to Paris_. So the "every TGV line is to- or from- Paris" serves that purpose. Japan is one-dimensional, so you also only need one HSR line for effect (exageratting a bit). But HSR in both of those countries are extremely expensive, and despite people posting all the "Japan is cool" stuff with people taking the shinkansen every day for work, the reality is more banal (business trips, family vacations, same stuff as what you find with planes).
But the big payoffs come from having people be able to rely on trains for more day-to-day stuff. And you solve the last mile problem by just building a train station every mile! And in that case your train really doesn't actually need to go that fast.
Why doesn’t some industrious individual purchase an entire town roughly 50miles from midtown Manhattan, owning say a 5 mile radius, and install a high speed rail (150MPH straight into Grand Central - no stops) 20min from Grand Central to the terminus, and then 10min from there to anywhere in the 5 mile radius. Now you can offer housing with a 30min commute to midtown. Only portions of Manhattan can offer that level of commuting convenience. Do the numbers not work out? Is this something that would only work in China, where the right of way, and land at the terminus could be acquired all at the same time without individual property owners trying to extract maximum value? Does a completely underground hyperloop resolve this land/right of way problem, reducing the entrepreneur to only having to acquire land at the terminus?
Underground doesn't help you. Western property rights operate under the ad coeleum doctrine, or "whoever's is the soil, it is theirs all the way to Heaven and all the way to Hell". The upper limit has been established by the US Supreme Court but there hasn't been a solid case about the lower limit, and testing this through litigation is a fairly difficult way to make money.
A Hyperloop doesn't offer much advantage over conventional technology given the short distance (50 mi); even at normal high-speed-rail speeds you spend a good chunk of the time accelerating and decelerating. Speeding up and slowing down faster is not tenable, as no one wants to be on a roller coaster as a commute.
The other thing is that the commuting range of New York is pretty far. The metro area is considered to stretch as far as Pike County PA (82 miles), Trenton NJ (70 miles), the entirety of Long Island, and New Haven (80 miles). Anything that is feasible to develop already has been; anything that hasn't been is either some land use that can't be developed (a park), has unfavorable geography (the Meadowlands is a marsh that gets flooded often and is vital to local flooding protection), or other mitigating factors.
Then there's the issue of the land assembling. No one could afford to assemble such a parcel. NYC's metro area was estimated to have 10% of the entire country's real estate value [1]. And even if one had the land you can't just do whatever you like because you're the owner; you're still subject to local zoning rules.
Check out Lebanon NJ. Still massive tracks of farmland and woods. 50 miles from midtown, currently with property for sale at $50k/acre. 5 mile radius is approximately 50k acres. At $50k/acre = $2.5B. With construction costs of $1B for an 18 mile run in Chicago, the Boring company could make this Lebanon <-> Manhattan for $2.5B. $5B for a 30min commute to Midtown Manhattan, and to break even, you’d only have to sell the land you acquired at $50k/acre at $100k/acre. I’d happily buy a 1 acre plot of land with a 30 min commute time to Midtown for $100k.
Lebanon NJ the town is covered entirely by a historic district. Like I said, you can't just do whatever you want and disregard local zoning if you own land.
> With construction costs of $1B for an 18 mile run in Chicago, the Boring company could make this Lebanon <-> Manhattan for $2.5B.
This is vaporware until it actually happens. Maglevs and monorails and personal rapid transit were also supposed to be significantly cheaper than their traditional counterparts, until they weren't. I could promise you HSR for $1, that doesn't mean I can make it happen.
Right, you need Lebanon NJ residents to decide they’d prefer doubling their property value to some crumbling old buildings. Disney was able to have his way in Orlando. It can be done.
Presumably if they went above and beyond normal local zoning restrictions with a historic district they care more than your average American.
And presumably if you could make a bunch of Americans magically consider massive redevelopment on that scale, it would be more fruitful to do it in a place closer in where you don't have to spend billions of dollars on transportation infrastructure, or the other billions of dollars establishing services like water supply, a grid with adequate capacity, schools, fire, police, medical services, etc. Sidewalk Labs wanted to be in the middle of the action on the Toronto waterfront, not in the undeveloped boonies.
OpenRailwayMap[0] is useful to see where High-Speed Rail has been built - choose Max speeds map style.
It uses data from OpenStreetMap[1] - free (as in freedom) map edited by community in a Wikipedia fashion.
Highway self-driving is not the computational challenge that general insane-city / local street / surface street driving is. With mild convergent infrastructure (better marking policies for construction, mesh networking or broadcast messaging about road hazards and bottlenecks, etc) it will become pretty safe.
And the trucking industry will push it quickly and probably within a fairly developed regulatory structure.
And really that's all I want out of self-driving. Sleep or work in a car on a divided highway. That's really it.
That one achievement will make short/medium trains, all intercity busses, and probably most airline flights under 400 miles not really that desirable. If my self-driving EV car gets me there even at 60 mph and I get to fill my car with crap, and I have the car when I get there, and I can load it with a family...
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] thread- It's not that "American rail construction is just bad. However, this is not because rail is bad; it’s because the United States is bad.". It's that american rail construction in the northeast is OLD, and we're hosed by the first adopter paradox.
- from this, it directly follows that upgrading the rail for high speed use is HARD, because the issue is at least in part down to rail line geometry. AIUI, a fundamental reason you can't go 95mph between Boston and New York is that the railroad tracks have curves in them whose radii have a maximum speed without risk of derailment that's quite low, and to resolve this problem you'd have to eminent domain swathes of, say, New Haven. There are other issues too, like local/freight/... sharing the same lines, but that's kind of saying the same thing twice: construction through densely populated Northeast Corridor cities is so impractical that it's hard to see how it could ever happen or be thought of as a particularly good thing if it did.
The UK has this problem with old rail too.
European rail is quite new, probably thanks in part to the "benefit" of Europe being leveled in the last century. China and Japan have new rail too.
Another difference: populations in Europe, China and Japan are more concentrated. Just look at how many airports there are in the US vs Europe. France, a country of 60M+, has a mere handful of airports. So it's easier to serve more people with less line.
Lastly, construction is (now) super expensive in the US.
Sad as it is, I just don't see long-distance rail as being economically viable in the US.
In my opinion focusing on cost versus fares is myopic to the point of insanity. As long as we're laser-focused on the economic viability of rail we'll never see any of the other benefits.
We have a responsibility to future generations to not just keep things the same but to make them better, and I think rail does that. If you look around and you dislike your current mode of living, hate your commute, and want to have access to cities, then guess what rail is a solution for all of that. It takes decades to see any real benefit from it though, which is why nobody ever goes for it.
Instead we've done the same but with sprawling highways, which doesn't do much for density (and requires cars, and once you have a car you just use it for commuting).
I wish this didn't need to be pointed out, but there are a lot of stupid proposals out there. So be on the lookout - don't blinding support HSR: put support where it will be useful.
Of course, that still may not be enough to justify such a line, but the fact that nobody travels from one end to the other is not an issue.
A train going Chicago to Minneapolis would only lose a few minutes stopping at cities like Milwaukee WI and Madison WI - both fairly large cities. An airplane could stop at each, but the cost of one stop would double the full trip time.
Where a train stops vs go past is a very complex subject full of trade offs. However in general a train that only goes non-stop between two points is a bad idea. I've been in discussions elsewhere in this topic about that - read them for more info. (including those who disagree - they have valuable insight)
This puts the time loss to stopping a train at 3-17 minutes.
People prefer not being constrained to the train tracks if they can drive, they prefer to not live near the constant blaring of horns and squealing of wheels on the tracks, and in these days prefer not to be stuck in a cabin full of potentially sick strangers for 2-3 hours a day round trip.
Was it legal and politically palatable to build there, or in the neglected neighborhoods around it? In the USA, unless you're talking about actual greenfield land, rail-supporting development is usually illegal to build.
The reason rail works beautifully in other countries is that you can get off the train and walk to useful destinations, even if where you disembarked isn't where you live. Shinkansen in Japan have tons of shopping, nice restaurants, and hotels all within a block or two of the station. So there's a reason for non-residents to stop as well as residents. And because everything surrounds the station there's no point for residents to go anywhere else.
You don’t provide enough specifics about your local situation, but it’s been long noted that airport rail lines underperform. The author Alon Levy’s blog and others in the transit space have covered this. TLDR: They fail serve the local riders well, in an attempt to serve less frequent airport riders who are more likely to pay for a taxi/rideshare, rent a car, get picked up/dropped off, etc. There are often poor airport connections, like people movers or airport connectors, getting to the right terminals, etc which creates more friction and confusion.
>neglected neighborhoods that never got the rush of development and gentrification rail was supposed to bring
Rail and transportation infrastructure generally is an enabler for re/development and land use, but not a guarantee of it. Necessary but not sufficient by itself.
That would be ridiculous, if it would up to 1 hour round trip it maybe would be more effective.
The other line (running from downtown to the airport) was also a total of 1 hour 30ish minutes including bus from my house to the terminal, then rail down to the airport. It otherwise was a 30ish minute drive, tops, and driving is what almost everyone chose to do if they had the car to do so.
(I live in the town that had the first rail line in Australia.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcontinental_railroad
First, there is a fundamental tradeoff between location and transportation. Land is not a produced good, it is owned by landlords and its value comes from location.
Transportation makes prime land less valuable and outlying land more valuable, thus it redistributes value outward, allowing people to escape from the thumbs of landlords and buy their own land. Eisenhower's freeway building project and cheap gas is responsible for the American middle class, much moreso than anything FDR did, as people could move out of apartment buildings in inner cities and buy land of their own, due to the improvements in transportation technology.
For those improvements to work, you have to fan out. A rail line isn't going to get it done, but what a rail line can do is transport people to a remote place and then they fan out with roads. That is a good idea for redistributing people if an area is already densely populated and the land is bought in a large circle around the city. Then you hop on a train to take you to nowhere and there you can buy cheap land. But if the built up area is relatively small, you are better off with a network of cheap roads to carry you to where land is cheaper.
Thus the U.S., which has always had smaller cities surrounded by more open space than Europe, got more bang from its buck with roads. But the same network of roads did not have the transformative effect in Europe as it did in the U.S.
What is interesting is the shift to remote work. The internet has made communication another strong rival to location, providing another threat to land values in inner cities. So it could be that in the future, we will not need so many subsidies for transportation but for things like broadband, to help nurture the middle class and allow people to buy land in remote areas.
People - especially landlords -- are very much aware of these dynamics, which is why historically there was great opposition to roads from moneyed interests, as documented by Adam Smith. And why roads are deserving of subsidies, due to all the positive externalities. In the same way, internet infrastructure is deserving of subsidies today. Whether or not rail is deserving of subsidies in the US depends on how large the disk is of expensive land surrounding cities. In the northeast, it is large, and that's why you see rail in the northeast. In most of the U.S., it's not large at all and you can buy affordable land without traveling too far away from work. In Europe, it tends to be large as well.
With the internet, that is only getting better and both road and rail are becoming less relevant as an agent for the promotion of the middle class land ownership. They are still relevant, but I believe the window has closed on dreams of high speed rail connecting cities in the U.S. High speed internet will get the job done faster and easier, if coupled from a large shift to working from home.
In any sensible universe, the major cities of Ohio would be connected to each other, Detroit, Chicago, and Pittsburgh by high-speed rail.
This is commonly trotted out, and it is false for all practical purposes. The US does have a lot of empty spaces where no one lives--but no one is seriously proposing to hook up empty spaces to HSR. If you instead look at where people in the US do live, it's not all that different from those places. If you mapped out the major cities of the Midwest centered on Chicago and compared it to France, you'll find that the US has larger cities whose distances from the major regional hub are roughly the same as their corresponding cities in France. Since HSR works in France to connect those cities, it should generally work equally well in the US to connect those cities.
The California HSR plan begs to differ.
>Since HSR works in France to connect those cities, it should generally work equally well in the US to connect those cities.
Only if people routinely travel to those cities rather than further away cities.
Do you still think that qualifies as "empty spaces"?
Fresno is a county seat and there's Cal State. That's it.
Same in France, every local baron wanted his dedicated HS line, so now we got plenty but only one is profitable.
>Only if people routinely travel to those cities rather than further away cities.
They do. People naturally travel more to places closer to them than further away. There is a strong correlation here. When you’re hungry and want to go out, do you go to a food place 5-10 minutes away? Or a place hours away? Or 3 Michelin starred place on the other side of the planet.
The regions targeted for HSR often have significant auto traffic on the highways connecting them, and short haul flights between their airports. HSR hits a sweet spot for trips that are long drives and short flights. Cost and time competitive, while also being more comfortable.
This is only true in a vacuum without our political and legal environment. If you could make the project immune to CEQA, eminent domain challenges, and union pressure, then you have a much more viable railway. If you could at least brush off two of those three and one of them was the union pressure, then it might actually get built in the manner it was intended to be linking San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles and San Diego. At this point we’ll be lucky to get a line that doesn’t share tracks with freight between SF and LA.
and to be clear, it's not that high-speed rail is an unmitigated good, but that we love our cars so much that any challenge to their supremacy is a literal (perceived) threat to our own egos.
high-speed rail makes a ton of sense for the coastal cooridors, as well as at least a few interior ones (e.g., the midwest, texas). it's probably not a good use of resources for a cross-continental passenger run of HSR, since air can more efficiently and flexibly link the coastal and interior intercity networks.
For example, the population density of Paris is about 20 times that of Atlanta, a city ~3x as large (including the Greater Atlanta Area).
I’ve always operated under the assumption that there is massive selection bias in the United States for people who like more personal space. Never considered it was part of car culture.
in LA, outside of a very few of the oldest core districts, even our supposedly sleepy neighborhood streets are often 40+ feet wide (note that cars are typically 6-7 feet wide), with 15 feet of public easement, and 15+ feet of mandatory setbacks, so urban land use gets out of whack real quicklike that way.
If we don't wait and want to build now, people don't want to fund the project due to lack of immediate ridership.
Funny how we keep building roads, and expanding highways, while saying building rail infrastructure doesn't make sense because there aren't enough people to use it.
It’s not that sad. We have lots and lots of other low hanging fruit to pick.
Let’s even further improve fright distribution by rail. Let’s get mass transit within our cities and their suburbs to be less terrible. Let’s have more than a handful of cities in the entire country where people can reasonably live without cars.
Most cities have terrible mass transit. Good transit is one where people don't have to arrange their life around it. Meaning it comes often, and is reasonably fast.
They upgraded their old regional lines too but that's not really relevant to the experience of new, 300+ km/h rail.
My point was that the rail infrastructure in Europe just isn't that old and even in the 1980s you had a huge advantage in building for speed over the 1830s.
Amtrak hasn't had the vision to stick with the plan. Instead we get a new plan every 10 years or so. Sure the new plan is arguably better, but the old plan complete would be better yet. The money spent making a new plan would fix one of the bad curves (only one though)
I think this would be better stated as “funding” — it's not like nobody at Amtrak has failed to think about the hotspots for them, it's just that they are in the unfortunate position of being expected to service a lot of [now] marginal routes against both very well funded alternatives, but they have limited governmental support for the kind of major infrastructure changes they need to dramatically improve their offerings.
A completely private business could, for example, simply discontinue unprofitable lines or acquire long-term debt to fund a major capital investment but they were created specifically to avoid closing routes and debt is a political hot potato. A government service could point to greater societal benefits to justify funding out of general tax revenue but Amtrak is expected make enough in ticket revenue that they're perennially short of cash. A large part of the problem is simply that railroads have high base costs which can be made up in volume but their service costs more than alternatives because we don't subsidize rail anywhere near as much as highways (for example, DC to NY on train costs more than a bus, but I-95 isn't a toll road funded only by users).
Edit: just to be clear, I'm sure that they're just as flawed as any other group of humans — it's just that whenever you see some obvious problem holding an organization back, it's almost never the case that nobody there has thought about it.
This is kind of partly true. The track in Connecticut in particular is bad enough that you really need new right-of-way as opposed to fixing individual curves here and there (which is the situation for the rest of the NEC). Alon has favored a new right-of-way that's basically right next to I-95 for as much as possible, which minimizes the takings you need between New Rochelle and New Haven. East of New Haven, there's far less density, and it's pretty easy to make a new right-of-way wherever you want to.
The other issue in Connecticut is that, even on the existing right-of-way, Amtrak isn't able to utilize the available speed capacity of the current right-of-way. This is due to Metro North intentionally slowing Amtrak trains down for its commuter rail schedule instead.
This never seems to be much of a problem when highways are concerned however.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/08/wisconsin-fo...
I was a bit skeptical until I saw this user map of the Northeast Corridor:
https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1dH5vJWx6lwBlBv...
The route that the existing track takes is insanely suboptimal and seems so hard to fix considering the existing urban sprawl in the relevant areas.
High speed rail goes well beyond that speed and needs much larger curves, at which point you're deviating enough from main roads you may as well just take a different path entirely.
The above isn't a perfect answer to all situations, but it helps a lot.
The rail solution to that would probably be a tunnel. A tunnel is a cheaper affair with just two tracks than if it has to be wide enough for two tracks and six to eight highway lanes.
In any case when you start building HSR it becomes progressively harder to eke out savings and the highest come from urban area speedups. Going from 50 to 100MPH cuts a lot more time than going from 150MPH to 200MPH. And the former simply doesn't work in the median of a highway.
I don't really know this area. Say you wanted to build an entirely new and mostly straight Stamford - Waterbury - Hartford - Providence alignment. Some of that would need to be in tunnel. But how much of that could you do on the surface without needing to demolish too many houses?
But then the bizarre/historic track geometry ruins the fast service...
Rerouting so far has been a headache; in New Haven-Boston where the tracks are so curvy new tracks have to be built, the FRA proposed going through entirely different population centers (the geography of the existing coast line is very challenging). This has resulted in an interesting fight where people want the train in their town, but also do not want the impact of newly constructed tracks through their town.
They really can't.
https://www.amtrak.com/routes/acela-train.html
Just to pick apart that specific example, you could instead build a bridge from West Haven to East Haven with much less eminent domain, but much more complaints about the bridge being built.
When a suspension bridge was proposed for where I-95 crosses the Potomac, the residents of Alexandria complained that it would be an eyesore and were able to get a drawbridge built instead of a suspension bridge.
What that leaves your argument with is that existing rail only makes things harder because of a sunk cost facility. Let's improve our bean counting then.
Maybe America is one big sunk cost fallicy, being an older republic. Time for some creative destruction I guess.
those parts of Europe, let's not forget, were rather thoroughly flattened to a wet paste about 80 years ago, and were rebuilt with nice, straight, quick rail lines by people who knew how fast trains that weren't built in 1840 could go.
The U.S. has essentially stopped building urban interstates since the late 70's, when opposition from residents became too strong to ignore. I don't foresee this changing in the near future.
My understanding is that construction costs in Europe are rising as well due to (among other things) increased use of tunnels in urban area due to opposition from residents.
I know the popular Western image of infrastructure development in China is jackbooted thugs forcing farmers off their land, and there's some of that as well, but most people are reasonably happy with the compensation they get. The Shanghai-Hangzhou maglev project (below) is also an instructive case study of an ambitious rail project that was cancelled largely thanks to (sadly unwarranted) public concern.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai%E2%80%93Hangzhou_magl...
1. Geography and geology is tricky. Rail lines don't curve because the builders just love curves. There's geographic and geologic reasons for a lot of rail line positioning. That's in addition to people living/working/shopping in a place where it would be useful to lay track.
2. Freight lines own most of the track in the US. Amtrak gets to use those lines but freight has right-of-way. Amtrak must side track when a freight train is coming. Amtrak only has a few sections of the NEC as dedicated passenger track. Without dedicated passenger track Amtrak's schedules are all over the place. Freight trains have trouble all the time and passenger trains need to sit and wait while they fix/move the freight train.
2. France and Japan have dedicated tracks. Germany has reliable high speed freight lines. again more than anything it's a matter of political will.
The rail networks of Britan and France, just to pick a couple, are older than those of the USA. No first adopter paradox in that comparison.
And it's largely irrelevant anyways because true high speed rail (TGV, HS2, ICE) doesn't start showing up in Europe until the '80s, long after WWII reconstruction wrapped up.
And then in the 1960s Dr Beeching’s cuts closed almost half the rail network.
The only new high speed railway in the UK opened in the 90s to connect London with the continent, I.e. Eurostar
Liberals want nation-spanning HSR but will never ride it; merely funding it is enough to retain the sense of victory over their red-state foes.
Why say this? It's a big capital-intensive project. A nuclear power plant is profitable if you exclude the cost of building the reactor, but that's the problem - you can't exclude it, and breakeven time is a big part of cost-benefit analysis.
What was breakeven time for the TGV? That would convince me more.
I wonder how they're going to cope with (let's give a very lowball estimate) 40% of their tonnage tapering off over the next few decades. Looks like coal shipped by rail is already way down from its peak, and dropping fast. Looks like they charge a premium for intermodal shipping—may have to cut prices on that to keep volume up.
Because as long as their aren't ongoing operational costs it's enticing to governments to build, they don't care if it loses money overall because they aren't profit driven and have non-monetary goals.
Why not all three?
Ground-effect airplanes should only take about 4x more energy than a car at the same speed, the track is just cement or even dirt, they're not useful for terrorism, no pilot needed, and they could even be powered electrically if they make stops every hour or two. You could drive onto a carrier and fly at 200 mph to your destination.
Basically a slow hyperloop, but you don't need a vaccuum or anything high tech at all. I've asked about this before and nobody has explained why it wouldn't work - maybe it's so obvious it goes without saying.
edit: hills could be made more flat but surely would be less problematic than for a train where the track must be almost totally flat, any small object or animal could be flown over maybe even trading speed for height, more energy intensive than high speed rail but construction and maintenance far less so. We can make a computer control system for F-117 but we can't control ground effect? These don't sound like carefully considered objections.
Rolling resistance is not a big deal for trains (or even cars). It exists, but it is small. The real issues for going faster for both is wind resistance. (maglev is better more for maintenance cost than rolling resistance - at least until we get to hyperloop speeds - if we ever do)
Ground effect is unstable and hard to control, incursions on the track would be very dangerous, but most obvious measures to mitigate intrusions interfere with ground effect flight or require bigger rights of way.
It would be a slow hyperloop with a much bigger ground footprint (like classical high speed rail), less efficiency than classical high-speed rail, control/safety issues not present in high-speed rail, etc.
Ground-effect vehicles might make sense over water, though, building effectively a very fast ferry. There's a startup from the last YC Batch trying it. Regent: https://www.regentcraft.com/
This idea is always met with extreme incredulousness about it because it violates their intuition. "You have to go as fast as possible or it won't compete well with air travel! If I have to stop in Merced for 5 minutes to let a handful of people on or off, I'd rather just fly".
The problem is that those handfuls of people, the result of the potential travel between the cartesian product of dozens of cities, adds up. There are number of trade publications that have analyzed passenger patterns on successful systems and have found that the ridership exclusively between major terminal stations typically accounted for ~50% of total ridership, and less than 50% of total revenue. Smaller hops have higher prices and better market penetration because they aren't served by air travel and therefore have no competition. Larger hops between major cities have lower prices simply because they have to compete with air travel. Even in a "perfect" world with non-stop trains, HSR is still going to lose some traffic to air travel, and they won't have all of that massive supplementary revenue from intermediate destination travel.
Unfortunately, the idea that we should build a system that isn't optimized for them just doesn't resonate with people. And since high speed rail is now a partisan issue, and those same parties have a sharp urban rural divide, we get two camps: 1) democratic voters that want high speed rail, but lose interest when experts say that there need to be lots of intermediate stops, and 2) rural voters who don't want high speed rail, even though they would benefit from it greatly, because "socialism". And because of it, I believe American HSR is doomed. It will either get built and lose massive amounts of money, or it won't get built at all.
If you build the rails well, you can run both express service (which skips stops to maintain higher speed) and local service (which stops at most or all stations).
I believe the way to solve some of this would be to attack it from multiple directions:
1. Require that future highway construction be "rail-ready" - i.e., leave room and have curves that are friendly to adding rail to the highway corridor in the future.
2. Develop local rail corridors that are "high-speed-rail-ready" - as a connection between two large cities is mainly of interest to a few, but commuter rail to the nearest large city is more obviously valuable. And if designed right it can be made for commuting but still be curved, etc correctly to allow higher speed trains if/when it's finally connected through.
It's not clear to me how a rural voter (I guess the 'voter' part is because these are publicly funded works) really benefits. Once a year vacations to the beach? Shopping trips where you are limited to what you can manage on foot? Visits to a specialist doctor?
Since the sense of rail depends on regular use, I guess all that's left is commutes from a dispersed area to a central one. You have to wonder how much telecommuting will decrease the need for that over time.
One good thing about rail is that you are allowed to do it piecemeal. There's bound to be somewhere that needs a point A to point B bullet train.
If it's standardized it will be easier to make sure you can develop it piecemeal.
That said, the advantage of rail is it stops at points in between. It cannot stop at every little town, but it needs to stop at every big city (you might even be able to do a suburb to downtown - the idea looks like it would work on paper but I'm not aware of real experience), and it the big cities are far enough in-between some small city should get a station.
This is very complex though. There is a trade off between stopping time and number of people on the train. You can stop in each city for as little as 1 minute (plus a few more to decelerate/accelerate) if your train has a lot of doors making it fast/easy to get on/off, but those doors mean there are less seats so less people are on the train. Or you can have just one door, but now there is a long line at that door and you need to stop for 15 minutes at each small town. So busy lines will have less stops than not so busy lines - the latter need more stops to attract all the customers they can get.
This trade off needs to be considered separately for each line.
Unfortunately this system means you need parallel tracks, one set for the high speed express trains and another for the regionals. This isn't as bad as it seems, it requires double the steel and concrete, but the land is the expensive part of the deal and even though the parcel you need is wider the expense is not doubled.
Or you can run the high speed rail on routes that are optimal for it and leave the regional rail in its byzantine routes from the 30s that serve the locals well.
That being said, I think even people that agree with that statement would still be surprised at the kinds of stops that successful systems make. For example, Tokaido Shinkansen, the most financially successful line in the world, makes stops in Fuji (pop. 245k), Odawara(195k), Anjo (188k), Kakegawa (117k), Nakamura-Ku (135k), Mishima (110k), Hashima (68k), Maibara (38k), and Atami (37k). There are three services: all-stop, skip-stop, and non-stop. The fastest non-stop service is about an 1:40 faster than the all-stop service, and 1:00 faster than the skip stop service. But most terminal-to-terminal customers still take the skip stop service because it has the highest frequency...enough to negate the speed advantage of non-stop service in most cases.
When the CAHSR proposal first came out, the phrase "cow towns like Merced" was practically a meme. People were laughing at the stop in Gilroy, saying things like "why? so we can buy garlic on our way to LA?". Most people even thought that stops in secondary cities like Fresno and Bakersfield were entirely unnecessary. But the experts who wrote the report (who are fairly well regarded, btw) chose those stops for a reason: they are rural minihubs that aggregate a lot of traffic volume in areas that are too far from larger cities.
In the words of an operations researcher I once worked with: with HSR, top speed is what sells the service, but acceleration is what makes the money. Acceleration minimizes the time loss from making more stops, and more stops means more money.
Trains have a number of advantages, one of which is a small time penalty for stopping at a station relative to aircraft (2-3 minutes vs ~45+ minutes on average), and the aircraft requires a lot personnel/all-hands to turn around quickly (see: Southwest Airlines). A commercial aircraft is simply not designed for lots of really short hops in rapid succession. There needs to be a new preflight check, refueling, unload/load belly cargo, some maintenance items are based on aircraft takeoff/landing cycles (tires, cabin pressurization, etc.) Trains stopping at station and continuing is trivial by comparison.
A rail operator wants to collect fare paying passengers along the route they are planning on operating, it’s an easy way to boost ridership and revenue. It is a balancing act to have station stops, but not increase end-to-end trip time excessively. Basic rule of thumb: Does stopping add more riders than it costs due to the stopping time penalty? If the model/data say yes, make the stop; otherwise do not.
And just because we have a station, doesn’t mean every train has stop there. We can have local, limited, and express trains. We can passing/siding tracks at stations to prevent local stopped trains from blocking the mainline for limited/express trains. We can have cross-platform time transfers between different train types and destinations. We can have multiple mainline tracks. These things do cost a bit more upfront, but it’s more about good planning and what kind of service to the public is the goal.
— The Tokaido corridor (Tokyo-Nagoya-Osaka) is extremely dense, both the Tokaido Mainline and Shinkansen line are effectively at capacity (which is also part of impetus for the Chuo Shinkansen). Running at very high speeds with fews stops, consumes a lot track capacity. Which is why JRs prefer running more local and limited-stop service trains, and less than “non-stop” express trains. It’s what a capacity constrained operator should do to optimize operations and maximize capacity subject to those constraints.
Likewise a California HSR program, should find a way to cost effectively serve cities like Fresno, Bakersfield, Merced, etc. as part of a larger HSR network.
Too bad I don't work in that office anymore.
Within Tokyo most of the trains run every 5 minutes or so.
Why is that? Cars and airplanes accelerate much faster, without any real rider discomfort. If it's due to train hardware itself, wouldn't an assist to get the train up to speed work, in a fraction of that distance?
I just redid the math - to get to 300 km/h needs 4.8km, not 10 that I thought. Faster speeds need more distance or course. Hills also impact the distance needed. You also need to account for same safety distance for a lot of acceleration applications.
How much time is added to the journey for a single stop (including time for the stop itself, braking and acceleration).
> democratic voters that want high speed rail, but lose interest when experts say that there need to be lots of intermediate stops
A few do. Based on the people they elect most don't actually care about high speed rail. They care about workers - the more the better, and even better yet if you can make those workers minorities. High speed rail is only a proxy for spending lots of money on something that gets people working, if the rail is never finished that is so much the better because they can keep paying those people to build the line.
Rural voters won't benefit much. By the time they drive to a big city where they can catch the train they may as well fly. The amount of distance needed to get to the train station means that there isn't very much in range by rail that they are not better off driving.
Note, there is rural voters and hobby farm voters. The hobby farm voters live and work in a big city, and go home to their small farm with a little bit of livestock to farm for fun. They might make money on the farm, but it isn't their day job. The only difference from suburban voters is they are just a little bit farther out. There are a lot of these voters who don't see how HSR will help them, even though it will once they realize how much faster it is to get to other cities.
/sarcastic, but not entirely
It seems like that there's no inherit value in these things by your argument.
And yet, yes, there is an issue with large infrastructure projects being turned into jobs programs so the scope creeps and they never get done-- A problem not unique to transportation infrastructure, but government-funded projects in general, as the incentives for project managers in govt and politicians are aligned to continuously increase scope
Randal O'Toole is the primary author of "mass transit is bad" style arguments used against us. It was so prolific that I had a counter piece of evidence titled "O'Toole is a tool" which just tried to character assissinate him.
What is he doing still being relavent and stuff? I had judges on my debate circuit that apperently knew him in real life and mentioned at the time that he was old...
Edit: for anyone that wants to know O'toole's canadian, extremely liberal equivilent who supports mass transit, I recommend you checkout the work of Todd Litman from the Victoria Transportation Institute. He wrote most of the evidence for "mass transit good" and has publicly feuded with O'toole multiple times.
" O’Toole looks at the most expensive few lines possible:
Britain’s 345‐ mile London–Scotland HS2 high‐ speed rail line was originally projected to cost £32.7 billion (about $123 million per mile) and is currently expected to cost £106 billion ($400 million per mile).
International comparisons of high-speed rail costs exist, and Britain’s costs are by far the worst. "
It looks as if California will exceed that cost by quite a bit for it's equivalent length HSR project, if and when it's ever completed.
And how does this square with the current reality of the California project costs (estimated to be over $100M, even though it's over a decade for completion, and the budget has already grown >2.5x)
" the official Obama-era crayon, at 20,000 km, would be $500 billion at tunnel-free European costs, or maybe $600 billion with 5% tunneling "
So we're gonna do the rest of the 19,400 km for only $500bn, when the most recent 600km is costing $100bn?
How much is that racism costing the US economically? Of course it costs the targets of racism the most: I don't have high-speed rail; they don't have jobs, health care, etc.
We see this, at various times, in transit tunnels (Big Dig, 2nd Ave Subway), nuke power plants, the embassy complex in Iraq, the Wall, F-35 and other military procurement, manned spaceflight, and California's bullet train fiasco (mercifully killed after shoveling out only the first few $billions of what promised to be a truly massive gravy train).
Solar and wind power projects seem momentarily immune to this process, for reasons not exactly clear. Their short terms, clear goals, and simple accounting may leave little scope for massive corruption. Corruption wants projects that deliver a steady flow of cash for at least four years, preferably 10 or 20.
There are rumblings about a new $trillion missile program, perhaps to take up the SLS contractors when SLS has to be cancelled in favor of SpaceX Starship at well below 1% of the price.
The difference between SLS and Starship illustrates the difference between a program intended mainly to fuel corruption, and one with goals that match the label.
I post a lot on here about rail, and I disagree with a lot of output from the Cato Institute, but the infrastructure cost of long-distance High Speed Rail in the US would be immense, and the geography of settlement and commuting patterns in the country are too car-oriented to take advantage of passenger-only HSR. Americans already do most travel by car and long-distance travel by air, so High Speed Rail would be a slower and costlier substitute for long-distance flights, and a maybe-faster but drastically less flexible alternative to <300 mile travel.
It's no accident France runs the TGV like an airline, because they work the same way: you get to your destination station, and now what? You need to hop on public transit or rent a car like you would at an airport. But in Europe, a big town is far more likely to have public transit of acceptable quality, frequency, and coverage to solve the last mile problem; all but the most transit-webbed US cities do not.
This article exposes some of the flaws and misrepresentations in his analysis, but then contributes its own flaws in turn. One example: in truth intercity buses are very widespread in Europe, and not only do they fill in gaps left by the rail system, but thanks to expressways on some routes they be as fast as "moderate-speed trains" too. Truly High Speed Rail only runs in a dozen corridors in Europe, and the rest of the passenger rail on the continent runs the gamut from decent to atrocious. Buses are flexible, because they can go where the roads already go.
One way to get around the last-mile problem is to ensure your destination is likely to be transit-webbed town, or your destination station is very close the location to which you actually want to go. This sounds a lot like commuter rail -- the speed depends on how much you want to spend on infrastructure. In the US, this would mean that lines radiate out from NYC, Boston, DC, Philly, Chicago, Atlanta, LA, SF, Miami, Seattle, Portland... but not any further than an hour or two of travel. The Northeast Corridor is a lucky exception because you have some of the most interconnected cities in the US all in a convenient line.
What's most frustrating is that many of both the opponents and supporters of HSR in the US miss the point: the point is to both invest in and subsidize infrastructure and programs that are societally useful and unlock productivity and opportunities. The Cato Institute would prefer a world without subsidies, but that's not appropriate for the sorts of high-cost functions that offer a major benefit to society. Pedestrian Observations would prefer more mobility and transit, but sometimes that transit actually looks like an airplane or bus or subsidized taxis, because it's what makes most immediate use out of the current infrastructure in a way that balances opex with capex.
Lots of people in the US fly distances in the 300-800km range cited in the article. So equating long-distance and flight doesn't seem right. Trains are no less flexible than flights (or busses) over any distance (obviously they can be slower); they only lose flexibility when compared with cars.
> One example: in truth intercity buses are very widespread in Europe, and not only do they fill in gaps left by the rail system, but thanks to expressways on some routes they be as fast as "moderate-speed trains" too.
The article's author says more or less precisely the same thing as you've said here. In addition, the flexibility of busses is not the same as the flexibility of a bus. Yes, bus services can range from inter-city routes moving at 80mph to local ones servicing small villages. But these are never the same busses.
Planes fly in more or less straight lines from source to destination, and adding a new route is just some paperwork and renting the terminal space. No multi-billion dollar investment to connect a new nearby or distant city.
>flexibility of busses is not the same as the flexibility of a bus
Again, he means the flexibility of adding new routes, not having the bus pick you up at your hotel.
Adding a new route, sure. Adding a new destination, not so much. Are airports cheaper than train stations? I don't know.
One of the justifications for California HSR was that existing airport slots are almost saturated. Studies showed that airport expansion was going to cost at least as much as HSR. Runway and terminal expansions actually do cost billions of dollars.
And while HSR costs have ballooned, so too would airport expansion costs. Perhaps even more so because much of the HSR cost increases are related to intransigent farm owners in rural areas, whereas the majority of airport capacity expansion work (at least on a cost basis) involves much more developed areas, where NIMBYs tend to be at least as ornery.
The studies also projected greater cost burdens with highway expansion alternatives. Nobody disputes that building additional lanes on I-5 in the Central Valley is cheaper than building HSR in those areas. But that's beside the point because the dilemma isn't about increasing throughway capacity in the Central Valley, but expanding capacity into and out of the SF and LA metro regions, where highway expansions are insanely expensive. Trains (and planes) let you offload people at various points within the metro region, so there's less of a highway bottleneck[2].
Maybe those studies were biased. Certainly many critics believed so. But the relative costs are much closer than people tend to believe.
[2] Especially considering the geography.
>In March 2018, the Authority revised its estimate to $77.3 billion and up to $98.1 billion, pushing initial service to 2029 and services from Los Angeles to San Francisco to 2033
The cost of Ca HSR has gone up to $98 billion. There is no way building even 6 airports could possibly cost that much, and you can build the airports when you need the capacity one at a time and airports support travel to anywhere in the world, not just the handful of other cities in California the rails connect to.
https://www.therichest.com/luxury-architecture/10-most-expen...
> #1: Kansai International Airport - $20 billion
So California could build 5 huge earthquake proof airports in the middle of the ocean including sea wall and bridge for the cost of HSR. It just makes no sense. I'm not opposed to rail or high-speed rail. But the places where better public transportation are needed are mostly in the US North East where density is much higher. Existing rail infrastructure is crumbling in the North East while California asks for Federal money for white elephant boondoggles like Ca HRS. It's infuriating.
It's true that the costs are crazy high, but that's not true worldwide. That means that objections to CA/US HSR are initially (at least) really objections to the ridiculous costs, not the actual idea itself.
First, projected infrastructure project costs in the United States are usually quoted (by agencies) in year of expenditure dollars, which means projected expenditures for each particular year are literally inflated. If you push a project back 15 years, you can easily see double-digit percentage increases in quoted total expenditures. I don't know the exact figure but AFAIU this is very much the case with CAHSR--a large fraction, and perhaps even a majority, of nominal cost increases is related to inflation adjustments as the timeline keeps getting pushed back and stretched. (Of course, that still leaves a large component that isn't.)
Secondly, pushing back timelines incurs all sorts of additional real costs. For example, you have to extend supply and labor contracts, which often means you end up getting less for your money because more people and equipment will end up sitting around idle for longer. You can also incur greater financing costs.
Also, I don't think any of the figures in that therichest.com link are inflation adjusted. AFAICT, they seem to just be tallying the year-of-expenditure or perhaps year-of-completion costs. This difference compounds inflation discrepancies even more. (There are other problems w/ those comparisons, too, such as that most of those airports were built far away from developed areas, but it's not worth going down that rabbit hole.)
Time is the the most critical component in all large construction projects, public or private. Time is money isn't just a catchphrase. If there are any hand-wavy, magical solutions to the cost problem that can be easily applied, one of the simplest and most obvious is to finish projects as quickly as possible. Don't let them linger and get stretched out.
Unfortunately, there are often political and regulatory pressures that push things in the wrong direction. If political blowback causes timelines to be stretched out, directly or indirectly, cost increases become a self-fulfilling prophecy. After learning about the accounting methods for how projected costs are quoted, and in particular digging into CAHSR costs, I vowed as a voting citizen to never oppose a project once it got off the ground, even if I initially opposed it.
As for buses, the article's author diminishes the significance of intercity buses in Europe by making it sound like private intra-national intercity bus service isn't competitive with HSR on travel time, as if HSR were widespread. HSR is only present along a dozen or so corridors in Europe, and while within France such premium bus services are a relatively new phenomenon, that isn't true elsewhere on the continent; so across the whole of Europe intercity buses are both much more common than he initially suggests, and much more competitive vs. rail than he suggests. After this, he does say buses thrive in the gaps between the train network, complement it, and have historically been important for international travel because of rail fare structures, and on those points I agree.
My wording of 'buses are flexible' does refer to the ease of introducing new routes (i.e. not having to build lots of rail), as a sibling comment correctly identified.
For personal travel, I think I'd generally agree. However, lots of US business travellers (pre-COVID anyway) would fly distances of 100,200,300 miles (the shuttles from Phila to NYC were almost always full, and that's just 90 miles!). These journeys have the no-car-last-mile problem, but that doesn't seem to have stopped the wide use of flight for those journeys.
Granted, post-COVID, it's no longer clear how many of these short-haul journeys business travellers will be making in the next 2-10 years.
They are among the least price-sensitive travelers and are the ones least inconvenienced by the last-mile problem, so their decision-making differs from those traveling for other reasons. (On average, they are less constrained by price and switching of modes, but are more constrained by idiosyncratic company procedures around travel.)
Is 4 to 7 times higher than anywhere else in the world. We need to bring it down to reasonable levels.
>commuting patterns in the country are too car-oriented
HSR isn't for commuting. It is for trips longer than a normal commute. The US is car-oriented - but I disagree with the word "too". HSR won't do as well (at least for the first dozen years) as other countries, but there are a lot of places where it should do well enough if we ever build it for a reasonable cost.
> intercity buses are very widespread in Europe
They also are in the US.
The key is the commute is under an hour, one stop, and it’s into London which a massive source of jobs in South east England.
I agree with your comment that HSR doesn’t do well for a decade. My train runs on the Eurostar line. That took a decade to draw people from planes. And the domestic train that I catch is now standing room only into London.
. An optimal solution to a problem or
. A sexy solution looking for a problem
but that it's an integral part of an entire society and lifestyle that some people want to embrace. Serious people-mover rail seems to be an organic part of some countries that are different in 100 (1000? 10,000?) different ways that people would like to emulate
The arguments about serious modern rail investment look to be proxy arguments.
Because the environmental impact of trains is, while controversial, unquestionably less than that of flying.
Because trains should be moving at an average of 140mph or so, which is more than twice that of a bus.
Because most airports don't connect you to the entire globe in a single hop, so you may as well take the train to the existing one that does.
CAHSR costs ballooned, but so do highway and airport expansions. The U.S. and many other countries have cost management problems with all large infrastructure projects.
I don’t get the country size argument either. Europe and China are also huge with trains stopping in small cities. At least, each coast should have a north-south line plus some truck lines to heavily populated areas.
https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-california-hi...
South Korea built a whole 50km terminal section of HSR in a tunnel[1], starting at the outskirts of Seoul. It only took 3.0605 trillion KRW or about 2.7 billion dollars.
SF to San Jose is only slightly farther (~50 mi or ~80 km).
[1] https://www.tunneltalk.com/Korea-14Jul2015-Yulhyeon-Tunnel-f...
https://la.curbed.com/2014/9/26/10042166/bev-hills-paper-war...
Gas explosions and terrorists, oh my!
On the up side, there is lot of space for luggage and stretching out, you can walk around the train, and there was an observation car and a café car (the food being more functional than palatable, but the scenery being rather nice.) So it's kind of like taking a break from reality and hanging out on a train for a few days while it slowly moves toward your destination.
So it had its moments, but I'm in no hurry to do it again.
I would rather staple myself to the bottom of a semi than ride a bus between 2 cities. I’d rather hitchhike, end up temporarily imprisoned in a grain silo, and fight free using my wits and a corn cob than ride a bus again. If my choice was a bus or simply never traveling again: well welcome to my cloister.
https://www.news-gazette.com/news/suburban-express-shuts-dow...
Suburban Express allegedly denied credit cards from ZIP codes with high Jewish populations, instructed employees to avoid handing out coupons to certain students who appeared not to speak English well and recorded a YouTube video in a UI dorm while complaining about the lack of English speakers and mocking Asian accents by saying "No Engrish."
…which may color my opinion just a bit.
Horrible experience. Trains are so, so much nicer. I always prefer trains over buses or planes (time permitting).
Trains are also much safer than buses, statistically.
The killer feature for me on multiple occasions was that they were one of the few transit options with enlightened bicycle policies. I once rode Boltbus to NYC, purchased a bicycle there, and took it back to Philadelphia in the space under the bus. They say you can only bring a bike if there is room under the bus, but I've never seen the cargo space fill up ever.
Frustratingly, even though Amtrak is starting to support bicycles, they do not allow bikes over 50lbs, which eliminates every e-bike or cargo bike that I've owned. This was not an issue on Boltbus.
I hope Boltbus resumes service soon.
I agree, although I'm curious - was this trip to NYC, or somewhere else? Round-trip Amtrak tickets from DC to NYC sell for $150+ dollars, while equivalent bus rides are usually $60 or lower, depending on your departure times.
I've happily taken buses over trains, despite the cramped conditions, just so I don't have to pay $100 more.
I think DC <-> NY is a special case where there's a lot of competition and it's possible to have a good experience.
IIRC Amtrak would've been about $200 vs $60 for the bus, and only about an hour faster.
But yeah, it's bad.
Rail doesn't always make sense and rail projects can absolutely be poorly managed. But O'Toole adds nothing but noise to the conversation.
Successful HSR exists in places like France and Japan because of how urbanism was shaped in those places. Everything is in Paris, so people _have to go to Paris_. So the "every TGV line is to- or from- Paris" serves that purpose. Japan is one-dimensional, so you also only need one HSR line for effect (exageratting a bit). But HSR in both of those countries are extremely expensive, and despite people posting all the "Japan is cool" stuff with people taking the shinkansen every day for work, the reality is more banal (business trips, family vacations, same stuff as what you find with planes).
But the big payoffs come from having people be able to rely on trains for more day-to-day stuff. And you solve the last mile problem by just building a train station every mile! And in that case your train really doesn't actually need to go that fast.
A Hyperloop doesn't offer much advantage over conventional technology given the short distance (50 mi); even at normal high-speed-rail speeds you spend a good chunk of the time accelerating and decelerating. Speeding up and slowing down faster is not tenable, as no one wants to be on a roller coaster as a commute.
The other thing is that the commuting range of New York is pretty far. The metro area is considered to stretch as far as Pike County PA (82 miles), Trenton NJ (70 miles), the entirety of Long Island, and New Haven (80 miles). Anything that is feasible to develop already has been; anything that hasn't been is either some land use that can't be developed (a park), has unfavorable geography (the Meadowlands is a marsh that gets flooded often and is vital to local flooding protection), or other mitigating factors.
Then there's the issue of the land assembling. No one could afford to assemble such a parcel. NYC's metro area was estimated to have 10% of the entire country's real estate value [1]. And even if one had the land you can't just do whatever you like because you're the owner; you're still subject to local zoning rules.
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[1] https://www.6sqft.com/study-shows-huge-disparity-in-u-s-urba...
> With construction costs of $1B for an 18 mile run in Chicago, the Boring company could make this Lebanon <-> Manhattan for $2.5B.
This is vaporware until it actually happens. Maglevs and monorails and personal rapid transit were also supposed to be significantly cheaper than their traditional counterparts, until they weren't. I could promise you HSR for $1, that doesn't mean I can make it happen.
And presumably if you could make a bunch of Americans magically consider massive redevelopment on that scale, it would be more fruitful to do it in a place closer in where you don't have to spend billions of dollars on transportation infrastructure, or the other billions of dollars establishing services like water supply, a grid with adequate capacity, schools, fire, police, medical services, etc. Sidewalk Labs wanted to be in the middle of the action on the Toronto waterfront, not in the undeveloped boonies.
[0] https://www.openrailwaymap.org/ [1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/
And the trucking industry will push it quickly and probably within a fairly developed regulatory structure.
And really that's all I want out of self-driving. Sleep or work in a car on a divided highway. That's really it.
That one achievement will make short/medium trains, all intercity busses, and probably most airline flights under 400 miles not really that desirable. If my self-driving EV car gets me there even at 60 mph and I get to fill my car with crap, and I have the car when I get there, and I can load it with a family...